Anne Colamosca is an independent writer and book critic.
Today post-1945 Italy is often presented as an age of anti-fascist hegemony. But Cold War Italy was no paradise for the Left — and neorealist filmmakers and writers had to resist Church censorship and right-wing hegemony over the country’s culture.
Though Bill Clinton ran for president on promises of empowering workers, in office he gutted welfare and passed NAFTA, undermining organized labor and driving working-class voters away from the Democratic Party. We’re still living with the consequences.
Late in life, diplomat George Kennan became known as a “dove” on US-Russian relations. But after World War II his containment strategy played a major role subverting democracies in the name of fighting communism.
Today marks the anniversary of Greta Garbo’s death. The 1939 movie Ninotchka gave her a breakout comedy role — but also reflected the grim mood in Hollywood as Europe headed to war.
In the early twentieth century, Carlo Tresca was one of the most important immigrant labor organizers in the United States. When fascism triumphed in his homeland in 1922, he took up the struggle against its American backers.
The bombing of Guernica on this day in 1937 wasn’t just part of the Spanish Civil War but a show of Nazi Germany’s military might. When antifascist journalist George Steer uncovered Germany’s responsibility, it prepared the world for the terror that followed.
The first meeting of the Italian parliament in Rome, 150 years ago today, was a symbolic show of national reunification. Yet the battle against foreign domination had raised sharply contrasting ideas of the future Italy — leaving a lasting impact on socialists worldwide.
Italy’s first postwar agriculture secretary, Fausto Gullo, was a Communist who used his office to redistribute land and give peasants control over their lives. His reforms promised to democratize the South’s deeply unequal economy — only for conservatives to reassert the dead hand of landowner power.
Inspired by the hardships faced by peasants in his native Abruzzo, Ignazio Silone’s Fontamara was one of the great anti-fascist novels of the twentieth century. But his own political journey was deeply conflicted, as he left behind his Bolshevik past to become a strident anti-communist.
The Booker Prize shortlisting of Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King is the latest sign of rising interest in Fascist Italy’s colonial war in Ethiopia. The genocidal violence perpetrated against Ethiopians in 1935–6 was soon turned back onto European soil — and united Italian anti-fascists with the Africans resisting colonial aggression.
Author of Broadway hit The Women, the Vanity Fair managing editor Clare Boothe Luce was a dogged anticommunist. As US ambassador to Italy, she worked tirelessly to keep the Left out of office — and set a precedent for Washington’s meddling in democracies abroad.
One of the great Italian novelists of the last century, Natalia Ginzburg was long overlooked in the United States. Yet as Italy turns back toward the far right, this leading voice of the antifascist generation is again calling out to the present.