Photo: AP

History repeats itself, but usually not word for word.

The rightwing Italian newspaper Il Giornale, property of disgraced former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, is doing just that by outfitting its Saturday edition with supplemental copies of Adolph Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

The decision has already sparked considerable backlash. Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi denounced the fascist display on Twitter, calling Il Giornale “sleazy.”

The Israeli embassy in Rome told ANSA, an Italian news agency, “If they had asked us we would have advised them to distribute much better books for studying and understanding the Shoah.”

Il Giornale’s director, Alessandro Sallusti, defended distributing free copies of the white supremacist and anti-semitic text, pleading that the goal was to warn readers not to repeat its mistakes. The paper has pointed out that it circulated a highly annotated version of the text.

Mein Kampf, which just went back into print in Germany this January (annotations are required by law) was first published in 1925 and quickly became a best-seller. In 1933, Benito Mussolini outbid publishing houses in Britain and the United States for foreign rights to the book, which several historians have interpreted as a token of good faith in Hitler’s fascist agenda. And what else could it possibly have meant?

Mussolini once famously called Mein Kampf “illegible,” but the reasons one might have for distributing it really aren’t.