Source: Ghazi Gheblawi · EP 149
Subject: The post-war Italian national myth of "the good Italians," and a century of colonial violence in Libya it was built to obscure
Italiani brava gente — "Italians, good people" — is the colloquial post-war Italian self-narrative in which Italian colonial conduct was treated as somehow lighter, more civilised, less culpable than the colonial conduct of the other European empires. The myth has functioned for decades as a national consolation. It allowed Italy to position itself, after fascism, as a country whose wartime atrocities were exceptional rather than systemic.
The historical record on Italy's behaviour in Libya does not survive the comparison the myth wants to make.
Between the 1911 invasion and the loss of the colony in World War II, Italy administered Libya through a sustained programme of violence whose specifics are unusually well-documented and unusually little-discussed.
The concentration camps in Cyrenaica between 1929 and 1934 detained tens of thousands of Libyans. Estimates of the death toll vary, but the camps killed a substantial fraction of the populations they enclosed through starvation, disease and execution. The deliberate destruction of Cyrenaica's nomadic society — the slaughter of livestock, the forced sedentarisation, the disruption of seasonal migration — was a deliberate policy.
The aerial bombing of Libyan settlements, the use of chemical weapons in the interior, and the public executions of resistance leaders (Omar Mukhtar foremost among them, hanged in front of a forced audience of 20,000 in 1931) were not aberrations. They were the colonial method.
Gheblawi's argument in EP 149 is that the survival of Italiani brava gente is itself a piece of historical machinery. The myth required two things: the deflection of comparison (Italy compared to "worse" empires — Belgium in Congo, Germany in Namibia) and the suppression of representation. The 1980 film Omar Mukhtar, directed by Moustapha Akkad and financed by Gaddafi, depicted the colonial period without the deflection. The Italian state effectively banned the film from public screening for decades. The ban is the maintenance system. The myth could not survive the film, so the film was prevented from reaching the audience that would have weighed it.
Gheblawi traced one of the ideological undercurrents back to the Battle of Adwa in 1896 — the Ethiopian defeat of the Italian army. The wound, in his reading, was carried in Italian political memory as something to be repaid. The repayment, when the time came, fell on Libya. The framing is not original to him — Italian historians have made the same argument — but it locates the colonial violence inside a longer logic, not as an aberration of one bad period.
The episode closes by noting that the work of dismantling the myth is now underway, partly from inside Italy and partly from outside it. The Italian artist Alessandra Ferrini discovered the Omar Mukhtar story from London, working from outside the Italian frame, and has produced a body of work that returns the suppressed material to circulation. A generation of historians, journalists and artists is doing similar work in parallel. The myth is not dead. It is, slowly, being weighed.