The following pages have the far more modest aim of offering a contribution to the correct evaluation of the kind of violence that the resistenti and Fascists practised – on the one hand bringing it back into that framework of the Second World War that was common to everybody, Fascists and anti-Fascists, Italians and Germans alike, and on the other hand holding fast to the fundamental distinctions between the parties involved. The enemy himself, a partisan has written, ‘had taught us all there was to know about death’, but remained a disciplined man, ‘sheltered from doubt’, and discharged his acts of inhumanity upon us.5 For this reason, too, quantitative facts, the importance of which should obviously not be denied, have not been given pride of place. As Thompson has written,
the symbolic importance of violence – both the violence of the state and the law and the violence of protest – may have no direct correlation with its quantity … Neither terror nor counter-terror can exhaust their significance in the light of a heavily quantitative examination, because the quantities must be seen within a global context, and this includes a symbolic context which attributes different values to different forms of violence.6
The great difference in symbolic value that the violence exercised by the men of the Resistance has compared with that practised by the regularly constituted armies and police corps stems from the breakdown of the state monopoly of violence. The citizens, hitherto more or less direct and conscious instruments and beneficiaries of state violence, became managers of violence in their own right. The moral problems springing from the immeasurable violence practised by tens of millions of men during the entire war were thus laid at the feet in a particular way, which demands more clear-cut answers of a few tens of thousands of partisans, who practised violence of their own free choice.
2. RESISTANCE VIOLENCE AND FASCIST VIOLENCE
The violence that flared up in Italy after 8 September 1943 came after a long period of practising and witnessing wartime violence, dating from 1940. But we have to go further back, to the Ethiopian war and the Spanish war and, for that matter, to the whole climate, of which Fascism and Nazism were both product and cause, that had shifted people’s attitudes – and not just in a few fanatics – to the violence present in the world from the recognition of a fact to the affirmation of a value. In 1914 the explosion of violence had managed to appear as the breakdown of a world that was too bland, too monotonous, too enfeebled.1 (Allowing for the obvious difference in scale, post-1968 violence, following a long period of unprecedented prosperity, would again have some of these characteristics.) In 1914 it had also managed to appear as the sudden unveiling of the intrinsically violent nature of the state.2 In the Italy of 1940, and as a final proof in the Italy of 1943, the exercise of violence seemed rather to be the outflow of what had been building up for a long time. This made the violence on the one hand more obvious, and on the other more ruthless; but at the same time it paved the way for the passage to a reconsideration of the limits of resorting to violence and the possibility of using it in a contingent way in order to render it impossible in the future. Violence as seduction and violence as harsh necessity thus clash openly, though coexisting at times in the same people.12
In a country like France, which, until the advent of war, had had no experience of Fascism in power, still in the 1930s the discovery of ‘paradoxes, ambiguities conflicts, still unresolved’ had led to violence being set against ‘the sweet dreams of our professors’; but, Sartre goes on to say, ‘it was a wretched violence … which risked leading us to Fascism’. And again: ‘It was the war which shattered the worn structures of our thought: war, occupation, Resistance, and the years which followed’.3
In Italy the dilemma appeared in an ostensibly simpler light: anti-Fascist violence against Fascist violence. The historicist foundation – in its idealist or Marxist version – of nearly all anti-Fascist political thought favoured this simplification. Moreover, we have seen how, faced with what Carlo Rosselli called the ‘war that returns’, the attitude of the anti-Fascists had been neither easy nor univocal. The German occupation and the birth of the Social Republic made the contrast between the two kinds of violence once again clear; but the global situation, created by the war, still involved all those who, on opposite fronts, were experiencing it.
Giaime Pintor, who did not live long enough to see things mutate into the Resistance, had traced this image of the war as ‘place of the demoniacal’:4
And everywhere the war has spread a facile cruelty, an unthinking, dull cruelty which is the worst secretion of man. The horrible sense of the gratuitous, of the unnecessary murder. Once the constraints have been removed, killing becomes a habit and punishing has become a routine exercise. The horrible weakness of man has emerged, the weakness of the man who can command.5
Pride in the Resistance must not make us hastily conclude that only the Fascists of the RSI were heirs of this attitude to killing other men. They were certainly the heirs in a growing and prevalent way, because this kind of behaviour was in tune with the basic nature of their culture; but traces are to be found among the resistenti as well. In The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi wrote that the oppressor and the victim ‘are in the same trap, but it is the oppressor, and he alone, who has prepared it and activated it’.6 Levi devotes a chapter of his book to the ‘grey zone’, which, in the strict sense, he sees as being that of collaboration (protekcja) as the indispensable ring in the mechanism of the extermination camps; but, as he himself suggests, that phrase also indicates the border zone between the territory of good and the territory of evil, which vie with one another for it. The higher the rate of collective violence taking place, the more likely it is that conduct in some way common to the two great opposing territories will spring from that grey zone.
