#this is really what the booths look like in La Bella Italia by the way--I used my own pictures

[twilightanimatedseries]

“Thank you. That’s twice now.”

Port Angeles  experimental color palette

[vavuska]

Montanelli and the perpetual denying of Italian war crime

Part 1 - Introduction - LINK

Part 2 -  Italian and Colonial Law, Institutions of Marriage in the Erithrean Traditional Constumary Law - LINK

8 - A Great Journalist? Posters say "No"!

The reasons of the valdalism seem to be always the same: the constant tribute to the memory of an awful journalist, who was also a (ex) fascist, anticommonist, racist and colonialist.

Indro Montanelli only merit was surviving a terrorist attack from Red Brigades as a result of his being a right-wing journalist with a fascist past never fully denied. Unfortunately when they shot in the legs, they turn him into a freedom martyr, who Montanelli was not.

Here there are some examples of what I'm talking about:

1. “We will never be rulers if we do not have the exact awareness of our fatal superiority. He does not fraternize with niggers. You can't, you shouldn't. At least until a civilization has been given to them. […] This war is for us like a nice long holiday given to us by the Gran Babbo (Mussolini) as a reward for thirteen years of school. And, said among us, it was time. None of us hope that the war will end, we have only one desire: to continue!"      (Indro Montanelli, article published on Fascist Civilization, 1936)

“Non si sarà mai dei dominatori, se non avremo la coscienza esatta di una nostra fatale superiorità. Coi negri non si fraternizza. Non si può, non si deve. Almeno finché non si sia data loro una civiltà. […] Questa guerra è per noi come una bella lunga vacanza dataci dal Gran Babbo (Mussolini) in premio di tredici anni di scuola. E, detto fra noi, era ora. Nessuno di noi si augura che la guerra finisca, abbiamo un solo desiderio: continuare!”

(Indro Montanelli, articolo pubblicato su Civiltà Fascista, 1936)

 2. On the use, removed for decades, of lethal chemical weapons during the Ethiopian war, Montanelli stubbornly stood on a denial line. In the end, after the Dini government in 1995-96, definitively clarified the modalities and dimensions of the use of aggressive chemicals, he had to apologize.

3. "Captain, it's a senseless sentence," he wrote to Priebke - German war criminal, Gestapo agent and captain of the SS during the Second World War, responsable of the Fosse Ardeatine massacre, a reprisal for an Italian partisan attack on German troops. 335 men were executed, 10 italian civilians for each German soldier who had been killed in the attack - in 1996, "As an old soldier, and even of an Army very different from yours, I know very well that you could not do anything other than what you did [...] Best wishes, Mr. Captain ".

  4.  Montanelli wrote to the US ambassador Clare Booth Luce in 1954, informing her of the formation of a paramilitary anti-communist organization and asking her to guarantee the help of the American army in terms of arms, fleet and aviation: “If at the next election a Popular Front however constituted popular reached the majority, what Scelba [ Mario Scelba (5 September 1901 – 29 October 1991) was an Italian politician who served as the 33rd Prime Minister of Italy from February 1954 to July 1955] would do? It would deliver power, and it would be the end ... Any man of government, even non-Christian Democrats today, would surrender for the total impossibility of carrying out a coup d'etat ... The police and the army are polluted with communism. The carabinieri without the King, have lost every bite. And across the country there is no force capable of supporting the action of a resolute man. We must create this force. You can't go wrong looking at the history of our country, which is that of an abuse imposed by a minority of one hundred thousand sticks. Majorities in Italy have never counted: they have always been in tow with this handful of men who did everything with violence, the unification of Italy, its wars and its revolutions. This minority still exists and is not a communist [...] Faced with this reality, I find myself in this dilemma: to defend Democracy until accepting, for it, the death of Italy; or defend Italy to accept, or even hasten, the death of Democracy? My choice is made. "

“Se alle prossime elezioni un Fronte Popolare comunque costituito raggiungesse la maggioranza. Scelba cosa farebbe? Consegnerebbe il potere, e sarebbe la fine… Qualunque uomo di governo, oggi, anche non democristiano, si arrenderebbe per totale impossibilità di compiere un colpo di Stato�� La polizia e l’esercito sono inquinati di comunismo. I carabinieri senza il Re, hanno perso di ogni mordente. E in tutto il paese non c’è una forza capace di appoggiare l’azione di un uomo risoluto. Noi dobbiamo creare questa forza. Non si può sbagliare guardando la storia del nostro paese, che è quella di un sopruso imposto da una minoranza di centomila bastonatori. Le maggioranze in Italia non hanno mai contato: sono sempre state al rimorchio di questo pugno di uomini che ha fatto tutto con la violenza, l’unità d’Italia, le sue guerre e le sue rivoluzioni. Questa minoranza esiste ancora e non è comunista […] Di fronte a questa realtà, mi trovo in questo dilemma: difendere la Democrazia fino ad accettare, per essa, la morte dell’Italia; o difendere l’Italia fino ad accettare, o anche affrettare, la morte della Democrazia? La mia scelta è fatta”.

