A little book by a certain Eric Gobetti (which intends to minimize and even justify the foibe) and now the usual, stale manifesto of intellectuals, not even very qualified, aimed at asking the highest Italian institutions for yet another recognition of the war crimes committed by the Italian Army in Yugoslavia during the Second World War, appear to be two elements of the same, evident political plan: that of trying to erase from our civil calendar the Day of Remembrance, that February 10 (which is less and less a reason for public demonstrations today), established in 2004 so as not to forget the foibe and the Julian-Dalmatian and Fiuman exodus.

We, who were among the first to support the law establishing the Day of Remembrance, would in fact have a thousand reasons to denounce the fact that public administrations and state schools snub the date and do not organize any initiative on the subject. Perhaps the chosen date of February 10, 1947, when the iniquitous Peace Treaty was signed, the ratification of which was opposed by men like Benedetto Croce, was wrong because it did not truly represent the drama of the Italians in the eastern Adriatic. Croce, at the Constituent Assembly, gave a truly great history lesson that made us understand the drama of war in a dimension that few had understood, overwhelmed by events or blinded by ideologies. The philosopher, who had fought fascism and had obviously expressed his opposition to entering the war in 1940, did not hesitate to argue that all Italians had lost that disastrous war, even those who were persecuted by the regime, because that war, "by engaging our homeland, also engaged, without exception, us who cannot detach ourselves from the good and the bad of our homeland, nor from its victories nor from its defeats." The patriot Croce prevailed over all the rest, but the philosopher contested, after having recalled that "war is an eternal law of the world that is implemented beyond any legal system", contested the legitimacy of humiliating the vanquished with a Peace Treaty that brought Italy to its knees. He also spoke out against the Nuremberg Tribunal.  A speech that the signatories of today's manifesto have certainly not only never read, but are not even aware of its existence. Today there are those who claim that it was a grave mistake not to have held a Nuremberg trial in Italy too, forgetting, for example, the amnesty wanted by Togliatti in 1946 for fascists and partisans. But that's not enough. It should be remembered that in Italy too there were military tribunals (in addition to the improvised people's tribunals that endorsed executions without trial) that addressed the issue of war crimes committed by Italians. In 1951 the Military Prosecutor's Office closed the investigations not on the basis of quibbles, as has been written, but on the basis of the fact that Tito's Yugoslavia refused to reciprocity in prosecuting war crimes against Italian citizens, first and foremost the foibe. In these decades, after Yugoslavia disappeared after a monstrous civil war that revealed once again the atrocious violence of those people, everything has been done at an international level to heal the wounds of so many years ago. Today the events of that past have been overcome by a European perspective which, however difficult and contradictory, has freed us from the nefarious nationalisms of 80 years ago.  Only people who are a bit fanatical and completely devoid of that sense of history that Omodeo spoke of can maintain, as Gobetti does, that the events of the Second World War "weigh like a millstone on the collective Italian memory." As Gianni Oliva, a historian who was among the first to write about the foibe and the atrocities committed by our army during the Second World War, recalled, under the last two Presidents of the Republic everything possible was done to bring about peace between Italians, Croats and Slovenes. In 2020, the highest state honor was even awarded to a poet over a hundred years old who continues to deny the foibe. But if we put ourselves on the level of frontal oppositions, I cannot then forget, for example, that the Gold Medal to the V. M. , awarded motu proprio by President Ciampi in 2001 to the free municipality in exile of Zadar, the Dresden of Italy due to the bombings it suffered and a martyr city due to the victims caused by Tito, was never delivered due to the completely illegitimate opposition of the Croatian government. Italy settled those accounts after the Peace Treaty of 1947, after the martyrdom of Trieste, which returned to Italy only in 1954, with the Treaty of Osimo which forever sanctioned the transfer of further Italian territory to Tito. The anti-fascist from Fiume Leo Valiani defined that treaty, desired by the worst Christian Democrat diplomacy, as infamous. We hoped that more or less everyone considered the drama of a heartbreaking story to have been overcome in some way. But this is not the case and Italians who do not deny their history will have to continue to preside over the Day of Remembrance that is being questioned by those nostalgic for Tito. Eric Gobetti's noisy polemics are not history, but the last vestiges of an ideology that we thought was over precisely because it was condemned by history. It's sad to have to entertain a discussion about a namesake of a great man with whom he only coincidentally shares a surname.

Pier Franco Quaglieni 

Source: Il Torinese – 08/04/2021