L'ultimo Evviva
The Last Hurray
The Last Hurray
An in-depth cover of the EC referendum and the rise of the Tribune Movement
Written by Simone Tonioli
Written by Simone Tonioli
Simone Tonioli, served as Representative for San Alessandro III from 1982 until 2016 with the Federalist Party. He would later serve in the cabinets of Presidents Urbano Onoforio, Emiliano Reali and Andrea Salvini. He was Minister of National Defence from 2010 until 2013, before becoming the Federal Minister for Euclean Community Affairs, which he served until 2016.
I - The Night it Fell Apart
Something is coming, I can feel it, I can taste it, I can smell it. I do not know what it is, or when exactly it will come, but it will. When it does, I am sure, it will be ugly, dark and vicious. It first came into view, obscured still, that first night, that night our world fell apart. I still remember the roars of thousands as the result was announced, the roars… they were bestial, like a roar of a dragon or beast that had been imprisoned for centuries, finally unleashed upon the world.
That night… I saw the numbers, the graphics, the majority in both chambers, I shuddered, my wife, she cried. Our world had fallen about around us, crashing down like a great mountain. As the mountain crumbled, our work, our destiny and dreams were crushed beneath it, the roars echoed out over the crashing. The joy in peoples’ faces at our failure, our defeat, our crushing blow. Was this even Etruria anymore? Was this country I loved? It didn’t look like it, nor did it feel like it.
In truth, throughout that miserable campaign for membership, I guess Etruria was slipping away from us, bring clawed into that movement’s direction. Many would say it was never our Etruria in the first place, we, of this select group or class of society who lived in our own reality. Entirely devoid of truth or actual sense of the country around us, entirely detached from the universe. Perhaps that was true, perhaps we were operating under the mass hysteria that we were leading the country toward that golden milestone, that goal that would, when achieved, would wash away all of our sins as a people and a country.
But really, that miserable campaign revealed a sickening truth, those sins, those black marks, those were cherished. Those were worn like badges of identity, or rather upon sleeves, so that any insensitivity could be offered as proof of patriotism. People didn’t want membership, because it would mean surrendering to the EC, our identity, our culture and our history. We’d be forced to come to terms with our dark past, the real truth of it, not the half covered, half romanticised version we’ve embraced for 70 years. We’d need to offer ourselves to a cause greater than Etruria, we’d need to offer Etruria itself, turns out not enough were willing to do that.
Its only with the crashing of the mountain and the roars of the victorious that the light of realisation revealed the truth about this country. We haven’t come to terms with our past at all, we walk the streets of Vicalvi and find ourselves surrounded by the Functionalists’ motifs, lampposts, murals and buildings, left spotless and glistening. We walk the streets of Solaria and spit upon the Coian street vendor for dirtying the pavement. We walk the streets of Propoce, Vilanja and spit at the Marolev for being an interloper. We’re surrounded and imbued with our past, we never cleaned it away, we never saw the darkness of it and that darkness has kept itself firmly in our hearts ever since.
Looking back to the day the Revolutionary Republic fell and Caviglia hung from the overpass, I wonder why we failed to clean away the darkness. Who decided to keep the past locked away in memory? Who decided to leave so many, who slaughtered and butchered innocents across the Solarian Sea, in their place in the light of freedom?
I sat watching the TV, the realisation that Etruria is not the Etruria I thought existed, brought me to fury and to tearful lament. We got it so wrong, everything, we got our own people wrong, our society wrong, our priorities wrong. Is there is something wrong with Etrurians? Are we so incapable of accepting the truth about ourselves and our country? Are we so incapable of letting go of our romantic daydreams of our own history? Are we so incapable of being a bit more Euclean and less Etrurian?
II - The Generals of the Shadows
I heard the rumours, the hushed whispers in the corner, of how the military was funnelling money into the No camp, how the military and intelligence were releasing titbits of corruption cases to the right-wing media. They didn’t want to come terms with the past, they refused to do it over their 23 years of abysmal tyranny. Oh, the military, how I enjoyed my pleasure of dealing with them. Not one of them ever seemed to recognise the record their institution held. None seemed to be willing to accept that they too owed the people the truth, let alone contrition. They despised the idea of EC membership, they despised the idea of going into their rightful place, beneath the civilian, behind the civilian. They despised the idea of retreating into the box that any democracy would put them in.
