Dear Italian friends living in America, dear American friends, we have been saying here for a long time that ideology is suffocatingly back in Italy. Not the mighty one of the twentieth-century political narratives, good or bad as they have turned out, but the now neurotic and intolerant one of the government-opposition, majority-minority cultural screen. To be frank and even a bit brutal, the real underlying pattern is Meloni – anti-Meloni. The corollary is post-fascism versus progressivism. Everything in this scheme is good, even the farthest away.
A red-green councilwoman for the Genoa City Council, Francesca Ghio, revealed in one of the sessions that she was raped at a very young age. I died when I was 12, she said. Today she may be able to name the person who raped her, hoping to make him pay. A public outburst over a personal drama that deserves respect and sensitivity. Then what happens? Meloni calls her to express solidarity, and she makes the conversation public, reiterating to the Prime Minister that it is her fault. In a political and cultural sense, of course, not a legal one. Whoever raped her at the time belonged to Genoa well, he was not an illegal immigrant, one of those who, according to the government, are the main perpetrators of sex crimes in Italy (something never said in those terms). But what does that have to do with anything?
Solidarity toward a personal wound remains what it is, that is, a gesture of solidarity that should be appreciated as such, also because Giorgia Meloni as a woman and as an institutional figure cannot be held responsible for that episode. Not only that, that conversation should have remained private and not become the subject of yet another ideological clash. Besides, where is reason in these stories? Responsibility lies with the one who carried out the rape, not with the one who legitimately won the election in 2022 and certainly cannot be responsible for all the ills of the world, even those that predate her tenure and, I would say, her political career.
Shall we say that since she has been there, patriarchy in Italy lives and dominates as never before? But that is solemn bullshit, refuted by sociologists and psychoanalysts even from the leftist area. In the meantime, however, by dint of ideological blows, irrational mass madness is advancing: as I write these lines, I read of a Landini saying in the streets, during the general strike, that they will turn Italy inside out. In Turin, protesters burned the Premier’s image again. This is not the first time this ritual of symbolic violence has been repeated. Beware, because misfueled ideology who knows where it eventually leads us….
The article That poison called ideology comes from TheNewyorker.
