This unique art in the world of getting involved in dreamlike disputes sooner or later will have to be recognized by Unesco at least. The last has to do with the institution of the National Day of Remembrance and Sacrifice of the Alpini, set for January 26, the anniversary of the devastating and monumental battle of Nikolajewka, land of Ukraine, in the year 1943. The trouble is that the Alpini they withdrew from Russia, where they had been sent by the Duce to fight alongside the Nazis: circumstances that are not recommended. Perhaps it would be enough to read Mario Rigoni Stern, and there would be less problems, perhaps the page in which he tells of General Luigi Reverberi, found by the Russians two years after Nikolajewka in a German concentration camp. The Russian commander called him: he wanted to honor those who had been at the head of the “famous Tridentina”, the only central-southern division that escaped the Red Army.
Or that the Red Army had not been able to defeat, Reverberi specified. We could close here but, if that’s not enough, we could also fished out a long article on Nikolajewka written in 1963 for this newspaper by Nuto Revelli, on which I imagine no one will have moral reservations to advance. The article concluded thus: “The message of the survivors was the condemnation of the absurd war policy of fascism. This explains why the peoples of the valleys who had seen their children die in Russia immediately sided, instinctively, with the Resistance (…). The partisans fought against the Nazi-Fascists also on behalf of their brothers, children, friends who had died in Russia ». It takes great talent to battle over what was already pacified.