I remember the day Reali told the cabinet of his intention to declare the referendum and official membership bid. I sank in my seat knowing, as minister of national defence, I’d be charged with the courtesy of informing the nation’s generals. I could picture their faces, the sullen realisation, the hidden anger and fury that their government would sell the nation out.
And so I did. I amassed the General Command Staff and informed them, and the faces came about. Though, to my naïve surprise, no words came out, but “I see” or “yes minister, we understand.” And so they, according to rumour, plotted and worked behind the scenes, in the shadows where they thrived and still thrive, to kill it. When I became Defence Minister in 2010, I had been told by my predecessor to tread carefully, “beware the generals, the entire military is built upon venerating, well… you know.” At the time I didn’t, nor did I dare ask for risk looking amateur, but very quickly did I realise what they venerated.
My first visit to an army base was a week after my appointment by Reali. I travelled to the 22nd Army Facility near Castelvetrano. Having toured the main base, met generals and grunts alike, I required the toilet, having been directed to the sleeping quarters, I ventured in and found the world in which our fighting men reside. The walls, the shelves, the ceiling, was bedecked with paraphernalia, relics, posters, flags and photographs, exclusively from either the ERR period or the Military Dictatorship. It was like any of those apartments lived in by neo-functionalists, arrested for murdering a coloured person. At the far end of the hall was a bust of Ettore Caviglia, the Duce Superiore. It wasn’t small, it was large. Black marble, his eyes staring right at me like a hideous monster from childhood.
Shocked, I rushed to the toilet and returned home. I called my predecessor and told him what I saw.
“You get it now. When I first saw that sort of thing, it was… an air force base in Carinthia. Then I saw it again at a naval base in Tarpeia. It’s the entire military Simone, you realised I guess, that the officers allow this?” Giacomo Lupelli said to me, “yes of course” I replied, “there you have it” he simply replied.
For days upon days I pondered what to do, how could we trust our military to dare keep to its remit if its entire body is infected with the Functionalist curse? I approached the head of the Army at the time privately. In my ministerial office he looked uncomfortable, as if dragged against his will.
I said to him what I saw, described in intricate detail. He looked at me for several seconds, “you understand traditions matter in the Army. Without them, we’re nothing more than a bunch of pyjama wearing bandits. We need tradition to be the fighting force you want us to be” he replied.
“This is not tradition, this is perverse veneration of the past, that has no place in Etruria today” I hurriedly responded, feeling the rising anger.
“Your Etruria” he replied to me without flinching nor altering of tone. Before I could even demand his resignation, he followed up, “I understand you and others like you would find it disconcerting to see soldiers of Etruria venerate a period where we weren’t prostrate before northern Eucleans begging for scraps. But please know, that this is not alien to soldiers or officers, you go out into real Etruria, you know, the places beyond your liberal intelligentsia strongholds and you’ll find the exact same thing, in millions of homes. So go to the President, tell him, tell the liberal media, nothing will change. Your liberal paradises will rise up in fury, but what’s that? San Alessandro, Stazzona and Castello Nero? Well that’s 60 million of us left. Remember that.”
“We also act in the national interest, always. We came at night once before to protect our country from MSU backed secessionists, we can come at night to protect our national honour” he followed up once more. The naïve me, knew suddenly, what he meant. And so I kept silent, those words, we can come at night, have haunted me ever since.
As the roars of the victorious echoed through my mind and house alike, I looked back upon those rumours and realised they were true. The general’s words ever haunting me, made simplistic sense, why would they allow us to join the EC? And his words about strongholds, three cities progressive and open, islands of liberalism in a sea of conservatism and nationalism.
We had got our country wrong. We had got it wrong since the 2000s, I never took notice of the far-right fringes’ claims that Etruria was governed by a tiny elite, until that first night. I thought it couldn’t get worse, but surely, it did. And that pacing, black mass I felt coming, would soon make its arrival.
