There are books that are not only born with the purpose of changing the image that countries have of themselves, but that also seem to end up achieving it. Like the Intervista sul fascismo by the historian and biographer of Mussolini Renzo De Felice with Michael Ledeen, published in 1975 in an Italy where there was talk of “historical commitment” and the word sorpasso began to be used to refer to the possibility that, for the first time, time, the Communist Party will advance Christian Democracy electorally. The proposal of a great alliance between a PCI unmoored from the USSR and a DC devoted to the social doctrine of the Church, with which Enrico Berlinguer intended to make the access of the communists to the government viable, was conceived as a maneuver in response to the political of the US State Department, then directed by Kissinger, which had led to the liquidation of the Allende government in Chile alluding to the domino effect and the Italian token. And the immediate political motive of Intervista sul fascismo, which obtained notable editorial success, was the creation of a climate contrary to that initiative, which finally, after the assassination of Aldo Moro, its main defender among the Christian Democrats, ended up shipwrecked. But the revision of the dominant points of view on the fascist regime and the undermining of the anti-fascist discourse with which the Republic born in 1946 had wanted to base its legitimacy that the book promoted transcended this temporary role and prepared the ground for success, in the 90s. , led by Silvio Berlusconi, of the strategy of insertion into the political system of the MSI, the neo-fascist party, through its descendant, the Alleanza Nazionale, from which the Fratelli d’Italia come. De Felice himself contributed to this success with another book-interview that also became a best-seller, Rosso e mero (1995), where he proposed the need to reconstruct the Italian national identity, leaving behind the anti-fascism-fascism opposition.
The Intervista sul fascismo is one of those books that, as they say, came to fill a void. To plug this hole, De Felice counted on the invaluable collaboration as a laborer of Michael Ledeen, then a visiting professor at the Sapienza in Rome and author of articles against Eurocommunism, who, upon returning to the United States, soon began working for Kissinger at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The history of historiographical revisionism is full of curious details. Like the biography of Ledeen himself, who later combined propaganda production in favor of neoconservative foreign policy and work as an advisor to the State Department with stellar participation in scandals such as Iran-Contra or in disinformation operations as notorious as that of the Bulgarian plot of the attack on John Paul II or Nigergate, which was intended to justify the invasion of Iraq.
