“Mein Kampf” and my newspaper
domenica 12 giugno 2016 English 0 commenti
Il Giornale, June 12, 2016I want to voice my disappointment for distributing Mein Kampf with yesterday's newspaper, and I do thank the editor for allowing me to express what I feel and think without any pretense, as he usually does, on his pages.
I look at the cover of Mein Kampf, the red stripe, the black swastika, and they smell death. I do not like my newspaper giving out this disgusting item. To my eyes, it's simply the picture a thousand images –the images of Auschwitz, of the Jewish children showing the number on their arm, of the dead piled up on wagons and in ditches. And it cannot be anything different, non culture, no history, just death, murder, genocide.
No matter how much that book may be studied, as its historical significance is factual, not cultural. It speaks of my own death (if only I was there at that time), of the death of my Polish grandfather, of his wife, of my Polish and Italian uncles and little children.
His reading is unequivocal: reading its miserable pages means to encounter the reiterated idea of the necessary extermination of the Jews, along with the excitement with which the German world, embraced such a goal. So many intellectuals, philosophers, writers, and musicians fell prey to the fascination of connecting mass murder with a territorial expansion policy for the search of the German "living space".
And that text is not dead nowadays. Hundred thousands of copies are downloaded on the internet, and it circulates plentifully in the Arab world side by side with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a best seller among Palestinians. Golda Meir told that copies of the Protocols were found in the backpacks of Egyptian soldiers in 1956, and those who enter an Arab bookstore today will almost surely find it.
To be clear, I would prefer my newspaper not to be associated with this book, even if director Sallusti explained his antinazi motivations in the front page column ("you have to know evil to be able to fight it") supported by the distribution of William Shirer’s text, a classic of the interpretation of Nazism, and by the introduction of Perfetti, a prominent antifascist historian. Myself, I wish to reiterate for the sake of honesty what I have already stated several times: I refuse the legal criminalization of the filthy Shoa denial. Even this perversion must be expressed, read, narrated, and interpreted –and the enemy must be beated in the war of ideas, not in tribunals.
There is no text in the world not even the most repulsive, that must be burned, there is no idea that should be closed behind bars, not even the most gloomy. I affirm it as a person on whose chest a satirical cartoonist applied a Star of David and a fascist simbol, and whom the anti-Semitic right and left show in their social network as one of the leaders of the tentacular Zionist international conspiracy.
Moreover, the most active Nazi genocidal antisemitism is not the one upheld by the nauseating, boring, and confusing Mein Kampf – and I really would like to know how many people will keep reading it beyond the first two pages, unless they are already driven by fanaticism. James Surowiecky writes on the New Yorker that it is no more than a miserable chapbook revealing who Hitler was indeed: just a dull, bitter, envious, and traumatized loser.
Today’s danger is to be found, unfortunately, in a thousand lurid cartoons whereby the Jews-Zionists form a single evil entity, nose, nails, rockets as by the Nazi tradition, and the mouth dripping the blood of slaughtered children. I could show the images I am referring to one by one, but I have seen nobody standing up around here, in Europe, shouting that this is unacceptable.
The major risk of a forbidden text, though, is to make it a universal taboo that clandestine masses secretly still read through their computers downloading thousands and thousands of copies. Don't hide it: if you launch it into the air, it has more chance of being riddle with shots in a confrontation. Don't hide it. But of course now my same newspaper must be ready to show and distribute, doing the same critical exercise, the charter of ISIS, or Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book. Of course, no moral or numerical comparison here. I am just speaking of horrible books.