Italy today celebrates the 80th anniversary of its liberation.

After two-and-a-half years, Italian partisans got rid of both the Nazi German former ally that had occupied half the country and morally rid itself of the already-fallen Italian fascist regime. To put it jokingly: We Italians invented fascism, but luckily we also invented anti-fascism.

Fascism, before it was a regime, was (and remains) a political model based on the overpowering of the other and the utter refusal to resolve conflict peacefully. Both before and after Mussolini’s fascists seized power in 1922, the squadristi exercised violence daily in the countryside and in the headquarters of political opponents — torturing, humiliating and killing. Mussolini declared in his famous 1925 speech claiming moral responsibility for the murder of Socialist politician Giacomo Matteotti, “When two elements are in struggle and are irreducible, the solution is force.”

An anti-fascist movement developed against all this, but it was quickly stifled. Scattered, the rebels of the first hour continued to work against the regime, but their voices sounded faintly.

When King Victor Emmanuel III turned his back on Italy’s German ally on Sept. 8, 1943, throwing the country into chaos, anti-fascists took to organizing to repel both the Nazis and the newly formed Italian Social Republic, the puppet state in which Mussolini sought to reassert his power in the northeast. But their anti-fascism was different from the previous one.

It was first of all a less intellectual and thought-out........

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