Freedom does not go to the streets with buses

P.i that a demonstration for peace, today a call to arms. Made in the name of a personal power on the hunt for revenge after the electoral disaster a month ago. Vincenzo De Luca can call the Togni Circus to the square, wave the adhesion of the Holy Family with the ox and the donkey, resurrect the dead Eav for twenty-four hours thanks to the hired buses, but he will never be able to escape the truth. How clear, limpid, evident to those who still have clear eyes to look and a good brain to think: with this initiative, Campania shapes its profile on that of Eastern democracies, authoritarian regimes masked behind a semblance of freedom. Never before, in fact, has a public institution been seen organizing an initiative that, to define politics, does wrong to the residual nobility of this word. Never before has anyone, elected to represent the entire citizenship and not a single part, had financed with as many as 300 thousand euros – money that belongs to everyone, not to the governor and his cronies – a show of strength that has, as the only one purpose, the affirmation of its dominion over the territory. From now on, anyone will be authorized to distort the institution he presides for private purposes and to spend public money to strengthen its hegemony. The regional governments of the center-right will be able to do this, if anything by setting up and funding processions against abortion or in defense of the traditional family. The leaguers who administer the north east will be able to do it, parading in the name of differentiated autonomy. And no one will be able to object that the institutions, with the state funds entrusted to them, must be above the parties because De Luca has already moved the boundaries, mixing politics and propaganda as in the worst authoritarian regimes. For days, in fact, we have been telling stories that recall the gatherings of the fascist tables or the communist pioneers: buses rented from Palazzo Santa Lucia, through the Eav (yes, the regional body that transforms the days of commuters into survival trials ), to fetch the children from schools and take them to the square; the handbook that prescribes the phrases to be written on the banners, the authorized flags and the allowed slogans.

M.hip only the uniform. But sooner or later that too will come. He is appalled to see what a cowardly left has been reduced to, capable only of shouting at the non-existent fascist danger without paying attention to the advanced autocratic experiments carried out in the shadow of his banner. It is dismayed to see that even the noble part of Naples – from the mayor Manfredi to the University, from trade unions such as CGIL and UIL to significant associations of the Third sector – bowed to the will of the Salerno czar in order to avoid conflict, a term that in history has always been the fuse of progress and that today, however, is considered absolute evil, almost as if compliance has become the only way of being in the world. Only the CISL and the Industrial Union have been able to pronounce a firm, unequivocal no. The reality, sorry to say, that the connective tissue of the city is hopelessly fraying, our own cultural identity now seems reduced to a gadget for hit and run tourists and in this void – where the imaginary and the real, the sense of community and street cleaning – the weed of authoritarianism is growing in a third millennium format. Someone will object: let us demonstrate for peace, an inescapable value. I could answer: and we also missed that you did it for the war … without forgetting, then, that peace was often the pretext for the obscene rallies of the Soviet regime. However, I prefer to ask a question in my turn: okay, but for what peace? The one that foresees the surrender of Ukraine to the Russian invader? What, if anything, definitively assigns the republics of Donbass and Crimea to Putin? Dunno, reading the press releases of Palazzo Santa Lucia one is clouded by the smoke of words lined up a bit haphazardly. On the contrary, we are discussing terribly serious, dramatic, complex things that cannot be faced with the grotesque frown of a declining potest, devoted solely to consolidating its shaky position income. Also because, let’s face it, if there is someone who does not even know where peace is at home, this is Vincenzo De Luca who has forged his power in verbal violence, in insulting on the loose, in familism and in revenge against his opponents. What led him this time to go so far, forcing the machine of an administration now subservient to his whims, by feeding under the radar the fear of retaliation that has always inspired? Two hypotheses emerge. The first: to build, through the demonstration, an imposing weapon of mass distraction that could erase the shame of the electoral massacre. The second: to field the original nucleus of the army with which he intends to conquer the national Democratic Party or, in the worst case, to negotiate favorable conditions for himself for his in the new leadership group. In some ways, these are also legitimate objectives, as long as they are not pursued by distorting institutional functions and using public money for personal purposes. What instead appears politically despicable is the exploitation of an epochal tragedy for one’s own gain, the fraudulent abuse of a dramatic anniversary such as the centenary of the march on Rome to stage an Orban-style propaganda rally. Freedom does not get on buses hired by a governor with other people’s money. Freedom goes to the streets by itself. When and how you want it.