Here are some of Vannacci’s mistakes in the Reverse World
The oversights in General Vannacci's "World upside down". The speech by Gregory Alegi, historian, journalist and professor at Luiss
Who knows if in Afghanistan and Iraq the raiding paratrooper Roberto Vannacci has ever been under fire as intense as that of the Italian press . An intense but imprecise fire, a bit like Wagner and Russia do in Ukraine: destroying everything, hoping that the defenders will also remain under the rubble. Nothing to do with modern warfare made of GPS and lasers that direct shots exactly on target. No drones that strike only after hours or days of observation, when they are sure of the target. Just a massive bombardment of the unacceptability and groundlessness of the general's worldview.
Some shots, in truth, seem to have been successful. Yesterday, in the Corriere della Sera , the linguist Massimo Arcangeli of the University of Cagliari ruthlessly documented not only the formal errors of the text (the result of haste, the assembly of heterogeneous materials and the lack of confrontation with a professional editorial team) but also various passages taken from other people's books without quoting them (what in the academic world is called "plagiarism" and what "common sense" calls "copying"). Indeed, it could be said that the Corriere was all too good, refusing to investigate – in addition to typos, interrupted sentences and shaky consecutio – the specific use of language. To give just one example: US President Joe Biden is characterized on page 115 as "left-handed" and "elderly" (81 years old), while his predecessor Donald Trump is not "right-handed" or "elderly" (although he is 77 years old) . The asymmetry is indicative of a choice of field.
This newspaper too has contributed to shifting the discussion from political alignments to facts, exploring with Otello Catalani the effective consistency of the three degrees and two masters. The unavailability of the thesis discussed in 2004 in Trieste, which according to the Thesis database spoke of the past, present and future of the special forces in which Vannacci served at the time, unfortunately does not allow us to verify sources and writing as done by Arcangeli for Il world upside down.
Less attention has been paid to the specific contents, in which other points of analysis can be found. The same is true for the state monopoly in education, which Vannacci attributes to the countries of "real socialism" (p. 186). No doubt: they did. What is indicative of a political position is to omit that before them Fascist Italy did it with the Gentile reform (1923), the Opera Nazionale Balilla (1927), the Ministry of National Education (1929), the oath of loyalty to the regime for teachers (1931) and the obligation to have a PNF card for all teachers (1933). Here too, incompleteness is likely to indicate a choice of sides.
An analogous attitude can be found in the Pantheon of the Italians of whom Vannacci would like to have «a drop of blood» (p.110). Aside from such blunders as listing Aeneas (who, as anyone in high school knows, was a Trojan who had come to the peninsula fleeing war in his own country), the list is purely male, with significant omissions of entire fields of culture (literature, but also non-mathematical science), gender (there aren't even Italian women who have won the Nobel, like Grazia Deledda or Rita Levi Montalcini) and religion (like Levi Montalcini, not only the physical Jew Emilio Segré but also the kind Enrico Fermi, who fled to the USA to free his wife Laura Capon from the anti-Jewish racial laws). Bizarrely, Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi appear, whose membership in Freemasonry (also in Carbonara sauce) and undisputed socialist tendency the general repeatedly demonstrates that he does not appreciate.
The vastness of the material assembled, sometimes from the social pages of friends (p. 355), offers an inexhaustible mine of ideas for historical, political and even psychological analysis and interpretation. Consulting any textbook of constitutional law would have highlighted how the First Amendment of the American Constitution (p. 282), the workhorse of American "conservatives", has as its subject the limitation of freedom of worship by the federal Congress but not by the states, which often have "Sabbath laws" which prohibit – for example – the sale of alcohol on Sundays. Press freedom itself exists only in the sense of a prohibition of preventive censorship, not of absolute irresponsibility, as the Supreme Court established when the New York Times published the secret study on the Vietnam War, known to history as the “ Pentagon Papers ”.
Perhaps the most revealing omission is related to Trump's exclusion from Twitter (p. 2). According to Vannacci, it would be political censorship against the American president. In reality, Trump used Twitter liberally and proficiently during the 2016 and 2020 election campaigns, as well as the years in between. The exclusion came only on January 8, 2021 following the use of the platform to incite rioting and aggression against Congress in order to overturn the electoral defeat. How risky is it to find in this distortion the key to understanding Vannacci's conception of the relationship between democracy, politics and the use of violence?
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/ecco-alcuni-errorucci-di-vannacci-nel-mondo-al-contrario/ on Mon, 28 Aug 2023 13:52:28 +0000.