A-Infos (en) Italy, FAI, Umanita Nova: Remembrance Day: Anarchists and the Foibe (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

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/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Subscribe/Unsubscribe https://ainfos.ca/mailman/listinfo/a-infos-en
Archive: http://ainfos.ca/en