A-Infos (en) Sicilia Libertaria: Review: So what about the foibe? (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

We are approaching February, the 10th of this month has been proclaimed 
"remembrance day". Of the memory of what? But about the victims of the 
foibe! Indeed, to be honest, a government circular has been issued for 
at least a month inviting the principals of all schools to give maximum 
prominence to this day, organizing initiatives, and communicating in 
advance (the deadline I think was mid-November) the calendar of the 
same. ---- One wonders why there is so much attention and all this 
anticipation when on January 27th, that is, well before February 10th, 
there will also be Remembrance Day, the day to remember the Holocaust, 
on which no circular has been issued by the diligent rulers and their 
Ministry.

There is an air of revenge, therefore. On the basis of a nationalist 
narrative that has been in vogue for some time which aims to compare the 
victims of the foibe to those of the Nazi extermination camps, putting 
everything on the same level, emptying the gas chambers of meaning, 
starting from assumed that "the Italians were also victims of the 
communists", that is, the communists also carried out their exterminations.

The vulgate on the foibe was born as a far-right ideological operation 
built with abundant use of historical lies in order to dismantle the 
meaning of the anti-fascist resistance.

Many have been said about the victims of the foibe: from tens of 
thousands to hundreds of thousands, even millions. Figures thrown around 
haphazardly and also endorsed by institutional exponents of the 
so-called left, who ended up espousing the thesis of red extermination 
as opposed to black extermination.

Now, it is not the writer's intention to relieve the Stalinist regimes 
of their responsibilities; nor deny that there had been a foibe case. 
However, the question is different, as Eric Gobetti explains well in his 
book "And then the foibe?", published by Laterza for the Fact Checking 
series in 2020, a series created specifically to dispel the clichés that 
invade our daily sphere and they then establish as established truths 
that few have the courage and desire to refute, dismantling them and 
revising them with very specific sources and evidence.

Gobetti did an excellent job, from which we can deduce some very precise 
facts:

The first is that the use of foibe, or karst cavities very present in 
the eastern area, on the border between Italy and Yugoslavia, today 
Slovenia and Croatia, to bury corpses, animal carcasses, make bodies 
disappear, was a custom that dates back at the dawn of time.

The second is historical but also geographical contextualization. The 
entire Istrian-Friulian area, as a border area, has been subject to 
continuous border changes resulting in regime changes. But until the 
Austro-Hungarian Empire, different ethnic groups coexisted in that area 
of the upper Adriatic, mainly Slavs, Italians, but also Hungarians, 
Germans, etc. When, after the First World War, the Dalmatian-Istrian 
territories were granted to Italy, which immediately afterwards imposed 
forced Italianization and fascistization, discriminating and repressing 
those who did not adapt to the new nationalist political measures. An 
ethnic cleansing that also led to violence against entire villages, 
expropriations, expulsions, purges and brutality of all kinds. They 
worsened under the German occupation, from 1943 until the end of the war 
with the liberation of the area by the Yugoslav partisans, among whom 
were many former Italian soldiers who joined them after the disbandment 
following the armistice of 8 September. In this last phase it is true 
that violence also occurred, but it was the logical consequence of the 
liberation from fascism, so much so that the victims of it were those 
responsible for the regime, both military and civilian, who had governed 
the area and who they were stained in various ways with violence, abuse 
of power, murders, summary shootings and discrimination in general.

This reconstruction denies the toxic narrative so dear to the Italian 
fascists according to which it would be a national Shoah in which a 
preponderant number of Italians would have been eliminated and informed 
just because they were Italian.

There were bodies thrown into the foibe (but not only), but the numbers 
are lowered to a few hundred, perhaps a few thousand, very different 
from the extermination of 6 million Jews with which some would like to 
put them on the same scale.

This is not intended to justify the murder nor the fact that a (far) 
lower number of victims than the Holocaust can be tolerated. But if this 
is the case, the story is a completely different one, and it cannot even 
be defined as a specific event in that area, given that throughout 
Europe, as territories were freed from the Nazi-fascist presence, events 
occurred similar, revenge, violence against those who had abused their 
power, causing mourning and sacrifices.

The mystification that is carried out on the foibe is an ideological 
operation set up with the aim of emptying anti-fascism of its liberating 
and libertarian, egalitarian and social justice-oriented meaning. If 
even the anti-fascists were guilty of crimes like the Germans, the Nazis 
and the fascists - this is the assumption - then anti-fascism must be 
banned from civil society, it must be considered criminal, or, if one 
really wants to insist on keeping it in afloat, then even Nazism and 
fascism have the right to be cleared and reevaluated.

A sneaky, false and dangerous operation that has been going on for some 
time. This year, more than before, the Ministry of Education will make 
it an opportunity to poison consciences by sending plenty of history 
fakers into schools to preach all this. We need to start raising a wall 
against intolerance and moral and political pollution. Eric Gobetti's 
book is an important brick of this wall.

Pippo Gurrieri

https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
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