[This text belongs to ‘PenÃnsulas’, the newsletter that Enric Juliana sends every Tuesday to the readers of La Vanguardia. To receive it you just have to sign up here]
This week, Italy is celebrating. It is a party that reminds us of the famous film ‘Novecento’, by Bernardo Bertolucci. On April 25, 1945, the National Liberation Committee (CLN) called for a general insurrection throughout the north of the country to finish defeating Nazi-fascism, while the allied troops were approaching Milan after having entered into Rome. The insurrection was victorious and the partisan groups took control of a large part of the territory that Nazi Germany had converted into a buffer state under the name of the Italian Social Republic, better known as the Republic of Salò, a small town located on the shores of Lake Garda . After a few months, with the signature of the regent Umberto II of Savoy (the referendum on the continuity of the monarchy had not yet been held), April 25 was proclaimed a national holiday.
Italy celebrates this year the party of the partisan liberation with the grandchildren of fascism in the Government. What a mess. It is not an easy situation and it should be qualified. In Italy, the republican Constitution of 1948 is still in force and the government is headed by a party called the Brothers of Italy that does not claim to be fascist, but does claim, in a postmodern key, some features of the totalitarian movement founded by Benito Mussolini in the 1920s. past. Nationalism, without breaking with the European Union. Constant exaltation of national pride. Statement of authority. Traditionalism. Vindication of masculine values. Anti-communism. And a certain militarism, now exacerbated by the war in Ukraine. “I will not rennegare, I will not restoreâ€. This motto, coined by Giorgio Almirante, founder of the Italian Social Movement, guides the steps of Giorgia Meloni, who calls herself “prime minister” in a country little given to feminizing the names of professions and public responsibilities. The Brothers of Italy (expression that heads the letter of the national anthem) are the grandchildren of the MSI.
“We do not deny fascism, but we do not want to restore it”, that continues to be the motto. Meloni will coldly participate in the institutional acts of April 25, presided over by the Head of State, Sergio Mattarella, maximum guarantor of the Constitution, while some of his collaborators are dedicated to heating up the atmosphere with revisionist statements. Formal respect for republican legality and culture war. That is the plan of the Italian Brothers, waiting for events in the rest of Europe.
Why do I talk so often about Italy? I have been asked that question not infrequently. In my articles, a mention of that country always escapes. I am going to confess: I love Italy. My first trip abroad, in 1973, was to Italy. A group of kids from Badalona in Florence. We were stunned. I don’t know if we suffered from ‘Stendhal syndrome’, but the impression was very strong. The following year, we did it again, and the next, and the next… That’s how I got to know Italy, until in 1997, when Juan Tapia, then director of La Vanguardia, appointed me a correspondent in Rome. I look back on those years with emotion and gratitude. I’m not exaggerating. I am a fairly self-taught journalist by training. The foreign correspondent was my university. In Italy I discovered beauty at the age of sixteen. In Italy I learned to see the world with bifocals at the age of forty. You have to raise your head to get the perspective right. You have to look down a bit to be attentive to what is closest. You have to read and travel.
The Italy of today is not the Italy of 1973. Many things have changed in the world since then and it is not good to get carried away by nostalgia. I believe the underlying reality is the following: in Europe forces are beginning to rule that do not have their roots in the anti-fascist consensus that sealed the end of the Second World War. In Eastern European countries, democratized after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the phenomenon is increasingly evident. Some of the rising forces in Eastern Europe, including the Baltic countries, refer today to nationalism prior to the fascist experience. Poland and Hungary are the clearest examples. Frightened by Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine, the Scandinavian countries are also emitting signals of nationalist retreat. And in Western Europe, Italy has taken the first step in that direction. France is submerged in great social upheaval and nobody knows what will happen to Germany if the gas crisis persists and it is forced to reduce its exports to China. The Carolingian idealization of Europe, a Europe united by strong federal ties, may have entered a critical phase. The European Parliament elections scheduled for May 2024 will be very important.
The course of Europe is at stake and the ‘Iberian exception’ is put to the test. In Spain we know it well. There is another party on April 25 this week. On April 25, 1974, Portugal also freed itself from fascism. A gray and administrative fascism, attached to the old colonialism, was overthrown in forty-eight hours, with hardly any casualties, by a generation of young Army officers who had taken to reading between ambushes and ambushes in Africa.
The opera entitled ‘Nixon in China’ has just premiered in Madrid. I was fascinated when I saw the ad in the newspapers. US President Richard Nixon’s trip to China in 1972 is one of the boldest moves in international politics during the period known as the Cold War. A good music lover friend offered me the chance to accompany him last Friday to the session at the Teatro Real and I will always be grateful. Three hours of sung international chronicle. I found it impressive. I cannot write about the musical quality of composer John Adams’s work, since I lack the knowledge for it. I have never been an opera fan. Can only say that I liked it. I really liked the music, the voices, the staging by Dick Bird and the script by Alice Goodman.
The characters are very well characterized and one of them stands out above all: Zhou Enlai, number two in the Chinese communist regime, prime minister from 1949 until his death in 1976. Son of a family of former imperial officials, he had the state in the head It was he who protected the reformist Deng Xiaoping during the Cultural Revolution. In the opera, Zhou Enlai appears as the only self-controlled ego facing Mao Zedong, living myth, Richard Nixon, obsessed with posterity, and Henry Kissinger, in love with his cunning.
Nixon traveled to Beijing to make irreversible the break in relations between the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union, which began after Stalin’s death. “The enemy of my enemy can be my friend.” That was the motto of the trip. It was about preventing a unified communist bloc from dominating the great Eurasian continental shelf, of which Europe is a peninsula, a peninsula of discrete proportions if we look closely at the map.
The United States achieved its goal: the Soviet Union was isolated from China and went into decline, weighed down by military spending incompatible with the well-being of the population. Fifty years later, China and Russia have met again, under the command of Beijing. We still don’t know the end of this new opera.
