Soundtrack – La Stampa

Ignazio La Russa invited Antonio Scurati to write a trilogy on Stalin, after having written the one on Mussolini, and reminded me of the story of the singer Shervin Hajipour, arrested for having written a song on the crimes of the Iranian theocracy and freed as long as he also wrote one against the crimes of the United States. Of course La Russa is not an ayatollah, the United States is not Stalin’s Soviet Union and Scurati is not Hajipour, who did not write the song about American crimes and was therefore sentenced to three years and eight months in prison. He is serving them in Evin, the Tehran prison where many of the boys and other artists in revolt against the sharia dictatorship are detained, including the rapper Toomaj Salehi, sentenced to death for war against God and corruption on earth, crimes committed with his songs as the soundtrack to the most moving and overlooked popular rebellion I have ever witnessed. As Azar Nafisi wrote, Iranian girls want to hold hands, laugh, wear lipstick, and for this they are arrested, raped, killed. I will never cease to be amazed at the Italian indifference in the face of such a great and heartbreaking tragedy, which for once the newspapers are not associated with, and in particular ours which never stops reporting. Yesterday for Toomaj there was just an appeal from Club Tenco, in the middle of nowhere. But I don’t impose my obsessions on anyone: everyone spends their time doing what they can and what they believe in. As you read this piece, Toomaj may have already been hanged or will be hanged in the next few days, with silence as the soundtrack.