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Response to Matteo Millan: Mapping Squadrist Violence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 October 2013

RUTH BEN-GHIAT
RUTH BEN-GHIAT*
Affiliation:
Departments of Italian Studies and History, New York University; rb68@nyu.edu
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Abstract

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Type
Paramilitary Violence in Italian Fascism: A Discussion
Information
Contemporary European History , Volume 22 , Issue 4 , November 2013 , pp. 579 - 583
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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References

1 Ebner, Michael, Ordinary Violence in Mussolini's Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)Google Scholar; Bosworth, Richard, ‘Everyday Mussolinianism: Friends, Family, Locality, and Violence in Fascist Italy’, Contemporary European History, 14, 1 (2005), 23–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Finchelstein, Federico, Transatlantic Fascism: Ideology, Violence, and the Sacred in Italy and Argentina, 1919–1945 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010)Google Scholar; Albanese, Giulia, ‘Reconsidering the March on Rome’, European History Quarterly 42, 3 (2012), 403–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Bidussa, David, Il mito del bravo italiano (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1993)Google Scholar; Focardi, Filippo, Il cattivo tedesco e il bravo italiano: La rimozione delle colpe della Seconda guerra mondiale (Rome: Laterza, 2013)Google Scholar.

3 Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Jovanovich, 1973), 257–8Google Scholar. Michaelis, Meir, ‘Anmerkungen zum italienischen Totalitarismusbegriff: Zur Kritik des Thesen Hannah Arendts und Renzo de Felices’, Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken 62 (1982), 270–302Google Scholar.

4 See Ben-Ghiat, Ruth, ‘A Lesser Evil? Italian Fascism in/and the Totalitarian Equation’, in Dubieland, HelmutMotzkin, Gabriel, eds, The Lesser Evil: Moral Approaches to Genocide Practices, eds (New York: Routledge, 2004), 137–53Google Scholar; Bosworth, Richard, The Italian Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives in the Interpretation of Mussolini and Fascism (London: Arnold, 1998)Google Scholar, 69–70 on the tradition of British superiority. A. J. P. Taylor was the most prominent exponent of the Mussolini-as-lackey theme, in The Origins of the Second World War (New York: Fawcett Premier, 1961) and in the movie he narrated, Mussolini, Men of our Time (1998), which proclaims that Italian Fascism was ‘all a sham’; Zapponi, Niccolo, Il fascismo nella caricature (Bari: Laterza, 1981)Google Scholar for cartoons in the international press. For critical reviews of the state of historiography before this latest wave of studies, Corner, Paul, ‘Italian Fascism: Whatever Happened to Dictatorship?’, Journal of Modern History 74, 2 (June 2002), 325–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Bosworth, Richard, The Italian Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives in the Interpretation of Mussolini and Fascism (London: Arnold, 1998)Google Scholar; Collotti, Enzo, ed., Fascismo e antifascismo: Rimozioni, revisioni, negazioni ed. Enzo Collotti (Rome: Laterza, 2000)Google Scholar.

5 On anti-Fascist and Fascist uses of the term “totalitarian” in 1920s Italy, see Petersen, Jens, ‘Die Entstehung des Totalitarismusbegriffs in Italien’, in Funke, Manfred, ed., Totalitarismus (Dusseldorf: Droste, 1978), 105–28Google Scholar; Gleason, Abbott, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 14–20Google Scholar.

6 The new attention to Fascist violence is also registered in the appearance of studies devoted to squadrism: Albanese, Giulia, La marcia su Roma (Rome: Laterza, 2006)Google Scholar; Franzinelli, Mimmo, Squadristi: Protagonisti e tecniche della violenza fascista 1919–1922 (Milan: Mondadori, 2004)Google Scholar; Reichardt, Sven, Camicie nere, camicie brune: Milizie fascista in Italia e in Germania (Bologna: Mulino, 2009)Google Scholar; and on squadrism as a template for Fascist masculinity, Capone, Alfredo, ‘Corporealità maschile e modernità’, in Bellassai, Sandro and Malatesta, Maria, eds, Genere e mascolinità (Rome: Bulzoni, 2000), 195–224Google Scholar. On the war as incubator of totalitarian violence, Ventrone, Angelo, La seduzione totalitaria: Guerra, modernità, violenza politica (1914–1918), (Rome: Donzelli, 2003)Google Scholar.