While the current practice and the constant spectacle of killing could lead to the sad habituation of which Pintor speaks, it could also prompt one to question oneself about the sense of staying alive, thus taking the problem of life and death back into the realm of one’s personal experience with particular immediacy. ‘It did not seem to me to be very natural that I should stay alive among so many dead companions’, wrote a partisan on the eve of being shot by a firing squad.7 ‘Are you ashamed to be alive in the place of another?’, was the kind of question that was asked in a death camp.8 Parallel with this, the death that you unjustly underwent could be accepted as a destiny that you shared with so large a number of your fellow men.
Many resistenti felt this sentiment before the risk of death and the certainty of being condemned. ‘I think today that the whole of humanity is suffering, that I’ll be neither the first nor the last to die in this war’, wrote a young man before attempting to escape from a training camp in Germany.9 General Perotti, on the eve of execution in April 1944 with the other members of the Piedmontese regional military command, wrote to his wife: ‘I consider myself one of the war dead, because war has been ours. And in war death is a risk everyone runs … so many are dying every day and most of them, innocently; I at least have fought.’10
And an Italian participating in the French Resistance: ‘There’s nothing extraordinary about my death, no one should be surprised and no one should grieve; so many are dying on the front and in the air-raids that it is not at all strange that I, a soldier, should fall as well.’11
Identical sentiments were present in those of other countries awaiting execution. A French intellectual: ‘I consider that at this moment thousands of soldiers of all countries are dying every day, dragged into the great wind that is sweeping me away too.’12 A Belgian engineer: ‘Hundreds of thousands of soldiers have died in this war: I am one of them.’13 A Yugoslavian woman worker: ‘Today when millions of men are going innocently to their deaths, I too find myself among them. This is what destiny has wanted and I do not grieve the fact.’14 A Soviet Communist: ‘Millions of men are perishing: are we any better than them?’15
This playing down of one’s own violent death does not stem only from the desire to assua
ge the grief of those who remain, and is at the same time a far cry from mystical identification with death. It should be linked rather with the attitude assumed before the exercise of violence as an unavoidable consequence of a choice made in the name of political and civil ideals, an integral part of which consists in calling into question violence as an instrument and a value. There was not only a reappearance of the utopia of the ‘last war’, which was fought as a war to end all wars and sustained the morale of the great mobilised imperial armies, saddling the enemy with full responsibility for the first shot. It was also a question of living, as indeed a Piedmontese woman partisan has said, ‘the first time in history in which one is rebelling against war and the promoters of war’, even if today the Communist comrades of this partisan, extollers of combative voluntarism, are loath to acknowledge (the testimony dates from the early 1970s) that ‘deep down’ there was ‘that aspect of the rejection of war’ (‘nobody says these things to the Party, nobody says them at school’).16 The words of another woman protagonist, whose husband was a prisoner, are along the same lines: ‘And so that hatred, that antipathy to war, bullying, violence reawakens … Then came 8 September and … and I joined the partisans.’17
It is certainly no accident that these last two quotations come from women. But at the other end of the scale a similar distancing from the arms ethic can be detected in a vice-brigadiere of the carabinieri, turned Garibaldi partisan, who, on the eve of execution, wrote to a priest asking him to urge his wife ‘to do all she can not to try to make their children into soldiers or militarists’.18
The general problem raised by declarations and behaviour of this kind may be expressed by quoting Primo Levi: ‘Is there such a thing as useful violence?’ Levi replies: ‘Unfortunately, yes’, and adds that in it suffering is a ‘by-product, something extra’.19 We shall come back to this ‘something extra’ and the discriminating value of the attitude towards it. Meanwhile, the ‘utility’ of violence must be traced back to the just cause in the name of which it is exercised. In those circumstances, what does it mean to say that one must not propter vitam vivendi perdere causam (destroy the reason for living in order to stay alive)? The radical answer that violence is itself a vivendi perdere causam was utterly extraneous to the historical situation; but it is indicative that in 1946 Andrea Caffi, a lucid and committed intellectual who had experienced all the great upheavals of our century, from the Russian Revolution to the Resistance as lived on French soil, came to the conclusion that ‘organised violence’ is always negative, in any war, ‘even against Hitler or … Stalin’.20 Echoing in these words is the trauma of Hiroshima and the onset of the Cold War; but they also bespeak disappointment in the results obtained by the exercise, during the Second World War, of so much ‘just’ violence.
