"Let's go beat up the blacks"(Pomigliano, Naples). “'You niggers, you can't stay here, if you don't leave it's your business!"(Tarquinia, Viterbo). "I'm not going to be visited by a black man!"(Cantù, Como). "Gas for the blacks"(Gran Sasso Island, Teramo). "We can't stop while you niggers are here!"(Pavia). "Dirty nigger, I hate niggers!"(Riccione, Rimini). These are all sentences uttered within a handful of days after the statement made last January by Attilio Fontana (Northern League), current Governor of the Lombardy Region, on the sidelines of an event in Briosco, in the province of Monza and Brianza: “We have to decide whether our ethnicity, whether our white race, whether our society should continue to exist or whether it should be erased.“. It is absolutely no coincidence, therefore, that the far-right movements, in our country, are constantly growing. Current acronyms include: CasaPound, Forza Nuova (national), Veneto Fronte Skinheads, Do.Ra. and Fortezza Europa (Veneto), Lealtà e Azione, Skin4Skin, Hammerskin, Generazione Identitaria and Manipolo d'Avanguardia (Lombardy), Avanguardia Nazionale, Rivolta Nazionale and Militia (Rome). What's happening to us Italians?? We weren't "Italians good people“, as Polish actress Kasia Smutniak said in an interview that was later exploited?
We therefore asked some specific questions, exclusively for Sociologicamente, to Luca Massidda , PhD in Communication and New Technologies and professor of Sociology of Political Phenomena and Sociology of Social Security and Deviance at the University of Tuscia. His latest book, Post Politica. Morfologia di una campagna elezioni social (Post Politics. Morphology of a Social Election Campaign ), was published in 2019 by FrancoAngeli. He is therefore one of the leading experts in the field.
Is our society a racist society?
"Certainly ours is a society that is rediscovering itself once again strongly xenophobicIn this repetition of history, we might have expected a discontinuity. The 2007 crisis is the first to emerge in a world that, as we said before, seemed to have definitively established the social and political illegitimacy of racial discrimination. At least on a formal level. The election of Obama, which had just turned two years old the day Martin Luther King told the crowd in Washington his dream of equality, seemed to be its consecration. In society. In politics. In the imagination. And yet, once again, the answer to thesocial insecurity and failures of globalization It was that of nationalist insurance. Close the borders, protect the borders, raise the walls. The sovereignist-populist turn of the 21st century, has once again taken the shortcut of xenophobia to try to release its tensions. Not only has the affirmation of the post-material value system, challenged by yet another structural crisis in the global economy, failed to stem the recomposition of the nationalism/xenophobia duo, but rather, it is precisely around the rejection of that universe of values and the political culture that supported it that the new reactionary offensive of ethnocentric populisms of the 21st century has organized itself. The narrative of immigration as a social emergency, a narrative that has worryingly spilled over from populist rhetoric into public, political, and mainstream discourse, has thus become the main argument for comprehensively calling into question an entire system of values. Of this uncivilized cultural revisionism, the immigrant is the first victim, but risks not being the only one".
Why is it that when we commemorate the victims of concentration camps and the foibe, there is a resurgence of racist sentiment throughout the world?
"The use of the foibe as a revisionist rhetorical argument is certainly not new. The problematic aspect today, however, once again, is the level of diffusion and the degree of legitimacy this position can count on. A position that does not so much aim to normalize fascism, but rather—in some respects, perhaps more worryingly—to to disown anti-fascism as a fundamental historical legacy for the construction and definition of our national political identity. Anti-fascism has even become a disvalue: those who claim its legacy become the target of political derision, 'mocked' by populist hucksters for their inability to free themselves from an ideological perspective that would no longer be of any use in interpreting the present time, its problems, and its conflicts. Anti-fascism is therefore identified as a empty political category, the mask that the hypocrisy of do-goodism and political correctness wears to attempt to give itself historical dignity. Thus, potentially, it ends up in the garbage disposal of populist rhetoric, along with other principles and rights, both social and civil, laboriously recognized in the post-materialist shift of late modernity.".
Read first part of the interview.
Read second part of the interview.
Giulia Marra & Marino D'Amore
© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
