Viruses, vox populi and populist logos
Italics by Teo Dalavecuras
"The appeal not to get vaccinated is an appeal to die substantially – you don't get vaccinated, you get sick, you die – or you kill – you don't get vaccinated, you get sick, you get infected, he she dies – that's it". These are the words spoken as always without emphasis by the Prime Minister during the press conference on Friday 23 July together with Ministers Marta Cartabia and Roberto Speranza.
Among others, Iuri Maria Prado indirectly commented on them, as always with grace and subtlety, in the online newspaper Linkiesta . When we say gracefully we also refer to the fact that the commentator does not name the author of the sentence quoted above, nor the presumed target of the harsh judgment of Mario Draghi (Matteo Salvini); in reality Prado does not even report the sentence that sent the progressive side into raptures, he merely makes some considerations on the moralistic intention of the judgments that are collected daily on behalf of people who have not yet decided whether to get vaccinated or have already decided not to to do it; a consideration that I fully agree with just as I remain worried about the high number of fellow citizens wary of what still seems to be the main defense against the spread of the coronavirus and not at all convinced by their arguments: the assessments and concerns of health policy and judgments morals about people are different things, Prado points out, and it is a valuable notation because it is increasingly rare.
The point, it should be clear, is neither Draghi nor Salvini, both held by their respective profession of head of government and head of a party to follow the ethics of responsibility, where that of the former is to push in all ways on the spread of vaccine and that of the second is to increase the consensus for the party that has relied on its leadership or at least lose as little as possible.
The point is not even the pandemic, but once again the quality of the public discourse, a discourse that in Italy has been revolving for two years around a single problem, how to prevent the "Lega di Salvini" from returning to the government after two exits Years ago. Speech made even more ambiguous by the fact that with Draghi the League in government has already returned to us; but, above all, polluted by that virus of the populist logos , which has irremediably infected the self-declared enemies of populism.
The "minor premise" of the syllogism intended to demonstrate the need for Salvini's League to be kept out of the control room is that this League is populism. The major premise is that populism is the evil (but this is not worth it to deal with as he has now dignity axiom: no one would dare say otherwise either or wonder what the axiom that means).
We all know or should know that among the pillars of populism there is the de-legitimization of the adversaries usually motivated moralistically (if not by "historical destinies" including today "change", "progress" or "future"); the transformation of the divergent and even conflicting interests represented in the political arena into sinful deviations from the North Star of the people's will (the Cartabia reform thus becomes the "schiforma" for five-star populism, as Corriere della Sera a century ago, for the fascists, at a certain point it had become the "Corriere della serva"); the objective refusal of the division of powers.
Let's not talk about the "pleasure of punishing", if I may paraphrase the title of the recent and important – consistently ignored by the public discourse – Ennio Amodio's book on "judicial populism". In the press conference mentioned above, where most of the questions brought up the reform of justice, Draghi had to be careful not to make the slightest mention of the right of defense and the presumption of innocence, two constitutional principles that to those who profess populism judicial (and even though they are part of the majority) the disrespectful expressions about the Prophet sound like to the ears of fundamentalist Muslims.
The reform launched by the Conte-bis government, however, was not only voted by the 5 stars but also by the party that for years has made its own "social object", the Democratic Party, which is preparing to isolate the populists. to inherit the votes of the Grillini thanks to the already proudly populist lawyer Giuseppe Conte and his Machiavellian statute.
Populist speech, by its nature unidirectional and totalitarian, excludes doubt, the civil exchange of divergent opinions, but only contemplates more or less sophisticated defamations and this on every side; even if you do not concede anything to the enemy, he conceals any contradiction, any ambiguity in his own bosom. Once there was sarcastically spoken of Bulgarian majorities, but the current secretary of the Democratic Party, if I'm not mistaken, was unanimously elected (with that zero point something of opponents that even the democracies of realized socialism allowed themselves).
