Wikipedia's antifa militias

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And so I am not alone. I am not the only target of the willing anti-fascist proofreaders who touch up suspect biographies on Wikipedia. Of the anonymous raiders dedicated to unmasking the genetic fascism that takes root in those who would like to erase the traces of a politically sulphurous family past. Of the brigades of cleansed memory who infiltrate the profiles of journalists and various people of the political-media circus to nail them to the unspeakable, the unspeakable, to genealogical shame. I said to myself: it happened to me, amen. And instead I discover that two illustrious colleagues, Antonio Padellaro and Alessandro Sallusti, in two recent books published almost simultaneously, have received the exact same psycho-biographical treatment . Conspiracy. Victims of the clandestine rectifiers who in the shadows plot to make Wikipedia compliant with the antifa civil religion.

And in fact, even Antonio Padellaro tells with due sarcasm in his “Imaginary Antifascists” (PaperFirst), that he discovered almost by chance the solicitous attention of the keen Wikipedia raiders. In the incipit of his biographical profile that the immense digital encyclopedia of which we are all compulsive users generously dedicates to him, right in the very first words, right in the preface, in the introductory caption, as in a secularized version of the “introibo” that in the Christian liturgy indicates the first word pronounced by the officiant at the beginning of the Holy Mass, in short immediately in the entry “Antonio Padellaro”, obviously without the knowledge of the person being biography, it is written like this: “Nephew of the fascist hierarch Nazareno, became a professional journalist in 1968…” etc. etc., where with etc. etc. it indicates more or less those sixty years spent in the profession known to all. A stigma, a phrase as dry as a bullet that translated, according to Padellaro, means this in an oblique way: "Dear reader, know that everything you read from here on cannot fail to be influenced by what you have read before. Namely that this person (and other anagraphic remnants of the shameful twenty-year period) are closely related to characters strongly compromised with fascism and the crimes of the infamous Republic of Salò". Padellaro's reaction: dismay? Indignation? No, the blank shot "responds exactly to the truth of the facts" and that is his "being the nephew of a fascist hierarch". However, incomplete, incomplete, strangely omissive, observes the Wikipedian Padellaro, because I would also be "the son of a state official who after September 8, 1943 decided to join the RSI, inserted in the roles of the Ministry of Popular Culture" (where, moreover - let us add this succulent detail to help the anonymous antifa informers - Giorgio Almirante worked).

Then I read the book “L'eresia liberale” (published by Rizzoli and released in the same years) by Alessandro Sallusti. Here too the introductory caption secretly inserted by the antifa corrector: “Alessandro Sallusti, born in 1957, is the nephew of Biagio Sallusti, lieutenant colonel of the Royal Army who after the armistice had joined the Social Republic and who was executed by the partisans for having presided over the special tribunal that had sentenced the partisan Giancarlo Puecher Passavalli to be shot” . Here, unlike the "truth of the facts" punctually respected by the posthumous Wikipedian punitive measure in the case of Antonio Padellaro, the delatory warning would also be slightly inaccurate, given that technically Biagio Sallusti, Alessandro's grandfather, was not (we are already in February 1946) "executed by the partisans", but rather by a post-Liberation tribunal that had proceeded with very summary procedures until the death sentence was promptly carried out.

In short, two journalists of different political backgrounds, called in their professional history to direct newspapers of opposite orientations such as Il Fatto Quotidiano and Il Giornale, are honored with the same attention by anonymous hands that in secret, with the weapon of the computer ready to issue the sentence of family condemnation, peruse archives and dossiers in the shadows to hurl the fruit of their tireless work into the new, gigantic digital encyclopedia founded in 2001. Which is also "the fifth most visited website in the world", as Sallusti himself recalls, in which "the Italian edition includes over one million nine hundred thousand entries and has over two million registered users". A godsend for clandestine raiders who feel omnipotent as they burst into the biographical profiles of "enemies" of dubious political respectability.

