Comment on Diary by Nicholas Farrell (13/09/2003)
Last week many people in Italy were both shocked and disgusted by Berlusconi’s statement about the fascist regime, according to which “That was a much more benign dictatorship – Mussolini did not murder anyone. Mussolini sent people on holiday to confine them”.
Giovanni Amendola (liberal deputy and former minister, d.1926);
Pietro Gobetti (intellectual and founder of a liberal review, d.1926);
Antonio Gramsci (founder of the Italian Communist Party, d.1937);
Giacomo Matteotti (socialist deputy, d.1924);
Carlo and Nello Rosselli (intellectuals and founders of an anti-fascist review, d.1937);
Father Giovanni Minzoni (active supporter of the peasant’s rights, against the landowners backed by the fascists, d.1923).
These are the most well known victims of the fascist regime that Berlusconi ignores, or pretends to ignore. But they are only a minimal part of the thousands of people who lost their lives under Mussolini’s dictatorship, either shot after being sentenced for political reasons, or beaten to death by the fascist squads, or questioned in torture chambers, or detained in prison for years, in inhuman conditions, until they died.
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