Liberation

 Today is Liberation Day and it is important for me ... and, I hope, for you, too. It's 80 years to the day since axis forces surrendered in Italy and dictatorship and occupation ended. It's a public holiday. 

I went to the ceremonies in Sanremo and joined the mayor and local townspeople, veterans and partisans organisations, civic and military personnel, and the town band, to commemorate liberty, democracy, the rule of law, human rights and those who fought for them. There were hundreds of us and I was pleased to see so many young families, teenagers and students, not just us - ahem - older folks. 

At the war memorial

The Resistance here liberated much of this region before allied forces arrived. It's not exactly tank country, after all, with its steep, broken landscape. Partisans could be anyone: communists, monarchists, anarchists, nationalists, catholics, atheists, policemen, army deserters, shepherds, professors, engineers, women, men, boys... One thing all these disparate beliefs and people held in common was that fascism, dictatorship and repression are the common enemy of humanity. The crowd today reflects that broad swathe of people and beliefs. I see national flags, peace symbols, partisan neckscarves, civic banners, military caps, councillors in sashes, civilians in jeans ... a fluffy dog barks along to that defining partisan song, Bella Ciao.

At the memorial to the victims of the 1943 Cephalonia massacre.

My grandfathers fought, too, and this was also my personal commemoration of their sacrifices. (More on their amazing experiences below.) And my hope that freedom to live one's own life will not be crushed again. There's too much whiff of fascism in the air again now, and in nations that ought to know better.

The parade moves down the high street, Via Matteotti, named after the leader of the opposition to Mussolini in parliament who was murdered in 1924.

 

We end at the memorial to the resistance where the mayor gives a speech quoting Italo Calvino, one of the twentieth century's foremost writers, who was brought up in Sanremo and described his time as a teenage partisan here in his first novel. (I recommend the book.) Students read passages of poetry, prose, letters from death row; representatives of the national partisan organisation and the Alpine Corps remind us why we do this, that resistance continues every day, that calls to treat this as the last commemoration by today's fascists (they still exist, incredibly) cannot be accepted as we are surrounded by monuments to the random reprisals and executions of the past, and that wars, dictatorships and brutality continue today. We're standing outside the very fort built 300 years ago not to protect the town but to repress local rebellion. Its cannons point into the city centre.

Memorial to the resistance, with today's commemorative wreath.

 

The ceremony over, I go into the fort. It's free today. There are the cells where criminals were held, but also political prisoners. There's a photo exhibition on about migrants, people fleeing civil war in Syria or poverty in Subsaharan Africa. They're being shouted at by cops, trying to jump onto lorries passing frontiers, drowning in the sea, shivering in bombed-out buildings... This is why we commemorate and celebrate liberty and fight cruelty and brutality.

A fleeing mother holds her child close under a thermal blanket. This photo is recent, but the image, sadly, is timeless.

 

What my grandfathers told me

I had a grandfather who flew as a hobby. When war came, his business was bombed. Out of work and already trained, he joined the air force and rose to senior rank planning airborne invasions: Sicily, D-Day, Arnhem ... I have a significant piece of Pegasus Bridge memorabilia that commemorates his finest hour. Not content with victory in Europe, he went and joined his brother in the British Indian Army who was fighting the Japanese.

"Defy the beast," he would always say. "Whoever tries to crush liberty and humanity needs to be stopped. I lost my livelihood and six years of my life, but I wasn't going to lose my freedom or that of my family to those who ignore the rule of law. Decency, fair play and liberty are paramount."

My other grandfather was a type of policeman who specialised in corporate and tax fraud. Serious enough work for him and his unit to be issued sidearms. He ended up on the wrong side of the lines, in Milan, where axis forces cleared out on this day in 1945. Because he and his colleagues were the only officials left who had guns, they were given a vague order to "hold the city". Against whom? That wasn't specified. Three days later the partisans entered bearing the dead bodies of Mussolini, his mistress and some henchmen, whom they strung up in Piazzale Loreto. My grandfather swapped his uniform for civilian clothes and went to see the upside-down man who'd himself turned so many lives upside down. He criticised the partisans for allowing the crowd to abuse the bodies, thus providing fascist sympathisers ever after with notions of martyrdom. (Piazzale Loreto has been remodelled from big green square to ugly roundabout, with new buildings over the site of the hangings. This is deliberate so as to obliterate a site of pilgrimage.) After US troops entered the city, he was able to reveal that, despite his official position, he'd been working for the resistance.

As a financial expert, my grandfather always viewed fascists as con men, who rose to power through deception and manipulation, not through righteousness, hard graft and love of the common good as claimed. That bogus image of uprightness was part of the fraud. How apt that the fraudster-in-chief was himself upended.

What is fascism?

It is said that Mussolini's son Bruno once asked over an evening meal, "Dad, what exactly is fascism?" To which the Duce replied, "Shush and eat your dinner."

Academic and writer, Umberto Eco (best known for his 1980 novel The Name of the Rose, made into a 1986 film with Sean Connery) wrote a short essay, Ur-Fascism, that sums it up well. You can read it in English for free here or summarised on Wiki here. Tradition, paranoia, conflict, machismo and crushing of the weak are significant elements, but to me this line of Eco's sums up fascism best: "Fascism was a fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions." That's the impression I get, too. Fascism collects the fears and failings of life's losers and pretends that they are collective strength; it is weak men's ideas of what strong men are. The fact that all these disparate outlooks may contradict one another is irrelevant, and is indeed what gives fascism its power; as both its adherents and enemies try to fathom meaning from this random mix of contradictions, it is busy bashing them all, perpetually. Orwell's famous 1984 "boot stamping on a human face for ever". 

Do you see any close logical ties between apocalyptic Christianity, billionaire capitalism, gun culture, unsolicited dick pics and deep-state conspiracy theory? No? That's OK, Trumpism provides a safe umbrella for them all to thrive under. That's fascism, just like the disparate values of conservative Catholicism, vorticist and futurist art movements that glorified aggression and the force of will, middle-class moneyspinning, hedonistic poetry, Roman history, socialism and military nostalgia were all grist to Mussolini's mill. For Hitler, Jews were both communist conspirators and capitalist plotters. Apparently simultaneously. Go figure. TERFs demand a UK court to define women, but not men, despite the feminist programme to seek equality. That's fascist contradiction, too. 

I've fought this shit all my life. I've reported aggressive and harassing Christofascists to the police; I've assisted getting violent, sexually brutal teachers jailed; I've reported and successfully sued overbearing bosses; I've removed transphobes and racists from my life with and without ceremony; I've assisted people get justice against conmen, exploitation and fraudsters, and against violent partners; I've voted and encouraged others to vote against dishonest politics; I moved to the European Union as I saw human rights in the United Kingdom stamped on... They're all types of fascism, oppression and brutality, and all from the same terrified narcissistic type of person who cannot bear that the false public narrative that hides their shame, phobias, loss or incompetence be exposed. The sheer amount of resilience needed to live in this world of false narratives sickens me. This is why I got up early to go to the ceremonies today. And because I want to live as a free person in this hostile world as best I can and as others tried to before me.

German playwright Bertolt Brecht reminded us in the last line of his 1941 Nazi parody "parable" play, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, why we do this: "The womb he [i.e. Ui/Hitler] came from is still going strong".

Thanks for reading. Stay safe and free and legal.

Sue x