The professionals of anti-fascism? Like those of the anti-mafia
Contortions and oddities of militant anti-fascism. The emblematic case of Gustavo Zagrebelsky on Repubblica . Damato's Scratches
At the end of an "intervention" by the president emeritus of the Constitutional Court Gustavo Zagrebelsky in yesterday's Repubblica we read this mischievous, or rather very mischievous, question which leads, as we will see, to a sensational discovery: "It is a coincidence that those who do not want to declare themselves anti-fascist are the same one who wants to change the Constitution?”.
The allusion is naturally to the proposal of Giorgia Meloni's government, being first examined in the Senate, for the direct election of the Prime Minister. On which Zagrebelsky himself tried to joke at the time – again in Repubblica – by writing that it had been so well thought out that it could even overcome a referendum. And incurring the underlining of the ironic nature of the article by the alarmed host newspaper.
Then the emeritus, aware that he could joke with the infantrymen but not the saints, gradually argued and developed his excommunication, up to the final question of yesterday's speech, preceded by this apodictic consideration: "After all, anti-fascism and democracy coincide and this coincidence has its founding table in the Constitution". To change which, therefore, we would practice at best an "illiberal" democracy, that is, an oxymoron, at worst a "fascism not of the past". Which is the title of the article just published by Zagrebelsky.
Well – here is the sensational discovery… of hot water – the penultimate article of the Constitution, the 138th, is the one which provides, allows, regulates, verbatim, "revision of the Constitution and constitutional laws".
This means, in the logic of the reasoning of the president emeritus – I repeat – of the Constitutional Court, that the fascist devil in 1947, with fascism already buried, with liberation having already taken place and been celebrated for more than a year and a half, managed to slip into the queue of Constitution with an article dedicated precisely to its revision, modification, reform, call it what you want in current Italian. Not in the one manipulated by doctrinal wiles according to which Parliament would not be enough for changes of a certain weight, not even with the parachute of the so-called confirmatory referendum, but it would be necessary to resort to a new constituent assembly, like the one elected in 1946 with the birth of the Republic.
Ah, the devil. What pranks is he capable of doing by moving in a black shirt through the flames of Hell, even though it was recently optimistically imagined as empty by Pope Francis. A devil already ridden in the so-called Second Republic by Silvio Berlusconi and Matteo Renzi in their passages through Palazzo Chigi but thrown back into the flames by the electorate by rejecting their reforms in the referendum.
The fear of the professional anti-fascists, as Leonardo Sciascia's good soul would perhaps call them, paraphrasing what he said of the anti-mafiosi, is that this time, with Meloni at Palazzo Chigi and with the mood in the electorate, the devil will not be rejected . It would be a big problem for them.
For the professional anti-fascists – I repeat – it would be a similar problem to what the lost ordinary referendum against the divorce law was for the DC in 1974 and in 1985 for the non-reformist left, then still avowedly communist, the lost referendum against the slowdown of the escalator of wages carried out by Bettino Craxi's government to stop and reverse a double-digit inflation that was devouring wages in the substantial indifference of the largest Italian trade union. On whom Enrico Berlinguer, shortly before his death, imposed an appeal to the electorate feared, without hiding it too much, even by the disciplined secretary Luciano Lama. The following year was followed by the victory of the government, defeated in a few localities, including the home town of the then secretary of the DC Ciriaco De Mita: Nusco.
The Berlinguer I am writing about is naturally the same as the so-called moral question whose photo the Nazarene secretary Elly Schlein has just had printed on this year's PD membership cards.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/i-professionisti-dellantifascismo-come-quelli-dellantimafia/ on Sun, 28 Apr 2024 06:21:36 +0000.