Controversy over spiked antifascist speech dominates Italy's Liberation Day anniversary

ROME -- Italy on Thursday marked its liberation from Nazi occupation and fascist rule amid a fresh media controversy over suspected censorship and the legacy of Italian fascist complicity in the Holocaust and World War II-era crimes.

Premier Giorgia Meloni, whose Brothers of Italy party traces its roots to the neo-fascist movement that emerged after the fall of dictator Benito Mussolini, joined the Italian president at the tomb of the unknown soldier in Rome for the solemn Liberation Day commemoration.

This year’s anniversary was marked by a media storm over the decision by state-run RAI television to spike a planned Liberation Day monologue by an Italian author denouncing fascism and what he said was Meloni’s refusal to repudiate it.

The issue struck a nerve in Italy, where Meloni’s 2022 election as the first hard-right leader since World War II has revived criticism that Italy hasn’t fully reckoned with its fascist past, in the same way that Germany did with national socialism.

The suggestion that RAI censored Antonio Scurati’s monologue because it criticized Meloni, her party and lingering neo-fascist sentiment has dominated Italian news for days and prompted Meloni to publish the Scurati essay itself on her Facebook page.

In the post, Meloni accused the left of mounting a scandal where none existed. While saying she didn't know what happened, she noted that RAI initially said it just didn’t want to pay Scurati “1,800 euros ($1,930; the monthly salary of many employees) for a one-minute monologue.”

The monologue, which was supposed to have been aired as part of RAI’s Liberation Day commemorations, recounted well-known incidents: The June 10, 1924 assassination by Mussolini hitmen of a Socialist lawmaker opposed to fascism, Giacomo Matteotti, as well as the 1944 massacres of Italian civilians during Nazi occupation.

“These two concomitant mournful anniversaries - spring of ’24, spring of ’44 - proclaim that fascism was throughout its historical existence — not only at the end or occasionally — an irredeemable phenomenon of systematic murderous and massacre-fueled political violence,” Scurati’s essay said. “Will the heirs of that history recognize this for once? Everything, unfortunately, suggests that they will not.”

Meloni has tried to distance her Brothers of Italy party from its neo-fascist roots and has gone out of her way to forge ties with Italy’s Jewish community, back a long-delayed project for a Holocaust Museum and support Israel, including in its current war in Gaza.

But the opposition has accused her forces of refusing to firmly declare themselves “anti-fascist.”

RAI, for its part, has launched an internal investigation to understand the decision-making that led to the Scurati monologue being spiked. Scurati is the author of the prize-winning volume “M” about Mussolini's rise and the parallels with the present day.

Perhaps predictably, the suggestion that the state-run broadcaster spiked a Scurati text critical of Meloni's governing party has only drawn attention to it, with calls for mayors to use their Liberation Day speeches this year to quote from it.

“At the root, there is a rule not to be forgotten,” commentator Aldo Grasso wrote in Corriere della Sera. “Once a text is censored, there is a strong risk that the text itself is no longer controllable and goes its own unpredictable way: the 'boomerang effect’. This is what happened."

The RAI controversy has fueled tensions on a Liberation Day that were already high given Israel’s war in Gaza and planned pro-Palestinian marches in Italy on a day traditionally celebrating Italy’s Jewish community. But Italy’s association of partisans who fought against Nazi occupation and fascist forces planned to go ahead with marches, including one in Milan featuring Scurati.

“Long live the antifascist republic!” said this year’s Liberation Day banner of the National Association of Italian Partisans.