Nicola Tiepolo - Available 08/02/2008
... "The facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored" Thus wrote the British novelist Aldous Huxley. And it is this phrase that is located at the 'beginning of a beautiful exhibition that is dedicated to the sinkholes opened on Saturday (today) to Brescia (public opening the next day): "Foibe / exodus. A history denied," curated by the historian, and Free collaborator, Roberto Chiarini, open until 8 March.
That foibe have long been ignored as an integral part of Italian history there is little doubt, and the controversies that have accompanied the establishment of Memorial Day (which just celebrated Sunday) shows as it is a nerve for many discovered.
Show coordinte and dimensions of the phenomenon can then be useful. The sinkholes are deep cavities in the karst terrain that Tito partisans used to delete a large number of political opponents or suspected over the last years of the Second World War and in the months after liberation. The stories of today make it right only to a certain point of the horror of that time.
summary executions of political opponents
In some cases, the sinkholes were used to hide the bodies of those who had been summarily executed, but often the victims were thrown alive into the foiba, sometimes linked with each other, and at the bottom of foiba found their end after terrible suffering. It happened that the victims in agony for days, tied the bodies of their relatives. .
According to the most conservative estimates, with this system were suppressed cjrca 5 000 people (but more 'probably the exact figure is over 20 thousand), mainly in two different periods: the first immediately after 8th September 1943, given the power vacuum following the collapse of the Italian armistice and filled by the movement. Liberation of Yugoslavia, the second after the liberation, for a few months when Tito's troops occupied most of Venezia Giulia.
to be swallowed by sinkholes were not only fascists and former fascists, but all those who in one way or another were opposed or might oppose the establishment of the Yugoslav communist regime in the region. In many cases the only crime was to be Italian. In some cases, were also targeted members of the Italian partisan movement, guilty, unlike our own communists, did not wish to align the positions Tito.
For a long time little was known about everything or nothing: silence weighed the question of Italian Communists and weighed the need to maintain good relations with neighboring Yugoslavia.
Only in the second half of the nineties have been able to celebrate some processes, however, largely ended up in nothing, against former Italian partisans and Tito. Point came the controversy about "revisionism" on "resistance attacks," use "of political history in key anti-communist."
The political and historical studies of the many idiocies that still minimize the size of the massacre of sinkholes or accused of fascism who dares to call to mind the story does not require special comment: longevity certain ideological scrap that we carry with us the last century has ceased to amaze the most.
The most culpable disputes this renewed awareness of a great national tragedy you are pretty strong made of a different kind of argument, that the alleged need to contextualize the play, recalling the first fascist repression of minorities slave who was the background.
's observation is interesting and merits consideration because it allows you to highlight what is the real reason why it is worth noting a "Day of Remembrance" for the massacres committed by Tito. The sinkholes were not in fact a mere reaction, was also disproportionate to a previously perpetuated violence. It was not just one case among many, of clashes since the birth of the world divided between their ethnic and national groups.
's elimination of all that is Italian
recognized as the Slovene-Italian historical commission in 2001, these events occurred so "in an atmosphere of settling accounts for violence and Fascist war, "but appear largely" the result of a preliminary plan that included several tendencies: a commitment explicable to remove persons and structures (even beyond the personal responsibility) linked with Fascism, the Nazi supremacy, with collaboration and the Italian State, together with a drawing of prior purification of real, potential or assumed, according to the advent the communist regime, and the annexation of Venezia Giulia to the new Yugoslavia. The initial impulse was set off by a revolutionary movement that was changing in the system, thus converting into violence at the 'national and ideological animosity between the partisans. "
It was in this sense a purely twentieth-century phenomenon of use of violence for the pursuit a political project, the total dehumanization of the opponent, the claim of being able eli undermine in the name of a best interest of the story: totalitarlsmi of right and left in this sense, are a terrible point of convergence.
On this level the preservation of memory is a very timely work, and the celebration of a day of remembrance do Veros. A job should be because the perception is that only in some cases, the reflection on the "century of genocide" has come to investigate the root causes of the 'explosion of violence, totalitarian right and left, that has bloodied the twentieth century.
The taboo on communist violence
In the Italian public debate, but not limited to a reflection on the nature of this disease is preferred to a general moral condemnation of political forms intolerable, which we refused to analyze the roots, perhaps for fear that those same roots could find flags of another color. With the dual effect that the sacrosanct rejection of political violence generated by fascism likely to remain at a level which is only part of the politically correct, while that of communist violence struggling to establish itself in the conscience.
How this memory is equipped in the future to reject the new ways in which political violence may appear, it's all to see.