It could be called a kind of Gomorrah
of racism, this latest book by Gian Antonio Stella. Stella from the first page sets the fundamental issue, that of 'fetishistic obsession
identity and xenophobic drift : "At the center of the world," say some old Rialto, "ghe semo rest of us: the venessiani de Venessia. In de across the bridge of the Liberty che porta in terraferma, ghe xè i campagnoli, che i dise de esser venessiani e de parlar venessian, ma no i xè venessiani: i xè campagnoli. Al de là dei campagnoli ghe xè i foresti: comaschi, bergamaschi, canadesi, parigini, polacchi, inglesi, valdostani... Tuti foresti. Al de là dell'Adriatico, sotto Trieste, ghe xè i sciavi: gli slavi. E i xingani: gli zingari. Sotto el Po ghe xè in napo'etani. Più sotto ancora dei napo'etani ghe xè i mori: neri, arabi, meticci... Tutti mori" (G. A. Stella,
Negri Froci Giudei & co.. L'eterna guerra contro l'altro , Rizzoli, Milano 2009, p. 11). Nella fine classificazione etnografica dei vecchi veneziani, riportata by Stella, but who lacked Kowalski, the old patriotic workers of Ford (played by the great Clint Eastwood) who clashes with Asian immigrants in Gran Torino
calls - with little imagination - "Japs" and that " venessiani "above - with educated ittologicamente fantasy - instead call the" relief "(the sole, yellow for the face and crushed). These gently reciprocate the favor to the Venetians and the world, considering not the city of the terraqueous like Venetian (or Venetian people, or the Po valley, or Christians, or Muslims, etc..), But nothing less than "the middle of Heaven and Earth, where the cosmic forces are in harmony "(ibid.).
Anyone who has studied a bit 'of cultural anthropology, but I'm not saying even a story (also fulfills one of the averages) knows that there's people that has not boasted some of the foundation myth of its divine origin or their biological superiority. They're all inside: Jews, Egyptians, Persians, Indians, Greeks, Muslims and Christians., Chinese, Japanese, Korean .. In every ancient mythology, in every religion, there is this claim to be entitled to a land on a site, and then to be the center of the world from that place, from the 'omphalos
(see chap. 3 "The navel of the world we are. No, us"). And at the same time, the fear of "Contamination" of the other. The other brings disease, infected, appropriate - more or less legitimately - a piece of that place where "we" recognize, we have our "roots," our "culture", in short, our "identity." The more we "expropriation" of our being ourselves, "pulls out" of our beautiful community, comes into our homes (dirty and corrupts our trains with its pestilential odors or its unclean food, peeing - as cursed Oriana Fallaci - on the walls of our churches, stole our goods honestly and laboriously accumulated, particularly rape and kill our women ...). The horror of what Borghezio defines "approval globalist" (p. 12) spinge allora a serrare le fila, a stringersi nel locale (significativamente, nel dialetto del mio paese, "locale" stava per "bar, ristorante", oppure per "appartamento"), a mettere la croce sul tricolore e a proporre referendum sui minareti., le moschee, i crocifissi e i veli, per mettere argine al contagio, per paura di essere "contaminati" dall'altro. Il razzismo ha il vantaggio di essere una "ipersoluzione" (Watzlawick), cioè di essere in grado di spiegare tutto, dall'influenza A alla crisi economica, dalle nuove povertà alla violenza sessuale. La purezza come criterio di appropriazione e di definizione culturale è in realtà una mistificazione tautologica: "puro" è solo ciò che ha avuto rapporti "we", "us" is the only criterion for determining what is "pure." In other words, the definition of "pure" is purely subjective and arbitrary and has no logical stringency, but only reflects a relationship of domination, power relations (I decide that you, you can not decide, you're different from me and therefore impure , contamination and contagious with your diversity but I am identical to myself and so pure, pristine, aseptic). He has no need: it is a fiction ideological construct a fake, just as "cultural identity" (which increasingly shows to be what Colonel Dax in Paths of Glory
of
Stanley Kubrick dice, citando
