JOHN McCOURTreviews The Italian ResistanceBy Tom Behan Pluto Press, 255pp No price given
TOM BEHAN’S book tells a complex history of how hundreds and eventually hundreds of thousands of courageous Italian partisan volunteers fought to overthrow Mussolini’s Fascist rule and rid the country of Nazism.
The volunteers were driven by desperation. After several years of disastrous campaigns in the second World War, they had nothing left to lose, though initially their small numbers and guerrilla tactics seemed to have little chance of success.
This book is an account of how success was achieved in the mountains and cities through an uneasy alliance with the Allies. It also explores how this success led to great disappointment in the aftermath of the war as the world was carved into two and Stalin and Churchill arbitrarily agreed that Italy would remain part of the West and that the left must be kept from power.
The sometimes sketchy and often brilliant book is divided into 12 thematic chapters. This format is at times confusing, however, and will be even more so for the uninformed reader, who would need a more readable account of these complex events.
A grasp of the resistance and its aftermath is essential if we are to understand the lamentable state of Italian politics today, dominated as it is by an amoral tycoon who holds almost total sway over an increasingly indifferent country.
The reality is that Communism has always been a minority movement in Italy although it was largely Communist-inspired volunteers who won the country its freedom. The depiction of the failure of the left to assume power in the aftermath of war is one of the most fascinating chapters.
The resistance should have ended with the left in power but instead the Christian Democrats, supported by the West and by the Church (whose role is all-too rarely studied in this volume), took office and held it for half a century until the 1990s.
Behan describes well how partisans felt betrayed by post- war Italy, which often looked on them as enemies in a state where the police and judiciary largely stayed in place following the collapse of Fascism.
In the past 20 years, the Fascists have been rehabilitated in an increasingly racist country where vigilante patrols are again common in the north. The left has played a big part in allowing this to happen and continues to be incapable of countering the policies of an increasingly right- wing government. In this climate, the reputation of the partisans has been sullied by a revisionist media campaign and many Italians no longer have a firm grasp of the historical realities of their country.
This is an anomaly Behan redresses by establishing definitively that the partisans were indeed the good guys and deserve to be remembered as such for their valiant fight for justice and freedom against oppression.
His book would be even more effective if it wasn’t so slanted in favour of the partisans, who were less than saints. One of many slips that reveals his bias is his description of the forced exodus after the war of Istrians, Dalmatians and Fiumani from the Italian province to the east of Trieste. He writes of the killing of “a million Yugoslavs”, which is surely an excessive estimate, and dismisses the destiny of the Italian esuli (exiles), reducing them to “a few thousand”, which is a gross underestimate and contradicts established records. The more likely figure is in excess of 300,000.
John McCourt teaches at Università Roma Tre and is director of the Trieste Joyce School. He has just edited James Joyce in Context ( Cambridge University Press)