By Daniela Padoan – La Stampa of Turín, Italy
In the ten months since the government took office, we have seen at work an institutional mode of communication made up of apodictic assertions, historical enormities, retractions, lapses, denials, reiterations, protests of instrumentalisation and accusations of decontextualisation, passing through the entire tonal scale ranging from victimhood to hate speech, in a continuous throwing of the stone only to hide the hand. It is a demeanour that enrages and takes away the seriousness of the political sphere, corrupting its language, while at the same time exhausting the capacity to react, leading public opinion, threshold after threshold, to that ‘critical anaemia’ that Piero Calamandrei spoke of when describing the condition of possibility of the totalitarian regime that was fascism. Words tumble and roll over each other like stones in an avalanche, and if at first they strike us, indignate us and leave us desolate, they easily wear out and little by little resonate as something known, already old, thrown behind us, annoying to recover. From Minister of Culture Sangiuliano‘s assertion that Dante Alighieri is the founder of right-wing thought in our country – in full continuity with Mussolini and the regime’s intellectuals who spoke of a “Dante forerunner of the great ideals of Fascism” – to the qualification of “musical band of semi-retired” with which Senate President La Russa portrayed as innocent victims the soldiers of the Bozen regiment, attached to the SS in an anti-partisan capacity. From the Cutro shipwrecks named as ‘residual cargo’ by Interior Minister Piantedosi, to the ‘ethnic substitution’ feared by Agriculture and Food Sovereignty Minister Lollobrigida – echoing the so-called ‘Kalergi plan’, a rant about the ‘world Jewish conspiracy’ to boost African immigration and weaken European populations, still in vogue in extreme right-wing circles. From the statement by the president of the Culture Committee of the Chamber of Deputies, Mollicone, according to whom surrogacy would be “a more serious crime than paedophilia”, to the appeal not to “outsource to third countries the vitality that is gained through having children”, launched by the Minister for the Family and Birth, Roccella. From humiliation as a pedagogical tool advocated by the Minister for Education and Merit Valditara, to the disconcerting similarity between the alleged unpredictability of the suicide of two women inmates in the Turin prison and that of the Nazi hierarch Göring at Nuremberg, made by the Minister for Justice Nordio. From the denial of the neo-fascist matrix of the Bologna massacre by the communications chief of the Lazio Region, De Angelis, in open polemic with the President of the Republic, to the bold support offered by the Deputy Prime Minister, Salvini, to the former chief of the Folgore paratroopers, General Vannacci, who was struck by immediate popularity after the publication of a book in which he basically states that there are no ‘black’ Italians and that the ‘plots of the international gay lobby’ and feminism are among the causes of the subversion into which we are supposed to have fallen. Beginning with its title, The World Upside Down, the voluminous pamphlet refers to the dismissal of that natural world, ordered and ethically normed by the state, of that God-Fatherland-Family that, at every latitude, in the short century, some general felt called upon to straighten out. We would be faced, therefore, not with subversive speeches bursting out of extreme right-wing social media or anti-constitutional ramblings, but with the defence of the right to an opinion by people who, unless they later rectify, declare themselves ready to be burnt at the stake, comparing themselves to Giordano Bruno, for having uncovered the dismissal of meaning introduced by ‘political correctness’.
Every day has its enormity and its retraction, in a continuous shifting of thresholds.
A dizzying, circus-like exercise, made up of deviously or foolishly depotentiated assertions that normalise a subculture nourished by racism, xenophobia, sexism, homophobia, contempt for the poor, the marginalised, the dissimilar, when not outright apologia for fascism, finding a sounding board in the institutional role of those who pronounce them and in the abnormal occupation of media space that reduces contradictory debate to farce.
“When you are a worker, it rains stones seven days a week,” said the protagonist of Ken Loach’s film of the same name. Today, stones also rain down on the democratic bourgeoisie, what Paul Ginsborg called the ‘reflective middle class’. If only we would stop indulging in the posture of condescending superiority of those who seem to be watching an exhibition of bad manners having much else to think about, and stopped instead to examine the stones as relics of a past civilisation – that ‘fascist civilisation’ that wanted to build the ‘new Italian’ – we would discover that the rhetoric of historical fascism is well at work in today’s public discourse, and that there is no point in closing our eyes like children in front of danger, waiting for it to magically dissolve, or, worse, like figures ready for new niches.
We have appealed to the memory of the Shoah and the witnesses like castaways clinging to a piece of wood, without fully asking ourselves what can happen in a country where the past no longer seems to interest anyone except, paradoxically, revisionists, while a multitude of people, lost or barricaded in smartphones and television, deprived of political community and a future, abandoned in their basic social rights, seem disinterested even in their present. On the other hand, if 20 per cent of young people between the ages of 15 and 29 do not study, do not work, and are not included in training courses – a figure that, in Europe, makes us second only to Romania – and 76.5 per cent of Italians, according to the latest Censis report, are unable to recognise fake news, it is clear that politics, the public sphere, and the very idea of democracy cannot but appear to be sidereal worlds, totally disconnected from the naked lives of individuals. In the eclipse of reality, where everything is named without assuming the consequences of what it implies – where runners run with headphones in their ears, climbing over trees felled by the Milanese storm in July, secluded from the disaster that stretches for miles, and droves of would-be influencers arrive at Lake Como for a selfie in front of Clooney and Ferragni’s villas wondering where Lake Como is – revisionism and denialism can only proliferate, nourished by conspiracy theories and victim criminalisation, in the same breeding ground as that alt-right which promises to unveil the truths concealed by the establishment. But what happens when these drives are in power, when they are the establishment?
“The ideal subject of the totalitarian regime is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but he for whom the distinction between reality and fiction, between true and false, no longer exists”. These are words taken from Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, which President Mattarella felt the need to pronounce on Remembrance Day 2017. Five years have passed, and with them the Gentiloni, Conte I , Conte II and Draghi governments. They have paraded before our eyes, only to immediately vanish like the residue of nightmares, images of a stubbornly ignored apocalypse, made up of climate, pandemic and war crises, of the ‘European values’ of democracy and welcome. Now it is the turn of a government that carries in its symbolic paraphernalia the flame of Salò and the Celtics of the Hobbit camps.
DeePL automatic translation.