My thoughts on December 12
My generations of Italians is the Piazza Fontana generation.
On Dec 12, 1969, 50 years ago, 17 people were killed and 90 seriously wounded by a bomb, in a bank in the centre of Milan (piazza Fontana, indeed). Other similar devices were uncovered throughout Italy, set up to detonate on that day.
Who did it? The Fascists. Why? To ingenerate panic into the middle class and motivate them to support a coup and a regime like those ruling the NATO Mediterranean flank, like Greece, Spain and Portugal.
It’s not conspiratorial thinking; there had been indeed some meetings, with minutes well kept, between Fascists (crucially, French OAS veterans), Italian secret services strategist, and American military analysts. Minutes were uncovered in Portugal, after the 1974 revolution.
Piazza Fontana was the beginning of a season known as “Strategy of Tension”. Tens of similar bombs exploded in the following years. The last one was in Bologna in 1980: there the Fascists had operated together with Gaddafi, they had no support anymore from the American forces. Each time the Italia secret services intervened, either to alert the Fascists and allowed them to escape (one is now a citizen of Japan) or to switch the investigations in the wrong direction. Favourite target: anarchists.
This is the history of my generations. We all grew up under the shade of that bomb, and the many that followed. We all knew that Fascists were the simple executioners, and the plan was drawn elsewhere, in Right-wing and Catholic circles, with some help from the CIA. And on every Dec 12 we all put on display on our windows a poem by Pasolini, “Io so” (I know). And we all got used to long court proceedings and secreted minutes, and security issues being mentioned as a reason not to prosecute that or that other Fascist, who all, every time, emerged triumphant after the sentence was read. We all get used to these smiling faces, to the wreath and the speeches, to the sense of injustice, or of justice never done because, as we were told, you cannot find the real culprit, and you cannot damn an innocent.
So please, don’t get me fooled with your proceedings and procedures. I don’t trust them. I can see the difference between protection of an innocent, and shielding your comrade, with whom you share the same prejudices and the same deathly vision.
Don’ get me fooled. Because I know.
I know what an antisemite is.
[12 December 2019]