The Blood of the Defeated

Abstract

In analysing Italy’s memories of the long Second World War it is appropriate to start at the end, when the plurality of these memories finally came to the fore of a political discourse long dominated by the narratives of Resistance and victimhood discussed in the previous chapter. ‘The end’ is, of course, too absolute a claim for any history book: it is only an artificial marker of a chronological narrative. Yet this book begins in the contemporary period, before plunging back in a long flashback and tracing its subject back to the present. Maybe the researcher is beginning to resemble his sources, yet this narrative structure is arbitrary but not random. As this chapter will demonstrate, the resurgence of the right and the consequent attempt at a broad-brushed revision of Italy’s Fascist history raises specific questions about the nation’s memories of its past. These are not only problems around the coexistence of opposite interpretations of the Fascist era or the repression of certain narratives, but also more structural questions raised by the way these contemporary debates have manifested themselves in popular culture: how selective have revisionist efforts been, and why? Has the politicised nature of Italian memory debates compromised them from the outset? Has the left–right contraposition prevented a thorough examination of the nation’s history and memory, and has it thus become a shared alibi to avoid any discussion of the darkest pages of Italy’s history?