Italy’s Inner Battle Over War Memory

Just over two months ago, Italy celebrated its National Memorial Day of the Exiles and Foibe on February 10th. Il Giorno del Ricordo, as it is known in the country, has been recognized annually since it was enacted by law in 2005. The date memorializes the victims of the Istrian- Dalmatian exodus and the foibe massacres, both of which occurred during the last years of the Second World War and took place in the Julian March, a region shared today by Italy, Slovenia, and Croatia. Although Giorno del ricordo stands to memorialize both events, much of the day’s attention in recent years has become fixated solely on the foibe due to disputes over the massacre’s history.

Because the foibe massacres happened during a time of serious political upheaval in Italian history, its memory has been the subject of an ideological tug-of-war. For much of the Italian postwar era, there has been a struggle on the part of its political leaders to settle on a widely agreed upon national history, which has prohibited the remaining embers of World War II from being fully cooled down. Thus, since these crimes were conducted by communist partisans who were aligned with the eventual Yugoslavian president Josip Tito, Italy’s right-wing has a special interest in investigating the killings as more than acts of political retribution. Today, members of the Italian right argue that the foibe massacres should be considered acts of genocide and that Yugoslav partisans participated in a systematic ethnic cleansing of the region’s Italian civilians. Although academic research rejects this claim, this hasn’t stopped the right from rallying behind the cause.

The argument of ethnic cleansing has received fervent advocacy and support from Matteo Salvini, the leader of the right-wing secessionist party Lega Nord and Italy’s current Deputy Prime Minister. Mr. Salvini has gone as far as to frame the killings as an Italian Holocaust. “There are no Serie A and Serie B deaths...it is right to know the horrors of Nazi-fascism and the bestiality of Auschwitz, this land has also suffered,” said the Lega Nord leader in 2017, arguing the gravity of the foibe through an analogy of the country’s first and second tier soccer leagues.

During Salvini’s ascent to national superstardom in 2019, the debate over the foibe reached its highest peak, according to David Broder, a historian of the Italian far-right and communism and author of the new book “Mussolini’s Grandchildren: Fascism in Contemporary Italy”. This was due in part to Salvini’s use of the issue as a means to garner widespread appeal and support. “But the ‘foibe’ issue comes up all the time”, said Broder, “it is the most direct way by which anyone can direct attention away from discussion of fascism, with the words “but what about the foibe.” The aforementioned phrase has become ubiquitously used as a whataboutism technique from political talk shows to debates on the chamber floor.

What makes this year’s Giorno del ricordo stand out from the rest is that it’s being rung in by the furthest right-leaning government that Italy has seen in decades. Giorgia Meloni, a champion of the Italian right and proponent of the ethnic cleansing argument, won a historic election to become Italy’s first female Prime Minister back in September of 2022. Prime Minister Meloni, who formed her government coalition with Salvini’s Lega Nord and Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, is one of Italian conservatism’s greatest success stories. And on February 10th of this year, Meloni signed a decree to establish a Remembrance Day Committee concerned with the victims of the foibe. A post announcing the decree on the Italian Government’s website read, “The committee will ensure efficient and coordinated planning of the initiatives and ceremonies proposed by authorities to mark the Day of Remembrance.” In conjunction with this announcement, Meloni made the following remarks:

“The memory of the sinkholes and the Julian-Dalmatian exodus has been the victim of a real conspiracy of silence for too many years.... our compatriots from Istria, Rijeka and Dalmatia are ‘Italians twice’ and keep our flag in their hearts.”

It is apparent that under Meloni’s reign, the right’s fight to win over the memory of the foibe will continue. “Meloni has explicitly celebrated the focus on the foibe as a victory for her political side,” according to Broder, who contends that the result of this revisionism is to turn the focus of World War II away from Mussolini and delegitimize antifascism. This is of utmost importance to the Italian right, especially Meloni who has direct ties to Italy’s fascist past. Before founding her current party, Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy), or Fdl, Meloni was a youth member of the MSI, a former neo-fascist party that disbanded in the mid-1990s. The claims are not only part of a strategy to garner sympathy for Italy’s fascist past but to demonize the right’s political opponents on the left as well.

But besides being an effort to whitewash history, the Italian right has used the foibe to bring about changes in policy, most notably with immigration. Ignazio La Russa of the Fdl, who’s currently the President of the Senate and a former member of MSI, stated, “The worst racism is the Left’s racism against Italians: yesterday with Tito and Stalin, today against those who oppose the Islamic threat.” Justifying restrictive immigration policies by referencing the foibe has become an all-too-common occurrence in Italian legislative debate.

With their use of memory, the right has increased the appeal of anti-immigration rhetoric with voters across the country. According to Broder, framing the foibe in this manner allows Meloni’s coalition to telegraph their incendiary positions to great effect. “The idea that Italians were ethnically cleansed after World War II is married, in right-wing parties’ propaganda, with the claim that there is another genocide underway today...the planned extinction, the “Great Replacement.”

Although Meloni and her allies have managed to use the foibe to make significant political gains, Fratelli d’Italia’s ability to remain popular is still up in the air. For the past five years, the Italian government has had crisis after crisis, resulting in ever-changing party allegiances, making it difficult for any political leader to remain relevant and effective in office.

Broder posits that although the use of the foibe is alarming, the future prospects of the Fdl aren’t on solid ground, and it is more likely that the party would be another “short-lived electoral phenomenon” like the country has seen time and time again in recent years.

In interviewing Mr. Broder, it became evident that the political debate over memory isn’t just an Italian phenomenon but an issue affecting many of the world’s democracies, especially the United States. He likened the Italian right’s comments on the country’s fascist past to the comments made by former president Donald Trump concerning the Charlottesville protests, “there are very fine people on both sides.” As for what the American public can learn from watching the foibe debate unfold in Italy, Broder remarked, “The lesson is simply the need to draw lines of distinction and insists that not all sides are the same and not all opinions have equal weight or legitimacy.”