The Eurosud association is participating in the “Poetry for Resistance” project, in collaboration with Cais 1515, IRMI and Globers from Portugal, Germany and Spain. These four nations share having had dictatorships, but also resistance movements. Military resistance, but also civilian resistance.
Why talk about resistance and antifascism in 2024? The liberation of Italy from Nazi-fascist occupation took place in the years 1943 to ’45. The symbolic date of April 25, 1945, is still celebrated today, chosen because on that day the retreat of the Germans and soldiers of the Republic of Salò from Milan and Turin began. Almost 80 years have passed since that April 25, the witnesses of that time are now very old and often at the time of the events was just a child. The world has completely changed, the nations that were at war with each other in those years are either allies or part of the European Union. Borders once covered with barbed wire are now crossed without even a passport. So why continue to talk about resistance today? What is the need? Simple historical curiosity? No.
The meaning of resistance, in Italy and the rest of Europe, was the conquest of peoples’ freedom and civil rights. That conquest is not final; it never will be. This is both because of the atavistic clash between peoples and rulers over the sharing of power, and because of never resolved conflict between freedom and security. That is why today it is important to talk about resistance again, because these conflicts have been rekindled stronger than ever. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, a famous 1992 book, “The End of History and the Last Man,” by Francis Fukuyama, theorized that the end of the Cold War coincided with the end of conflicts in the world. The idea, utopian, that the world had crystallized under “enlightened” European and American control. It didn’t. History went on, with the explosions of contradictions, inequalities and conflicts, military and social. The last two decades have been marked around the world, by a series of key events, which have challenged our certainties.
While the growth of globalization hinted at an increasingly interconnected world, the collapse of the Twin Towers, the wars in the Middle East, the gigantic subprime debt economic crisis in 2008, the sovereign debt crisis in 2012, Brexit, and then the pandemic worked to disrupt it. In the background, social and economic inequalities have grown, while fear of the new world has led the politics of security and mistrust to grow.
Let’s give some context.
According to the World Inequality Report 2022, the richest 10% on the planet own 76% of total wealth. Inequality has risen worldwide, especially in Southeast Asia, South America, and Africa. Europe and Oceania remain the places with the least inequality, but it has grown over time. Growing differences between social classes have eroded the social compact between populations and politics. And it is precisely Europe, increasingly older and with fewer children, that has closed in on itself in recent years, intimidated by migration and a changing world threatening a status quo of economic and even moral superiority. Change breeds fear; fear leads to calls for more security. Governments are always happy to give more security that translates into less freedom. This has led to a slow decline in democratic freedoms around the world. As the World Democratic Index 2023 well explains, only 24 countries in the world are complete democracies, 50 are imperfect democracies, 34 are hybrid regimes, and as many as 59 are authoritarian regimes.
Finally, in 2022 Russia’s aggression of Ukraine brought war back to the borders of Europe, while the Israelo Palestinian conflict brought unprecedented violence back to the Mediterranean.
This is the context in which we move today, a context in which the harsh words of politics take us back to the harsh tones of race and class divisions. Phrases such as “us first,” “let’s stand up for ourselves,” “let’s respect traditions” translate into “We are better than others,” “let’s isolate” and “let’s fight those who are different.” The difficult situation in which European societies and economies find themselves today leads to increasing radicalization of ideas and positions. The messages brought by social media, slogans of a hundred and fifty lines at most, simplify and therefore polarize low-level ideological clashes, bringing positions of intolerance, violence, anti-Semitism, homophobia and racism to the fore once again.
This is the context in which we find ourselves today, and this is the context in which it is necessary to remember anti-fascist resistance.
