http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090821/REVIEW/708209986/1007
August 20. 2009
Mario Calabresi's father was gunned down in an era when political
bloodshed overran Italy and Italy shrugged. His new book, writes
Saul Austerlitz, calls for an end to the country's culture of
forgetful impunity.
Pushing Past the Night: Coming to Terms with Italy's Terrorist Past
Mario Calabresi
Translated from the Italian by Michael Moore
Other Press
Dh52
One man plunged from a window of the Milan police headquarters on
December 15, 1969, and two died as a result. A young radical named
Giuseppe Pinelli had been arrested by the Milan police on December
12, suspected of complicity in a horrific terrorist attack. After
three days in custody, he tumbled from a fourth-floor window to the
street below. The death was apparently accidental, or self-inflicted,
but Pinelli's friends saw it otherwise. He was a martyr to the
leftist cause, they believed, and his death a state-sanctioned
murder. They were convinced that his killer the man from whose
window Pinelli fell was a police inspector named Luigi Calabresi.
Pinelli had been arrested in connection with the bombing of Milan's
Piazza Fontana, in which 16 people were killed and 88 wounded.
Suspicion fell on leftist anarchist groups, and Pinelli was swept up
in the first wave of arrests. (Neo-fascists would ultimately be
proved responsible for the attack.) The police inspector had been
absent from the room when the prisoner died, but Pinelli's
associates, and much of the left-wing media, were convinced that he
had been murdered, and that Calabresi was the culprit.
"We've been too nice to Police Inspector Luigi Calabresi," read an
article in the leftist newspaper Lotta Continua in 1970. "He gets to
keep living peacefully, to keep doing his job as a policeman, to keep
persecuting our comrades. But he has to learn that everyone knows his
face, including the militants who despise him. And the proletariat
has issued its sentence: Calabresi is responsible for the murder of
Pinelli and he will have to pay for it dearly."
In 1971, the newspaper L'Espresso published a letter signed by 800
Italian intellectuals, which dubbed Calabresi "Inspector Torture" and
alleged he was "responsible for the demise of Pinelli". These were no
empty words. Two years later, Calabresi was gunned down. No official
remembrance was observed; no tributes were forthcoming from the
state. Having been marked as a murderer, Luigi Calabresi was himself
murdered, and no one other than his wife and his children mourned.
Today, the violence that shattered Italy in the 1960s and 1970s has
been consigned by most Italians to the distant corners of their
memory, recalled, if at all, as an anomalous explosion of chaos. The
country may have convinced itself otherwise, but Italy is still
haunted by the horror it witnessed: the horror of Piazza Fontana, and
of the murders of Luigi Calabresi and the former prime minister Aldo
Moro, of the antimafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo
Borsellino, and the thousands of lesser names whose lives were
extinguished by the terrorists of the left and right and the Mafia's
brutal killers. So what story does a country tell itself about the
tragedies it has endured? About the terrible things it has done to
itself, and to others?
For Mario Calabresi, author of Pushing Past the Night: Coming to
Terms with Italy's Terrorist Past, his father's death is only the
beginning of the story. His book, a slim volume suffused with
violence and sorrow enough for a dozen such works, is an act of
memory, a wail of outrage composed in the measured tones of the
prosecuting attorney or the investigative journalist. The editor of
the well-regarded newspaper La Stampa, Calabresi tells a
heartbreaking tale, but it is not his alone. Having begun with his
own loss, he moves on to the plight of the other families the
Calabresis met at gatherings for the unmarked dead. Pushing Past the
Night is a vessel for their stories, which amplify his own loss and
illustrate the chaos that ambushed Italy. The personal becomes the
political, which becomes the personal once more; Pushing Past the
Night oscillates between family memoir and historical tome, never
settling on a consistent tone, finding neither wholly appropriate
without the presence of the other. His family's tragedy is only one
tile in the mosaic of Italian calamity. More than the deaths
themselves, Calabresi mourns an official culture that allows for such
forgetfulness. Memory is itself a political act in a culture of
selective amnesia.
Piazza Fontana was only the beginning of a terrifying decade of
revolutionary violence that would culminate in the kidnapping and
assassination of former prime minister Aldo Moro by the leftist Red
Brigades in 1978. Neo-fascists and leftists traded bombs and bullets
in train stations and city squares, targeting both civilians and
public officials. They were not fighting each other so much as they
were both at war with the government, hoping with each successive
wave of murderous mayhem that the tottering stability of moderation
would give way to revolution be it fascist or communist.
