The bill of the health regime: many exasperated and disillusioned Italians pushed into Putin’s arms
The West that mimics the mechanisms of authoritarian regimes loses credibility in the eyes of its own citizens. Towards an epochal clash between democratic civilization and totalitarianism, we will regret having played the consensus of millions of Italians with an operetta authoritarianism on the Green Pass
In recent days it has happened several times on social media that the outrage for what the Russian army is perpetrating in Ukraine was liquidated with contemptuous comments that recall how our governments also behaved in an authoritarian way during the Covid emergency. Do the Russians behave brutally towards civilians? So? We don't remember when they locked us up at home and forced us to present a certificate to go shopping? Do the Russians arrest the protesters? So? Don't we remember when no-vax demonstrations were banned here?
Well, let us say that – as wrong as the lockdown and the Green Pass were – the comparisons between the poor health policies of the Italian government and other Western governments and the Putin massacres are ridiculous. What's more: they are offensive. More: they are sacrilegious. What we are witnessing in Ukraine, through Russia, is at a level that is comparable only with the great totalitarianisms of the twentieth century. Putin brings us back to Hitler and Stalin, not – please us – to Arcuri and Speranza.
And, however, it also makes sense to reflect on how what has happened in Italy and in other Western countries in the last two years has contributed to weakening the consensus for our institutions and for the very concept of democracy.
The way in which Conte, Speranza, Draghi and other Western leaders have "played" with our rights – without understanding the delicacy and importance of the issues of individual freedom they were handling – has inflicted enormous damage on social and national cohesion. In particular, the Italian government has become the protagonist of a real escalation of provocations against a part of the population, those who are reluctant to the vaccine, going so far as to mob it, humiliate it, to the point of leading many people to lose jobs and income.
It does not escape the fact that today there is a large level of overlap between those sentenced to "civil death" by the "health police state" and those who today reject any form of empathy with the Ukrainian cause and, in many cases, do openly cheering for the Russian president.
A few months ago, on these pages, I wrote how the extreme fury against the no-vax would have caused, to many people, wounds that they will carry with them, thus forever undermining their trust in public debate and institutions. This scenario is regularly occurring and today we are paying the bill for the war unleashed by the government against millions of deplorables . The truth is that some citizens are so exasperated that today, just to "spite" the ruling classes, they would rather be ready to lick the boots of the worst tyrant.
It is reasonable to ask how it is possible that the ability to recognize and condemn "evil" has failed even when it occurs in such clear and overt forms. How is it possible that someone really comes to think that Putin could be the "just revenge" against Hope?
Unfortunately an answer can be tried to formulate and it is the following. It is obvious that Speranza was not a "ruthless dictator", that prof. Galli was not Dugin and that the policemen deployed to check the self-certifications were not Bucha's butchers; however, the fact that for two years our rulers have been so committed to mimicking the mechanisms of authoritarianism has trivialized and "thrown away" the whole concept of "democratic difference" and the whole debate on the principles of Western freedom.
If the West chooses to treat its citizens like any other China, then it loses, in no time at all, all the investment made in its history to give value and substance to the principles of democratic freedom – to the point of even making it appear the "tsar" of the Kremlin a "lesser evil".
Mind you, the hardened Putinians would have been there anyway, but most likely they would have been fewer. There is a not insignificant band of people that the government has, in fact, thrown into the "arms of the enemy".
Was it wise? Really, for a few less intensive care units, was it worth it to "break" with 10-15 percent of citizens and lose, perhaps definitively, their loyalty to the national community?
Moreover, the "rupture" caused by the pandemic was only the latest and most sensational of the "social ruptures" induced in recent years by our ruling class, which has greatly increased the distance between the elite and cultural groups and social networks further away from the "good laps".
The feeling is that having cultivated, in many cases knowingly, so many "internal enemies" will represent an element of profound weakness in the cultural and moral war that has opened. We will need everyone's support – and many will not follow us. This thing will, unfortunately, be a big deal.
What is certain is that, however things will go, one of the major issues of the next few years will be to try to remedy and rebuild that cohesion at the country level which is an indispensable condition for a strong and efficient democracy. It will require a long work and above all a lot of humility, hitherto lacking, on the part of those who will have government responsibilities.
The post The bill of the health regime: many exasperated and disillusioned Italians pushed into Putin's arms appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL https://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/il-conto-del-regime-sanitario-molti-italiani-esasperati-e-disillusi-spinti-tra-le-braccia-di-putin/ on Mon, 04 Apr 2022 03:52:00 +0000.