Army Calendar, Democratic Party and Anpi slip-up: “Reevaluate the twenty-year period”

It all started with an online article from La Repubblica about the Army’s 2024 calendar. The title ends prominently: «For Italy always… before and after the 8th of September 1943». According to the newspaper “it seems like another way of normalizing the darkest period in contemporary Italian history”, the Fascist Twenty Years. The left immediately screams scandal. However, it would be enough to open this calendar to understand that the intention is exactly the opposite. The initiative, in fact, aims to celebrate the soldiers who fought for Liberation, alongside the Resistance and against the Nazis. For the president of ANPI, Gianfranco Pagliarulo, “it is unacceptable, on the one hand they want to represent institutional continuity when in fact there was a radical rupture between the fascist regime and the anti-fascist republic”. The number one of the National Party Association is furious: “The new Italian army is being placed on the same level as the Salò army.”

Then there is politics. Sandro Ruotolo, head of the Democratic Party’s Memory, is even more explicit: «The Minister of Defense, Guido Crosetto, must withdraw from circulation the Army’s 2024 calendar that reevaluates fascism». The same request comes from Avs, with the group’s deputy leader in the Chamber Marco Grimaldi presenting a question to Crosetto. According to him, the calendar “tends to shorten the period of the fascist dictatorship”. It would be enough to read the introduction by the Army Chief of Staff, General of the Army Corps Pietro Serino, to understand how things really are: «Through the reconstruction of those tragic events (the Second World War, the Armistice and the Resistance, ed. ) we wanted to pay tribute to the men who participated in these events in the absolute belief that they were serving their country, honoring the oath they had taken. They offered their lives only and always for Italy. As proof of this, many soldiers, who survived three years of a very tough war, had no doubts, after September 8, 1943, about what their duty was and what position the Italian Army should take.” Each month is dedicated to one of these heroes. Here we then find Captain Luigi Dionigi Tortora, killed on November 14, 1943, who “with the sacrifice of his life” saved “an entire partisan garrison from capture by the enemy”, fighting with the Gramsci battalion against the Germans.

Captain Antonio Cianciullo, one of the “first determined defenders of the fight against the Germans”, also lost his life in Kefalonia. The month of May is dedicated to the value of Colonel Giuseppe Cordero Lanza di Montezemolo, who “organized the Clandestine Military Front”. Captured by the Germans and tortured, he was shot in the Fosse Ardeatine. In response to the surreal controversies of the left comes the clarification from the Ministry of Defense: «The calendar highlights the commitment and value of Italians and our soldiers in the War of Liberation, in the awareness that, like those of then, today’s soldiers beyond Furthermore, with the oath they take, they commit to serving the country and its republican institutions.” Crosetto himself recalls that «the soldiers celebrated in the calendar are all undisputed heroes awarded with gold medals for their military valor who fell in the War of Liberation. Could these be fascists? Therefore, the minister considers it “crazy that some opposition representatives tarnish soldiers and officers whose memory we just need to continue to honor, as the Army has done”.