In a brilliant chapter in his book The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories, Alessandro Portelli described how a 21-year-old steelworker died in a clash with police on March 17th, 1949, in Terni, central Italy.
Workers at a steel factory had walked out on a Thursday morning to go to a rally protesting against the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty by the Italian government. They were confronted by police close to the factory gates, and the confrontation turned violent.
Less than half an hour passed between the beginning of the walkout and the killing of Luigi Trastulli, but these few minutes had a profound influence on the culture of the town of Terni.
The day became “the ground upon which collective memory and imagination built a cluster of tales, symbols, legends, and imaginary reconstructions”.
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Many versions of the tragic event were forged and disseminated, so radically different from each other that they cannot be passed off as the product of misremembrance.
The first divergence appeared in the newspapers. Conservative newspapers reported that the death was the product of an illegal march which had seen ordinary workers manipulated by their zealous leaders, and such was the violence that it was not clear whether Trastulli had been killed by police or by his workmates.
By contrast, L’Unità – a Communist daily newspaper – claimed that the workers had not even been on a march, rather they had just been leaving work at the end of a shift. They were then attacked by police, with “the usual frantic dance, the usual clubbing of heads”, and firing of bullets.
For the workers, the death of Trastulli and the injuries suffered by others was constructed into an epic narrative of a “police massacre”. Songs were sung and poems were written which placed Trastulli’s death – symbolically – on the factory wall.
By the 1970s, even the date on which Trastulli was killed had been shifted – it was said to have actually happened during street fighting after 2,000 workers were laid off.
Terni was an industrial town, and the mass redundancies – and the reaction to them – provided a new context for workers.
The story of the death of a protester was defined in history, not by the killing itself, but by what happened afterwards.
The history of the extremist attack on the US Capitol on January 6th, 2021, has been similarly contested from the very start.
Documentaries exploring the events of the day, the Maga [Make America Great Again] people who shaped it, and the violence, make plain the brutality and anti-democratic nature of what took place. The evidence presented of what happened seems incontestable: this was an attempt to stop the democratic transfer of power.
By contrast, social media flooded with support for the rioters and some mainstream media also gave voice to alternative narratives in which those who rioted were mythologised. A Justice for All song was released in 2023 by Donald Trump and the J6 Prison Choir; it was soaked in patriotism and misinformation.
Reimagining of the rioters as victims rather than aggressors is part of the notion that the largest single criminal inquiry the US Justice Department had undertaken was a matter of persecution rather than prosecution
The history of the day has truly been transformed by the result of November’s presidential election. The loss of life on January 6th, the life-changing injuries and trauma, the destruction of property, the general outrage has been swallowed in the politics of the return of Trump.
Unlike in Terni, of course, the date will not ever be shifted, rather it will be further elevated as J6. And it will now be viewed through the frame of a victory: this is the vision of a world where Trump has never lost and where “J6ers” are heroic loyalists.
That he ordered the release of 1,500 defendants on “full, complete and unconditional” presidential pardons or through commutations as one of his first acts was not a surprise. Trump had taken to referring to them as “hostages”. Those released include more than a dozen members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers militia, many of whom were convicted of seditious conspiracy.
The symbolism of announcing the pardons to mark the return to power is hugely powerful. It is part of the construction of a revised narrative of January 6th, which Trump has described as a “day of love” on which there was minimal violence, if any at all.
The core of this is to understand that this is not about deciding what is true or what is false from the accounts that are now produced, rather to see that the production is a strategy. This is precisely what happened during the postwar polarisation of Italy, where opposing versions of reality and history were prepared and where they both prospered.
The reimagining of the rioters as victims rather than aggressors is part of the notion that the largest single criminal inquiry the US Justice Department had undertaken in its 155-year history was actually a matter of persecution rather than prosecution. This echoed through the words of Trump’s vice-president JD Vance, who referred to those convicted after “a garbage trial”.
[ US Congress certifies Trump election victory on anniversary of Capitol riotOpens in new window ]
In the coming years and, then decades, the story of January 6th will be retold time and again in song and poem, there will be more documentaries and movies, and more books and stories. The basic events of the day will be smothered by rhetoric and by the power of a presidency supported by supplicant billionaires. Their tech and media power cannot disguise that no amount of money can actually buy you real freedom; indeed, in this instance, it forced the opposite: a noxious bending of the knee.
This bending is also an endorsement of a new history of January 6th, 2021.
Paul Rouse is a professor of history at University College Dublin
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