The Resistance is the heritage not of one particular faction, but of an entire nation

(The Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera recently ran this excerpt from a 2015 book on how, sometimes, even the winners don’t seem to write history. The book’s title is, May my blood be of service. Men and women of the Resistance. I translate some of it here, somewhat loosely, with possibly sub-optimal wording and slightly different formatting — I never have understood why Italians lay out paragraphs the way they do — but it should be accurate to the meaning.)

Italy has been fighting a war of memory for thirty years now. We antifascists have lost this war, significantly and spectacularly.

It wasn’t an electoral defeat. I don’t say this simply because the Left always loses elections. Also because in Italy alone — and this is another sign of our defeat — we have come to believe that if you are antifascist, then you are a Communist, or at least a Leftist.

That is not so.

Nazi-fascism was defeated by men of the right. An English Conservative named Winston Churchill. A French Nationalist named Charles de Gaulle.

Before the Nazis began exterminating Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals, they set about eliminating children with Down Syndrome, locking them in trucks that became the primordial gas chambers. This program of eliminating “mental minorities” was interrupted thanks to an opponent of the regime — not a Bolshevik, but a Bishop, and one of aristocratic descent, no less: Clemens August Joseph Pius Emanuel Antonius von Galen. From Münster’s cathedral pulpit he declared,

Do you, or do I, have the right to life solely as long as we are productive, as long as other people consider us productive? If we accept this principle now in application that unproductive people can be killed, then woe to us all when we grow old and decrepit! … No one’s life is safe anymore.

Martin Bormann, Hitler’s secretary, proposed that they hang the bishop. He wasn’t joking. To punish The White Rose, a group of university students guilty of having distributed some flyers, the Nazis opted first for torture, then beheading. (To think Mussolini chose these men for allies!) Conscious of the arts of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels objected that hanging a bishop was not a good idea.

In all his life, which woman did Charles de Gaulle love the most? His daughter Anne, afflicted with Down Syndrome. She perished in his arms at the age of twenty. Because of this, the general and his wife, the devout Catholic Yvonne, opened an institute to shelter and save children like those the Fuhrer euthanized by gas.

The choice between Nazi-fascism and its opponents was not a choice between Left and Right; it was the choice between barbarity and civilization.

And yet this conclusion, considered obvious throughout the world, is contested in Italy. … The first partisan bands were founded by Army officers, in particular by Alpine Troops who had served in Russia and who held on to their weapons after witnessing how the Germans carried out that war of extermination, convinced that sooner or later they would have to use them against them. Most Italians deluded themselves into thinking it would suffice to conclude an armistice with the Anglo-Americans to escape the conflict unscathed. They hadn’t grasped that for the Nazi regime and its criminal leader, the war was by now a question of life and death, and that Italy would become a field of battle, a land of conquest.

And yet, it should be clear, they have won. The fascists and the anti-fascists. Millions of Italians remain ignorant of the tragedy that was fascism, and more than that, do not want to know. And they think, perhaps in good faith, that the Resistance was offered only by Communists, or at any rate by the Left. In reality, the Resistance was a pluralistic phenomenon. It was offered by partisans of every political persuasion: Communists, Socialists, Activists, and Anarchists, sure; but also Moderates, Catholics, Liberals, Monarchists, and above all by twenty-year-old men who didn’t even understand what a political party was, but who wanted nothing to do with fighting for Hitler or Mussolini.

…

But the Resistance wasn’t offered only by partisans; it was offered also by civilians: by farmers who protected patriots, by Jews, by women, by nuns who hid the persecuted in their convents, by priests. Much is said, and rightly so, of the priests executed by certain partisans; no one ever speaks of the 190 priests shot by fascists and the 120 shot by Germans — shot because they had chosen the Resistance.

…

The Resistance is the heritage not of a particular faction, but of an entire nation. .