Willy, rage is rampant in an Italy that no longer educates its children

Willy’s funeral, today, the funeral of a nation that he no longer knows how to educate or protect his children, where, as Walter Veltroni wrote in this newspaper, the risks of dissolution are accelerating. And hate to hate, an underrated epidemic, to act as a solvent for that social glue that has turned us into a respectable and respected democracy. I hate those who are different, those who come from outside, the fat, the weak, women, the disabled, those who try to oppose the law of the strongest, who do not fall, at least not yet no, among the laws that we have given ourselves as a nation.

Look at it and look at it, please, the photo of Willy Monteiro Duarte at school, with a denim shirt, the high tonality of the frizzy hair, so smiling and happy, so sweet towards life and the classmates who were by his side. He was 21 years old, working as a cook apprentice and dreamed of being a soccer player. He was a good boy, an Italian from Cape Verde, which is like saying Italian from Ascoli or Biella. Maybe the amber color of his skin doesn’t even have to do with it,. even if skin color starts to make a difference again, for the worse for those who are not white.

Chronicles of these days. In Lecce, at the ceremony of awarding honorary citizenship to Yvan Sagnet, a Cameroonian worker’s rights activist, the center-right (center?) Left the town hall in protest. In a meeting in Ostrava, Yeman Crippa, a middle distance blue, born in Ethiopia from Trentino, sets the new national record in 5,000 meters and from social networks they want him to end up as Zanardi (which among other things, thank God, is getting better). Luca Caprini, councilor of the Lega in Ferrara, policeman and trade unionist, investigated for liking a post on Facebook where Hitler and the crematoriums sang to attack the singer Sergio Sylvestre, an African-American, guilty of crippling Mameli’s anthem in a match of soccer. The phrase that appealed to his tastes: But that man with the mustache who used the ovens no longer exists.

Yes, say: social media junk, an escape from a bad mood and worse instincts. And by minimizing, circumscribing, reducing Nazi hooliganism to the jokes or exuberance of a young man in search of a future more glorious than the one that awaits him, one becomes accomplices of a mutation of which the night of Colleferro a non-secondary station, an alarm siren that we pretend not to hear.

In one of the interviews that he kindly gave for his ninety years, Liliana Segre, senator for life and victim of Auschwitz, does not minimize: the end of that boy a shipwreck of civilization. Then remember how the nightmares of history are born: Unfortunately I have seen how you start to hate someone and how you teach how to do it, first by ridiculing the person, then by harassing. And from violent words, the next step is violent deeds, up to the point of killing. Jews in Hitler’s Germany made up 0.75 percent of the population. The Germans were convinced that the main cause of their problems was precisely the members of that small percentage.

It was rekindled in these sad days, between the torchlight processions for Willy and the circumstantial phrases of the political leaders, a moldy debate: kicking and punching that good boy one of the signs of the return of a certain fascist mentality? How to certify in which historical category Colleferro’s night of shame falls can put some souls at peace. Of course, the paraphernalia of so many words sown in this election campaign tends to fan the growing fire of anger, rather than quenching it. Extremely documented field investigations (Paolo Berizzi concentrated them in his latest book) show how many extreme combat gyms, such as those frequented by those arrested for the Willy massacre, are incubators for the extreme right, especially of young people. The headlines of some newspapers, for example about the attack on Salvini by a Congolese woman who tore off his shirt and rosary, also joke with fire, with the person responsible for the unjustifiable aggression turning black (better than black, if we are satisfied ).

Is a new fascism brewing? So many attitudes and so many omissions contribute, and not a little, to the leavening of a phenomenon that promises violent tears to the feelings and values ​​shared, at least not so long ago, by our country. This phenomenon could be called splascism., relative of Italy in orbace, of the Menefrego, of the presumed (very presumed) Italian superiority, but with a characteristic that the masses docile to the Duce did not have: infidelity to everything and everyone, except themselves, and their own flock. . nourished, fascism, from almost physical impatience to any rule, including masks. It allows itself to be filled with slogans that simplify, to the point of brutalizing it, the complexity of the moment the world is experiencing, and Italy suffers more than others. And it feeds on dreams, on fascism, after all: lots of money with little effort, zero sense of duty, no availability at the slow pace of sacrifice. They are hearts, many hearts full of nothing, that must be disinfected, like the environments now that the virus is present. But very few and very few attempts.

Next to Willy’s photograph, try putting one of his supposed executioners, with fierce faces on sculpted bodies, with clothes, accessories and settings that are not compatible with honestly earned income: It is striking that there are two Italian women who cannot communicate and perhaps do not even cohabit. The tragedy that the second is boastful, but it seems that it only worries the unshakable loyalty of the rudiments of the Constitution, of the Charter of the rights of men and women. The fact that Prime Minister Conte attends the funeral of Willy Monteiro Duarte, dressed in the ideal white T-shirt or T-shirt as requested by his father Armando, makes us feel less alone, just a little comforted.