April 25, this is how Mattarella celebrates “the moral revolt of patriots for national redemption” – Corriere.it

“L’Italy is a Republic founded on the Constitution, daughter of the anti-fascist struggle”. Consistent with himself, the head of state celebrates April 25 without interpretative corrections, without making the judgment harsher or more sweetened and letting the controversies on the meaning of the anniversary settle. It is enough to re-read what he said in Milan in the similar appointment of 2015, as soon as he was elected, to make sure that there is not a Mattarella 1 and a Mattarella 2, ready to change register perhaps with some sagging because the right is now in government. His DNA is not modifiable. It was therefore to be expected that yesterday between Cuneo, Borgo San Dalmazzo and Boves, symbolic places of the Resistance, he would launch a message conceived on that scheme of non-revisable values. And so it was. This time, however, he has a strong emotional charge and clear historical connections, such as to clear up any ambiguity, from anyone who propalates.

A lesson in civil pedagogy that the president begins by evoking the famous words of Piero Calamandrei: «If you want to go to pilgrimage to the places where the Constitution was born, go to the mountains where the partisans fell…». This is the case of this corner of Piedmont, a land of “34 gold, 174 silver and 228 bronze medals for the Resistance”, where Duccio Galimberti, intellectual, shareholder and partisan, is called back into service. “The war continues” he said on 26 July 1943 in the square of Cuneo. «It continues until the expulsion of the last German, until the disappearance of the last vestiges of the fascist regime, until the victory of the Italian people who rebel against Mussolini’s tyranny … we cannot join an oligarchy (headed by the king and Badoglio,
ed.) which seeks, by throwing Mussolini overboard, to save itself at the expense of the Italians».

A diagnosis “extraordinary for lucidity and vision”, which makes us understand the “value and meaning of the Resistance”, says Mattarella, recalling the parable of Galimberti: captured, tortured and killed a year later. When, after the trauma of 8 September 1943, “the theme of the reconquest of the homeland and the confirmation of the values ​​of his people, after the deceptive slogans of fascism” prevailed in the country. Namely, and here does the list of distortions by which Italy allowed itself to be hypnotized: «The myth of the boss; a patriotism opposed to the patriotism of the others in defiance of the universal values ​​that animate the 19th century Risorgimento; the myth of violence and war; the myth of dominating Italy and imperial adventures… fight not to defend your own people but to attack. Not for the sake of freedom, but to take freedom away from others.”

Facts, not theorems. The head of state mentions them telling how the Resistance was «above all a moral revolt of patriots against fascism to affirm national redemption”. A movement of people that involved old people, workers, peasants and mountaineers, young people, soldiers who “refused to join the Nazis to do violence to their own people”. The partisans took up arms and the reprisals and massacres of civilians began. The first right in Boves, put on fire by the SS, while Borgo San Dalmazzo recorded one of the major deportations of Jews to extermination camps. “Refugees in search of salvation delivered to death for the servility of the collaboration assured to the Nazis”, Mattarella points out severely.

«Hard was the struggle to ensure Italy’s survival in the catastrophe to which fascism had led it. Soldiers from other countries helped us, who became friends and solid allies: many of them are buried in Italy”. And here is Mattarella’s sentence: «The supreme crisis of the country required a decisive moment, for a new idea of ​​community, after the failure of the previous one. It was a question of transfusing the authentic soul of the nation into the State… to give life to a new Italy».

Which was forged thanks to various political families, without claiming hegemony of a single party. Everything was played out in a few months. From the decision

to institute a Constituent Assembly, to the referendum in favor of the Republic to break the pact with a monarchy “co-responsible for having delivered Italy to fascism”, to the caesura to re-establish “the principle of the prevalence of the person and of the community over the State”, eliminating totalitarianisms. Today, 78 years later, the “true Italian identity is expressed in a strong and mature democracy in its institutions and in its civil society”. Society that manifests itself, honoring the Resistance, with the work of doctors, workers, entrepreneurs, those who pay taxes, volunteers, young people who protect the environment … Anyone who ventures to undermine the freedoms conquered know, word of Mattarella, which always applies the old motto: «Now and always Resistance».