Who doesn’t know what happened on April 13, 1973, in a working-class neighborhood of Rome? Specifically, in Primavalle. For those who are unaware or have forgotten, two brothers—a twenty-year-old man and a ten-year-old boy—were burned alive in a fire set at their home by three members of Potere Operaio. The “crime” of those two boys was that they were the sons of the secretary of the local chapter of the Italian Social Movement.
Among the many murders that make up the long list of martyrs of the postwar Italian Right, the Primavalle fire was the one that most deeply affected public opinion, so much so that even a President of the Republic became associated with that painful memory. Rightly so, it can be counted among the emblematic events of the “Years of Lead”—those 12 to 13 years, from 1969 to 1982–83, which only to those with a distorted view might now seem “formidable.”
Bringing the Communists to Power
It is obvious that the Years of Lead were not accidental. Far from it. With their coup-mongering narratives, their shadowy massacres, and their targeted assassinations, they served to create that “democratic emergency,” which was supposed to lead Italy toward the “historic compromise,” toward “national solidarity”—in short, toward the Communist Party’s entry into government.
The project could count on the support of a large part of Italy’s ruling classes. The same elite that set out to construct the “great lie” surrounding the Primavalle fire. Pierluigi Battista recalls: “The tragic truth of what had happened that night was obscured by a hateful concert of misdirection, manipulation, and lies, which concealed the events as they had actually occurred in order to turn them instead into the plot of yet another mendacious narrative.” Prominent figures from the Communist Party and the Socialist Party, intellectuals or self-proclaimed intellectuals, and sectors of the judiciary—supported by newspapers such as Lotta continua, Il Manifesto, L’Unità, Avanti, Paese sera, and Il Messaggero—contributed to the construction of the “great lie.” “The murderers”—Pierluigi Battista continues—“came from the world that mattered, self-assured, convinced of their own superiority… The fathers of the nation, who claimed to embody the respectable world, who enjoyed an excellent reputation, and who wanted to conceal the depravities of their murderous sons. And who used anti-fascism to remain silent about a massacre that had struck the fascists.”
These are weighty words. They reveal the essence of a political-cultural dimension, traces of which continue to run deep right up to the present day. To bring such a political-cultural dimension into focus, therefore, means exploring dynamics that are terribly relevant today.
How was it possible to “use anti-fascism to silence talk of a massacre that had struck the fascists”? To understand this, we must look back at a historical-political context dominated by slogans such as “killing a fascist is not a crime,” or “MSI headquarters must be set on fire with the fascists inside; anything less is not enough.” Those expressions drew on the same ideological arsenal that in 2026—as the news reports tell us—led a person with absolutely no known historical expertise to ramble from the highest hill about “fascist propaganda against women.” Likewise—as the news reports continue—the mere announcement of a demonstration addressing the imbalances created by mass migration is enough for some to demand its “absolute ban” on the grounds that it constitutes an “outrage against the Constitution and democracy.” Otherwise, we are warned, “anti-fascist, anti-racist, and democratic Rome will mobilize… with absolute determination to defend dignity, history, and republican legality.” And furthermore: small and medium-sized publishers are required to sign a document on “anti-fascist values”—the so-called “anti-fascist license”—in order to participate in a fair that is held, moreover, in public spaces and supported by significant public funding.
A nation held hostage by the “civil religion of anti-fascism”
It would be a mistake to dismiss these positions as mere “petty politics.” In fact, they operate within a framework defined by more structured reflections, which express the ideological backdrop against which Italy is still being held captive eighty years after the end of World War II. It is, therefore, on this ideological backdrop that our attention must be focused.
The keystone that underpins and connects “the blood of the vanquished” from the immediate postwar period and the “Years of Lead” of the 1970s to the most recent theorizations of ur-fascism—that is, so-called “eternal fascism”—is the so-called “civil religion of anti-fascism,” recently revived by a political scientist who reiterated that antifascism “for antifascists is a past that does not pass, an eternal present … because antifascism is the historical, theoretical, and political origin of the republic.”
Needless to say, these few words encompass issues so contentious and vast that they cannot even be touched upon here. Here, we can only note that if, in the third decade of the 21st century, reputable scholars proclaim “anti-fascism” to be a “civil religion,” it likely means that the impression held by those who claim the “anti-fascist stigma” is on the verge of dissolving among those with a “decent knowledge of politics” is, at the very least, optimistic. Likewise, the claimed relevance of a “civil religion of antifascism” demonstrates that the now-outdated references to the reality imposed by the final decades of the twentieth century have come to naught—a reality in which domestic and international factors brought about the decline of the ideologies that shaped the twentieth century, resulting in the collapse of myths and beliefs that had until then served as primary symbols of identity. It would seem that, for several decades now, it has been acknowledged in vain that “anti-fascism has no longer been able to serve as a unifying force analogous to a sort of civil religion, giving rise instead to the dramatic problem of divided memory” (G. Marramao).
