Soon we will no longer be able to explain why celebrating April 25 is important, nor why it is the day that says who we are and who we really should be. The day of liberation, in fact, resembles more and more to a large palace that has made history, but only the older ones remember its splendor. To those who have not seen it in his youth, to those who do not retain a direct or mediated memory of the witnesses, show the face of a decline that only the last eyes of lovers manage to remove. From that building, which was the architrave of a democracy and a nation that tended to the best, cocci cocci falls on the road, cracks open in the load -bearing walls, mouses and cockroaches enter undisturbed and outlines. There is still an increasingly smaller Italy that around that building, on that day, gathers festive, pretends joy, or recites triti scores of propaganda. But the most conscious of the anti -fascists cannot help but ask themselves: why? What do we still do in this square?

The remaining flame

It would be nice to tell us that it is not fault ourbut They. It would be easier and would lighten everyone’s consciences. Yet, the question does not concern the heirs of the social movement, the Russian and the Meloni, who would have gladly done to this anniversary, and that in the face of the persistent matter – which indeed is increasingly rarely posed to him – on their anti -fascism they always seek, to respond, long periphrasis that serve to say what we all know: that is, that anti -fascists are not. It is said in chorus, at this point of the speech, that this is the problem, and I understand it. Except that on this point we have an answer that we already know and that carries a defeat that is worth admitting: anti -fascism has not become a common and essential heritage of the Italian democratic policy. If it has not become so far, it will never become it again. The battle conducted at the time conducted by Gianfranco Fini, who thought that to bring the Italian right to the government it was right and necessary to remove the flame that burns in Predappio on Mussolini’s tomb from the party symbol, was irreversibly lost when Giorgia Meloni, almost thirty years older, redoing a right -wing party that focused with foresight and ambition to the government, that Then of his government. And there has remained so far, and always too late will go away, if it ever happens. Except that the end of anti -fascism as a fundamental value of participation in power is the consequence of the change of a society, not its cause. The non -anti -fascists could not govern, a few decades ago, because the country did not want them. Today it is no longer so, and the responsibility is only marginally of the beneficiaries. Even the Russian president of the Senate, in short, is a consequence and not the cause. This is, even if we don’t like it.

The main theme of the matter are therefore not They. The question from which we leave arrives instead straight to usthat composite and jagged, which mixes very different anthropological and political chromosomes, generations grown up on bread and politics and individuals who have become large in a time without parties, or populated by parties without ideas and identities, and which in April 25 declare they recognize an intrinsic value, because it recalls that it is from the radical adversity to fascism that the republican constitution was born; That it is so synthesis between different souls and among them in some cases radically distant: and yet, however different, they were able to be together in the name of a bigger reason, anti -fascism, which was to be a value so large as to make Togliatti and De Gasperi together be together, the malfas and sturzo, Tina Anselmi and Giulio Andreotti, and many others also well beyond the short time and founding of the constituent. Anti -fascism, that great value that it should be able to make at least him, not one day a year but every day of the year, Schlein and Tajani, Calenda and Conte, Renzi and Enrico Letta: and let’s not lose further in the list, we have understood ourselves.

Why celebrate liberation

In short, what is it for still celebrating that liberation, for us that we believe in it? To say that fascism sucks and that the anti -fascists were right, of course. This would be the easiest yield, because it is disguised as resistance. A surrender that threw himself in full in the past, in the value memorial: on April 25 serves to remember the fight against fascism, the men and women who risked and lost their lives for a greater value, freedom, that is, that gift of which we still benefit today, and we are not always or we seem so conscious and aware of what is worth. It is certainly true, all true. And however, told so, on April 25 ends with being only a party that looks back, at a difficult yet bright time in which a country that had invented fascism, in a young and voluntary minority, to cultivate the seed of awareness and rebellion to that abyss. The celebration of a remote past that no longer retains a living witnesses, a feast of the (prei) history, almost only for archivists, to replace Meloni and the Russian that we are not like them. A lazy thing, easy, at no cost: the opposite of the resistance. Moreover, it is that they seem to celebrate it, Giulivi and unaware, many political leaders of the Italian center -left. They go to the square, they title streets where they govern, strengthen ties with their small urban peoples: but of this anti -fascist rhetoric, what remains? Where do these words arrive, if not where they are already heard and practiced as their own? They come to the small peoples who define themselves on the left, and which are the summary of good identities for social networks and local elections, to lift a few hundred preferences in the West of Massa Axention. An identity of the left that self-conscious self-use, and contrasts with an indistinct mass that is not fascist, but is rather indifferent, rancorous, and dreams of a golden past, in which we were all “Italian”: that it has probably never been gold, and which will certainly not return. This is the society that, in Italy and throughout the West, vote on the right, who finds themselves in the order words of those who do not have historical fascism in unpleasant, but not for this reason he wants to return. A warm society, which is not outraged at all, which is not exalted at all.

Ten years ago, in the seventieth of the liberation, we tried to observe the littleness of our battles, compared to the size of those of those who had allowed us not to have so much need to fight. Ten years later, now that the witnesses really are no longer there, and that we have asked us for an effort to be the ones who leave a legacy, the time for an inner liberation has come: they are not the heirs never repentant of fascism those to be conquered, but an entire society totally rough, without stimuli and sense of the community, belonging and values ​​that are not the motif and real estate of each. It is an infinitely bigger challenge and in this, perhaps, finally worthy of being approached to the heroism of those who freed us. It is a crossing in a cold and arid desert. In the end maybe there is a fertile land, or maybe not. Courage, perspective, and a little madness are needed: moreover, if there had not been an America in the middle, on the way of the Indies, even Christopher Columbus and his crew would have died of hunger and thirst.