Senate Speaker Ignazio la Russa is
unworthy of the high office he holds, the second highest in the
land after President Sergio Mattarella, centre-left opposition
Democratic Party (PD) Chair Stefano Bonaccini said after what he
called a string of gaffes culminated in him saying Friday a WWII
Partisan attack that sparked the Ardeatine Caves reprisal
Massacre was "less than glorious".
La Russa on Friday criticized the Italian Partisan attack during
World War II that led to the 1944 Ardeatine Massacre in which
335 anti-fascist prisoners and civilians were murdered as a
reprisal.
The massacre at the Ardeatine Caves site (Fosse Ardeatine) near
Rome was revenge for the attack in Rome's Via Rasella on the
Bozen Police Regiment, an SS paramilitary unit which had been
raised from people in the largely German-speaking Italian
province of South Tyrol that had been annexed to the German
Reich.
The attack, the biggest anti-German partisan attack in western
Europe, killed 33 soldiers and two civilians also died,
including an 11-year-old boy, although it is not known whether
this was due to the blast or the gunfire of the company in
response.
"Via Rasella was a page (in the history) of the resistance that
was anything but noble," La Russa, a founder member of Premier
Giorgia Meloni's right-wing Brothers of Italy (FdI) party, told
the Terraverso podcast of daily newspaper Libero.
"Those who were killed were a music band made up of
semi-pensioners, not SS Nazis.
"They (the Partisans) were well aware of the risk of reprisals
on Roman citizens, anti-Fascists and others".
He was speaking after being asked about the furore stirred by
Meloni saying the Ardeatine massacre victims were killed because
there were Italians, rather than because they were
anti-fascists.
He said this was a "trumped-up attack".
La Russa was also recently in the news for saying that
discovering he had a gay child would be like finding they were
fans of AC Milan, rivals of his own favourite club, Inter Milan.
He also caused a stir in December by celebrating the 76th
anniversary of the foundation of the postwar neofascist Italian
Social Movement (MSI), a precursor to FDI.
La Russa also boasts of his fine collection of Mussolini busts.
Bonaccini, who is also Emilia Romagna governor and who recently
lost a PD leadership race to the more leftwing Elly Schlein, the
party's first woman leader, said: "Here we are no longer in the
field of gaffes. By now, La Russa has made a series of them, so
it seems to me that I can politely say that the second office of
State is held by someone who does not have the characteristics'.
Speaking from the stage of the 'Tempi Radicali' festival
organised in Modena by the daily newspaper Domani. Bonaccini
then described La Russa's words on the victims of the Via
Rasella attack as "shameless and lying" in mischaracterizing an
SS unit as a harmless marching band.
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