Politics & Power Quote by Gianni Agnelli

Italy isn’t being described here so much as it’s being strategically framed: as a battered terrain where normal rules of judgment don’t apply. Agnelli’s language does the work of a brief for the defense. “Overrun by the War” makes the conflict sound less like a set of choices and alliances than a flood sweeping through helpless geography. The passive construction (“had been bombed heavily”) politely obscures who did the bombing and why, shifting attention from accountability to aftermath.

The sentence is a careful stacking of injuries: civil war, the Gothic Line as a scar across the country, industrial cities flattened, then “political disorder before 1948.” That last clause matters. 1948 is the hinge year of the Italian Republic: the first decisive postwar election, Cold War pressure, the battle between Communist strength and Christian Democratic consolidation. By marking “disorder” as pre-1948, Agnelli sketches a before-and-after that quietly flatters the restoration of stability that benefitted industrial capital and the postwar business elite.

As a businessman, Agnelli is also narrating an origin story for the economic miracle and for Fiat’s role within it. If the country was in chaos, then rebuilding industry becomes not just profit-making but nation-making. The subtext is: don’t moralize from a distance; this was triage. It’s a memory shaped to justify pragmatism, smooth over uncomfortable wartime entanglements, and place order - the kind markets and factories like - as the hard-won endpoint of trauma.