Antifascism and Anti-totalitarianism: The Italian Debate

Abstract

For more than ten years now, the Italian media have been using negatively connoted terms such as 'crisis', 'loss of values', or even 'end of a paradigm' when addressing the question of 'antifascism' generally. This would seem to reflect the changing political and cultural circumstances of the postwar era, the successive passing away of some of its most prominent historical figures and lastly, from the beginning of the 1990s, the near-total collapse of the entire Italian political system.1 The discredit cast on the Republic 'born out of the Resistance' has in fact contaminated the way Italian society has ended up 'treating] its past' (in both senses of the word).2 In short, members of certain political currents have been questioning the very foundations of the antifascist commitment in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, with the obvious intent of deflating the legitimizing and identity-boosting function antifascism had acquired in the postwar Italian governments. What Emilio Gentile once called the process of 'retroactive defascistization of fascism' that he saw working its way through Italy's general public opinion during the postwar era may also have contributed to the change in the meaning of 'antifascism' as an important political and cultural referent during that period.3 The dissemination of such a 'pseudo-culture of rehabilitation' has largely been the work of the media. In Italy, as Bruno Bongiovanni has recently argued, it is the media that have established 'the agenda of the politicohistoriographical debate'.4 Fascism appears therein as a rather benign 'Italianstyle' form of 'authoritarianism' in no way comparable to the brutality of the German National Socialist regime.5 The very impressive revival that the notion of totalitarianism has enjoyed in the Italian media has produced a number of disturbing simplifications regarding the communist experience, reduced to having 'a supposed nature' as 'the Communist phenomenon', but also regarding antifascism itself, which has