DOWNLOAD ~ Italian Radicals in Canada: A Note on Sources in Italy. by Labour/Le Travail ~ eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Italian Radicals in Canada: A Note on Sources in Italy.
- Author : Labour/Le Travail
- Release Date : January 22, 1996
- Genre: Business & Personal Finance,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 260 KB
Description
FOLLOWING THE FASCIST seizure of power in Italy in October 1922, thousands of Italians hostile to the new regime left their country of origin to escape political persecution and to wage their anti-Fascist campaigns from the relative safety of democracies in Western Europe and the Americas. (1) Anarchists, socialists, and communists left Italy with the intention of continuing in foreign countries their struggle against the state, capitalism, and, of course, Mussolini fascism. In this struggle they were joined by their ideological comrades and co-nationals already settled in countries such as France, Spain, the USA and Argentina. Some of the anti-Fascist emigres chose Canada as their place of exile. Here they found an active group of Italian leftists already engaged in labour and political radicalism. Together they took up the fight against capitalist exploitation here and Mussolini's regime, helping to build multi-ethnic political organizations. Though the majority of expatriate radicals were men, a number of women were actively engaged in anti-fascist-activity, usually as a part of an entire family of radicals. Some women, however, were militant radicals in their own right, and thus deemed subversive and dangerous by police authorities in North America and in Europe. The history of the Italian left/Italian anti-Fascism in Canada remains largely unwritten, in part the result of the erroneous assumption that archival records dealing with the subject are insufficient to permit a viable historical reconstruction. This lacuna is especially pronounced given the substantial body of scholarly works on the ethnic left and radical politics among other immigrant groups in Canada. In fact, such records do exist, the single most important of them being the files of the Casellario Politico Centrale (Central Political Records Office; hereafter CPC), Italian Interior Ministry, which are housed at the Central State Archives in Rome, Italy. The CPC itself pre-dated the rise of Italian Fascism, having been established in 1894 to engage in the business of political surveillance. In the pre-Fascist era it tracked republicans and anti-monarchists, as well as socialists and anarchists. The Fascist political police who co-ordinated the CPC's surveillance activities after 1922 compiled detailed files on thousands of expatriate radicals, drawing on the reports of Italian consular officials in foreign countries, local police and security officials (in Italy and abroad), and private letters exchanged by the so-called "subversive" expatriates in question. Of the files in the CPC today, approximately 70 per cent were compiled during the Fascist era.