Why do Gruber, Floris and Berlinguer love Travaglio, Di Battista and Orsini so much?
The fascination for bêtise in our TV lounges. Michael the Great's Notepad
One day Lilli Gruber, Giovanni Floris, Bianca Berlinguer will have to explain why the most popular guests in their television lounges have been colorful characters – from Travaglio to Di Battista to Orsini , to name just a few – who, dissimulating their hatred for the West with self-righteous pacifism, they poisoned the wells of public discourse about the invasion of Ukraine. Bad faith or stupidity? Allow me a brief literary digression to attempt an answer.
One of the characters in Jean-Paul Sartre's “Nausea”, the Autodidact, reads the works he finds in the library in alphabetical order of authorship, renouncing any selective criterion. "The Man Without Qualities" by Robert Musil tells how General Stumm von Bordwehr categorized the main philosophical currents as opposing armies: on one front the empiricists, on the other the rationalists; here the idealists, there the materialists. But the ideas, since they do not obey pre-established orders and alignments, make fun of him. The Autodidact and the General are probably homages to Bouvard and Pécuchet, the protagonists of Gustave Flaubert's novel of the same name. Like them, they try their best to pass themselves off as competent, but in fact they remain two splendid idiots.
After the eponymous work by Miguel de Cervantes, Alberto Arbasino considered that novel to be the most beautiful book in the world: "The fascination for la bêtise, for human bullshit, has never been felt by any author with such enthusiastic and paroxysmal gluttony" . In this sense, the two copyists are the true forerunners of our time, the transversal heroes of presumption who, with their ballast of obtuseness and indestructible prejudices, look imperturbably onto the modern society of entertainment. And then: give us the grey, monotonous, boring, soporific Tribuna politica by Jader Jacobelli. Sometimes there was the risk of falling asleep, it's true, but the bale counters and their bullshit didn't have the right to asylum they have today.
( The snores of Orsini and Travaglio on the Luiss )
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Punctually, every time the Holy Land is the scene of a bloodbath, in certain radical intellectual circles the ignoble equivalence between the Nazi genocide of the Jews and the Israeli repression of the Palestinians is overshadowed. This is a blatant distortion of historical truth, which is not always countered with the necessary decisiveness. After all, the anti-Jewish prejudice has its roots in a millenary tradition. It so happened that a former pentastellato senator was able to raise the alarm with impunity on the ancient plan of hooked-nosed bankers to control the world, drawing on the old victim paradigm of the forgers of the "Protocols of Zion".
But if this can be considered as a clamorous case of domestic political and cultural misery, much more disturbing is a phenomenon that risks flourishing even to the west of Allah. I am referring to that denial according to which the Jews, yesterday's "false victims" of a "non-existent" genocide, are today's real persecutors. As is known, for its theorists the State of Israel is an imposture, the abusive recipient of a deviated solidarity. Its birth and its existence therefore make use of an undue license of moral legitimacy, they are only the fruit of the bad conscience of the West. In this delirium of reason, the Holocaust becomes a "myth", Zionism the avatar of the Jewish conspiracy, the Tel Aviv government its intelligence and military outpost.
Just take a look at social media these days to get an idea of the wide consensus these aberrant theses now enjoy. The danger of a revival of anti-Semitism in Europe therefore remains very serious. However, the continent that has seen "the most European and least nationalist of its citizens" (Amos Oz) exterminated cannot think of reconciling itself with its past and planning its own future as a community of destiny by lowering its guard against the "murderers of memory” (Pierre Vidal-Naquet).
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/gruber-floris-berlinguer-travaglio-dibattista-orsini/ on Sat, 13 May 2023 05:32:12 +0000.