Sometimes historical publications are stern and sullen, starting with their titles. This work by Marco Rossi is an exception, like many of his books, highlighting the author's penchant for popular mockery: "Winning! But will we win?" is in fact the inscription penned by a worker "in a no less symbolic place, the retreat of the ANIC factory" in Livorno, a few months after Italy's entry into the war. Likewise, a "cinematographic" approach is present in the writing, when the turbulent days before Italy's entry into the war are recounted with historical expertise, with local newspapers supporting the belligerent position "in a rather fatalistic tone," though without evoking the terrible consequences of that choice. The anxious waits of the Livornese, aware of the vulnerability of the city to air raids and with no confidence in anti-aircraft defenses, culminating in Mussolini's announcement, greeted by attacks on anti-fascist shops.
After the first French bombings-a prelude to the much more devastating Anglo-American ones of 1943-44-many Livornese fled to the countryside, having experienced firsthand "the preparation of air raid shelters in basements."
Marco Rossi's research is thorough and detailed, and also corrects some historical errors, both in the chronology of the 1940 attacks and in the attribution of the bombings.
The French Air Force's use of the name of the poet and writer Jules Verne for the famous Farman 223-4, the privateer aircraft that allegedly bombed Livorno on the night of June 15-16, is striking. Although this name harks back to the plane's original civilian use, later militarized, memory cannot help but return to the two French units operating in Kosovo in 1999, named Baudelaire and Rimbaud. A criminal and persistent aberration.
Marco Rossi entrusts Nicola Labanca with the conclusions on the failed technical history of Mussolini's anti-aircraft defenses, which ultimately represents nothing more than "the general history of a regime that speaks and hastens war without preparing for it, placing ideology, politics, and party before the rationality of the exigencies of war."
Browsing through the fascinating photographic inserts on the sinkholes and destruction of the city of Livorno, we encounter one of the most sinister and horrifying historical pages of the war catastrophe under examination: the opening of Italian concentration camps for men and women who, without any charges, were deemed "dangerous in the event of war." In many cases, this was a double filing: a large portion were already registered in the List of Persons to be Arrested in Certain Circumstances, when local police stations applied preventive detention to coincide with prohibited anniversaries such as May Day, the Paris Commune, or the Russian Revolution, or during regime demonstrations or visits to the city by members of the government.
An obsession that also persisted, that of the camp, which in this case housed, in addition to the still-existing Roma and Sinti bandits, political opponents and "asocials" in 51 facilities of various types, mostly "abandoned and sometimes dilapidated buildings" scattered across the peninsula.
Marco Rossi rightly points out that, unlike police confinement, civilian internment did not provide the possibility-even if only formally-of appealing to the Appeals Commission. This further repressive tightening was not justified by the actual danger posed by the anti-fascist front in 1940, lacking weapons and economic resources, but rather can be interpreted as "a function of the totalitarian consensus to which the regime aspired when it imposed the human cost of victims and unpopular choices dictated by the war economy."
In June of the same year, along with the first groups of interned "political" individuals, the internment of Livorno Jews, already classified as subversives or generically anti-fascists or anti-Nazis, also began. Rossi recalls that the first act of the anti-Semitic policy was the 1938 Census of Jews: noteworthy is the Ministry of the Interior's call to prosecute all members of the "Jewish race," even if they were atheists or professed other religions. In 1940, Mussolini ordered the construction of concentration camps "also for Jews, in case of war," although the integration of Jewish communities into the military, if not into the fascist party itself, constituted a concrete impediment to government concern, so at this stage only "subversive" and anti-fascist Jews were deported to the camps.
In three years-from 1940 to 1943-around seventy Livorno Jews were interned, before the Nazi-Fascist roundups and infamous mass deportations to concentration camps began under the Republic of Salò.
This intense historical narrative, unfolding in a single year, is complemented by two interesting appendices: the list of Livorno subversives interned in June 1940; and the institutional career of policeman Marcello Guida, which will undoubtedly help younger readers discover the strength of the historical thread that links the catastrophes of the distant past to those of the recent past, as well as the subversive choices of the past to those of the present. It's difficult not to read between the lines of this terrible 1940 the echo of the current massacres, with their burden of inhumanity and the cry of being understood and fought.
MaGù
https://umanitanova.org/marco-rossi-vincere-ma-vinceremo-livorno-in-stato-di-guerra-giugno-1940/
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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