Marcello Veneziani criticizes the current trajectory of global politics and culture as leading towards societal decline, emphasizing the abandonment of common sense and the erosion of traditional values. It advocates for a reassessment of policies and ideologies to prevent what is seen as the impending self-destruction of civilization.
What world are they leading us into? Let’s summarize the situation for those who might have been distracted, lost the overall thread of the situation, or have just now come into contact with the world after living as automatons. According to what we’ve learned these days, we should go to war with Putin, turn a blind eye to the massacres in Gaza because they’re not a genocide, stop all attempts to stem migration flows, not celebrate our religious holidays but only Ramadan, amend the Constitution to no longer include the right to life but the right to abort, follow woke prescriptions in schools, universities, on social media, in family and in both public and private relationships, everywhere. Suggesting this catechism to us are not isolated pedants who have lost their minds, but in order the leaders of the European Union and some of its national governments, such as France; the United States, seen both as a superpower and military apparatus and as the Mecca of woke ideology, cancel culture, and political correctness; and then the media factories of public opinion, local and Western, schools and universities scattered throughout Italy and the entire West, and finally the personnel of the left wing. The real fallout of this degradation is there for all to see: go see what the capital of Europe, Brussels, has become to understand that words are followed by misdeeds, urban decay, and civil decline becomes daily life.
We live in an intensive and accelerated course in global stupidity, culminating in the issuance of a license that provides all the alibis and elements for the final suicide of our civilization and ourselves; preceded by the suicide of one’s identity, history, and tradition.
The elementary rules of living, the instinct for self-preservation and survival, the recognition of reality and our limits, the defense of one’s identity, dignity, and freedom of critical thought, and everything that saves life and intelligence, are violated, trampled, banned every day, from top to bottom. Moreover, we fail to see things as a whole and in the combined effect they produce when added together; we can only see them one piece at a time, in isolation and fragmentarily; and each thing, thus detached from the rest and the context, loses its negative charge which multiplies when combined with others. What’s the big deal about a public declaration of war, what’s the big deal about the abortion right entering the Constitution in France, what’s the big deal about a day skipped at a school attended by many children from Islamic families; what’s the big deal about censoring that parent, that teacher, that soccer player, that person? Local, circumscribed episodes.
Just using common sense in small things and a sense of reality in big things would suffice. Speaking of the former, for example, wouldn’t it have been easier to continue lessons at schools and exempt from class those who intend to observe rest for religious reasons on that day, rather than adapting the entire school to Islam? It wasn’t even about denying them their right to their holiday but not to subordinate our school to their belief.
Wouldn’t it have been simpler to disagree with the quote from David Hume by Professor Spartaco Pupo, explaining the reasons, rather than using the power of censorship and proposing absurd Jacobin punishments with immediate effect on his career and reputation? Moreover, wouldn’t it be more intelligent to separate the claim of truth about the Regeni case from the overall relations between states, and from the opportunity to stem the phenomenon of irregular immigration? Wouldn’t it be a sense of reality and honest critical judgment to recognize that Putin’s Russia is a false democracy but with real popular support, to acknowledge that despite our propaganda, Putin is winning in Ukraine, and to admit that we have always dealt with autocratic, despotic, totalitarian regimes and must deal with giants like China, which is certainly not a liberal democracy? Why be scandalized and scream of the West’s betrayal for those, like Salvini, who dared to say these things?
We wonder where this escalation of bellicose statements, this absence of a willingness to negotiate, vainly hoped for even by the Pope, will lead us? Do we realize that we are reaching the point of no return in this mad spiral of war? Are we aware that the West today can no longer dictate the world, establish right and wrong, but is one among others, and there are vast geographical areas, strong world powers, that are not aligned with our codes?
And what will it lead to within our society, this continuous, permanent censorious and punitive bigotry concerning everything about the relationships between men and women, the roles of parents and children, the languages of life and communication, historical memory, and the defense of our heritage? What material do they have in their brains (I have a suspicion) those inquisitorial professors who, by virtue of their ideological code of conduct at the university, order a colleague to remove a post containing a quote from an 18th-century empiricist philosopher, now reduced to a proponent of the “patriarchy” and enemy of feminism; from which the professor, his translator, was supposed to distance himself? I repeat, each single incident in itself means nothing, it’s a negligible detail, it cannot raise alarm, at most irony, a comment, and that’s it. But the accumulation and multiplication of these incidents create an atmosphere and contribute to changing a way of thinking and ultimately a world, especially when these micro-behaviors meet with the macro-behaviors of states and their leaders, up to the mobilization of laws and forces in service of these delusions. A cooling down, a critical brake, an intelligence filter is urgently needed; but above all, sovereign forces capable of countering the march of stupidity towards mass self-destruction are urgently needed.
La Verità, March 20, 2024
