From Gervasoni to Bassani: towards a new age of censorship (and self-censorship)
Odd timing, really. Carl Gustav Jung would have seen behind it the telluric physiognomy of a synchronicity, of an apparent case moved by a karst, chthonic will: because, after the reprimand of State imposed on Marco Gervasoni, the gallows advance for another Marco, always a university professor .
It is the turn of Luigi Marco Bassani, a lecturer at the State University of Milan, a convinced, coherent and sincere liberal and expert in American liberalism and political doctrines, one of the greatest Italian connoisseurs of American federalists and anti-federalists, on which he has edited a valuable volume for the Bruno Leoni Institute, as well as having expertly informed us on the republic / democracy dichotomy in American constitutional thought and on the work of John C. Calhoun.
Bassani, following a five-month disciplinary investigation within the university where he teaches, was found guilty and punished with suspension for one month from teaching and salary.
An objectively serious punishment, and which appears even more serious if one goes to fathom its grotesque origin: in fact, the Milanese professor was recognized guilty of the certainly atrocious crime of 'sexism' by means of a meme , having dared to share an image on his Facebook page sarcastic and ironic that took up a gossip about Kamala Harris.
Now, it appears clear, evident, glaring, crystalline to anyone with a minimum sense of personal decorum and reasoning not crushed by the politically correct stoned that plagues contemporary society as sharing a meme is nothing more than an exercise in free criticism. , of satire, and of sarcasm no matter how ferocious the issue may seem.
Because, let's say it and write it and scream it, that little picture did not integrate any criminally relevant extremes, and God forbid, and the only violation that it could have integrated is that of the ballerina and greyish cloak of the egalitarian and whimpering psychosis of the guardians of politically correct.
Perhaps it points to the quick, despite being internally dead, apathetic, emptied of meaning, strength, emotionality, the keepers of progressive orthodoxy thought well before basing the usual withered and drunken dog that digitally attacked Professor Bassani, describing him as a inveterate misogynist, and then does not pay, after the lecchino and collectivist dossier, he asked and demanded his blood tribute, through disciplinary procedures, with the University bureaucracy that seems to have lent itself.
Francis Bacon argued that the stimulus of free speech leads to an improvement in knowledge and the human condition: that said, it appears as clear as the world they are preparing for us, a leveled world, fearful, stupid, senseless, hypochondriac, totalitarian in its mediocrity. and in its absence of complexity and roughness, it will be a world devoid of innovation, of strength, of the desire to know and to test themselves, a world in which everyone will hide their true being, their passions, their idiosyncrasies out of fear, a tremendous, icy fear of hurting others.
I find it disconcerting that an Athenaeum sanctions one of its teachers for a meme , because the china, the final drift of this process of tribunalization of the free expression of thought is the wide open and carnicine jaw of Big Brother.
If you think about it, between investigations, morning blitzes, disciplinary processes for social media bulletin board students , it is becoming really hard to express a concept that is little more complex than saying hello, good morning, but what a nice weather today: at this rate, the University professors will be terrified of rejecting a completely unprepared student, for fear of being denounced, no one will post any more thoughts, no matter how blatantly ironic, not to end up in the ruthless meat grinder of the mass media , politically correct hysteria and parlor politician.
You can't put your underpants on words, Busi said in an old interview dating back to the 1980s. And in fact, if we consider that Victorian prudery used to dress the legs of furniture with socks, one would wonder if we have not returned to that era of chimneys, small hypocritical sins and morals imposed by public power.
We are ending straight into a new age of censorship, in which we will have to self-censor ourselves, and perhaps we already do: because, let's face it, when we hear or read or in any case we learn that a university professor is being searched or disciplinarily sanctioned for expressing criticism, opinions or ironies of various degrees, a conditioned reflex, Pavlovian, takes us, which leads us to wonder if that very funny phrase we were about to post on Twitter could bring us trouble.
And let's be clear, every freedom carries with it and within the canon of responsibility: we do not claim the barbaric will to smear and slander anyone, it is not that freedom, but we demand the right to be able to say that we are still free, and intelligent and witty and with some things to say, even if the same ones might hurt or hurt the pale susceptibility of the many.
The Belgian situationist Vaneigem explicitly warned that there cannot be a bad or good use of freedom of expression, and that the only flaw is an insufficient use of this freedom: and we are suffocating it, restricting it, we are getting used to a limitation. constant and progressive, which erodes the very meaning of our being in society.
Bassani pays for having expressed a concept, by means of the digital semantic means of the meme : he exercised his right to irony, to criticism in the midst of sarcasm, expressing with that image and that caption the exemplification of a narrative that in reality has also occupied serious journalistic investigations of the Anglosphere.
By now we are really at a total short circuit, at the sunset of acumen and the possibility of staying with our backs straight and saying what we want to say, not to offend, not to make us cry but only to improve, albeit problematically, the world, the environment. , the social ecosystem within which we fight every day to remain ourselves. In his most famous text, "On Democracy" , Dahl noted how silent citizens are the perfect subjects of an authoritarian government: and this is the price we are about to pay, sacrificed in an authentic conspiracy of silence, to find ourselves from one day to the next. other reduced to mere subjects, without any awareness or freedom.
I do not resign myself to living like this, to being a mere ornament of this flat and anodyne world, and I am sure that not even Professor Bassani will resign himself to whom all my solidarity goes, always remembering, as Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, "forgive me my virtue, given that in times like these, amidst so much corruption, virtue has to beg vice on its knees, asking permission to do it good ” .
The post From Gervasoni to Bassani: towards a new age of censorship (and self-censorship) appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/da-gervasoni-a-bassani-verso-una-nuova-eta-della-censura-e-dellauto-censura/ on Mon, 17 May 2021 03:56:00 +0000.