“There is an inside and there is an outside”: it is an expression used by the author of a book to describe a clear difference between two dimensions: that of those who look and that of those who are the object of the gaze.
It made me think. Looking at history is observing from out and from afar. In short, listen to those who say that only contemporaries can write it, because they are direct witnesses of a specific event. Even in the Resistance, whose work we remember today, there is a out and a inside. The out it is the rhetoric of celebration: a superstitious ritual that has, if nothing else, the duty (and perhaps also the power) to ward off tragic events such as that of the great war disaster that fell on the heads of our grandparents.
It is of these, however, the size of the inside. It belongs to our grandparents, or great-grandparents, or fathers. Today, even more than yesterday close to 2024 but closer to 1939, the difference in the size of the insideif we relate it to threats that we were not even remotely led to imagine.
This is how, accompanied by a sense of empathy from the news, sitting for Sunday lunch, or in the rush of our daily tasks, we superficially receive the aseptic news of lives canceled just a few dozen kilometers from the border of Europe. While there is Pope Francis overlooking the loggia of St. Peter’s begging for a ceasefire; or while marches for Peace are being planned, or while terrible images of war are circulating, between one performance and another at the Festival or when someone crosses the finish line of a Formula 1 Grand Prix.
Distracted, after all, because we are safe from the bombs. Because it’s a party anyway. Because we are Italian. Forgetting, brutally, that our grandparents, or great-grandparents, or fathers were Italian, who from one moment to the next were sucked into the horror of “inside”. Inside the war: they entered head and foot, in many cases without ever leaving it, obtaining as compensation a name written on a cold stone, like that of the War Memorial, too often outraged and offended. And with it its stories, with it those names, with it the lives they represented and the warmth they emanated.
Thinking, with due respect, of our grandfathers, or great-grandfathers or fathers, the word “resistance” takes on another contour. Resisting is not just passively waiting for the current to pass, bending like the rush of a Sicilian proverb. To resist is to act, to live, to look at things from within.
To resist is to exist twice: women and men who came into the world for love and accompanied by the grace of Chance, ready to listen to the voice within, that minority choice of our Don Tonino Bello, witness of peace in times of war. We would like more of Don Tonino Bello. More witnesses and fewer narrators. More peacebuilders. To redeem those who went to war in times when those in command forced you to go.
We need more Peace workers. That stone thrown into the middle of a pond that sinks but causes an imperceptible increase in the water level means that nothing is useless.
To resist is to exist without having to regret it. To resist is to reconcile and reconcile. To resist is to live like contemporary men that, although crossed by a rich swarm of technology, we are increasingly naked in the face of the irreconcilability of ancient and instrumental hatreds. Resisting is equivalent to teaching yourself how to overcome something that, in a few years, will seem absurd to us, just as our cars or our clothes, or our social media squabbles will seem absurd to us.
Resisting is medicine in the contemporary world. It is what allowed our elderly to look to the future with hope, when everything seemed lost. What do we have to lose by following this example?
I read and reread, with gratitude and emotion, stories and phrases of those who experienced that war first-hand, some reaching the end joy of Liberation, someone else who never returned from the front: some of our fellow citizens are giving it to me as a gift. Precious gesture. Real content. Some of these writings belong to names that are carved right here, like Faithful Moschetta, whose stories will be worth knowing one day. Thank you.
Some others are whose like Matteo Cannone or Pasquale Gissi, they actually went to war. Pasquale, 108 years old, is still among us. Tangible sign of that Resistance. Thank you!
With these letters, we have nothing to write further, nothing to imagine, to invent; nothing to deny. Here there is anti-fascism which is Resistance. Because without resistance there would still be fascism. Without ifs and buts. Is the story. With its “inside” and its “outside”.
Without Resistance there would still be fascism. You can’t be afraid to admit it. Not here, not from a position like this, not from this role of mine. Without Resistance there would still be fascism. And so Resisting, today more than ever, is everyone’s duty.
Happy Liberation Day to everyone.”
Thursday 25 April 2024
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