The fact is that the vivendi causa of those human beings who underwent Fascist and Nazi aggression was also that of not tolerating the intolerability of that aggression.21 It would have been paradoxical if propter vitam of the aggressor, the victim of aggression gave up sustaining his own vivendi causam, which led him in the first place to put his own life in danger. The ‘truth’ of the resistenti aimed therefore at giving an affirmative answer to the question put by Thomas Mann in 1918: ‘Can truth be an argument, when life is at stake?’22 Answering ‘yes’ meant committing oneself to finding, within a truth that does not make violence into a value, sufficient justification for a practice that seemed to belie it. I should like to venture a comparison with an experience that is in so many ways distant. The Maccabees who were fighting against the Seleucids were asked:
Was it necessary to fight on the Sabbath against an adversary who didn’t respect the rules of the game? The problem had arisen at once, at the beginning of the revolt; experience led them to conclude, ‘if we all do as our brothers have done and do not fight rather against the Gentiles to defend our lives and our institutions, very soon they will have wiped us off the face of the earth’.23
Concluding the chapter in his memoirs on ‘The Tragedy of Munich’, Churchill wrote: ‘The Sermon on the Mount is the last word in Christian ethics. Everyone respects the Quakers. Still, it is not on these terms that Ministers assume their responsibilities of guiding States.’24
During the Resistance the problem of the fifth commandment was raised as a preliminary issue by several anti-Fascist Catholics. ‘The cristiano-sociale [sic, Christian Democrat] has raised the question of conscience: Is it legitimate to kill?’ says a Communist report from Turin.25 As we recalled earlier, a professor at the seminary of Como, don Onorio Cairoli, claimed that it was right ‘to oppose the Germans and their collaborators, within the limits dictated by the natural commandments and by the decalogue’.26 In a Communist document, a Garibaldino, Catholic commander’s hesitation about attacking the enemy and laying ambushes for him is attributed not just to ‘exaggerated military honesty’, but ‘perhaps … to religious prejudice’.27
Replying to a reader who had asked Il Popolo what canonical measures he would incur if he used ‘Fascist methods of persuasion on the Fascist don Calcagno’, the Christian Democrat writer replied that it was sacrilege to cause ‘real offence’ to a cleric who had not been reduced to lay status or banned in perpetuo from wearing the cassock (measures that were never adopted against the founder of ‘Crociata italica’), and added, in poor taste:
It seems to us though that, more so still than canonical reasons, moral considerations and respect for legality, a necessary premise for a constructive anti-Fascism should dissuade us from the Matteottisation of don Calcagno or anyone for that matter. When the time comes, the law will deal with Farinacci and his lot as well.28
Not that recourse to violence, in exceptional circumstances, was extraneous to Catholic thought: one need only think of its justifications of tyrannicide. Closer to home, though the sides here are inverted, in 1921 Alcide De Gasperi had criticised ‘those who intend to condemn every Fascist action under the vague condemnation of violence’. Violence, De Gasperi had recalled, is sometimes legitimate: the violent one might appear to be Renzo (in Manzoni’s novel I Promessi Sposi) resisting an abuse of power, while the real violent one was don Abbondio.29 The fact is, however, that the Catholics did not always find it easy to separate the problem of violence, considered in principle, from the questions, discussed chiefly in Chapter 5 of this book, of order and legality. This slippage was favoured on the one hand by the extensive interpretation of the principle, to which we shall return, that it is permissible to kill only for legitimate defence,30 and on the other hand by the fact that, when the Christian Democrats (like, for that matter, the Liberals) spoke about today’s violence their thoughts ran to the violence of a possible and perilous tomorrow: revolutionary violence, against the existing social order, proletarian violence. La Libertà took a stand ‘against all political violence’.31 Conquiste sindacali appealed to the doctrine of Christ – revolutionary, yes, but not violent.32 More problematically, the Christian Socialists wrote that ‘a clean sweep is always necessary, to kill is almost always useless’ for those who do not want to give the class struggle ‘a metaphysical significance, a mystical essence in order to make it into a bloodthirsty God of hate’.33
The problem of the connection between violence and legality was not, however, the invention of some scrupulous and fearful Catholic consciences. By long tradition, both Christian and lay, what made it legitimate to kill, suspending the authority of the fifth commandment, was primarily, if not quite exclusively, the cover of legality – in other words, the recognition of the state monopoly of violence. Now, the theme of the institutional void and the all-determining choice, which has been central to our argument so far, finds its critical point precisely in the exercise of violence – that is to say, of the legitimisation of exercising the jus vitae ac necis (right of life and death) without any secure institutional cover. The preference of many Catholics for purely military partisan activity can be interpreted, in this regard, as a quest for the traditional guarantee of a non-guilty
use of arms.34 The authorisation given to the military was, in short, more reassuring than the choice of the political; and it was an authority introjected by the conscience of each single individual and endorsed by the age-old authorisation given by the Church to the secular arm of Christian principles. This could give rise to the paradox that the more one harboured religious doubts and scruples, the more readily one had recourse to this authority, either by taking up arms oneself or saddling others with the more unpleasant aspects that went with doing so. In the Modena partisan division the Christian Democrats wanted order and regular and inflexible tribunals, but preferred the firing squads to be composed of Communists.35 A lay conscience like Primo Levi has baldly laid bare the contradictions, and not the consolations, generated by this kind of behaviour:
I demand justice – he writes of himself – but I am not able, personally, to trade punches or ‘return the blow’ … I prefer to delegate punishments, revenges and retaliations to the laws of my country … It is indeed because of this that my career as a Partisan was so brief, painful, stupid and tragic: I had taken on a role that was not mine.36
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