Liz Willis

Experiencing war as the ‘enemy other’: Italian Scottish experience in World War II

Anti-Italian riots; wholesale internment of men and boys; hundreds drowned in the terrible tragedy of the Arandora Star, torpedoed with its crowds of deportees: these are the headline events associated with Italians in Britain in the Second World War in history and collective memory. Wendy Ugolini does not deny their significance but one aim of her book is to demonstrate that they were far from being the whole story and that many aspects of the Italian experience as ‘the enemy other’ have been side-lined. Her focus is on Scotland, where Italians constituted by far the largest immigrant presence, where some of the worst riots and looting occurred when Italy declared war (10 June 1940), and where she was able to supplement her research with otherwise unrecorded first-hand accounts. Ugolini shows convincingly if unsurprisingly that hostility and suspicion towards those perceived as ‘different’ did not erupt from nowhere on the above date. At the same time, the war undoubtedly brought a ‘dramatic heightening of already existing prejudice’ (p. 47) and unprecedented opportunity for giving vent to it, inflicting various forms of collateral damage on those who lived through it and were permanently affected. To the often ugly reactions of the populace was added the ‘violence of the British state’ which came as a ‘massive shock’ (p. 138). Among the hitherto unheard voices given expression here are Italians who served in the British armed forces and auxiliary services, women relocated from ‘protected areas’, teenage girls left to run family businesses, and a small number of women internees. Stereotypes are challenged and narrative clichés like that of the ‘innocent victim’ (tending to efface individual agency and character) undermined. Occasionally the author’s wish to redress balances and differentiate her findings from those of previously published work, especially that of Terri Colpi and Lucio Sponza, can make the balance appear to dip too far in the other direction. Thus she takes issue, no doubt correctly, with the ‘post-war exculpatory paradigm functioning to erase histories of Fascist complicity or consensus’ (p. 58) but fails to acknowledge the socialist and libertarian strand of Italian exile politics except in a few asides: Sylvia Pankhurst is quoted (p. 97) with reference to anti-fascist exiles being caught up for Medicine, Conflict and Survival Vol. 28, No. 3, July–September 2012, 263–273

Outbreak of peace at War Museum

Braving the enormous naval guns dominating the approach and the tons of military hardware looming oppressively inside its main entrance, about a hundred assorted anti-war activists, students and other interested parties made their way to London’s Imperial War Museum (IWM) on Friday 13 and Saturday 14 April 2007 to attend a conference entitled ‘Peace History: Encouragement and Warnings’. The invasion was officially sanctioned, and the event which occasioned it organised by the International Peace Bureau and the Movement for the Abolition of War, in association with the Imperial War Museum itself, a co-operative effort welcomed and appreciated on both sides. The object of the exercise was to draw attention to forgotten or neglected aspects of history concerned with peace-building, with an emphasis on practical examples drawn mainly from the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Before proceedings began and at intervals throughout the two days, participants had the opportunity to learn or remind themselves about many of these examples by browsing an impressive array of exhibits on the walls, celebrating women activists for peace on one side and Nobel prize winners on the other, while the Peace Museum (Bradford) was prominent among many organisations which made literature, posters, and speakers available. A banner of the Movement for the Abolition of War (MAW) beside the platform caught the eye and set the tone with its equation of war with poverty. After introductory remarks from Bruce Kent, long-serving former chair of CND, and from the Director of the IWM pointing out that this location for such a conference was less incongruous than might appear, in view of its origin (commemorating the end of the First World War), Peter van den Dungen from the University of Bradford gave an informative paper on Bertha von Suttner, ‘the woman behind the Nobel Peace Prize’. He summarised her eventful career and the influence of her writings, in particular Die Waffen Nieder! (1889, translated in 1892 as Lay Down Your Arms). Another two outstanding personalities were remembered in the following sessions: Hodgson Pratt, in connection with the early history of the International Peace Bureau (IPB); and Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the Medicine, Conflict and Survival November 2007; 23(4): 311 – 313

Recent Papers and News Items

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