By Elio Vittorini

ABSTRACT: A collection of documents on the radicals' libertarian antifascism: to recognize fascism means to understand what it has been and above all what it can be. Apparent antifascism too often hides a complicity with those who represented the true continuity with fascism, the reprise of laws and methods typical of that regime.

(" WE AND THE FASCISTS", The radicals' libertarian antifascism, edited by Valter Vecellio, preface by Giuseppe Rippa - Quaderni Radicali/1, November 1980)

I often receive letters from young people who still seem confused or desperate, or at least humiliated by having been Fascists. They are twenty four or twenty five, or even only twenty - one tells me he is eighteen - and they come from every social class, not excluding the working class, although for the most part they claim to be studying at the university or have just graduated. Half of them are returning from concentration camps in Germany or prison camps. Among the other half are some who have been soldiers in Graziani's army or the X Mas. (*) But there is no lack too of those who were partisans and yet still feel guilty for having been Fascists "for a certain time". Each one has his date "up to which" he was a "Fascist" - up to January '43, up to February '43, up to March '43 until as late as July 25, or September 8, '43, or one or another month of '44. One even said up "until yesterday morning" having written me on last November 5. But they all have the same reason for writing to me: the same conf

usion, the same desperation, the same feeling of ---------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

*) Rodolfo Graziani, a Fascist general; X Mas, a Fascist military group.

inferiority and the same hope of getting rid of it: they all say the same things and they all strike one in the same way for the honesty of soul they reveal.

Why do they write to me? They write apropos of some article that appeared in POLITECNICO (*), but what they say always goes beyond the immediate occasion. They refer to my books and they indicate that for some time they have been looking for "someone to turn to". Their letters began arriving after the first number of POLITECNICO appeared. There were two of them after the first number and I wanted to answer them at once. But the letters began to multiply, there were tens of them, then hundreds of them, and now I am glad that I did not answer them at once because, thanks to what I have learned from them, I can now answer them much better. Whether they remained "Fascists" until the very end, or whether they put in a year or two of active anti-Fascism in the clandestine struggle, the most remarkable thing is that all of them accuse themselves of not having been "a man", of having been able to be one... They believe that they were "non-men" and they are looking for someone to give the lie to this, they are l

ooking for a ray of hope. Who can give it to them? They have trouble opening themselves up. The need to open up is, in them, almost the need to risk everything, but it is also the need to be understood, taken into consideration. And the fact that they turn

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*) A review founded and directed by the author in Milan which was published during the years 1945-47.

to me doesn't say anything about me, it only says how great is their need to find someone to turn to.

TODAY IS THE DAY OF THEIR CRISIS

Now I am replying to all of them at once. I deliberately make no distinction between the crises of those who say they were "not men" (that is to say "Fascist") up until January or July of '43 and the crises of those who were it up until a month ago. There may be differences between one and another of them. Certainly there are. But spiritually they don't count if they have not avoided the crisis or have not helped them to overcome it. Just what is their crisis, exactly? If they were simply "guilty", it would be quickly resolved with their recognition of the guilt. But it is a crisis of people who believe themselves to be guilty without actually being it, and only those among them can resolve it who succeed in convincing themselves that they are not guilty. If many youths today have a clear conscience it is because they are convinced that they did nothing wrong and not because they feel that in some way they have paid (by having joined in the clandestine fight) for the part they took (passive or active) i

n Fascism. Shouldn't we then tell all young people that they have the right (inasmuch as they are young and so grew up under Fascism) to convince themselves that they are not guilty? And the only way to help them convince themselves that they are not guilty is to show them what in reality they were: tools of Fascism, yes; blind to what Fascism was; victims of what it seemed to be; weak, not strong, but not Fascists.

WHAT IS FASCISM?

Here we need to say exactly what Fascism is, what it was in Italy, and what it was able to appear to be. Today's reactionary propaganda, especially the Anglo-Saxon kind and not excluding the Vatican kind, tries to pass it off as a sort of moral aberration. In that way they can condemn it and strike at it's executive aspect alone: Its concrete dictatorship, its police persecution, its repressive orgies, its form and its methods. But they do not strike at or condemn its cause or its inherent nature. This cause and this nature are not Italian or German, they are also Anglo-Saxon, they also pertain to the Vatican and the whole world. And today's reactionary propaganda cannot condemn the cause and the nature of something whose accomplices it is. It condemns the material perpetrators and keeps those truly responsible away from all possibility of being struck; it condemns the adjective and puts the noun in a safe place.