LE LETTURE CONSIGLIATE:

Sulle lettere di Montanelli a Clare Boothe Luce:

- M. Del Pero, Anticomunismo d’assalto, in «Italia Contemporanea», Istituto Nazionale per la Storia del Movimento di Liberazione Nazionale, n. 212 (1998), pp. 633 – 646

- M. Del Pero, M. G. Rossi, Una Gladio in borghese. Intervista a Indro Montanelli, in «Italia Contemporanea», Istituto Nazionale per la Storia del Movimento di Liberazione Nazionale, n. 212 (1998), pp. 647 – 652

Su Clare Boothe Luce:

- S. J. Morris, Rage for fame: the ascent of Clare Boothe Luce, Random House, New York, 1997

- W. Sheed, Clare Boothe Luce, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1982

- M. Del Pero, American pressures and their containment in Italy during the ambassadorship of Clare Boothe Luce, 1953-1956, in: «Diplomatic History», vol. 28 n. 3 (giugno 2004)

5."In Italy, a pickaxe blow to the closed houses was enough to bring down the entire building, based on three fundamental props: the Catholic Faith, the Fatherland and the Family. Because it was in the so-called brothels that these three institutions found their safest guarantee, "wrote Addio Wanda, published in 1958 in opposition to the Merlin Law, the law that closed brothels and criminalized forced induction to prostitution. Montanelli was against the Merlin Law because “(...) The day in which they are allowed to live their life without fear of ending up in those menageries, Italy is destined to become one of the many countries of Protestant morality and customs, where the condition of virgin it does not exist, just as there is no whore, all women being united in an intermediate limbo; and where the family no longer exists, your duties having been absorbed by the society (...) Madam, do not delude yourself, either as an Ambassador or as a convert: between Cardinal Ruffini and the abstinent chaste vegetarian standard bearers of Initiative, the true Catholic is the cardinal, who does not do the Robinson Crusoé of Virtue. Like military chaplains, who are authentic priests because they live among authentic men (...) Tits and flag, Madam. They are the summary of the history of Italy, its inseparable pillars, its engine, the key to understanding it. To abolish one is to destroy the other. "                                                       N.B: Althought Montanelli portrays in a very negative way the end of the traditional view of women as “virgins” or “whores” - I Think he would be glad to know that in Italy this way to see women in society never really ended - and also called feminists and abolitionists “churchy” - even if he ws the one who actually defended brothels and forced prostitution to protect the Church and the traditional families -, he wrote unitentionally some good point of feminism goals!

“È bastato in Italia un colpo di piccone alle case chiuse per far crollare l’intero edificio, basato su tre fondamentali puntelli: la Fede cattolica, la Patria e la Famiglia. Perché era nei cosiddetti postriboli che queste tre istituzioni trovavano la loro più sicura garanzia (...) Il giorno in cui ad esse si conceda di vivere la loro vita senza timore di finire in quei serragli, l' Italia è destinata a diventare uno dei tanti Paesi di moralità e di costume protestanti, dove la condizione di vergine non esiste, come non esiste quella di puttana, tutte le donne essendo accomunate in un limbo intermedio; e dove non esiste più la famiglia, le sue mansioni essendo state assorbite dalla società  (...) Signora, non si faccia illusioni, né come Ambasciatrice, né come convertita: fra il cardinal Ruffini e i casti astinenti vegetariani alfieri di Iniziativa , il cattolico vero è il cardinale, che non fa il Robinson Crusoé della Virtù. Come i cappellani militari, che sono dei preti autentici perché vivono in mezzo agli uomini autentici (...) Tette e bandiera, Signora. Sono il riassunto della Storia d'Italia, i suoi inseparabili pilastri, il suo motore, la chiave per comprenderla. Abolire l'uno significa distruggere l'altro." 