7 For the relationship of the PNF and the state, see Gentile, Emilio, La via italiana al totalitarianismo: Il partito e lo Stato nel regime fascista (Rome: La Nuova Italia, 1995)Google Scholar. Information on squadrists in the cultural and film bureaucracy, see Ben-Ghiat, Ruth, Italian Fascism's Empire Cinema, forthcoming with Indiana University Press. Paul Baxa argues that the squadrist conquest mentality influenced Fascism's urban interventions in the streets and piazzas of Rome: Roads and Ruins: The Symbolic Landscape of Fascist Rome (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010)Google Scholar. For Italians seeing the party as another state apparatus, Duggan, Christopher, Fascist Voices: An Intimate History of Mussolini's Italy, (London: Bodley Head, 2012)Google Scholar.

8 Ebner, Ordinary Violence; Reichardt, Camicie nere.

9 Quote from Franzinelli, Squadristi, 44. Memoirs that link Fascist squadrism with an antidisciplinarian body politics include Gallian, Marcello, Comando di tappa (Rome: Cabala, 1934)Google Scholar; Rosai, Ottone, Dentro la guerra (Rome: Quaderni di Novissima, 1934)Google Scholar, but see also Balbo, Italo, Diario 1922 (Milan: Mondadori, 1932)Google Scholar. For squadrism's attraction for youth, Wanrooj, Bruno, ‘Una generazione di guerra e di rivoluzione: I giovani e il fascism degli origini’, Storia e problemi contemporanei 24 (2001), 109–127Google Scholar; Ben-Ghiat, Ruth, Fascist Modernities: Italy 1922–1945 (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2001), 107–22Google Scholar.

10 Mattioli, Aram, Experimentierfeld der Gewalt: Der Abessinienkrieg und seine internationale Bedeutung 1935–1941 (Zurich: Orell Füssli, 2005)Google Scholar; Kúnzi, Giulia Brogini, Italien und der Abessinienkrieg 1935/36: Kolonialkrieg oder Totaler Krieg? (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2006)Google Scholar; Mattioli, Aram and Asserate, Asfa-Wossen, eds, Der erste faschistische Vernichtungskrieg: Die Italienische Aggression gegen Athiopien 1935–1941 (Cologne: SH-Verlag, 2006)Google Scholar. On the Militia in East Africa, Rochat, Giorgio, ‘I volontari di Mussolini’, in Labanca, Nicola, ed., Fare il soldato: Storie di reclutamento militare in Italia, (Bologna: Unicopli, 2007), esp. 125–26Google Scholar.

11 Il film dell’ardimento italiano (The Film of Italian Daring) trumpeted a publicity poster for Luciano Serra, pilota. The dagger used to stab the Ethiopian adversary was identical to the pugnale di marcia issued to Militiamen. On this film and the references to squadrism and violence that recur in empire films, Ben-Ghiat, Italian Fascism's Empire Cinema, chapter 3.

12 Stefani, Giuletta, Colonia per maschi: Italiani in Africa Orientale: Una storia di genere (Verona: Ombre corte, 2007), 60–1Google Scholar.

13 Labanca, Nicola, ‘War Crimes in the Italian Colonies’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies 9, 3 (2004), esp. 309CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Burgwyn, James, ‘General Roatta's War Against the Partisans in Yugoslavia: 1942’, and Lidia Santarelli, ‘Muted Violence: Italian War Crimes in Occupied Greece’, both in Journal of Modern Italian Studies 9, 3 (2004): 314–29 and 280–99 respectivelyCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 An example is the episode reported by eye-witnesses that occurred on 23 July 1942 near Ljubljana, where during reprisal killings two female and ten male villagers were executed and their corpses placed on an open military lorry along with the carcass of a pig. A mixed group of Fascist militiamen and Army grenadiers sat on the corpses and sang Fascist songs as they drove the lorry through the streets of Ljubljana. The bodies and the pig were buried in a common grave, and the Italians sang ‘dirty songs’ as they arranged the male and female corpses in lewd positions. See UNWCC, PAG-3/2.0, reg. no 364/Y/It/11, Appendix 24, microfilm pages 1108–1109. On this Bourke, Joanna, An Intimate Portrait of Killing: Face to Face Killing in Twentieth-Century Warfare (New York: Basic Books, 1999)Google Scholar.

15 Ebner, Ordinary Violence, esp. 47; Focardi, Il cattivo tedesco e il bravo italiano.