by Giuseppe Criaco
In his essay on the Eternal fascism, Umberto Eco he wrote “behind a regime and its ideology, there is always a way of thinking and feeling, a series of cultural habits, a nebula of dark instincts and unfathomable impulses”.
We must start from these words to understand the outcome of the last political elections: because Italy, especially a certain Italy, has always cultivated a series of “cultural habits” symptomatic “in nuce”, of a fascist germ. Already Carlo Levi in his Christ stopped at Eboli pointed out in that strip of Italy a “fascist thought, on the part of the wealthy classes, and petty bourgeois linked to the clerical circles, which could still infect the newborn institutions and which” will perpetuate and worsen, under new names and new banners, the eternal Italian fascism “.
About that Leonardo Sciascia denounced, with conviction, the never dormant ideological and cultural collateralism of the Italian people with the nostalgia of the strong man, referring then to the broad consensus of the Christian Democracy. The Sicilian writer said that “The idea of the state scares many Italians: and above all a democratic state, which forces us to make choices, which obliges us to reflect, to ask ourselves questions, to worry about the consequences of this or that political decision. The Italians don’t want to know about such a state ”. And he concluded by asserting that many Italians, of any political orientation, today they would live inside “a fascism” (therefore not fascism) “as inside their own skin”. Within a regime that did not give them the worry of thinking, evaluating, choosing. A people once again ready to trade exercise of rights for the promise of a simpler life.
But what do the cultural habits evoked by Umberto Eco consist of. Among all the first characteristic is the cult of traditionalism, the respect to certainties consolidated over the years that must not and cannot be questioned. A sort of monolithic truth already announced that leads to impossibility “Of the advancement of knowledge” and at the same time, I would add, a setback in the field of rights. Above all, those rights that are nothing more than the rights of freedom that characterize a civilized country, in the field of the “other” family, civil unions, the management of one’s own body for each woman, in what must be our sensitivity (and that of our children) when it comes to faith and spirituality.
Rights referred to in left today it defends itself without having the strength or the conviction to consolidate them and place them at the center of its experiences of government. Assuming and claiming a truly “other” position with respect to the dictates “God Fatherland Family” repeatedly evoked, emphasized, and repeated by this right. As obscurantist passwords.
Words and slogans against which today’s Italy no longer has the ideological and cultural antibodies of the past, for “Protect yourself”. Messages that want to “invigorate” the instincts with the easiest impact. Theses they claim the only sense of belonging still possible: the national one, in a world in which every cultural belonging has been pulverized and which has transformed peoples into shapeless and homologated masses (here is the new Pasolini anthropological mutation 2.0). And to which this right (right) of today can offer a single possible glue: that tribal And nationalist, which recalls the most ancestral sentiment and for this reason the most dangerous.
Dangerous words and slogans that denote how fascism that does not pass is still around us “In civilian clothes maybe” as Umberto Eco suggested from his pages, in which he warned that “he can still return in the most innocent guise. Our duty is to unmask it and to point the finger at each of its new forms, every day, in every part of the world ”.
Especially in our house.