6. "Ah! Sicily! - he states in February 1960 in an interview with the prestigious French magazine Le Figaro Letteraire - You have Algeria, we have Sicily. But you are not obliged to tell the Algerians that they are French. We, an aggravating circumstance, are obliged to grant the Sicilians the quality of Italians".

“Ah! La Sicilia! Voi avete l’Algeria, noi abbiamo la Sicilia. Ma voi non siete obbligati a dire agli algerini che sono francesi. Noi, circostanza aggravante, siamo obbligati ad accordare ai siciliani la qualità di italiani”.

7. Oxford riot, September 1962. Segregationists protest against the enrollment of James Meredith, the first black man to do so, at the University of Mississippi. The clashes make 2 dead and 300 injured. This is the comment of Indro Montanelli, in the Corriere della Sera of October 3, 1962: “(...) Little by little America is realizing that with this problem it must live together because it cannot solve it. Or rather, it can solve it only in the legal context of equality of civil rights. Biologically, no. Because it will be unfair, it will be repugnant, it will be rationally inexplicable and unacceptable; but it is a fact that mingling with blacks has given catastrophic results wherever it has been practiced. I know I say a heresy, for the times that are running, but I prefer heresy to hypocrisy.”

(...) Piano piano l'America sta rendendosi conto che con questo problema essa deve convivere perché non lo può risolvere. O meglio, lo può risolvere solo nell'ambito giuridico della parità dei diritti civili. Biologicamente, no. Perché sarà ingiusto, sarà ripugnante, sarà razionalmente inesplicabile e inaccettabile; ma è un fatto che il meticciato coi neri ha dato risultati catastrofici dovunque lo si è praticato. So di dire un'eresia, per i tempi che corrono, ma preferisco l'eresia all'ipocrisia.

8. Backed by Giorgio Bocca, he called the journalist de l'Unità Tina Merlin, who denounced the human faults in the Vajont Disaster [ On 9 October 1963, during initial filling, a landslide caused a megatsunami in the lake in which 50 million cubic metres of water overtopped the dam in a wave of 250 metres (820 ft), leading to the complete destruction of several villages and towns, and 1,917 deaths. Although the dam itself remained almost intact and two-thirds of the water was retained behind it, the landslide was much larger than expected and the impact brought massive flooding and destruction to the Piave Valley below. This event occurred after the company and the Italian government concealed reports and dismissed evidence that Monte Toc, on the southern side of the basin, was geologically unstable. They had disregarded numerous warnings, signs of danger, and negative appraisals, and the eventual attempts to safely control the landslide by lowering the lake's level came when the landslide was almost imminent.]  "jackal". He will make amends twice, in 1997 and 1998, from La Stanza di Montanelli in Corriere della Sera, confessing two serious faults: to have arrived on the spot without knowing anything about the dam and to have taken a totally ideological position in favor of the responsible company, Sade, only because it is contrary to the nationalization of electricity.

9. In a cable of January 12, 1978, declassified by US Government and published by WikiLeaks, called "Montanelli sees the blood ahead", US diplomats report in Washington in 1978 what they define the "tactics" of the journalist: blackmailing the DCs [Demo-Christian Party] ready to make concessions to the communists and sink Berlinguer to return the PCI [Italian Communist Party] to the hard line. Going back to the hard line, the next step would be a civil conflict, in which the PCI would be destroyed. Perhaps - says the journalist - Italy would have a Pinochet-like democracy. That would be a hellish prospect, but better than a government with the PCI.

10.  In the Giornale of 24 October 1980 Montanelli wrote - inventing a source - that he had known, eleven years earlier, that is, immediately after the massacre in Piazza Fontana, that Pinelli, police informer, had confided to Commissioner Calabresi that the anarchists were preparing "something big". Then, when Calabresi, who obviously had recorded everything, made him feel the tape, Pinelli, not resisting the idea that his companions qualified him as informer, would have thrown himself out the window.  Needless to say, they were all lies. Called to answer his statements in court Montanelli had to repeatedly apologize, admit that he was wrong, that he was misunderstood, that he did not express himself well, that he invented relevant details from a healthy point of view. In front of the judges he had to take everything back, so much so that the attorney general said "And since I was a boy I always gave him a kind of myth, today this myth has collapsed". "When he wrote unpredictably, on his admission, to be interrogated as witnesses in a public trial ... therefore with the inevitable consequence of being misguided. On the other hand, he threw the thesis back into circulation and he loved the responsibility of the anarchists in the massacre" .