The outrage over the Piazza Fontana bombing, and the false arrests
stemming from it, accelerated the process of leftist radicalisation
in Italy. The government, seen as the instigator of the attack, was
viewed contemptuously by groups like Lotta Continua, whose ranks were
made up of students and factory workers. If even the Italian
Communist Party, barred for so long from government, was co-operating
with the ruling Christian Democrats as part of the "historic
compromise", first proposed in 1973, then politics had proved
entirely fruitless, and other means of grappling against repression
were necessary. Armed struggle, never entirely taboo in Italian
political life, became, for some, an entirely valid means of
expressing muscular dissent. That the only other groups reaching a
similar conclusion were their ideological enemies on the neo-fascist
right was an irony that went mostly unrecognised.
The similarities between neo-fascist groups and
revolutionary-socialist ones like the Red Brigades and Prima Linea
were immediate, obvious and unmentionable. Unmentionable, because
Italian political life in this time meant choosing sides, and a code
of silence, a kind of omerta, forbade undue criticism of one's own
team. Violent leftists were a continent-wide scourge in the 1970s,
but in Italy, the gap between theory and act was perhaps smaller than
anywhere else.
The killers themselves were delusional thugs baptised with a splash
of Marx, "people who thought they were in a war," as one widow notes
of their violent acts of theatre. Calabresi details the trials, the
early releases and the speedy rehabilitations, but his anger is
reserved for the society that confuses the abandonment of memory with
forgiveness. Former terrorists appear on television and are elected
to Parliament as the memory of those they killed recedes ever further
into darkness. Deeds, like words, have been erased by some
obliterating machinery, carted away to the landfill where history's
rubble is stored. As Calabresi notes, the shelves of Italian
bookstores are crammed full of memoirs of the Anni di piombi the
Years of Lead written by former terrorists. History has been
written by its losers. Absolution is the motivating impulse; Italians
look back to the Anni di piombi so as to pardon the misguided for
their excesses. A teacher of Calabresi's younger brother exemplified
this approach: "What, do you want those poor guys to go to jail?" The
killers have been transformed into the victims, and the motivating
factors what got them to the Piazza Fontana, in other words
practically erased.
Their violence has been artificially distinguished from that of their
right-wing opponents, the product so they argue of well-meaning
revolutionary idealism taken to excess, not murderous extremism. But
the mea culpas have, paradoxically, erased their victims from the
collective record. The dead have been solemnised without the weight
of their loss ever having been tallied. What prevents this is not a
lack of recognition, but its blinkered quality.
Calabresi is calling for an honest reckoning with his country's
violent past. But clear and unequivocal condemnation of politically
orientated violence has never been a feature of Italian political
life, from Mussolini onwards. In its absence, Calabresi offers the
only thing he can: sympathetic imagination, and calmly proffered
detail. He seeks to simultaneously understand what happened to his
father, scapegoated for a death for which he bore no responsibility,
and what drove those who hounded him to his death. The men who killed
his father are only shadows in Pushing Past the Night voices on a
newspaper's editorial page, presences at an acquaintance's apartment
but by presenting the testimony of their supporters and
collaborators, Calabresi offers them a dignity denied his father: the
dignity of respectful attention. Calabresi violates a long-held
national taboo by noting the similarity of right- and left-wing
violence, but it is necessary to press deeper. In Italy, politics are
not a simple matter of right and left.
Italy has witnessed the rise of violent organisations like the
leftist Red Brigades and the neo-fascist militia Gladio, and of
politicians who are themselves enmeshed in violence and corruption,
like the former prime minister Giulio Andreotti (convicted of
association with the Cosa Nostra) and the embattled current premier,
Silvio Berlusconi. All are symptoms of Italy's culture of impunity,
where violence is shrugged off, corruption ignored and conspiracy
tolerated. Miscreants flout the law, confident that the unmeasured
weight of the national guilty conscience makes any eventual
punishment vanishingly unlikely. Left and right is less the issue
than order combating chaos, law tangling with lawlessness.
Criminality and politics have been bedmates for far too long, the
boundaries between one and the other grown willfully blurred.
