Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

France as a whole was mostly collaborationist during the Nazi occupation.70 But Italy was quite different: the Italian resistance was so significant that it basically liberated Northern Italy, and it was holding down maybe six or seven German divisions, and the Italian working-class part of it was very organized, and had widespread support in the population. In fact, when the American and British armies made it up to Northern Italy, they had to throw out a government that had already been established by the Italian resistance in the region, and they had to dismantle various steps towards workers’ control over industry that were being set up. And what they did was to restore the old industrial owners, on the grounds that removal of these Fascist collaborators had been “arbitrary dismissal” of legitimate owners—that’s the term that was used.71 And then we also undermined the democratic processes, because it was obvious that the resistance and not the discredited conservative order was going to win the upcoming elections. So there was a threat of real democracy breaking out in Italy—what’s technically referred to by the U.S. government as “Communism”—and as usual, that had to be stopped.