(MENAFN- The Conversation) An elegantly dressed Italian emerges from an exercise in central London on the evening of April 22, 1924. He has a secret project to meet with representatives of Britain’s ruling Labour Party, including, he hopes, newly arrived Minister-elect Ramsay MacDonald.
Giacomo Matteotti, co-founder and leader of the Italian Unitary Socialist Party, is one of the warring factions of the fascist movement that has tightened its grip on Italy since Benito Mussolini’s appointment as Prime Minister in October 1922, following the famous march. in Rome. Array
But for now, Italy remains a democracy. Matteotti, 38, a tireless advocate for workers’ rights, still hopes Mussolini can be arrested. He entered Britain without a passport, as the Italian government refused to grant it to him. At home, physically and verbally assaulted through fascist mobs and pro-government newspapers. Even in London, he followed through fascist agents, a fact he revealed to him through his contacts in the Labour Party.
For Matteotti, this new British government (the first led by Labour, though not overwhelmingly) is a glimmer of hope. He is willing to listen to their thoughts on what is happening in Italy after Mussolini’s disputed election victory earlier this year. month. The next few days in London will be, Matteotti hopes, decisive in his fight against fascism.
Instead, less than two months later, he kidnapped and murdered him as he was on his way to Parliament in Rome. It is a crime that shocks Italy and, a century later, still leaves many questions unanswered.
From the point of view of their social origins, MacDonald and Matteotti may not have been more different. Britain’s new prime minister was a working-class Scotsman who had risen through modest jobs and political activism. In contrast, Matteotti came from a wealthy circle. of relatives who owned 385 acres in the Polesine region of northeastern Italy.
Until April 1924, however, Matteotti, an avowed enemy of the Italian state, was almost a refugee. The Fascists feared his exceptional eloquence, with which he expressed his opposition to the Italian government in Parliament and in national and foreign newspapers.
It’s unclear whether the two men actually complied with Matteotti’s four-day layover in London; MacDonald would have been reluctant to announce an unofficial meeting with an opposition MP from some other country. But we do know that Matteotti was connected to other prominent Labour figures. .
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On April 24, he gave a speech to the executive committees of the ruling Labor Party and other staff organizations, in which he called for “morale and help” for Italian personnel who oppose fascist violence. His gripping account of the situation in Italy prompted the publication of an English translation of his book A Year of Fascist Rule, which highlights a long list of violent crimes allegedly perpetrated during Mussolini’s rule.
But anything else would have worried Mussolini about Matteotti’s stopover in London, as part of a European tour that also included stops in Brussels and Paris. The Italian Prime Minister had just signed an agreement giving the U. S. company Sinclair Oil a monopoly on oil exploration. He later warned that the Labor government might also have provided Matteotti with evidence that this monopoly had been granted through Mussolini in exchange for a $2 million bribe (worth around $40 million today).
Less than two months after his trip to London, on a hot afternoon of June 10, 1924, in Rome, Matteotti left his home near Piazza del Popolo for a short walk along the Tiber River to the capital’s parliament building. A speech he is scheduled to deliver the following day at a consultation on the government’s draft budget. Reportedly, he worked on this speech day and night, reading knowledge and crunching numbers for many hours.
But waiting for him was a car with five other people on board, fascist members of a secret organization formed a few months earlier at the Viminale, the palace of the Minister of the Interior. This secret organization, known as Ceka for the creation of the Soviet political police to suppress dissent, had been following Matteotti for weeks. The squad’s leader, American-born Amerigo Dumini, reportedly boasted that he had killed several socialist activists.
The gang moved quickly, grabbing Matteotti and dragging him toward their car, an Italian Lancia complex. Shouting, the opposition leader threw his car with parliamentary identification on the ground, where he was later spotted by passers-by. The car sped through the deserted unpaved streets of Rome. Matteotti would never be seen alive again.
The next afternoon, the mood in the Italian Parliament was feverish. The Socialist parliamentarians, alerted through Matteotti’s wife, denounced the disappearance of the parliamentarian, but were not entirely surprised. Twelve days earlier, Matteotti had given a speech denouncing the recent general election that gave the fascists their place. First (and only) electoral victory. The vote was marred by threats and acts of violence that prevented many anti-fascist applicants from running and many staff members from voting.
As Matteotti made his way to Parliament, Mussolini allegedly heard the question, “How is it possible that this guy is still circulating?”In an article in the fascist newspaper Popolo d’Italia, the prime minister called the speech “monstrously provocative” and “deserving of something more tangible. “what epithets. “
Two days after Matteotti’s death, however, Mussolini’s tone had changed. He again confided to the parliamentarians that “the police had been informed of the prolonged disappearance of the Honourable Matteotti” and that he himself had “ordered them to intensify the search”. Mussolini confided in her that he wanted to send her husband back alive.
However, during that time, events were beyond Mussolini’s control. The janitor at a construction site next to Matteotti’s home had given police the license plate number of a suspicious car he had seen the day before the murder. Police temporarily knew the car’s owner as Filippo Filippelli, editor of the pro-fascist newspaper Corriere Italiano. That same afternoon, Dumini, who was on the front page of the newspaper, was arrested and more arrests would continue in the coming weeks.