Samuel Johnson , del patriottismo: "l'ultimo rifugio delle canaglie"). E' stato detto tante volte ma vale la pena ripetere che, beninteso, questo vale per chiunque (ebrei, cristiani, turchi, cinesi...) rivendichi pseudo-purezze culturali che non esistono da nessuna parte (a parte forse qualche tribù indios amazzonica che non ha mai avuto contatti con nessun'altra popolazione, come
questa ) e non solo per il Ku-Klux-Klan. La purezza (del sangue, dell'identità, dell'ideologia) richiede inevitabilmente, necessariamente, la pulizia e se l'identità culturale deve restare pura, l'unico detergente è la pulizia etnica. Stella ricorda che il modello della ethnic cleansing par excellence, the Holocaust, genocide was preceded by the Boers in South Africa by the British who wanted to get rid of the white Africans (considered "impure" because the product of a mixture of Dutch, French, German) which caused a "massacre": "some 30,000 farms were destroyed, at least 120,000 people, overwhelmingly women and children ... were interned in concentration camps where over 20,000 children lost their lives ..." (p. 18). So ruthless ethnic cleansing, Stella recalls, they can be used even by Hitler himself as an excuse "to reject the United Kingdom in 1941 to charges of genocide and told in the infamous
Ohm Krüger (di cui però Stella omette il titolo, che aggiungo io) "girato per istigare le SS a vendicare le donne e i bambini boeri", film che al Festival di Venezia del 1941 vinse la
Coppa Mussolini come miglior pellicola straniera (ibid.). (Ironia - malvagia - della sorte, i primi campi di concentramento, com'è noto (ma credo non abbastanza), furono creati dagli inglesi in Sudafrica nel corso della seconda
guerra boera : si veda
qui ). O come il
genocidio degli armeni (tra uno e due milioni di morti), che
servì al nazismo come modello della
"soluzione finale della questione ebraica" (
Endlösung der Judenfrage ). Then the Turkish Committee of Union and Progress said it was "to save the motherland from the ambitions of this accursed race [the Armenians] and to take charge on their shoulders patriotic stain that obscures the Ottoman history" (p. 23).
A similar obsession with purity, cleanliness, the removal of stains and cleans away, has something of psychopathology in the Freudian sense. The pariah is impure, the Dalits who corrupts by his mere presence. Useful in this regard, the cap. 17, "The stupidario fanatics," an anthology of horror physical racist ideology and latitude of each species to the other feeds. They show a characteristic trait of racism, his constant news: his being "always in the balance between the ridiculous and the monstrous" (p. 299), an epistemological status somewhere between obscene jokes and criminal mentality. Ethnic and sexual stereotypes are a form of objectification of the other, the stranger, of the stranger to immobilize it, fix it, turn it into a "thing" (in philosophical language: reification) to be able to control, dominate, in order to operate on it's own power (to go to war, buy, sell, exploit, pointing to public opinion as a scapegoat, deny rights ...). Racism is a form of depersonalization and objectification of the human: it is denied recognition, hostility deep, atavistic, ancestral to admit that the 'ingroup
may be similar to'
outgroup, we can share, you can talk about
equality among human beings. Once again we are witnessing today the return of the ideology of oppression, annihilation of the other, the rejection of the comparison and relation to another. Maybe it's time to go to recite the prayer to God that the secular ends
Treatise on Tolerance Voltaire: "God of all beings, all worlds, of all time, Thou shalt not have given us a heart for hate each other one another, nor hands to kill one another; is' and we help each other to bear the burden of a painful life and passing. It 'so that small differences between the clothes that cover our weak bodies, in all our inadequate languages, including all of our ridiculous customs, in all our imperfect laws, including all our foolish opinions, of all our beliefs so dissimilar to our eyes and so equal in front of you, in short, that all these little nuances that distinguish the atoms called 'men' are not many signs of hatred and persecution. "
