Thursday, July 13, 2017
Melville Room (University of Glasgow)
This paper focuses on continuities in representations of communism from the Fascist period to the early postwar Italian Republic. Fascism and the war years habituated Italians to seeing the world as an epic battle of good against evil. Twenty years of rhetoric and imagery presented politics as a struggle of absolutes, and the postwar repression of widespread collaboration with Fascism created an environment in which a new set of absolutes solidified. Tropes of the Fascist struggle against the communist enemy transferred easily onto the postwar conflict between the Italian Communist Party on the left and the Christian Democrats and the Vatican on the right. The Fascist era declaration of first internal enemies and then external ones habituated Italians to the notion that the “political other” was a civilizational threat and a biological “other.”
Using posters, films, and pamphlets produced by the Christian Democrats and the Vatican, the paper traces the characterizations of communism taken from Fascism by the postwar right to terrify and threaten Italians into voting for the DC. The Church and the DC depended heavily on Fascist depictions of communists -- on the threat that a victory of the Popular Front would mean the collapse of the moral and social order and domination by a godless outsider. The resurrection of Fascist era films such as “Siege of the Alcazar” and “Man of the Cross,” reconfigured posters, and slightly revised political discourse reveal the ways in which the political culture of Fascism continued to shape the postwar democracy.
