Fifty years since Ramelli’s attack

Battista Falconi's italics

Fifty years have passed since the attack which led, after a few days of excruciating agony, to the death of Sergio Ramelli. After all, it is just one of the many opportunities for reflection on the so-called Years of Lead, a very apt expression, which offered almost one a day: the headlines on the act of violence against the political opponent or on the terrorist attack, often attributable to dark plots, were part of a gloomy everyday life in those times. Who knows why, then, one of those episodes stands out more vividly in the memory, whose filters and mechanisms remain completely mysterious. Perhaps in Ramelli's case the methods are striking: hitting a boy on the head with a size 36 wrench leaves little margin for pre-intentionality which, however, was recognized by the murderers as a mitigating factor.

Listening to them talk and remember their murder, those murderers, reveals a hallucinating unawareness that goes even beyond the "banality of evil" coined by Hannah Arendt. If the hierarch Eichmann represented the depersonalization of the cogs that make up the gears of evil, here the protagonists offered an unsolicited surplus of evil. It is really difficult to think about the subsequent survivals of the families, affected in this way and never compensated by a truly shared memory, by a collective recognition of guilt, by an unconventional request for forgiveness. Indeed, made the object of contempt and ridicule if not threats, as it genetically runs with the enemy.

When we think back to those times of "killing a fascist is not a crime" it is inevitable to grant a little more understanding to those who still celebrate them today with rituals of unacceptable fascism. This must be said without any sympathy for Roman greetings and "presents", which are truly demonstrations of low intelligence, in the rational sense of the term. But the heart and the brain also command other visceral instincts, which the memory of Sergio Ramelli inevitably lights up.

If you pass the double pike, it happens a bit like the self-styled influencers who go crazy on social media, claiming that Pope Francis is not dead and posting crazy videos in which they wander, even getting lost, in the corridors of the Gemelli Polyclinic: “See? It's not there!”. The feedback they raise is largely made up of people with average common sense who perculate on them, but since on social media the "whatever you talk about it" approach applies, even those who are bullshit are interacting. The underlying motivation from which these poor people start, apparently, is not however completely delusional: the Holy Father's illness is in fact subject to a confidentiality that in the past was conferred on any state of health, but which today, since coming out has become almost an obligation, sounds like a suspicious choice.

It went like this with Covid too: conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxers, supporters of atrocities and absurdities that are very dangerous for public health, were to some extent also driven by a communication that left no room for the slightest glimmer of perplexity. Just think of the sale as a "vaccine" tout court of temporary, incomplete, insufficiently tested and carrying heavy collateral risks: it was certainly better to take them, in health terms, but it would have been honest to admit their imperfection. Also out of respect for the many victims who can presumably be attributed to the resulting adversities.

This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/cinquantanni-dallaggressione-di-ramelli/ on Thu, 13 Mar 2025 14:59:49 +0000.