”How did we get to this point so suddenly? This is the question I tried to answer in a series of Instagram stories, in which I retraced the last thirty years of Italian history to explain how we arrived at a “new fascism”. Let’s reread them and weave them together”. This is how Michela Murgia tells herself in the posthumous book that arrives in bookstores on Tuesday 30 April, with the title ”Remember me as you please” (Mondadori, 324 pages, €19.50). It is the result of a week of recordings in which she told herself to Beppe Cottafavi, her editor and friend.
This is how the excerpt anticipated today by La Repubblica continues.
”Ministers who talk about race, control of women’s bodies, rights taken away from minorities, xenophobic policies, protesters registered by Digos, purges in the cultural and information system: here is the list I have drawn up to summarize the political news since May last. The thing is, we didn’t get there all at once. It is a trend that many had already predicted in recent decades. The current state of affairs has been predictable for years and there have been voices that have done so, starting from huge or very small events, but all revealing this new fascism. I try to go back to the passages that were revealing for me”. He therefore summarizes these last 30 years of his life in a political analysis, starting from when: ”When I was twenty – he says – I read a reportage book by Gad Lerner, Workers. I take it from the library because I want to understand. Starting from Fiat, Gad talks about how the world of work has changed in the primary sector, its players and above all its ideology. The passage that struck me then told how the factory workers, structurally voting to the left, had gradually begun to give consent to the Northern League. The League was this stuff here, Bossi shouting that the League had it tough”. Thus comes the League ”an openly racist, anti-Southern, chauvinistic and separatist party for economic and fiscal reasons” but in his opinion ”the turning point was 2001. Don’t believe anyone who says it was the Twin Towers. The G8 in Genoa is a point of no return for my generation. State violence against the defenseless, the cover-ups, the death of Carlo Giuliani, the politicians who covered up the abuses, the culprits who made careers, the manipulated news, the trials full of lies.
Genoa has forever broken my trust in the democratic state. Ordinary people, adults and young people, of all backgrounds, asked the governments of the planet to pay more attention to people and less to goods. And they were victims of a mass beating by the police under the tolerant gaze of the Italian government. The government was an alliance between the Northern League, the National Alliance and Forza Italia”.
Then he cites ”the immigration law, the mother of all rejections, which is not by chance called Bossi-Fini”, ”the Biagi law, which made all jobs precarious outside the national sector contract”. ”Back then I wasn’t writing yet, I was a religion teacher in Sardinia, I was involved in politics like a citizen does: reading and voting. But I’m starting to think that Primo Levi was right. Every time has its fascism ”. Passing through precariousness, family day and the Englaro case. ”If we don’t see this fascism coming, it’s because we are not used to seeing fascism coming from a democracy. We have always seen it start from more or less dictatorial monarchies or instabilities. This is a relatively new path: “democracy”.
”What happens on the left in the meantime?” asks Murgia. ”Matteo Renzi proposed himself as a “democrator” with some success. This is because he attempted centralist reforms (fortunately he lost the constitutional referendum, imagine a similar instrument today in the hands of Meloni), he was a populist who disintermediates communication between “the boss” and “the people” (hashtag dilloamatteo on Twitter) , sues (or threatens to do so) journalists and intellectuals (hashtag colposucolpo ), and makes the rhetoric of merit and excellence his own (we should all be Marchionne) concretizing it in the Jobs Act. I know, now someone comes along and tells me: he did good things too. Like the law on civil unions. But it was exactly that law, from which the fundamental question of adoption within the LGBT couple was removed, that created the situation which today allows Meloni to erase the name of a parent from the public registers”. Finally, ”Giorgia Meloni arrives. He arrives when he can finally arrive without the masses finding him strange or dangerous. In summary, quoting Primo Levi again: “Every era has its fascism”. I finished”.
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