FASCISM AS A NOUN

What is Fascism as a noun? We can grant that it is an aberration. But it is a politico-economic aberration and not only a moral one. Morally speaking it can even take on dignified and venerable aspects; parliaments, pontifices; English aspects,

American aspects and Vatican aspects. It is its politico-economic substance that counts. And this substance is capitalism which has reached the stage of maximum industrial and financial development, which attacks to defend and preserve itself. It sees a mortal danger in the contemporaneous development reached by the proletariat. It sees that democracy has favoured the proletariat on the political level. It wants to arrest this development, to stop the political democracy that favours it and extend its economic dictatorship to the political field. What then is Fascism as a noun? What I have already said: the extension of capitalistic dictatorship to the political field.

Capitalism too had need of political liberty in order to develop. Today, having reached the apex of its development, capitalism no longer needs political liberty. Does it tolerate it as a kind of PRICE to be paid for exercising its economic dictatorship? But this PRICE becomes ever higher, ever more dangerous and threatens to eliminate its class dictatorship. And so capitalism tries to avoid paying it any more, or to reduce it, limit it, put on a credit account, transform it into waste paper, etc. It is Fascism. Every attempt, I say - demagogic and totalitarian like the Italo-German one, the treacherous and complex one that shows its face in England or America from time to time, the even more treacherous and complex one that gives the reactionary touch to certain non-Sunday sermons in the OSSERVATORE ROMANO (the official Vatican daily, ed.) and infinite other varieties - those that have been and will be.

THE "FASCISM" OF THE YOUTH VARIETY

But the young people who write to me, could they have known that this was "Fascism"? Even today it seems that they still don't know it. They are feeling guilty for having been "Fascists" in the "moral aberration" sense, that is to say in the sense of Fascism as an adjective and not Fascism as a noun. They have never seen the face of Fascism as a noun. It would have been hard for them to have seen it. Italian Fascism was always careful to hide its face, and if in its actions it gave itself away little by little, it was still difficult for young people to understand who had been brought up not to understand. Who had ever done anything to help them understand? Anti-Fascism had gone abroad and its voice, like everything else that arrived in Italy from abroad, arrived distorted, not up-to-date, ridiculous. And yet the young were generous. They weren't reactionary. They were not for Donegani, Agnelli, (*) etc. but against Donegani, Agnelli etc. They were for progress, for "better social justice", the eliminat

ion of the large land owners and the socialisation of the large industries. Fascism told them that this was exactly what it was about: progress, social justice, elimination of the large land owners, etc. It presented itself as being against Donegani,

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*) The presidents of the Montecatini mining industry and the Fiat auto industry respectively.

and no one told them that it was, instead, the last expedient of the Doneganis.

Unfortunately, in Italy there were forces even more reactionary than the Fascists: feudal residues of the old right-wing parties that the Fascists, with their modern importations of pro-monopoly regimes, had distinctly surpassed. They offered resistance. It was easy to make it seem that they constituted the whole of anti-Fascism. And young people were persuaded that Fascism was a struggle against every kind of reactionary and for the realisation of a socially revolutionary programme. All one needs to do is leaf through the newspapers for youth, especially of the period between '31 and '35 to have proof of it. The Fascists' demagogic slogans become in these pages the subjects of enthusiastic debates and the motives of concrete attacks on capitalism, on the bourgeoisie, on the production relations of bourgeois society. The young people count on the development of Fascism in a collective sense. They also count on a rapprochement between Italy and the USSR. And if in the end nothing happens to confirm their

hopes, they blame it on the "reactionaries who have insinuated themselves into the Fascist Party", as they put it.

