“This is what is striking. The progressive indifference to the weight of the words: “And what did I ever say wrong?” The mounting wave of indifference towards those who are scandalized by racist insult.”
Where does the preconception come from? How ancient is the notion of foreigner? Who is the “different”? From where it comes from the need to to dig a moral-racial-social boundary with the other people? The essay by Stella offers a vast range of points of reflection:, to answer exhaustively to these and many other questions. A careful historical-journalistic analysis, with an essential style, able to reach the heart of the problem, without frills.
Of course, the main case study is Italy. A country with a lot of incoherences, almost impossible to understand. For centuries it has been a country of emigrants forced by hungry and poverty to seek their chance of a better life all around the world, yet forgetful when someone else knocked to its door looking for help against war and fame. Or at least this is the impression that is given by some political parties, that based their search for consensus on hate and stigmatization of the other people, the so called “different”.
Out of place nationalisms, scattered in the cultural subsoil of almost all the countries of the world, are re-creating a negative political landscape. In the European Union we can daily see these examples. So we have anachronistic dreams of those who would like to recreate the Great Hungary against Romanian minorities, or those who would like to recreate the Great Romania against Hungarian minorities. A total contradiction in terms, that managed somehow to gain more and more consensus.
The book was published in 2009, and we read an updated edition in 2011. Two years heavy like one hundred years. Today, ten years after the first edition, it seems that geological ages were passed, due to the evolution (or regression?) of the world. Almost everything in the political-social language has been accepted against those who are thought to be “different”.
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Gian Antonio Stella, Negri, froci, giudei & co., Rizzoli, Milano, 2009
