It often happens that an inherently American fact also becomes a major topic of Italian public debate. We are talking about the murder of the young conservative influencer Charlie Kirk. A murder that we can ascribe to political hatred.
The greatest democracy in the world is also the one that carries within it the great darkness of mysteries and a violence that in history, so many times, from verbal has become real. One does not have to go too far. Trump could have been killed during the campaign. The bullet that, according to him, God deflected lapped his ear but was dedicated to his head.
I have been to the United States ten times for my Top Secret for the (unnatural) deaths of John and Robert Kennedy and the assassination of Martin Luther King. President Reagan was shot, but John Lennon was also shot under the house, perhaps a parapolitical assassination as well.
Each time we dance between individual acts of madness, conspiracies, intelligence services, ambiguity. This time ideological hatred has a lot to do with it. In Europe, the massacre carried out by the Norwegian neo-Nazi Breivik (77 dead) was ideological. But America has its own different and even paradoxical genetics, precisely because, as mentioned, it is also a mature and extraordinary democracy.
In our country, fortunately, the political opponent is still fought mostly with words. And here the country’s two female leaders, PM Meloni and Pd Secretary Schlein, on Kirk’s story dialectically beat each other up.
For Meloni and the Italian center-right, Kirk’s murder shows us what happens when an opposition uses tones of violence, of hatred, of annihilation of the opponent. For Schlein, Meloni instrumentalizes in her favor, but the condemnation, she says, was unanimous. Some progressive intellectuals in the trap of justificationism fell into it, though.
On this I am clear: to physical violence that leads to death you just say no. Without ifs and buts. And the discourse must be everyone’s, bipartisan. Italy also had its years of lead and we don’t want them back.
The political dialectic must be heated and free, but no cancel culture, zeroing in on the other-it is dangerous for some brains. The American paradox (another one) is that cancel culture comes more from the progressive world and not from the supposedly authoritarian world of Trumpism.
And it is precisely a short-circuit of those who defend rights but claim the right to want to silence (to the extreme, then, unfortunately, in the interpretation of some fanatics) those who do not think as we do.
Do we place limits on political language? No, but let us set limits to consciences and make a reminder of something that has little appeal but is always very useful, which is common sense, measure, and balance.
In the knowledge that words are not empty coins, but the human brain’s highest form of action. Learn how to use them.
The article The power of words comes from TheNewyorker.
