Liberation Day in Torino

Featuring photos of partisans marching through the streets of WWII Torino, to student protestors and strikers in the 1960s and 1970s, the messaging is often moving.

The spirit of the fighters, who defeated the Nazis and Mussolini’s fascists, still remains, we’re reminded. “Eighty years of resistance,” as one of this year’s posters proclaimed.

As much as I find this revolutionary spirit inconsistent in today’s Italy, I appreciate the rhetoric. It has to be employed, even if it exaggerates, as it still maps to certain issues in Italian politics, particularly Gaza.

This April, however, something changed. Within days of this year’s commemorative adverts going up, the Liberation Day posters were replaced by far-right ones about Ukrainian plans for world domination, and martyred fascist militants.

If you want to sample the zeitgeist, it was all there. Emboldened by the return of Donald Trump, and the longevity of Giorgia Meloni’s government, fascists are taking the initiative to raise their visibility.

Never mind, of course, that all these posters are promptly and repeatedly torn down by my leftwing neighbours. It’s their appearance, at all, that I find dispiriting, even though they’re inevitable.

Covering this year’s commemoration of Liberation Day helped restore my mood. Held the night before, on 24 April, in central Torino, the crowd was large and their placards revealing.

To be expected, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict monopolised the event. No war is as well-suited to remembering World War II, and the Nazi genocide, as what’s transpiring in Gaza.

While it isn’t on the scale of the Holocaust, the eliminationist nature of the violence invokes its memory and forces the comparisons. Live streaming of the carnage by citizen journalists underwrites the links.

Though it may seem out of place protesting against a conflict in the Middle East, the racist, Islamophobic politics that have become mainstream in today’s Europe localise the Gaza war and make it one of its own.