Cold-War Iconographic Battles: The Italian Communist Party and Italian Anti-Communism (1945-1956)

Abstract

The negative images of communism that hostile political cultures made up in the course of the twentieth century are essential elements to understand the making of communist identity itself. The essay will deal with the responses of the Italian Communist Party (ICP) to the heavy anti-communist campaigns that took place in Italy during the Cold War, namely in the first decade after World War II. It will be mainly based on the analysis of propaganda posters and other visual communication materials, and will be focused on some significant cases of interchange of graphic references, symbols and narrative styles. As long as it was becoming one of the strongest and most influential elements in the Italian democratic arena, the ICP had to face an intensive and popular hostile discourse, spread by both other political parties’ personnel and non-party religious and social activists, and based on its identification with atheism, the betrayal of the nation, the threat of a new global war, and economic inefficiency. The study will highlight to what extent the reaction of the party’s propaganda offices to such attacks, and especially the adoption of recurrent anti-communist themes for counter-attack, will contribute to the implementation of a more effective and genuinely national discourse for Italian communists.