FLASH
Shkruar nga Marco Mondini
It is precisely the party that calls itself national that denies its own people the ability to enjoy those liberal orders that all civilized peoples enjoy...
" I was a suspect, a man whom the police could arrest at any moment, for no reason, for a simple denunciation or for a whim of the commissioner. " Exactly one hundred years have passed since Giuseppe Scalarini wrote these words in his diary.
He lived under the watchful eye of the regime and was fully aware of it. Not because he was a dangerous terrorist or a subversive with revolutionary ambitions. In fact, the only weapon he had ever used was a pencil. The problem was that with that pencil he drew for the newspaper Avanti!. Scalarini was the author of some of the most blasphemous and striking cartoons of modern Europe. A steadfast and courageous socialist, polemical, incisive, antimilitarist and, of course, antifascist. That was enough to be persecuted, to “live with one’s soul in suspense”, awaiting an arbitrary arrest, or internment, that could come at any moment.
Because in 1926, there was very little left of liberal Italy and, in essence, of the rule of law. Yes, there was still a Parliament, with a freely elected Chamber of Deputies. At least in theory. The elections, in fact, had been accompanied by violence and bloodshed, and the deputies of the anti-fascist parties who had managed to survive the pressures and threats had abandoned the hall in protest after the murder of Giacomo Matteotti.
There was still a king, who would take care not to interfere, while the legal orders he had sworn to protect were being distorted to the point of being transformed into dictatorship. There was still a constitution, the Alberti Statute. Benito Mussolini and his collaborators would not touch it. There was no need. A few ordinary laws, approved between January and February of that year, a century ago, were enough to complete the totalitarian metamorphosis of the new state.
The President of the Council was transformed into the Prime Minister, a figure with full powers, to whom ministers owed obedience, who governed through legal decrees and who was responsible only to the monarch. Newspapers and periodicals ceased to be independent. It was enough to stipulate that the responsible directors could exercise their duties only with the approval of the prefects to push most of the still anti-fascist newspapers either to close or to align themselves, becoming mouthpieces of the regime.
Elected mayors and municipal councils became a thing of the past. The municipalities came under the control of the government, which from that moment on would directly appoint podestàs who suited its interests. As the former League general Roberto Vannacci would perhaps say today, these measures were all “legal”. To the extent that a military camp of enthusiastic loyalists, always applauding and ready to obey, can be called a legitimate parliamentary assembly, it can also be said that this is true.
Amid the murders, arrests and threats, Montecitorio at that point resembled anything but the seat of a liberal Parliament, and very few still had the courage to speak out. One of them was Luigi Albertini, who rose in the Senate to denounce the assassination of liberal democracy.
"It is precisely the party that calls itself national that denies its people the ability to enjoy those liberal orders that all civilized peoples enjoy ," declared the former director of Corriere della Sera, amid insults from fascists.
The government had subdued the legislative branch, suppressed freedom of the press and thought, humiliated the right to organize and strike, and threatened the independence of the judiciary. In short, it had emptied the traditional idea of democracy of its meaning.
“ Only the facade of what Italy was left standing, ready to collapse at any moment ,” Albertini warned. And he was not wrong.
A few months later, with the laws for the protection of the state, the regime finally took off its mask. The Unique Text for Public Security and the Special Court became the pillars of the architecture of a police state, where any citizen, regardless of what he had done or not, could be arbitrarily detained, arrested and deported. For all Italians, not only for Scalarini, the long years of suspended life began. And of fear./ Adapted from "Pamphlet" by "La Repubblica"
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