Have you ever been tempted by that fake handbag while strolling in Florence? Did you glance at that remarkably well reproduced Rolex in a Capri pizzeria at dessert time?
There’s much more on offer in Italy, but only for locals. Especially for young locals, or not so attentive baby-boomers. Why should they go through the long decision process and high cost of getting something genuinely authentic, when they can have a fake?
A fake history, for home consumption.
The people who lived WWI and WWII are completing their bow in the sky of life. They can tell the difference between the real stuff and the counterfeited. Some want to shed light, others don’t. But many do not recognize the events they have lived anymore in what is reflected by the media.
There are just too many occasions in which politicians and journalists behave asymmetrically, with selective memory and amnesia. And other cases they draw symmetry where there is no symmetry at all. They want to confuse our ideas on history. They are faking it. They are PATACCARI.
There are too many journalists who are interviewed on TV by other journalists. A mirror game, you quote me, I quote you back. In the TV interviews some journalists have under their name the “member of parliament” label. Others carry the solemn caption of “historian”.
I thought historians were scholars studying documents in universities, doing research, year after year…not people who did word-crunching for a living. But it is sure that now anybody, politicians and journalists on top, can claim to have a chair at a university in our poor country. Wiki-them, they depict themselves as “historian and journalist…”. So the circle is closed. Tout se tient. These people will write the history books. They are doing it already. After so much boots-licking and microphone-holding, they deserve a comfy office.
If you want to see footage on historical events in Italy, you can try Istituto Luce or RAI Teche. Do send an email to Luce in order to access historical filmed material. They will never answer to you. Try to ask to access the same at RAI. It is locked away by the “managers”, for their private cut-and-paste of history.
There are still journalists who wear out their shoes doing their metier. There are citizens who were witnesses or victims, who speak out (about Genova). BBC in 1989 produced two films on the fascism and we never got to see them. God save YouTube!
Paolo Rumiz is a journalist doing his job of investigating infinite shades of grey, and not selling ready-made all-black or all-white easy solutions from a chair in a university. Here are two articles – in italian I am sorry. They both cover the theme of the day, the foibe. And the asymmetries, forced symmetries, distorted memories, in a word, the fake history.
On the first article, he describes the fascist lagers in Italy. In the second, dated as of today, he reminds us that the Risiera di SanSabba was a nazi lager – because Triest was part of the reich – and so the parallel between foibe and Risiera is a nonsense.
But some politicians (and many journalists) don’t even know where Triest is on the map. Like with the poor woman dead today after 17 years of forced feeding, they just USE people, USE history instrumentally…and forget about them when they have reached their objectives. Their objectives? look where the fakes take you. Follow the tread…tout se tient. Triest is the key. They are looking for friction, and Triest has always been the perfect ignition point.
Both articles are on bora.la
Rumiz sulla rimozione della memoria storica in Italia
I volonterosi carnefici del duce
We’re just back from Berlin, after this fantastic long week-end dedicated to the fall of the wall. Our digital camera is in ER, so let’s hope that our reflex did a good job…photos in a few days, like in 1989!
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and I was in love with both John Taylor and Simon Le Bon of Duran Duran. Geez…I could not make up my mind! In Cold War attire, Le Bon had a bon enfant sovietique spy attitude.
The Bar Necci will reopen tomorrow night in the quartiere Pigneto, only 14 days after the arson attack. The same builders and carpenters who refurbished it have re-created the caffé, apparently only the original wallpaper was impossible to source but all the rest should be there!
