In April fifty years ago a boy died after a long agony. It was called Sergio Ramelli. He was a militant of the Youth frontthe youth organization of the national right, Milanese, had written a class theme on the terrorism of Red Brigades.
A small group of students of Avant -garde worker He published his theme on the bulletin board at the school entrance, accompanying him with an inscription: «Here is the theme of a fascist». Then he was attacked, punching and spit, mocked and delighted, until the writing appeared “Ramelli Fascist you are the first on the list». And one evening, while returning home, he was attacked by four militants of the far -left group who hit him with the wrench Until the skull to break it and left him in a pool of blood on the pavement. Then, after a few weeks of agony, Sergio died.
I was then his own age, and I had also been a militant boy of the youth front, to my country. I felt that he had also been killed with him a part of meI could have written the same theme and I also exposed myself with the tricolor flag in the squares and my ideas at school; But I was lucky enough to live in a less hot place, where the English key was not used, and where words rarely made lethal weapons, scuffles broke out. Today that boy remember manynot only right; Also Walter Veltroni He remembered it, and he honors him.
Recently Giuseppe Culicchia He dedicated a nice book to him in which he reconstructed the story and the terrible climate of those days. Is entitled Kill a fascist (Mondadori).
April, the most cruel of the months
Always in April, «The most cruel of the months»According to TS Eliot, in Rome, Two years earlier Two boys had been slaughtered, indeed a boy and brother, an 8 -year -old boy, guilty of being children of the local secretary of the section of Social movement. They were burned at home them, while sleeping, in what will be remembered as the First valley storage. The killers were the militants of Worker. It was a popular house, it was a humble family, with six children, it could be a massacre with multiple victims. They were called Virgil and Stefano Mattei.
Other names of victims of violence grant me but I avoid listing them. On many of them, apart from the rituals of the militants and their names mentioned in the rallies and Missini posters, he calmly silent and silenceas if they were children of a minor God, or worse than an evil God, cursed victims, including that 8 -year -old boy.
I leave the accusations and recriminations alone, in a season he had Many victims among the boys on the right but also on the leftas well as among the young people in uniform, the police. But I would like to see that they were victims of a war never bornof an aborted revolution; victims of a clash in which there were criminals and victims, but there were no winners or won, because in the end neither triumphed nor the communist revolution of their executioners nor the ideal revolt of those young neo -fascists.
It is terrible to die in a civil war but more terrible it is to die in time of peace; When you participate in a civil war you know what you can meet because you know that you are fighting for a cause and in a challenge in which one will triumph over the other. But in the case of the years of lead and the violence that raged in the seventies, there is also the mockery of one inconclusive historywho had no results, if not the Victory of the status quo And of a world that was not liked by victims or executioners.
Their sacrifice it served nothingnot even for cynical and merciless purposes of history. Power remained unchanged, the governments continued to succeed the same formula, with the same protagonists; Political power did not suffer from it. To use the jargon of time, won the systemthat both adversed even with different motivations.
Their only motivation was paradoxically retroactive: it was a residual account of the civil warwho now turns 80; those boys died in the name of the past, of a past that they had not knownthe fascist regime and the partisan war, and the aborted hope of a revolution after the resistance, the advent of a communist, proletarian regime, which never saw the light Nor would he ever see it, because the world at that time stood down to a rigid division, decided to Yalta.
So the reason for their war was purely retroactive and symbolicconcerned thirty years earlier and another generation, and in any case He could not have changed the set national and world structures. Pure grudge remained in the air of time. Pure accounts of hatredpermanence of the high livery to anthropological category, without any reason to be, without any future and no present.
And how much that hatred has still been circulating, it demonstrates yet another train of our days. Which still dates back to A blood of bloodnot thirty years ago but even of eighty years ago. Was denied the title of a Rotonda in Florence to the greatest Italian philosopher of the twentieth century, Giovanni Gentileon which we have often written and of which in these days a very dense and human portrait of his life in the family has come out: it is entitled The Gentile family. Letters and photographs from 1900 to 1945a full -bodied volume published by the editions The letters, of the grandchildren of the killed philosopher.
The mayor of Florence, the mayor of Florence, was denying the toponymy naming to the philosopher, Sara Funaro of the Democratic Party. Forgetting the humanity of his grandfather, Piero Bargellinithe mayor of Florence at the time of the flood, the Christian Democratic and political writer, the mayor* (or/a) in office for the city in which he lived and died kind, rejected the proposal taking it with his right to the government that “still gaze turned to the worst years of our past”.
I would not like to remember, once again, Gentile’s consistency and humanityhis role as a peacemaker who took on in the middle of the world and civil war, his defense of anti -fascists and Jewsits distance from Nazism; I just say it was A great philosopheras few are there in the course of centuries, and which was recognized as such by great scholars of each side; He was a great Minister of Educationfounder of important cultural institutions, such as theItalian Encyclopedia Treccani.
And I add that with the miserable criterion of canceling the memory of those who have had ties with harmful powers, we should delete the memory of Seneca because he was a councilor of Nero; and even that of the two greatest philosophers of antiquity, Platowho was the councilor of the tyrant of Syracuse, and Aristotlethe “master of color they know”, who was the tutor of a ruthless emperor as Alessandro Magno. And we could continue hunting over the centuries.
This yet another petty example of Cancel Culture shows how much barbarism is still operating in our time; How much hatred is still active And regurgitant, like a permanent vomiting, on our history, on our thoughts, on our civilization and humanity.
The world changes too much, time runs quickly, but They are still therestopped, to spit on the dead and deny honored burial even to the largest. Ergo Sum vomitingis now their code of life and theirs heraldic motto.
