Garibaldi the first fascist E-Book

Marcello Caroti

• Herausgeber: Youcanprint Self-Publishing
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Italy has been the first country in history where a National Socialist regime was established. This did not happen by chance, in fact you can trace back the origins of Fascism to the Italian Risorgimento and more precisely to the person of Garibaldi. The purpose of this book is to show the readers how all this happened and to do this we must answer the following questions. Who really was Garibaldi? Was he a hero or a bandit? What has he left to the society and culture of his country? Come and find out the truth, let’s overcome the nonsense that the myth has accumulated on the man who has contributed so incisively to the birth of Italy. Let’s discover the role that Freemasonry has played in the life of Garibaldi and how Freemasonry has contributed to his success. What relationship did Garibaldi have with the Mafia? We examine the origins of this phenomenon and see how the Mafia participated to Garibaldi’s enterprises. Come and listen to the voices of the protagonists. If we read carefully their testimonies we can see how they have sown (unknowingly) the seed of a culture and of a political movement that later became Fascism. At the end, after the death of Garibaldi, let us walk together along the road that, starting from socialism, has led Italy to realize this regime.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Introduction

The years of his training

The Revolução Farroupilha

The Guerra Grande

Italia

The Mille

The conquest of the kingdom

Mafia

From Marsala to Volturno

The conquest of the South

Delirium

A solitary man

National Socialism

Bibliografy

Marcello Caroti

Garibaldi the first fascist

The roots of Fascism in the Italian Risorgimento

Milano, June 2015

Youcanprint Self - Publishing

Title | Garibaldi the first fascist

Author | Marcello Caroti

Cover image | © Georgios Kollidas - Fotolia.com

ISBN | 9788893060394

Prima edizione digitale: 2016

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To those who Cultivate Understanding

Introduction

This essay does not want to be another biography of Garibaldi, we do not think it is possible to add anything new.

We want to propose a series of reflections on the person of Garibaldi, his thoughts, his life, his writings to define his position with respect to the two ideologies that have shaped the history of Europe and of Italy in the past two centuries: Nationalism and Socialism.

We decided to produce this essay because it seems to us that to date the contribution that Garibaldi gave to the birth to this new country has not been properly explained. The purpose of our work is the search of the roots of fascism in the Italian Risorgimento with particular regard to the person of Garibaldi.

In the last chapter we will examine the evolution of this new ideology from the death of Garibaldi up to the birth of the first two National Socialist regimes in Europe: Nazism and Fascism.

Since Garibaldi died, in 1882, many people tried to grab his legacy and have claimed to be the most faithful interpreters of his thought. Socialists, Fascists, the Resistance, the Communists, they all tried to grab his name and image. Moreover we have to consider that together with Leonardo, Colombo and Mussolini, he is one of the most famous Italians in the world; in Italy he is certainly the most popular among the Founding Fathers. To which political movement did Garibaldi belong?

To answer this question we have to understand who he really was. If we draw his biography in this book it is because you cannot understand him without examining the entire evolution of his personality in the political and ideological context of the society in which he lived. To do this we must first do a proper and thorough de-mythologizing of this icon of the Italian Risorgimento. Normally it is not easy to demythologize a character that in 150 years of history and political propaganda has accumulated such a stratification of legends that made him become a kind of super hero but in our case a simple and basic research is sufficient provided it is done with an open mind and without bias. We used sources that have been available to the public for years because, surprisingly, it is not necessary to make new discoveries but rather to properly use the sources we already have.

We consider this work of ours as a completion and a continuation of the work of Denis Mack Smith. If the reader will have the impression that we have been somewhat sympathetic to the Bourbons or to the people of the south he must know that this was not our purpose, we did not do it intentionally. We felt it was necessary to clarify the relationship between Garibaldi and the Mafia because much has been written about it but in a way that we consider very inaccurate and sometimes very imaginative. We had to analyze the Bourbon regime and the society of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies to briefly describe the genesis of the Mafia.

We have quoted as many sources as possible to let the reader hear our characters and participate to their emotions: the quotes are part of our essay together with our text. In this way the reader can understand the characters we are dealing with not only rationally but also emotionally.

First of all we quoted Garibaldi. He fortunately left us a considerable amount of literary production and, moreover, his actions and his speeches were recorded by a crowd of friends and/or enemies who, in turn, left us their testimony. His Memorie are a very useful source for understanding the man; it strikes us his sincerity in telling objectionable episodes of his life, episodes that others would have not even mentioned. As we will not write a complete biography, the reader is required an elementary knowledge of the Risorgimento and the life of Garibaldi.

Welcome to History.

The years of his training

The Memorie of Garibaldi are the most important source for those who wish to understand the man and the motivations that guided him in his patriotic activity. They were written on several occasions, reviewed, abandoned and rewritten.

He wrote the preface in 1872 when he was 65 years old. Already in the preface there are a few things that strike the reader.

A violent anti-clericalism: "The priest is the personification of the lie. The liar is a thief. The thief is a murderer: and I could find to the priest a number of infamous corollaries. .... The priest! Ah! This is the real scourge of God! In Italy he maintains a coward government in the most degrading humiliation, and restores himself in the corruption and the miseries of the people!"1. A violent anti-clericalism in words, up to the point of ridicule, will remain a constant of his thought. As a boy he had two priests as tutors who left a deep antipathy toward the priests and the Church in general. Besides, his mother, a devout Catholic, wanted to send him to seminary, a detestable thing for a boy extremely lively and fascinated by the adventure.

A deep bitterness: "I will be accused of pessimism; but ... having believed for most of my life in the human improvement, I am saddened to see so many evils and so much corruption in this would be civil century". A moralistic-educational attitude is normal in the literature of Romanticism.

This pessimism led him to declare: "Republican, but more and more convinced of the necessity of an honest and temporary dictatorship at the head of those nations, such as France, Spain and Italy that are the victims of the most pernicious Byzantinism". This too will be a constant of his thought and action. Whenever he takes power he will appoint himself dictator, still remaining always a staunch Democrat.

A remarkable inconsistency!

He was certainly not a fanatic ideologue: "Tolerant, and not exclusivist, not capable of imposing by force my republicanism, for example to the English people, if they are happy with the government of Queen Victoria, let them be happy". This elasticity or pragmatism will be instrumental in his moving over to the side of the monarchy because it was indispensable for the unification of Italy. Always the same pragmatism led him to reject totally the Marxist ideology.

What leaves the reader amazed is the closing to the preface: "Lover of peace, law, justice – we are forced however to conclude with the axiom of an American general: ‘La guerra es la vertadera vida del hombre!’ (War is the real life of man)". In the same sentence where he declares his love to peace he cannot hold himself from declaring his love to war. In fact to war he will devote his entire life. This inconsistency could be interpreted as a case of senile dementia but it is not. This is him, it is his way of thinking that will shape his thoughts and his actions, in fact, his entire life.

In his Memorie he almost always talks about war, a little about himself, very little about politics and never about socialism.

In describing his youth he says nothing about how and why he became an Italian patriot, it takes it for granted. "".