Politics & Power Quote by Roberto Benigni

Benigni is doing something deceptively difficult here: claiming ownership and refusing it at the same time. By starting with Italy as “the country where fascism was born,” he punctures the comforting national myth that the Holocaust is always someone else’s crime. The phrasing admits complicity without turning it into a flagellation ritual. “We have a particular relation” is carefully chosen vagueness: it gestures toward Italy’s role in anti-Jewish laws and collaboration, but also toward a postwar culture that often prefers stories of rescue and innocence. He’s naming a burden while sidestepping the defensiveness that direct accusation can trigger.

Then he swings outward. Calling the Holocaust a “turning point in history” reframes it from a discrete European catastrophe into a moral hinge that redefined what modern states can do with bureaucracy, propaganda, and indifference. That’s why it “belongs to everybody”: not as a shared guilt ledger, but as shared responsibility to recognize the mechanisms. The line “It is a part of humanity” is blunt on purpose. He refuses the temptation to treat the Holocaust as an aberration, a freak outbreak of evil. The subtext is darker: if it’s part of humanity, it sits inside the human repertoire, available whenever fear is politicized and people are sorted into categories.

Coming from an actor known for turning Holocaust memory into mass culture (Life Is Beautiful), the intent is also protective. He’s defending remembrance against both nationalist minimization and the museum-glass impulse that makes tragedy feel safely distant. He insists it’s everyone’s story because the warning only works if it isn’t quarantined.