This time it’s different
The numbers, it is true, do not coincide with reality . But knowing them in order of magnitude helps to defend oneself from the distortions of oneself and of others. A small page hosted on the Government website reports the numbers of a persecution of the last century. In Italy in 1938, the Italian Jews counted were about 47,000, equal to just over 0.1% of the population of the time. After the introduction of the racial laws, about 200 teachers, 400 public employees, 500 private employees, 150 soldiers and 2,500 professionals lost their jobs. The ban on the attendance of the schools of the Kingdom forced 200 university students, 1,000 high school students and 4,400 elementary school pupils to abandon their studies. Five years later the deportations began. With the signing of the armistice on 8 September 1943 and the German occupation nearly 7,000 people were transferred to prison camps. Only 837 returned.
Like every time, this time too is different. State persecutions differ greatly in their motives, less in their trajectories. They can target a condition (income, disability, ethnicity, etc.) or a choice (political orientation, creed, lifestyle, etc.) which must therefore first be defined, institutionalized, certified. In order for this preparatory and discriminating phase to be followed by others that are more violent and properly persecutory, however, a second premise must also be satisfied, that is, that the target group is a minority. Otherwise it would not be possible to hit it without affecting the structure called to make itself complicit or at least indifferent.
Many are wondering in these hours how to resist. I don't think there is a "right" way to do it, each one acts according to what he feels and knows, in the squares, in the courts, in the assemblies, in the newspapers, in the family, from the pulpit. The variety of registers is also strength, the ability to keep multiple fronts open. But there is no need to dwell on how if quanta are not cultivated. You don't need unity without quantity.
What we have been witnessing for months is the attempt on a very large scale, without parsimony of means and expedients, to create a minority against which to finally rage. He expects nothing else. But until then the machine will linger in the preparations of propaganda and hatred, of coaxing and announcements, of threats and alarms, of hitting a few to educate them all. Without consent there is no majority and without majority there is no minority, there is no green light to unleash the hunt.
This time it's really different. And it needs to continue to be and to be more and more, at the cost of every possible sacrifice. There is no other safeguard, political decency, jurisprudential remora, memory, there is no other diaphragm. It is also necessary that we be aware of this diversity, that we do not believe in it, perhaps boasting of it, solitary and surrounded. You don't need heroes, but a gross, anonymous and inert mass, a bovine impediment that detaches your eyes from the obscene spectacle of the top management and from the clot in which they have merged their voices in an attempt to homologate the represented by manipulating the representations and representatives, to alter the what by replacing the mirror.
These are the numbers, not those of the last time. If they stay that way, maybe more will happen, maybe worse, but they will have to do it alone.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Il Pedante at the URL http://ilpedante.org/post/questa-volta-e-diverso on Wed, 28 Jul 2021 09:27:32 PDT.