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The struggle in projects, ideas and symbols between the strongest Communist Party in the West and an anti-Communist and pro-Western government coalition was the most peculiar founding element of the Italian democratic political system after the Second World War.
Until now, most historians have focused their attention on political parties as the only players in the competition for the making of political orientations and civic identities in Italian public opinion. Others have considered Italian political struggle in the 1940s and 1950s in terms of the polarisation between Communism and organised Catholicism, due to the undoubted importance of the Church in Italian culture and social relations.
This book enlarges the view, looking at new aspects and players of the anti-Communist ‘front’. It takes into account the role of cultural associations, newspapers and the popular press in the selection and diffusion of critical judgements and images of Communism, highlighting a dimension that explains the force of anti-Communist opinions in Italy after 1989 and the crisis of traditional parties. The author also places the case of Italian Cold War anti-Communism in an international context for the first time.
administration consonant with its historical role. The qualified victory of anti-Communism Having established the cultural framework within which Italian Catholicism’s main forms of anti-Communist mobilisation operated in the early post-war period, we can begin to assess their overall effectiveness. The identification of Communism with materialism and anti-religion undoubtedly had a degree of success, as in the imaginary of many Italians Communism was perceived first and foremost as an atheist and anti-Christian movement rather than a revolutionary one. The proliferation
‘egalitarian’ nature of the youth football movement in the Communist world.40 To summarise, the period of Italian Communism’s harshest clashes with its opponents in the government was also the time when it discovered the full 207 28 0 208 Communism and anti-Communism in Italy ideological potential of the Soviet ‘myth’, and when it engaged in creating an image of the USSR and the People’s Democracies that served to help present and explain the party’s economic and social programme. As Stalinism’s rigid constraints on Western Communism came to an end, Communist publicity