–Lucy Hughes Hallett
Thursday, February 2, 2023
The Anti-Fascist
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In 1931 the exiled anti-fascist Lauro De Bosis flew, in a flimsy wooden aeroplane, from Marseille to Rome. Arriving in the skies over the Italian capital, he dropped leaflets, then turned back. The round trip was too long for such an aircraft, and De Bosis did not expect to complete it. He had left behind, ready for publication, a text called The Story of My Death. On the return journey his plane – out of fuel – crashed into the sea. One of his leaflets contained a warning to those less principled Italians who were, gladly or with glum pragmatism, getting by in fascist Italy: "Accept nothing from fascism. All that it can give you is the price of your prostitution."
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- John Bedell is an archaeologist, historian, and father of five living in Maryland. He has self-published two novels and is writing a third.
2 comments:
What a shame - I imagine he could have been a valuable pilot in the actual war effort years later, if he'd decided to live and emigrate to, say, Britain.
I just don't understand these sorts of gestures. They just seem so senseless and ineffectual. I could perhaps see the hope for pamphlets changing some minds in 1931, as it was still fairly early on - but to die for it? Insanity, to my mind. Utterly absurd.
When I look at a group like the White Rose, in Munich, I feel a deep sense of pity - their hearts were in the right place, but their naivete caused them to waste their efforts and their lives in pointless symbolic gestures which accomplished nothing. Was it heroic? Arguably, yes - standing up for one's principles in the face of overwhelming defeat is a noble cause.
But to what end? What actual good did any of it do? With Hitler at the height of his power, during the height of the war, what sense in there is making and distributing pamphlets? They would have done better to contribute to the actual war effort in some way - any way. The mind might easily leap to tale-worthy acts of violent resistance like sabotage, assassination, etc, but even simple deeds like performing simple surveillance, carrying messages, or even just producing excess food, clothing, medical equipment, etc, to provide to either the Allied war effort or local resistance cells would have been far more practically useful than simply printing pamphlets and dying for it.
@Verloren
Pamphlets *could* serve a useful purpose in places where there was a real possibility of recruiting significant numbers of others, such as the occupied countries. But overall I'm definitely with you on this.
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