"Cosa Nostra has been part of a wider criminal system that has
written some of the most bloody and tragic pages in the history of
our country," a prosecutor observes in Peter Robb's book Midnight in
Sicily, and the point is a crucial one. Like its political
counterparts, Mafia violence has never been properly reckoned with
in part because the most ferocious anti-Mafia fighters were murdered
or isolated by the Cosa Nostra, and in part because there has never
been a national consensus on the need to combat the Mafia.
If Italy has never been able to put politically motivated violence
behind it, this is because the nation has never fully acknowledged
its ubiquity. To do so would require a more complete realignment of
history than many Italians would be comfortable with; only in Italy
could one former prime minister (Andreotti) be a convicted associate
of the Mafia, and the current prime minister have once been on the
rolls of a secret neo-fascist organisation.
In this, Italy has much in common with some countries whose guilty
conscience has been thoroughly repressed, and others wrestling
belatedly with their historical burdens. Opinion polls in
contemporary Russia regularly rank Joseph Stalin near the top of the
list of national heroes, and schoolchildren are taught a violently
distorted version of Stalin's Great Terror and the gulags that bears
little resemblance to the historical record. Rather than acknowledge
their complicity in the Nazi crimes of the Second World War,
Austrians refer to their country as "Hitler's first victim", and
Polish history turns a blind eye to the country's rampant
anti-Semitism and some Poles' collaboration in the Nazi death camps.
Iraq has struggled in recent years with how to properly account for
the sadistic depredations of Saddam Hussein's regime, and Cambodia is
only putting associates of Pol Pot on trial now, three decades after
the collapse of the Khmer Rouge. Incarcerating or executing the
killers is, in some ways, the relatively easy part. Far trickier is
the process of understanding what led the killers to pick up their
weapons. Italy consumed itself from within, and there was no
occupying force or judicial tribunal present to investigate how this
state of affairs had come about, which raises a question: when a
society fails its own citizens, how does it assign the blame? How
does it right itself once more?
Italy's is a culture where to prod the perpetrators of violence is to
sign one's own death warrant; look at Falcone and Borsellino,
murdered in 1992, or the journalist Roberto Saviano, still in hiding
some three years after publishing his penetrating study of the
Neapolitan Camorra, Gomorrah. It is a culture of forgetting, where
victims and killers are buried under the same mound of repressed
memory. Calabresi is demanding recognition, to be sure, but his book
is actually a call for something far more revolutionary: remembrance.
On the streets of Hamburg in another European country that has had
to wrestle with the consequences of murderous violence, on a far
greater scale the cobblestones are broken up by plaques noting the
ghostly presence of the city's vanished inhabitants: here a Jew once
lived, here a Jew once worked, here a Jew was abducted for
transportation to a concentration camp. The city is itself
constructed out of such remembrances; any casual traveller might find
himself distracted purposefully so by its invitations to memory.
Italy's trauma, in comparison, has been thoroughly stifled. Italy
needs to produce more official remembrance, more scholarly works of
history and maybe fewer self-serving memoirs from its killers. In so
doing, it will allow its widows and orphans to properly mourn. It
will also reduce the likelihood of their ranks being perpetually replenished.
Robb begins Midnight in Sicily with an inscription from the Italian
poet Eugenio Montale that has particular relevance here: "History
isn't the devastating bulldozer they say it is. It leaves
underpasses, crypts, holes and hiding places. There are survivors."
Mario Calabresi is such a survivor, and Pushing Past the Night is a
painstaking search of those underpasses, crypts, holes, and hiding
places, gathering the rubble and refashioning it until the shattered
pieces speak once more. At the long-delayed ceremony honouring Luigi
Calabresi in 2004, the president of Italy, Giorgio Napolitano
(himself a former Communist), who had pardoned Calabresi's killer,
told his widow and family "we have rediscovered memory…. It is an
honour for me to give you this medal, even if it has taken far too
long." It had, indeed, taken far too long for Italy to remember its
victims. But perhaps, the broken pieces, never to be made whole
again, would themselves be a reminder of the perils of forgetting.
--
Saul Austerlitz is the author of Money for Nothing: A History of the
Music Video from the Beatles to the White Stripes. He is at work on a
history of American film comedy.
.
0 comments:
Post a Comment