Within 48 hours of Matteotti’s disappearance, the newspapers of Corriere della Sera linked the crime to fascists close to the government, as evidenced by Dumini’s close friendship with Mussolini’s press office chief, Cesare Rossi, who was well known in Rome. The resulting public outrage – largely directed against Mussolini himself – might even topple the Italian government, sounding the death knell for fascism.
One hundred years later, Matteotti’s disappearance (and the upcoming discovery of his remains on the outskirts of Rome during the quiet August holidays) remains a motify in Italy’s collective memory. the current government, which has withheld budget for projects commemorating the centenary of Matteotti’s assassination.
His death may be one of the most important political assassinations of the 20th century. By killing an opposition leader, Italy’s fascist regime has taken political violence to a new level, making it clear that it is in a position to punish anyone who stands in its way. in their own way, regardless of their position. Dictatorship threatened Italy and fascism has become a staple in dictionaries around the world, inspiring countless authoritarian regimes, including Nazi Germany.
For the Italian right, however, Matteotti is a ghost. Throughout her political career, Italy’s current Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, has almost never spoken about the ancient crimes of the fascists in Italy, and not once about Matteotti’s assassination. This is not unexpected given the fascist roots of Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party, whose logo features a flame symbolizing the fascist spirit burning by Mussolini’s grave.
Nor has the age-old debate over homicide ever led to a unanimous conclusion about who gave the order to kill Matteotti and why. Some prominent Italian historians, such as Renzo De Felice, have warned that Mussolini himself had been the victim of a political conspiracy, believing that since the assassination that occurred after the victory of “Il Duce” in the April 1924 elections, he no longer needed to eliminate an opponent and threatened to trigger the political crisis that had ensued.
Now, as we approach the centenary of Matteotti’s death, scholars and archivists from Italy and the UK (adding the authors of this article) are stepping in to shed new light on the Matteotti case, with the help of documents preserved in the archives of the London School of Economics (LSE) that has taken place. and that most Italian historians, De Felice adds, never had the opportunity to study.
The more than 4,000-page collection includes transcripts of original documents collected as part of the anti-fascist tribunal’s investigation into the murder of Mauro del Giudice, which had not been made public at the time. Although those documents were examined by historian Mauro Canali in the 1990s – which led him to accuse Mussolini of being directly guilty of the murder – we still do not know all their main points and a more thorough investigation is long overdue.
With this we hope to dispel once and for all the theories of some right-wing historians and identify once and for all that it was Mussolini who ordered Matteotti’s assassination and also why he gave the order.
The story of how the documents were hidden in the LSE library takes us back to London for another clandestine job, this time with Gaetano Salvemini, an esteemed professor of fashion hitale who fled Italy in November 1925.
Salvemini sent a letter of resignation to the University of Florence while in London where, like Matteotti, he sought to oppose the risk of fascism in his country. Unlike Matteotti, he did not make the mistake of returning to Italy. He would later live in exile in the United States as a professor at Harvard University, although he became respected in his country as one of the most important Italian intellectuals of the 20th century.
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Intellectuals and politicians, including John Maynard Keynes, George Macaulay Trevelyan, Thomas Okey, and Ramsay MacDonald (who is no longer prime minister but remains leader of the Labour Party), had publicly expressed their views when Salvemini was arrested in Italy by the fascist government a few months earlier. .
“When I’m in London, I’m not in exile. I am at home, in the depths of my heart, loose among the loose,” Salvemini wrote to her friend, art historian Mary Berenson.
In December 1926, while still in London, Salvemini won the secret package which soon passed to the LSE. Like Matteotti before him, his movements were reported to Mussolini, and a letter from the Italian embassy in London, dated January 12, 1927, informed the Italian leader that:
Salvemini and others involved in smuggling those documents knew well that their quest for justice for Matteotti would not be a success for the foreseeable future. But they were driven by the confidence that one day those documents might prove beyond doubt that Mussolini had orchestrated Matteotti’s assassination. murder. After reading them carefully, Salvemini himself wrote in The Fascist Dictatorship in Italy, a harsh 1928 account of why Italy has become a dictatorship, that the documents he obtained contained irrefutable evidence that Mussolini was the instigator of Matteotti’s assassination.
The explanation for why they ended up at the LSE was likely due to Salvemini’s friendship with Alys Russell, an American-born British Quaker, aid organizer, and first wife of British philosopher Bertrand Russell. She entertained Salvemini at her Chelsea home alongside LSE luminaries such as political scientists Graham Wallas, Harold Laski and Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson. So Salvemini would probably have seen the LSE as a safe haven, and the documents have remained there ever since.
Following Dumini’s arrest on June 12, 1924, and public outrage over Matteotti’s disappearance, Mussolini found himself on the defensive. He fired the police leader and Cesare Rossi, his closest adviser, and told the Italian parliament:
But smelling of political bloodshed, the opposition parties made a very important mistake. In an attempt to pressure Italy’s King Victor Emmanuel III to remove Mussolini from office, they walked out of Parliament until those guilty of Matteotti’s murder were brought to justice.
