Often it is possible to understand the signs that indicate much more reasoned and lengthy descriptions of the deeper and more realistic climate of a situation. It happens sometimes that these signals prove to be exceptions or blunders to a social analyst, as well as all this may be an indicator of ideological imagination rather than obsessing become more clear and transparent understanding of facts and ideas. These concerns must always be kept in mind to understand why, beyond appearance, it is increasingly urgent and essential, especially in the social, cultural and political. Without at first sight different, seemingly unrelated behaviors, if properly evaluated for their true significance can often suggest interpretations of reality more than ever, revealing, and not lead us into errors of assessment.
But then we come to some considerations dictated by their different acts, starring personalities. These are two episodes that cover a total of the two expressions most reliable of the Italian left, the legalistic and institutional and the eventful. I refer in particular to the views expressed by the historian of literature and "maître à penser" Alberto Asor and death (brutal murder) of the "pacifist" Vittorio Arrigoni. Two things far apart, the two main characters probably almost incompatible lifestyles and perhaps ideal, but tied by some things I would highlight here.
The news of the murder of Vittorio Arrigoni by the hands of Islamic fundamentalists in the Gaza Strip, resulted in a just and rightful commonly shared indignation. The Italian activist living in the territories ruled by Hamas tortured and held in these places for years, intense activity in support of Palestinian claims, accepted and supported in its activities, Palestinian organization with which he collaborated actively. In fact, Hamas representatives have bestowed the honors due to a fight for their cause and have readily identified the killers.
The importance of gradients
Arrigoni had made his consistent choice, a political and ideological kind, to side with Hamas against the State of Israel. His positions, as far as we know from reports in various media, were highly accurate and deployed, so for him to criticize and even condemn Israeli writers such as Oz and Yeoshua still considered accomplices ("with blood on their hands" seems to have said) in the country that occupies more than forty years, roughly a land that does not belong. A man, Arrigoni, certainly consistent, who has dedicated his life to fight, so intransigent, and fight with all possible forms, a hated and despised enemy. So a person who, from my point of view, it is difficult to consider pacifist.
But it often happens that those who are considered pacifists are deployed in a politically correct, regardless of their beliefs for anything non-violent. Maybe, but we feel that pacifism is something different. The mother of Vittorio Arrigoni, understandably destroyed by the pain, asked for and received her son's body be brought back to Italy without passing through Israel, that the activist had fought all his life against the Jewish state. Her gesture, symbolic, is actually the incarnation of a powerful symbol that represents the tragic and violent extremism unjust entire regional area.
Places and spaces are human and symbolic actions like this that make it even more obvious meanings as strong as the confluence of several intransigence: that of Israel (which occupies with violent Palestinian territories), the Palestinian fundamentalist Hamas and that of the mother's gesture who the very people for whom he always fought murdered her son. But it is an act, one that respects the will of the mother of her child, who, as he wrote in the Corriere della sera "Israeli writer Etgar Keret," in wanting to distinguish good from evil, completely negates the possibility of any ambiguity and all shade of gray. "
The land of Israel and its seven million inhabitants are so vile that their contact is likely to desecrate his body? Denying the right for Jews and Arabs who live in this area to have a physical space, organized according to their wishes, will probably solve the problem of the equally right of Palestinians to have one of their own? The last trip of Arrigoni becomes an even stronger symbol of hatred, war and rejection of those who consider themselves enemies alike, not at all a symbol of peace and respect for diversity. It would be hypocritical and easy to conclude that these remarks claiming that everyone is mourning its dead, even if the temptation is strong, but the dead among those who believe in a just cause for freedom and who are victims of their consistency, should be respected equally, but can not be turned into symbols of hatred and further violence. This is rather what happens in many areas of the left which grants licenses of pacifism in its own use, provided always that the enemy is said and responsive to a well defined cliché. This basic flaw leaves the possible cultural understanding with these actors in the fight against Israel, but does not exempt us from continuing our struggle for a variety of different societies to live in mutual respect.
The personalization of evil
The other question, however, is less emotionally engaging, but still reveals a common obsession among the Left, more than ever, that prevents our country, even to think of a way out of a short time by prevailing Berlusconism. Asor Rosa (that, just for memory, that at the end of the sixties in his text still very popular on the left, called our author Pietro Gori a petit-bourgeois writer), in an article in the April 13 Manifesto eloquent title "There is no more time," invoking the intervention of police and law enforcement in general, assisted by the Judiciary, in Italy to establish a government of public health, indispensable to clear the current government. A coup for a good purpose, an apocalyptic appeal to a last-ditch intervention to unseat the real coup. And here we are facing another obsession of the Italian left, the one that personifies in a man the world's ills.
Our readers will allow me to spare me the list of failures of this government, I hope to be discounted. But this snooty and elitist culture, pedantic and not at all popular, which dominates the prophets of the Italian left, it really is far too self-referential and subtly authoritarian. The champions of democracy (one that only legitimate their power and not what comes out of the elections), have become even more patriotic (they have never seen so many Italian flags waved and endorsed by all, even by those who in theory should be as internationalists), are desperate (rightly) for governmental expressions of Italian society. But leave out the fact, alas this is hopeless, that our leaders are the embodiment of dreams and expectations of the majority of our people and the hypocrisy of the so-called civil society (the need to spend an oxymoron) is actually the false ideological temptation of the Italian left (but not only apparently). In the case of Asor, his powerlessness in the face of irreversible, it has gotten to the point of thinking that the so-called civil society, the part of people who say that first of all hate the enemy, no matter if they also have some idea of society different from today, police and magistrates are also different, with a government which they contend, can purify Italians from the evil of the current government. An intellectual contortion, a harrowing and haunting shortcut justified by the belief that in Italy there isn't any more democracy. Of course, we did not need Asor to know that now of is oligarchy but, unfortunately, at right as at left.
This left is then increasingly unable to learn from their mistakes, to thoroughly analyze the roots of the drift of the democratic system and, perhaps, think of the idea of direct democracy rather than representative. In fact, the market for the parliamentary sale, in which all are accustomed to, the concern of all parties has always been to emphasize the non-bond (constitutional) of the parliamentary mandate. That is to say that a service must not meet any of his choices, while it would seem more appropriate, as well as more democratic, arguing instead that one is someone else on a specific purpose and not for ever, as is the case in parliamentary systems .
The Berlusconism unfortunately, is not only in the minds of many Italians, but in his "developmental" and "modernizing" cases, within the Left albeit gradually different.
anno
41 n. 363
Francesco Codello