The Massacre at the Fosse Ardeatine. History, Myth, Ritual, and ...

They didn’t; but their heterogeneity gives rise to further problems. If some of them put their
lives at stake – the partisans - others did not; the Jews, or those picked at random off the street,
never chose to risk their lives. So while all can be called martyrs, or indeed heroes, they
cannot all be called innocent; many of them had done something. As one son said, “My father
was no innocent. He had tried to fight the Germans”. And a daughter similarly asserts, “I
don’t want to be the daughter of an innocent victim”. There is no unifying category there,
unless the very abstract and harmless category of the “martyrs” of freedom, the “martyrs” of
liberty.
Their actual options are barely mentioned.
Alongside the account of the Resistance that locates it as the property of the Communists, so
to speak, there has been a different myth, of the Resistance as a united movement involving
the majority of the Italian people. And the sense that everyone had to be represented in it
caused a search for the lowest common denominator; in this case, patriotism and democracy.
The Communists themselves went along with this drive to represent the Resistance as
something harmless and uncontroversial, not least because in the middle of the Cold War they
had to legitimise themselves as not just a legitimate, but actually a founding element, in the
Italian democracy.
So they underplayed the fact that the resistance was a conflict. They
underplayed the fact that partisans were armed fighters who had not only died, but also killed;
all the monuments to the partisans are monuments to dying partisans.
As a historian recently
said, “The Resistance is the only war which is celebrated for the battles it has lost, rather than
the ones it has won, because the ones that it has won would remind us that it was a war”.
reference for this? Thus the partisans who took part in the attack in via Rasella have lived
through the half century with a sense that while the Party defended them and supported them,
it never really owned their action. In fact, a number of anti-partisan versions, like the
version, “They should have turned themselves in”, are widespread in the Left as well, because
it’s common sense.
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