The heirs 2
The other was a very specific set of brutal attacks, far more limited in time and scale. “The Holocaust represents such a source of moral capital and authority that to compare the foibe, or any other event, to it is to stake a powerful moral claim about persecution and victimhood,” said Pamela Ballinger, a professor at the University of Michigan.Īfter all, the foibe and the Holocaust were crimes of two very different scales: One was the systematic extermination of an ethnic group throughout Europe that claimed the lives of 6 million Jews. The foibe has become somewhat of a “civil religion” for a large chunk of the political class, elevating the massacre to almost the same level as the extermination of European Jews.īut even without Michetti’s overt antisemitic cliché, the comparison would still be both inappropriate and politically charged. Ruth Dureghello, president of the Jewish Community of Rome, tweeted that “Michetti’s words are dangerous and hide a disturbing prejudice.” And on top of that, he did so using an explicitly antisemitic trope: “Maybe it’s because did not own banks or belong to a lobby,” he wrote last year. The conservative candidate who lost Rome’s recent mayoral election, Enrico Michetti, went as far as complaining that the foibe massacres unfairly enjoy less interest than the extermination of European Jews. In other words, the foibe has gone from being an almost forgotten episode to something that is memorialized, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, as “ own Holocaust.” In fact, the foibe killings are the only war crime that enjoys a national remembrance day, other than the Holocaust, and it is not uncommon for small cities to celebrate both remembrance days together, since they are only two weeks apart. But in the past few decades, the foibe has become somewhat of a “civil religion” for Italian institutions and a large chunk of the political class, elevating the massacre to almost the same level as the extermination of European Jews for part of the Italian public. Until recently, the event was barely discussed and hardly memorialized. The foibe mass killings are a gruesome historical episode not widely known outside of Italy. Italy’s most prominent newspaper, the Corriere della Sera, ran a front-page article accusing Montanari of “infamy.” A lawmaker from Italia Viva, the centrist party of former Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, demanded the rector be fired in a country where such cancellation requests are quite rare. Sure, Montanari was attacked by Giorgia Meloni, leader of the post-fascist Brothers of Italy, but attacks also came from the centrist and liberal camps. After publishing an opinion piece where he criticized how the right had weaponized the memory of such massacres, for a few weeks between August and September, Montanari became the most reviled figure in Italian media.Īnd it wasn’t just the right-wingers. Tomaso Montanari, an art historian and rector of the University for Foreigners of Siena, found out the hard way. But there’s one thing that will still get a public figure in serious trouble: casting doubt on whether the so-called foibe killings of Italians by Yugoslav communist partisans at the end of World War II was ethnic cleansing and should be put on the same level as the Holocaust. Politicians can easily get away with saying Italian dictator Benito Mussolini “ did good things,” tweeting the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or even promoting a World War II bunker-turned-tourist attraction with guides cosplaying as Wehrmacht officers. There are few historical taboos in Italian politics.