I am not just talking a lot of rubbish. Here I am speaking from personal experience. And I was born in 1908, not '20 or '22. I was already fourteen in the year of the march on Rome. I had heard tell, in one way or another, of how Fascism was born. And yet, after initial diffidence due solely to the fact that I was officially registered with the Fascist youth organisations as a secondary school student, I too acted as an "agitator" in the sense described above, in the pages of more or less provincial Fascist papers. I too was one of them. I was not "acute", not "strong". A non-man? I was one of the "weak". But what young person here in Italy who was never one of the weak can today be truly strong? Personally, my blindness to Fascism ended early. The aggression on Europe, which reconciled the residual pre-Fascist Italian reactionaries to Fascism, was what gave me my first doubts. Was this all that Fascism knew how to do? Repeat in the Twentieth Century the undertakings of the mercantile age? Italy's rappr

ochement with Hitler's Germany and its support of Franco in Spain gave me back all of my capacity to understand. In Autumn of '36 I dared to write in a weekly review that Fascism should have given its support to the Madrid government and not to Franco. And the weekly dared to print this (albeit cutting several sentences). I was not the only one to develop. Thus I was expelled from the Fascist Party and I began to think the way I think today. Can I for this reason blame those younger than me for not having followed my same development and not having broken with Fascism at the first signs? I was born in 1908. I had been formed, more or less, in the same way that Fascism was formed. I had had an initial diffidence and I read a lot... Furthermore, I had instinctive sympathies and antipathies: sympathies for the Americans and the Russians and antipathies for the Spanish church and Carlist generals. Would I have gotten to know the Fascist NOUN without my lucky antipathy for the ADJECTIVES with which its new accomp

lices adorned themselves?

AGAINST THE NOUN, RIGHT FROM THE BEGINNING

I have heard of many youths who abandoned Fascism during the Spanish Civil War. But the far greater number of youths who remained faithful to Fascism, despite that war and despite the Anschluss, despite Munich, despite '39, '40, '41, or '42 - the same youths, who today are in the minority and who dragged along after Fascism even despite the German occupation of Italy - were not tied to Fascism in any different way than the way of these youths who write to me and their peers who want to "explain their position to someone", than the way in which I was tied to Fascism, before the Fascist intervention in favour of the Spanish reaction. I am sure that for them (the "weak", the deceived, simple workers, simple students, simple kids in good faith, ready to pay for it in the first person, and not those who joined up just to get ahead) it continued to be the same way that it had been for me up until '36. A foolish way, if you will, but not reactionary. An anti-Donegani way, anti-English, anti-American, anti-half

-the-world because of everything Doneganesque and only Doneganesque that this world allowed them to see of it. We must not forget that Fascist propaganda was such as to cultivate in them the illusion that they were revolutionary in being Fascist. And the closer it came to defeat, the more Fascist propaganda took this line. Until the very end, young people were able to believe that Fascism was struggling against all forms of reaction for a socially revolutionary programme. May I say it with a paradox? Theirs was an anti-Fascist way of being Fascist.

This I think we must say to youths like those who write to me oppressed by a feeling of inferiority for having been "non-men", "Fascists". Can we leave them with their sense of inferiority? It would mean allowing them never to become men. And they would become corrupted, whereas in fact they are pure. I want to tell them: you have never been Fascists. Your way of being so, no matter until what date you kept it up, was an anti-Fascist way. Were you also weak? But precisely because you were weak and know what it means to be weak, you can be today the strongest of the strong. The truest form of strength is not always that of having always been strong. Now that the time of the Fascist adjective is over, it is important to be strong against the Fascist noun which never wants to meet its end. This is what it means to know, what it means to fight. You were never Fascists in the sense of the noun; on the contrary, you thought your Fascist fight was a fight precisely against the Fascist noun. And should you not

as anti-Fascists fight against what you thought you were fighting in your Fascist fight? Today there is no longer the possibility of misunderstandings. Fascism is there: behind the shoulders of the Doneganis, the Agnellis, the Marinottis; and only those who are for them, for them in whatever new way and with whatever new adjective, is a Fascist. Are you for them? You never have been. Therefore you have the same right as the older anti-Fascists to be anti-Fascist today. You have the right to be "men".

(from "Il Politecnico", no.5, January 5, 1946)