It would be nice if the Italian public discourse were cleared of some of the ambiguities of which I have given only the most obvious examples. We could start with the story of the birth and triumphs of the 5 stars which, as the mainstream media have told it so far (in addition of course to La 7 and il Fatto Quotidiano ) requires a much higher degree of credulity than Santa Claus himself he expects from his little beneficiaries. Moreover, the now substantial archiving of Enzo Scotti's legendary Link Campus university, formerly a nursery for 5-star ministers as well as land of more or less occasional passages by members of the Democratic Party, should facilitate this modest but not superfluous operation-truth.
But the problem posed by the virus of populist logos goes far beyond our borders, one more reason not to cultivate illusions.
With the usual fanfare of the (media) band stationed in front of Palazzo Berlaymont, the EU Commission has announced a plan ("fit for '55") which among other things provides for a ban on the sale of cars and other vehicles (boats and aircraft) within the EU, other than 100% electric ones starting from 2035, a program that taken literally sounds like the death sentence of the main European manufacturing sector. Romano Prodi, a man who, in addition to industrial policy, geopolitics and many other things, knows the mechanisms of European institutions in depth, having practiced them as president of the Commission in the delicate passage of opening up to the satellite countries of the former Soviet empire, a prudent person, criticized , arguing as is his custom, the plan announced by Brussels. The "gang" ignored the news, in fact, recording it without comment to archive it more quickly. The "gang" keeps a family. The Commission, on the other hand, "never explains" even if "always complains" (unlike His Majesty) and in order not to explain itself, it uses the ancient technique of bureaucracies, the flood of words.
Second example, the hydrogeological catastrophe in Germany in mid-July. It took a liberal-conservative journalist from a liberal-conservative newspaper outside the EU, the Swiss Neue Zürcher Zeitung , to read banal but essential considerations for framing the disaster: climate change is a reality; one can try to counter it but it is a long-term and wide-ranging (global) undertaking. In the meantime , what has always been done should be done to prevent the consequences of extreme climatic events: for example, water containment works and their protection from foreign materials, those that in extreme events obstruct its course in coincidence with bridges, alarm systems that are activated at the first signs of an extreme event and save lives. Starting from these observations, Eric Gujer, managing director of the old Zurich newspaper asks a rhetorical question, wonders if we are sure that the competent authorities have taken all the necessary measures in the recent and older past to prevent the consequences of climatically extreme events, and offers a definitive consideration: two months after the elections in Germany it is more convenient for everyone, the majority and the opposition, to raise the issue of climate change and the absolute need to combat it, here and today, rather than identifying and denouncing the omissions or delays in government policies with respect to the duty to limit their harmful consequences. It only needs to be added that the second alternative is purely theoretical because a meticulous indictment on the non-compliance of governments would have no significant media echo, which during the election campaign would make it a pure cost without compensation.
In a European context characterized by a substantially unique thought composed of abstract or rather generic slogans, from "Fridays for future" by Greta Thunberg (have we already forgotten?) To the plans produced and distributed continuously from Brussels (one of the last, baptized "From farm to fork", a very "cool" way of updating the old "from producer to consumer", announced with the usual fanfare, has been signed by all the big food multinationals, from Ferrero to Mondelez to Nestlé: let alone if these here are not for "healthy" and "sustainable" nutrition, whatever that means), in such an artificial communication system, insisting on ostracizing as a populist anyone who points out, even with discretion, that the king is naked, is just an exercise of dilapidation of the residual minimum credibility of the media: that the king is naked is a trivial fact. Sometimes I wonder, certainly for my unforgivable naivety, what future benefits the media expect from this deliberate dissipation of their "goodwill".
Last February a Lombard councilor was pleased to illustrate the excavation work on the seveso flood containment tank: "after 45 years and 116 floods", the commissioner pointed out. In Milan, however, on the front pages that the Fridays for future relentlessly celebrated every Friday, there was no trace of these modest delays in the execution of works of vital necessity for the environment and the safety of people. After all, we do not want to expect that media that are daily committed to explaining how our life will be or how it will be in fifty years to deal with such details …
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/chi-e-infettato-dal-virus-del-logos-populista/ on Tue, 27 Jul 2021 08:42:01 +0000.