Feb. 10 marked the commemoration of one of Europe’s darkest chapters: the Foibe massacres. This day, recognized in Italy as Giorno del Ricordo, honors the victims of communist-led mass killings that targeted ethnic Italians in central Europe after World War II.
Thousands were murdered or exiled from their homes along the Istrian peninsula by the communists of Josip Broz Tito’s Yugoslav partisans between 1943 and 1947, most of whom were cast into the foibe, a “narrow ravine on the Carso plateau, behind Trieste and Istria.” Historical accounts suggest that the women were raped first and often tossed into the foibe while still alive. It was a horrific period in Italy’s history that many have tried to cover up, hide, and deny.
Compared to the incessant mentions of fascist terrorism, communist atrocities are frequently overlooked, dismissed, or diminished in magnitude. Episodes of communist genocide, such as the Soviet Union’s Red Terror in the early 1920s, the Holodomor in Ukraine in the 1930s, the Great Purge in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, the Chinese, Khmer Rouge, and Vietnamese communist atrocities in the 1960s and 1970s, don’t receive nearly enough appropriate awareness and scrutiny. The Foibe massacres of the 1940s receive significantly less recognition than those horrors, rarely, if at all, being mentioned in history books.
The ill effects of this absence are compounded by decadeslong state-sanctioned suppression efforts of the killings in Italy, as the Italian government shamefully covered up these crimes for years, with public recognition of the victims only coming in 2005 due to the efforts of the Silvio Berlusconi coalition government. As such, Giorno del Ricordo hardly gets any contemporary media coverage, if any, especially outside Italy.
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Furthermore, many contemporary socialists, communists, and other left-wing historical revisionists have sought to dismiss the Foibe massacres in connection with communism or left-wing political thought. While they don’t deny the existence of the killings of Italians, they blame it on several reasons, one of which is prevalent today, the anti-fascist resistance. This, like the communist crimes of yesteryear, is predicated on violence to deconstruct existing government structures. Other left-wing scholars have rationalized the Foibe massacres, saying the victims were Nazis, fascists, and members of such oppressive regimes.
Sound familiar?
Moreover, when recognized, these mass murders by leftists, socialists, and communists are frequently masked as justifiable retribution or necessary efforts conducted under the banner of anti-fascist utopias, all the while being carried out by acolytes of the treacherous, ruthless, brutal, and murderous ideology of communism. It’s a pattern that stretches decades, with the red sickle and hammer accompanying acts of left-wing violence of this tyrannical ideology. This holds true whether it was the Istria peninsula in the 1940s or, incidentally, Turin, Italy, in 2026, as contemporary communists have wreaked havoc there, causing violence and destruction.
Additionally, the research and scholarship of the Foibe massacres is mired in controversy as well. For decades, numerous efforts, most frequently by socialists, communists, and others on the Left, have stifled inquiries into the tragedy, along with any indagation, public discussion, and scrutiny. Stringent efforts have sought to keep these horrors silent, saying it is “too painful” or “too much of an embarrassment” to share. Notably, it should come as little surprise that such excuse makers are frequently aligned with anti-fascist causes.
Consider this New York Times article‘s headline, “In Trieste, Investigation of Brutal Era is Blocked.”
“The pits, covered with tons of debris, are believed to hold hundreds, perhaps thousands of corpses,” the article says, describing the Foibe massacres. “The bodies are those of Italians and Yugoslavs who opposed the Yugoslav Communist takeover of the city in May 1945 … “
“But attempts to investigate have gone nowhere,” the outlet wrote in 1997, approximately 50 years after the Foibe massacres. For decades, Italian scholars and historians have adamantly opposed revisiting this tragedy, including the historian Giampaolo Valdevit, who told the outlet in 1997 why there was little interest in discussing the Foibe atrocities.
“It is impossible to consider exhuming bodies,” Valdevit, then of the University of Trieste, told the publication. “It’s just too controversial, too painful. This is a chapter of the war people in the city are not ready to reopen.”
It took almost eight years after Valdevit’s words for Italy to recognize the victims with a commemorative day. Yet, even with Giorno del Ricordo, efforts to squash recognition of the victims of the Foibe massacres are prevalent today.
Dr. Joze Dezman, a Slovenian historian, former museum director, director of the Archives of Slovenia, and first chairman of the Commission of Concealed Mass Graves in Slovenia, is a leading expert on the Foibe massacres. In an interview for research prepared for a conference on the victims of communism, Dezman revealed that communists will go to great lengths to conceal historical truths about their oppression, violence, and murders. They regularly use propaganda, strategic messaging, intimidation, and even violence to prevent recognition and acknowledgment.
After his scholarship connecting communism to the atrocities of the Foibe Massacres, Dezman was removed from his position as museum director in what he claimed was retaliation.
“I have been literally deleted,” Dezman said at the time, regarding left-wing efforts to silence his research. “I am receiving no museum notifications, I am not invited to attend any meetings, my right to be heard has been taken away from me.”
It’s indicative of the depths to which communists will go to hide the truth behind the Foibe massacres.
Echoing Dezman’s claims about communist suppression, University of Hawaii Professor RJ Rummel identified such tactics as “democides.” He explained that efforts to expose communist crimes, violence, and murders are dismissed and discredited. Additionally, such efforts are frequently deemed fascist propaganda, a phenomenon that has reared its ugly head repeatedly in the 21st century in the U.S., specifically over the last 10 years or so. Incidentally, attempts to silence scholarship, recognition, and awareness of the connection between communists and the Foibe massacres have also been called “fascist propaganda.”
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has consistently voiced her support for the victims of the Foibe massacres and her disdain for the decades of cover-ups. She regularly posts messages on her social media commemorating Giorno del Ricordo and rebuking the communists responsible for the crimes.
“Thousands of people killed and persecuted by the Titoist communists for a single crime: being Italian,” Meloni posted on X in 2021. “We remember their sacrifice, which came to light after years of ideological oblivion.”
In 2022, Meloni blasted those seeking to diminish the crimes and “sling mud” at the victims.
“Despite some apologists continuing to sling mud at the victims, Italy … recognizes and commemorates the tragedy, so that no one else ever suffers these wrongs,” Meloni said at the time. “We do not forget.”
On Feb. 10, 2025, Melonni again commemorated the tragic killings of Italians by communists, emphasizing that such a history must never be allowed to repeat itself.
“Today we celebrate Remembrance Day,” she posted. “A day that calls Italy to remember a painful page in our history, victim for decades of an unforgivable conspiracy of silence, oblivion, and indifference.”
“We remember the martyrs of the Foibe and the tragedy of the Julian-Dalmatian exodus,” Meloni said. “Hundreds of thousands of Italians who chose to abandon everything rather than give up their identity.”
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”Italy will never again allow this history to be distorted, denied, or erased,” she continued. “Because this history is not a history that belongs to a portion of the border or to what remains of the Julian-Dalmatian people.”
“It is a history that belongs to all of Italy. To each and every one of us,” Meloni said.