of Alberto Mario Banti edition, 20.02.2011
Roberto Benigni in Sanremo, but certainly what he loved Berlinguer! What - with gentle sweetness - with Troisi joked about Brothers of Italy ... What a transformation! Amazing! Yes, since Thursday, February 17 "on the stage of the Ariston," as they say in these circumstances, not only did the exegesis Inno di Mameli. He has done more. He made an apology of passionate political and moral values \u200b\u200bproposed innate. And - as someone said - he also taught a history lesson. A "memory" lesson history, if we want to use the vocabulary of the comic.
Good. And what have we learned from this history lesson? That we Italians and Italian-2011 even descended from the Romans, who were known for having possessed a great army, which instilled fear in everyone. They also state that the fighters of the Lombard League (1176); from Palermo who rebelled against the Angevin on the evening of Easter Monday of 1282, by Francesco Ferrucci, who died in 1530 in the defense of Florence and Balilla, boy who in 1746 started a revolt against the Austrians in Genoa. Interesting. As a historian, I frankly do not know. I mean I did not know that all these people who thought they had fought for other reasons in fact had already fought for the construction of the Italian nation. I thought this was a distorted version of history offered by national leaders and intellectuals of the nineteenth century nationalists. And what a century of historical research had shown the invalidity of that claim. But, you see a little 'that is going to discover in one evening on television.
But there's more. We found that all these "Italians" were good, the exploited and oppressed by foreigners, violent, savage and rapist - foreigners who in turn were German, French, Austrian and English. And this is an interesting concept, one that erased at a stroke the sentiments of opening to Europe and the world that have successfully characterized the political action of the last forty years.
Then we understood that we feel a special thrill of excitement when, walking through the Louvre museum or some other foreigner, we are faced with a painting, say, by Titian or Tintoretto, and this because those are painters 'Italian' and we, in some way descended from them. How strange: this seemed a strange concept really: I get excited even in the face of other paintings, Dürer, Goya or Manet, to say that it is irreducibly anti-patriotic?
And finally we figured out what the fundamental value that makes us Italians and Italian, and that should make us love the fighters of the Risorgimento: the mystique of the heroic sacrifice and death on the enemy, killing themselves on the altar of the motherland, the militarization of the war-mongering policy.
Here. I argue that the recovery time from uncritical of the Risorgimento as a founding myth of the Italian Republic to run the risk of calling into the circuit values \u200b\u200bare as dangerous as those built by the nineteenth-century nationalism: the idea of \u200b\u200bthe nation as a community of descendants a nation that exists only ab aeterno, at least the dawn of time, the idea of \u200b\u200bwar as a fundamental value of patriotic masculinity and the idea of \u200b\u200bthe political community as a system of differences: "we" are "us" and we are united, as opposed to "those other" foreigners, which are different from us, and we are dangerous to the integrity of our community.
Each of these ideas put into the circuit of a society like ours, which is crossed by intensive migration processes, it can become very toxic: it can lead to the belief that defending the Italian identity implies defend itself from 'other' which - as different - they are also dangerous and can lead to fantasize about a special peculiarities, if not superiority, of the Italian culture, and calls to have a closed and exclusive vision of the political community to which we belong, and especially to highlight causes of war ideals that, in the present context, at least I seem out of place.
Here, the performance of Benigni seems to me that the risk of a re-enactment of the worst nationalism is becoming reality: the more so in view of the enthusiastic reaction that has greeted the performance of the comic, almost as if he had said Benigni things that everyone had the heart who knows how long. Now if these people are the ministers of Russia or melons, it is not surprising, coming by these two political activism that has always cultivated the national values. But when they join too many politicians and commentators from the left, many of them also ex-communists, well there is to be truly amazed.
One might ask them: but what was of internationalism, pacifism, Europe, the opening of solidarity that has characterized the best democratic culture of the past decades? Why I do not think that such a background of values \u200b\u200bis compatible with these forms of neo-nationalism. With his long monologue, in fact, Benigni - despite having spoken out against nationalism - in essence, inviting us to appear contrastare il nazionalismo padano rispolverando un nazionalismo italiano uguale a quello leghista nel sistema dei valori e contrario a quello solo per ciò che concerne l'area geopolitica di riferimento.
Beh, speriamo che il successo di Benigni sia il successo di una sera. Perché abbracciare la soluzione di un neo-nazionalismo italiano vorrebbe dire infilarsi dritti dritti nella più perniciosa delle culture politiche che hanno popolato la storia dell'Italia dal Risorgimento al fascismo.
0 comments:
Post a Comment