Is it all in vain? Is it all outdated? On closer inspection, these observations seem difficult to dispute. Historiography has had to acknowledge the extreme difficulty of assigning shared and recognizable contours to anti-fascism. This applies to the interwar period, when—according to one political scientist—anti-fascism could be said to have followed “significantly different trajectories in Moscow, Prague, Paris, London, Mexico City, Los Angeles, and New York.” And it holds true today, both at the national level and at the international level, where, in particular, it has recently been concluded that
the considerable differences in standpoint between the various contributors—who for the most part have been working on the subject for years and offer us previews of ongoing research—clearly show that antifascism is still an object of historiography that is contested starting with its very definition, and these differences are unlikely to disappear in the foreseeable future.
So then—if everything converges on the synthesis of those who have asserted that antifascism no longer constitutes “the horizon of a European public sphere, but a terrain of conflict in the public use of the past”—why make it the foundation of a “civil religion”?
Antifascism, Entrenched Interests, and “the Eternal Present”
One possible explanation is the preservation of “old ideological strongholds,” which invariably safeguard specific, concrete interests: take, for example, the passionate appeals to antifascism launched by those sectors of the film industry that have been deprived of the substantial “blanket” funding doled out until recently in the form of a credit tax.
In reality, we’re still only scratching the surface. There is something more to the phrase “civil religion of antifascism”—something far more sophisticated. A “civil religion,” in fact, is “the set of beliefs that refer to a transcendent entity and serve to legitimize a political community.” One immediately evident aspect of this conceptualization is that “the set of beliefs” upon which a “civil religion” hinges becomes a “transcendent entity.”
Thus, a first consequence of positing a “civil religion of antifascism” is to detach antifascism from history. In this way, it ceases to be a political-ideological construct—albeit one of difficult-to-define content, as we have seen—but one inevitably anchored to specific spatiotemporal coordinates, to a historical experience. Once removed from the realm of contingency, anti-fascism becomes an utterly abstract entity, capable of opposing any broadly political expression that proves unwelcome to the “high priest” of the moment: only under these conditions can anti-fascism pose as the “eternal present.”
From this perspective, therefore, anti-fascism becomes an antidote both to U. Eco’s “ur-fascism”—which demanded the fulfillment of no fewer than fourteen conditions—and to L. Canfora’s, which identifies its “core” in “racist supremacism, as the ultimate goal of one’s own nation.” And that is not all, because in this dimension—which is now, to all intents and purposes, literally “metaphysical”— since it lies beyond experience, anti-fascism becomes a useful shield both against the “fanfascism” of the 1970s and against “fascism in the modern sense of the word,” understood as “authoritarianism + militarism + racial hatred and hatred of those who are different + sexism + crass populism,” where—to say nothing of the rainbow of meanings —the significant point seems to lie in the fact that, for a word coined to designate a specific political movement founded in 1919 of the Common Era, a distinction is made between a meaning “in the modern sense” and a meaning whose “ancient” sense dates back, in fact, to just a century ago, and which in the meantime has taken on countless variations. The result is to confirm once again the absolute substantive evanescence of both “ur-fascism” and the opposing “eternal” antifascism.
The Disturbing Heirs of Rousseau
However, in the “civil religion of anti-fascism” there is a further, more serious, and disturbing aspect. It can easily be gleaned from one of the modern theorists of “civil religion”: J.J. Rousseau.
“Civil religion,” according to Rousseau, is the set of “dogmas” established by the “sovereign,” which bind every citizen within the community encompassed by the “social contract,” on pain of being “banished as unsociable” if a non-believer, or put to death if “after having publicly accepted these dogmas, he acts as if he did not believe them.” In this way—and this is the second aspect highlighted by Rousseau, though it is the ultimate goal of resorting to a “civil religion”—“social unity” and the “cohesion” of the political community are guaranteed, in Rousseau’s own words. Hence the instrumental nature of resorting to “civil religion.” Through the artifice of “civil religion,” a particular conception of the nature of relationships among the members of a community and of the community’s purposes becomes a constitutive paradigm of coexistence in a manner so pervasive that it defines the way human beings are, think, and relate to one another: they are such—that is, they are human beings—insofar as they share those dogmas, those articles of faith. Otherwise, they are “banished as unsociable.”
It is “civil religion,” therefore, that confers upon them both humanity and citizenship. In this way, “civil religion” defines “humanity” itself—that is, it gives meaning to being “human”: one is such, one is a “human being,” and is therefore endowed with intrinsic dignity, insofar as one adheres to the “social contract” founded on “civil religion.” In other words, a person’s dignity—their very being “human”—does not exist in and of itself, but is constituted by their faith in the beliefs established by the “sovereign” as the foundation of the political community, of which the individual is both a follower and an active priest.
It is only on these premises that one can understand the meaning of a “civil religion of anti-fascism”: if you do not declare yourself an “anti-fascist,” not only are you not part of the political community organized along that dividing line, but your very status as a “human being” is undermined. For this reason, “killing fascists is not a crime.” And it is also for this reason that the assassination of Charlie Kirk cannot be equated with that of Martin Luther King.
Furthermore, to address more immediate current events: it is for this reason that, if you do not sign up for the “anti-fascist license,” you cannot exercise your civil rights—or rather, you do not even possess civil rights to exercise.