“I realized that a history of Italian colonialism was missing, so I decided to fill this gap by writing myself”. Angelo Del Boca was a partisan, a journalist and above all the first, and most important, historian of Italian colonialism. He was born in Novara on May 23, 1925, and died in Turin on July 6, 2021.
“The false myth of ‘Italians good people’, which has covered so many infamies, actually appears to be a fragile, hypocritical artifice upon examination of the facts. It has no right of citizenship, no historical foundation ”. Del Boca documented in an indisputable way the crimes, the massacres and the attempted genocide carried out by the Italian army in Libya and Ethiopia, where Mussolini “even thought of resorting to biological warfare, even though he knew perfectly well that no one in the world had practiced it. “.
Del Boca found the telegrams with which Mussolini authorized the military commanders Rodolfo Graziani and Pietro Badoglio to use chemical weapons against the Ethiopians, prohibited by the Geneva Convention of 1925. Del Boca also denounced the Italian bombings on inhabited centers, the mass shootings, the deportation of tens of thousands of civilians. An image very far from that “mild and good-natured colonialism, carried out thanks to the action of a chivalrous army, unable to carry out brutality, respectful of the enemy and indigenous peoples”, described by Indro Montanelli in Corriere della Sera.
Historian Davide Conti said on the Manifesto: “By highlighting the criminal nature of Italian colonialism, Del Boca forced the country to look at its recent past by tearing that lying veil with which unlikely laws are still promoted today that in Italy and in Europe equate Nazism and Communism; Shoah and sinkholes; fascists and anti-fascists and who, placed at the center of a celebratory rhetoric centered on the victimization and self-absolving paradigm, end up eluding and canceling the historical responsibilities of the Italian dictatorship from the collective imagination ”.
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