Alem Woldezghi * May 23, 2007 by ww2.Carta.org
After 100 years, Italy is still prey and victim of representations of glory and revenge, when compared to its institutional amnesia colonial past and in contact with each other: the collective imagination of the Italians on Africa and the African is still caked in exotic forms of representation and subliminal. Italy commemorates the Republican not just colonial past. It seems only to want to undo your past does not love ricordare.Eppure democratic Italy has a moral and historical responsibility towards the former first daughter colony, Eritrea.
supporters of colonialism have always been of the opinion that the Italians, unlike the English, have assumed a human attitude in Abyssinia and never racist, even at times when demand was particularly hard. According to the scientists did not go well: the massacres, the ever-present racial discrimination, the explosion of fascist racism can testify to the contrary. All Italian colonialism was marked by racism and oppression, which are the basis of every colonial conquest. Moreover intervene militarily against a weaker nation shows violence and abuse. E 'means the absolute misunderstanding always been against a tradition of ancient civilizations such as Eritrea, which aimed to destroy the Italian politics dramatically.
On these roots grew fascist racism, in my opinion, it must be a clear manifestation of the violence inherent in colonialism all, a heavy and urgent appeal today for those who do not want to close my eyes and ears in the face of tragic reality.
For example, it is possible to speak of specific sex crimes Aoi fascist colonialism in [Italian East Africa]? Certainly yes, if sex offenders are in the first forms of representation of Eritrean women and their sexual exploitation by fascism qualified work force to coerce men in the colonies but also the end of colonial rape, in that sense it was authorized by those same representations. Fascism said: "The woman returns to be lower, the subjects of the father or husband ..." but also that Italian citizens could not live with a subject of Africa.
Not only that: the overthrow of these representations, following the declaration of the Empire in May 1936, the law of 1937 with the penalties for reports of 'nature marriage "between citizens and subjects should be read in this context and brings to light the link between sexual politics of colonialism and racial fascist. According to the definitions of colonialism, fascism was the only suitable black woman for sex and white instead of the feeling of love. Already
the path of nation-building led to the definition of racial identity for Italians. With the declaration of the Empire that identity based on the purity of blood played a central role in policy-colonial racial purity, understood in a biological sense, became the project is projected into the future.
In Italy, the transition from a colonial to an imperial consciousness involved the absolutizing the idea based on the so-called racial supremacist. Between colonizers and colonized were no longer tolerable uncertain boundaries 'race' became a necessary separation supported by discipline and self-discipline that involved all aspects of daily life. In this process, anthropology was becoming a status that would take it beyond the purely scientific or academic to get freed up and support the policy choices of the Mussolini regime.
With the war in Ethiopia and the founding of racial discrimination is transformed, by practice, in law making state law: Italy, unique among the European powers, is promoting a form of segregation race that is unmatched in Africa if not the experience of apartheid South Africa. The colony of Eritrea thus becomes the first laboratory test of racial laws in 1938 will be extended to also affect the Jewish community in the country.
The relationship with the otherness of Africa was based on exclusion, violence, exploitation and slaughter, pages removed or even openly denied in the name of a myth deeply rooted in the collective, which continues its atypical Italian claims as if it were a 'colonialism with a human face. " Do exist in Italy serious historical studies on colonialism, but are unlikely to have access to the training system and in the school.
* (Alem Woldezghi was born in 1949 in Eritrea. In his youth he played in 'EPLF, the Eritrean People Liberation Front, engaged in political-military struggle of the Eritrean People's Liberation Ethiopian occupation that lasted until 1993)
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