The collapse of the Berlin Wall is a celebration of our liberal democracy. The letter from Minister Valditara
The letter addressed to Italian schools by the Minister of Education and Merit, Giuseppe Valditara, on the occasion of the Day of Freedom, instituted to celebrate the anniversary of the demolition of the Berlin Wall ”.
The letter addressed to Italian schools by the Minister of Education and Merit Giuseppe Valditara on the occasion of the Day of Freedom, established to celebrate the anniversary of the demolition of the Berlin Wall ”.
"Dear girls and dear boys,
on the evening of November 9, 1989, tens of thousands of inhabitants of East Berlin cross the Wall crossings and pour into the western part of the city: it is the symbolic event of the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the end of the Cold War and the reunification of Germany and Europe. The fall of the Wall, although it does not mark the end of communism – to which the People's Republic of China continues to refer today, among other countries – nevertheless demonstrates its dramatically bankruptcy outcome and determines its expulsion from the Old Continent. .
Communism was one of the great protagonists of the twentieth century, in different times and places it has also assumed profoundly different forms, and to minimize or trivialize its immense historical impact would be a serious intellectual error.
It was born as a great utopia: the dream of a radical revolution that uproots humanity from its historical limits and projects it towards a future of absolute and perfect equality, freedom, happiness. In short, let him project it towards heaven on earth. But where it prevails it inevitably turns into an equally great nightmare: its concrete realization everywhere involves the annihilation of individual freedoms, persecutions, poverty, death.
Indeed, for utopia to be realized it is necessary that absolute power be exercised without any mercy, and that everything – humanity, justice, freedom, truth – be subordinated to the revolutionary objective. This is how ruthless tyrannical regimes take shape, capable of reaching heights of violence and brutality among the highest that mankind has managed to touch. The way to heaven on earth is paved with millions of corpses. And the intuition that Blaise Pascal had two and a half centuries before the Russian revolution turns out to be dramatically true: "Man is neither angel nor beast, and it is unfortunate that whoever wants to be an angel makes a beast".
Historians have studied communism a great deal and will continue to study it, trying to convey with ever greater precision all the extraordinary complexity of its events. But from a civil and cultural point of view, November 9 will remain an anniversary of primary importance for Europe: the moment in which a tragic misunderstanding ends in whose name, for decades, the continent has been divided and its eastern half suffocated by the despotism. This awareness is even more relevant today, in the face of the resurgence of aggressive nostalgia for the Soviet empire and the new threats to peace in Europe.
The collapse of the Berlin Wall marks the definitive failure of the revolutionary utopia. And it can only be, then, a celebration of our liberal democracy. An imperfect political and social order, full of contradictions as it is, in need of being reinvented and rebuilt every day. And yet, the only political and social order that can give reasonable guarantees that humanity, justice, freedom, truth are never subordinated to any other purpose, be it noble or ignoble.
For all this, the Italian Parliament instituted the "Freedom Day" on 9 November. On all this I invite you to reflect and discuss ”.
Giuseppe Valditara
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/il-crollo-del-muro-di-berlino-e-una-festa-della-nostra-liberaldemocrazia-la-lettera-del-ministro-valditara/ on Wed, 09 Nov 2022 13:03:51 +0000.