Autor: FIR | 10. 3. 2025
You might think it’s news from Absurdistan when you read that 80 years after the liberation from Nazi barbarism, municipalities and larger cities in Europe are still finally taking the step of revoking the honorary citizenship of fascist representatives.
At the end of February, the northern Italian municipality of Salò decided to revoke Benito Mussolini’s honorary citizenship. On the one hand, it is of great symbolic importance that this municipality has finally taken this step, as Salò was the last retreat of the Italian fascists after Mussolini was deposed and large parts of the country were liberated by the Allies and the Italian resistance. Entirely dependent on the Wehrmacht, which had occupied the northern half of Italy since September 1943, Mussolini and his vassals established the “Republic of Salò” in the small town in the foothills of the Alps, a puppet state by the grace of Nazi Germany. It was officially called the Repubblica Sociale Italiana, or RSI for short. This ostensibly “social” state was the radicalized and unleashed version of fascist rule over the whole of Italy, including the persecution of Jews and deportations.
One could actually criticize that it would have been long past time to take this step. Nevertheless, it is remarkable, as the center-left majority in Salò’s municipal council is taking this decision at precisely the time when a government team that sees itself in the political tradition of the Italian fascists is in power in Rome. The President of the Italian Senate pays homage to Mussolini with a statue of the Duce in his living room. And the head of government, Meloni, has never left any doubt about her sympathies for Mussolini. So this municipal council decision is actually also a sign against the fascist government in Rome.
If we turn our gaze to Spain, numerous municipalities there would also have reason and opportunity to actively defend themselves against the still existing cult of Franco as a political signal against the attempts of the Partido Popular and the extreme right-wing Vox to turn the country’s ideological orientation back in a fascist direction.
It has already been a decades-long struggle to properly honor the victims of Franco’s rule. Although the former places of pilgrimage for the Francoists have been dissolved by political decisions of the central government, in many parts of Spain there are not only memorials, but also other public forms of tribute to Franco. Here, the anti-fascist forces still have a major task not only to commemorate the fighters for the Spanish Republic and the victims of the Franco era, but also to campaign for the dissolution of memorials to Franco’s rule.
Particularly problematic in various Eastern European countries is the historical revisionist reinstatement of Nazi collaborators in social recognition. The honoring of the Ukrainian nationalist and Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera is scandalous. This is not just a matter of rehabilitation by neo-Nazis and the extreme right, but the Bandera cult encompasses the social narrative of today’s Ukrainian state.
For many years, FIR and its member associations have been opposing Nazi glorification and SS rehabilitation in the Baltic states or the public honoring of Hungarian collaborators on the occasion of the “Outbreak” in February 1945, the so-called “Day of Honor”, in which more than 1000 people took part this year. In Sofia, several hundred neo-Nazis honoured the Bulgarian general Hristo Lukov, a fascist and collaborator who has been stylized as a symbolic figure of Bulgarian neo-fascism for over twenty years, with a torchlight march at the end of February - despite a ban. The “Lukov March” thus attracts neo-Nazis from all over Europe, including Italy, Spain, Romania, France, Hungary, Austria and Germany.
80 years after the liberation from Nazi barbarism, it is time to send a clear message against any glorification of the Nazis. This would actually be a political task for the European Parliament. In view of the latest historical revisionist resolutions, however, we will probably wait in vain.
International Federation of Resistants Fighters