But this retreat of the opposition – known as the secessione dell’Aventino after the hill where other people accumulated political movements in ancient Rome – did not have the desired effect on the king, who feared the leaders of the republican opposition more than fascist violence. on the contrary, this resolution allowed Mussolini to legislate unopposed while the seats of the 123 deputies who had joined the uprising remained vacant.
However, opposition voices have not been completely silenced. In July 1924, an article written by Matteotti a few days before his assassination was published posthumously in English Life, a short-lived monthly magazine edited by Brendan Bracken, a close friend of Winston Churchill, who would be his Minister of Information during World War II.
Matteotti’s article, titled “Machiavelli, Mussolini, and Fascism,” is a reaction to an article published in the magazine in June by Mussolini himself. The Italian prime minister’s translated essay on the Renaissance intellectual Niccolò Machiavelli had the provocative title “The Madness of Democracy. “
Matteotti’s reaction ridiculed Mussolini’s request to use force, while redeeming Machiavelli’s legacy. He cited the 18th bankruptcy of The Prince, in which Machiavelli wrote:
Matteotti’s article also lays out the main points of the questionable deal with Sinclair Oil, stating that he was aware of the evidence of corruption in the Italian government. In 1997, the historian Canali warned that this was what Matteotti was about to reveal to Parliament and that this was the real reason for his assassination.
After describing Mussolini’s as “an outrage on morality,” Matteotti ended the article with a prescient warning that fascist movements would “make Italy notorious throughout the world. “
The article was widely commented on in the British press, which followed the story of Matteotti’s murder almost daily. In Italy, however, the absence of parliamentary opposition gave Mussolini a respite from those posthumous accusations.
Finally, in mid-August 1924, when most Italians were on vacation to keep warmth and political debate to a minimum, Matteotti’s body was suddenly recovered from a wooden site about 20 miles from Rome. His funeral passed very quickly and the coffin was carried through the night. in an attempt to save you from public meetings. However, the funeral in Matteotti’s small hometown of Fratta Polesine was attended by thousands of people, with many more paying their respects on the last trip of his frame.
In November 1924, investigators into Matteotti’s death believed that his assassins had acted on Mussolini’s orders. Sensing greater political danger, Il Duce intensified his authoritarian rule over the country. In a speech to Parliament on 3 January 1925, he took “political responsibility” for the murder, although he admitted to ordering it. Mussolini’s speech ended with a rhetorical invitation to impeach him, in front of a parliament now populated only by fascists. Instead, they applauded and cheered their leader.
This speech marked the end of Italian democracy. Within 48 hours, Mussolini imposed draconian restrictions on the country’s press freedom and gave the government the strength to shut down all branches of opposition parties.
Amid Mussolini’s grip on power, there is no hope of uncovering the facts about Matteotti’s murder, at least in Italy. A trial was initiated in 1925, but it was heavily manipulated: anti-fascists passed judgment on who had led the investigation replaced, and the trial was moved from Rome to Chieti, a small town and fascist stronghold, to minimize public attention.
Then, in July 1925, Mussolini decreed an amnesty for all political crimes. The decree was so openly aimed at saving Dumini and his affiliates that in anti-fascist circles it was referred to as the “Dumini amnesty. “, all the perpetrators were released and the fact of the murder was buried for decades.
The nature of Mussolini’s involvement has been little disputed after his execution in April 1945 and the end of World War II. Italy is now struggling to triumph over the civil war that has marked it for so long, with anti-fascist parties seeking reconciliation rather than rekindling outrage over Mussolini’s crimes. Two years later, Dumini and his two accomplices were nevertheless sentenced to long criminal sentences for the murder, but were released thanks to a new amnesty law.
However, just as Salvemini had hoped when he handed over the investigation documents to the LSE, Mussolini’s conceivable duty for the murder was preserved in the transcripts of the original investigation. Now, at the request of one of the authors of this article (Andrea), those documents are being digitized and on Tuesday, April 23, the physical copies will be presented to the public for the first time.
The purpose of our new studies is to find out once and for all why Matteotti was murdered. Was it their democratic resistance to fascist misdeeds, especially the violence and fraud that occurred in the 1924 general election?Was this evidence of the corruption of Mussolini’s government?Or was Matteotti murdered for his reputation abroad, exemplified by the links he forged with the Labour government on his last fateful stop in London?
And there’s another reason for our research. By shedding new light on the events leading up to Matteotti’s assassination, we aim to shed light on the well-being of all political dissidents in the context of the resurgence of autocratic governments and the corrosion of democracies. values – adding in Italia. Al paying tribute to a martyr of democracy in the early 20th century, we underscore the desire to perceive and confront the mechanisms that are still used today to silence opposition and authoritarian regimes around the world.
The Murder of Giacomo Matteotti: An Archive and Seminar will be held at the LSE Library in central London on Tuesday 23 April.
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