It must be a real mania, an obsession experienced as a weapon of struggle for Good and unmasking Evil, wherever it may nest, and since fascism is absolute Evil, absolute and obligatory it must be the search for a relative, a father, a grandfather, a great-grandfather, an uncle compromised with fascism who will certainly have transmitted the disease by heredity, an anagraphic curse, a genetic defect, a guilt of the fathers (and grandfathers) destined to fall on the children (and grandchildren), especially if the children and grandchildren do not demonstrate full and unconditional adherence to the dictates of the anti-fascist doctrine (or antifa, anti-fascism is too serious a thing). It must be a group of well-motivated, pugnacious fighters, in fact, if the same, identical antifa incursion has colonized my biographical profile on Wikipedia (full of material errors, incorrect dates, assignments never received, but this is not very important, after all it is just an attack on my self-esteem). For some time now my biographical profile Wikipedianized in an antifa sense begins with these words, in the same tone as those used in those of Padellaro and Sallusti: "Pierluigi Battista, son of Vittorio, who was a volunteer in the Italian Social Republic, and then leader of the Italian Social Movement etc. etc." Originally this incipit was not there. But the rules of Wikipedia themselves contain the possibility of making changes that the witty and those mobilized in permanent service have seized as the propitious opportunity to redeem the sadness of an anonymous existence. “You can improve this entry by adding citations from reliable sources according to the guidelines on the use of sources”, the rule prescribes. Hence the rain of antifa incipits. Which however no longer strikes, it is fresh water, and remains only a fact of custom. Padellaro laughs about it. Sallusti laughs about it. For me, the intrusion even worked as a stimulus to write a book entitled “My Father Was a Fascist”, published in 2016. Instead, I would like to know how the militants of the clandestine intervention in other people's biographies are formed, where they meet, how they communicate. As Camilla Baresani wrote in an article from a few years ago, quoting a statement by the co-founder of the digital encyclopedia Jimmy Wales made public during an annual meeting entitled “Vikimania” (it was called exactly that: it's all true, it's not fake), it was discovered that “91 out of 100 Wikipedia contributors are men”.

I don't know if things have changed in the meantime, but at the time only 9 out of 100 women used that "(somewhat cumbersome) data entry mechanism" where "anyone can build, amplify, correct an entry". Gender discrimination or, to use a derisive expression very much in use in times of ostentatious patriarchy, a manifestation of "feminine wisdom"? In any case, a very useful imbalance to reconstruct the anthropological and character identikit of the Wikipedia raider who, I fear, engaged in the constant unmasking of the enemy of the people, did not even realize that the game no longer achieved the desired effects. They wanted to warn their contemporaries against people in whose veins politically infected blood could circulate, thinking of undermining their credibility. Otherwise, what was the point of wasting so much time on such a ridiculous activity? But the years have passed and being the child or grandchild of unrepentant fascists is no longer a crime. In other times, or rather until a few years ago, it was not like this.

Not in Italy and not even in France, though. Emmanuel Carrère, for example, had dedicated part of the book “La vita come un romanzo russo” (Einaudi title) or “Novel russo” (title changed in the Adelphian passage of the same text: it is becoming a habit) to the tragic circumstances of his collaborationist grandfather disappeared in the aftermath of the defeat of the Nazi invaders. Now he is about to publish a book entirely dedicated to the figure of Georges Zourabichvili, that is, his grandfather, the father of Hélene Carrère d'Encausse, a great scholar who died in 2023, a French academic, a prestigious figure in French and international culture, the analyst of Russian things who, alone in the world, had predicted the dissolution of the Soviet Union quite a few years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Zourabichvili was a Georgian emigrant who fled to Paris after the October Revolution. A cultured man and certainly resentful of those who had forced him into exile, he earned his living by driving a taxi and in the days following the Liberation he was arrested and taken away by strangers. No one saw him again. “His body was never found, there is no tomb with his name,” wrote Carrère. He had worked as an interpreter for the occupying Germans with administrative duties, a form of widespread mild collaborationism, but no crime had been charged to him. Yet the damnation of memory will fall on him and his tragic fate, starting with that of his daughter, Emmanuel's mother, who was only fifteen when her father was swallowed up in nothingness and who wanted to eradicate from her professionally brilliant life every trace, even anagraphic, of her father's misfortunes. “As an adult, the poor girl with an unpronounceable surname became, under her husband’s surname,” her son wrote, “a leading star of the French cultural establishment, a brilliant career “built on silence and, if not on lies, on denial.”

This conspiracy of silence was broken by her son, devoted to the point of effrontery, to the cult of autobiographical literary sincerity, and she was very offended because she would have liked to die before that unspeakable secret was broken. Now that his mother is dead, her son Carrère has decided to tell that dark story in every detail. But the times of silence and shame of the mother are over, the blackmail of secrecy has dissolved. The sense of curse and embarrassment have vanished. Today it is much easier to say you are the children and grandchildren of fascists. The anonymous and malicious little hands that wanted to furtively insert the genetic stain of paternal fascism into the first lines of the Wikipedia profiles of Antonio Padellaro, Alessandro Sallusti and myself (and who knows how many others) no longer hurt, they no longer discover who knows what unspeakable secrets. The era of embarrassment and shame has ended, despite the desperate attempts to keep it artificially. But they think that an immense audience like that of the gigantic digital encyclopedia can revive, through those furtive inclusions, a war that, apart from a few small minorities, no longer heats up the spirits . Making Wikipedia the last redoubt of antifa fanaticism seems only a pathetic exercise: wasted effort.

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