“Fire and Blood” is a series of interlocking essays, the first part considering the origins of the European civil war, its anatomy, the war against civilians and a fascinating chapter on judging the enemy. For him “if civil wars are tragedies, some deserve commitment”, and given that today’s “amnesiac democracy is necessarily a fragile one… an attitude of an apolitical rejection of commitment, condemnation of violence and stigmatising of ideologies should not be seen as a form of timeless wisdom” It is seldom that an author’s references and sympathies are so boldly and clearly stated. ![]() They were Italian partisans and his mother only twenty when Italy was liberated. In his fine preface establishing his historical perspectives, he then acknowledges the antifascist family from which he came. “įor Traverso the twentieth century should not be just viewed as human tragedy or the evil power of ideologies. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious. ![]() Writing in 1940 in the darkest period for the anti fascists and socialists, he states “in every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it …Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. It is as though he accepts Walter Benjamin’s position in his Theses on the Philosophy of History, when Benjamin argues we ought to have “contracted a debt to those who fought” and who did not win. For him the voices of those defeated need to be heard, such as Luxemburg, Gramsci, Azana, Trotsky and Benjamin but also figures like Junger and Schmitt. But to understand the whole historical perspective, he demands that the stick be bent backwards and the role of the actors/perpetrators as well as the vanquished be given due presence. Consequently the victims become the witnesses and upon whose evidence, historical assessments and judgments are developed. Traverso frames the book by recognising that much of historical research today instead of being dominated by the history of the victors is drawn from the perspective of the victims and their experiences. Sometimes they were part of the wars of liberation from occupation, but they were also struggles which arose from the desire to overthrow inherited wealth and the “established order”, based on hopes and beliefs that there should be greater equality and societies formed with the interests of the many to replace the concerns of the few. In many countries such wars meant that communities and classes within the same geographical space were and are permanently fractured by actions based on diametrically opposed political positions and which resulted in deaths, traumas and with long standing scores still to be settled. It is part of family histories passed onto and forming political allegiances of new generations. However throughout much of Europe the term, civil war, recreates the most searing experiences in living memory. The exception being of course those living in Ireland. Such a formulation carries little personal resonance with most people living in Britain, “civil war” exists only in the distant past of the English revolution, now securely placed as history. He persuasively argues the age of wars and revolutions extending from 1914 to 1945 should be viewed as a European civil war. ![]() Recently Verso has been publishing books which subject such formulations to critical scrutiny and Traverso’s book could be as one such. In debating this period it appears standard to use the framework of “totalitarianism” – a concept that during the Cold War became central to equalising out political agencies and states, equating communism (in all its forms) and fascism. One of the major political discussions in the last twenty to thirty years has been how to analyse the period of wars and revolutions, which occurred throughout most of the twentieth century. Jane Shallice reviews Fire and Blood: The European Civil War, 1914–1945, by Enzo Traverso, translated by David Fernbach. Published by Verso Books, London, 2015, 304pages, £16.99.
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