Considerations based on a 1947 article in Umanità Nova ---- Every year, around "Remembrance Day," we are told that a guilty silence about the Foibe massacres had fallen for decades. But this narrative does not stand up to the test of facts. ---- Already in 1947, shortly after the end of the war, the anarchist weekly "Umanità Nova" openly addressed the issue, displaying a clarity often lacking in public debate today. In its article on an episode that occurred near Trieste, the newspaper does not deny the horror of the killings nor the pain of the victims. On the contrary, it acknowledges their gravity, but consciously rejects the political operation that the nationalist press attempted-and still attempts-to construct around those events.
"Umanità Nova" immediately dismantles the central mechanism of the victim narrative: the arbitrary extension of individual crimes to the entire "Slavic people," serving only to fuel national hatred and ethnic resentment. It denounces the exploitative use of the foibe as propaganda bait, useful for removing context, erasing fascism's responsibility, and presenting Italians solely as innocent victims of history.
The article emphasizes a point that is systematically erased today: events must be framed within the historical, social, and psychological conditions in which they occurred. Years of war, occupation, systematic violence, and contempt for human life. Without this context, memory is not memory, but propaganda.
Forget about "silence": the problem has never been silence, but who spoke and from where. There were those, like the anarchists, who even then sought to distinguish between real pain and the political exploitation of pain. Remembrance Day, as it is celebrated today, deliberately chooses a one-sided, nationalist memory, serving the rehabilitation of an Italian identity that is by definition a victim and never responsible.
Recovering texts like "Umanità Nova" does not serve to deny the deaths, but to deny the lie. Because a memory that rejects historical context is not memory: it is an ideological construction.
Text of the article by UN:
FROM TRIESTE
FOIBE
Not long ago, on May 23, a group of Yugoslav partisans, for reasons still unknown, took two young Italians from their home, killed them, and threw them into the "Staerka Jama," a "foiba" located near Padriciano. They then used explosives to collapse part of the wall to permanently hide the bodies.
The bodies were recently discovered and identified, and the alleged perpetrators were brought before the Assize Court in Trieste.
These are the facts of a dark and terrible tragedy, which has attracted the attention of both the Italian and Yugoslav nationalist press for opposing reasons. The former, in order to further exploit Italian resentment toward the Slavs, tends to give a broad meaning to the episode in question, extending to the entire Slavic population what, in this case, are merely manifestations of the criminal nature of a few individuals. These individuals were driven to what they did by motives that, it seems from the course and outcome of the trial, go beyond the political realm and instead fall within purely personal and private interests. The event we are discussing also serves as a good starting point to remind Italian nationalists of other similar events, in which many lives were taken for political reasons by the Slavic populations, once they were able to free themselves from Italian rule. These events were certainly painful, but an objective and honest press should limit them, both in space and time. Furthermore, they should be framed within the specific circumstances in which they occurred, within the truly abnormal psychological conditions of those times, determined by the habit of evil and bloodshed acquired during the war, and by the general disdain for the life of the vanquished enemy, typical of any soldier arriving in a foreign land as an occupier (the various German, Italian, English, French, Russian, and other occupations teach us this with their experiences).
On the other hand, the Slavic nationalist press seized on this trial to rekindle ancient passions, hatreds, and ancestral resentments of the Slavic people toward the Italians: it acknowledged the "foibe" massacres and, in contrast, published a long series of written and photographic documentaries of atrocities committed by the Italians in Yugoslavia.
Like hungry hyenas, newspapers on both sides pounce on what is revealed in a trial full of dramatic twists and turns, which are exploited by reckless reporters with criminal sadism, with the sole purpose of inciting even more hatred between these two peoples, of further deepening the chasm that has opened between them. And pens dipped in the morbid hatred of both Italian and Slavic nationalism work admirably towards this goal, blindly forgetting to trace the infamous cause of this and other similar crimes. None of those who write condemning the various "foibe," the Katins, Lidices, Dakaus, Buchenwalds, etc., think of condemning the primary reason for these massacres, indicative of a progressive brutalization of humanity: WAR! Yet it should be clear to everyone that one absolutely cannot expect those same men, coldly trained in the barracks to commit murder, to act humanely when they happen to find themselves forced to apply to the practical realms of war and coercion the lessons they were taught in peacetime. And then, the horrors of the foibe, Katin, Buchenwald, and so many other massacres occur, including the "heroic" ones on battlefields on a par with the former, massacres that were committed with the same coldness with which the young soldiers were educated.
No one thinks to condemn the cause of such horrors, either because they are unaware of it, or because it is much more convenient not to. And so the comedy continues, focusing on isolated facts and episodes, which, if they have value in themselves, would be even more so if they were connected to the armed conflict, if they condemned it in the name of a superior humanity and civilization.
G.B.
"Umanità Nova", 22 June 1947, a. XXVII, n. 25, p. 2.
https://libertari-go.noblogs.org/gli-anarchici-e-le-foibe/
https://umanitanova.org/giorno-del-ricordo-gli-anarchici-e-le-foibe/
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Link: (en) Italy, FAI, Umanita Nova: Remembrance Day: Anarchists and the Foibe (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]
Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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