It is time for a severe counter-narrative, because no one will come to save us from pandemic communism
It was in the furious running of death and disease through the narrow streets of Oran that everything, freedom, love, empathy, hugs, contemplation of silence and beauty, was sacrificed on the altar of efficiency. : Albert Camus, in "The Plague" , notes it in a painful but ineluctable way, as if every pandemic were forced to bring out the worst, and most mechanical and servile, aspect of the human soul.
The social organization is functionalized towards a single purpose, that of survival, and in this shady hole the temptations to give some direction to society itself, to make it become something else: these are basically the expectations nurtured by Minister Speranza who in his The book, hastily withdrawn from trade, glimpsed the nuances of an opportunity for the full-scale return of leftist hegemony.
And there is a point, again in that book, an authentic manifesto of pandemic communism, understood as welfare hyper-nationalization, capillary public control and cultural leveling devoted to the utmost sanitary precaution, which sounds significant: the laudatory paean of the media that they produced an authentic "whole nation mantra" . If you are familiar with George L. Mosse's work on the nationalization of the masses, you will realize, perhaps with a shiver down your spine, that a nationwide mantra propitiated with a single media narrative is a very dangerous slope.
Because the power, more and more often, to govern in a careful and capillary way does not need to repress or use the iron mallet; the awe determined by making us believe, as Camus noted, that everything must and can be sacrificed to the utmost precaution, the only totem capable of exorcising the rage of the new plague.
" A government of terror works less well overall than a government that, by non-violent means, manipulates the environment and the thoughts and feelings of individuals, men, women and children, " wrote Aldous Huxley in "Back to the New World" .
The reality of the facts is that for two years now we have been literally engulfed by an abyss in which, like the torture of the drop that digs the flesh and dulls the senses, we are inundated by a continuous series of emotional pornography, statistics and data on infections, vocation to medical martyrdom, grief and suffering and cacophonous voices of politicians who preach limitations, restrictions, prohibitions, commands.
In this abyss every instant is an eternal and mechanical reiteration of a pandemic time zone, always fixed and stopped at zero point: life does not proceed, it is hibernating, only the sense of suffering flows that the mass media send back in a continuous jet.
Photocopied newspaper headlines, news that occupy three quarters of the news, seriality in the way of approaching information increasingly similar to propaganda: 'let's close to save … ' to which you inevitably add some holiday particularly dear to the popular spirit, or headlines that incorporate words like 'horror', 'terror', 'tragedy', hyperbole of mourning and tears. It is now a matter of format , of a lava flow of communicative desperation that ends up making the real indistinguishable from the magnified, the truth from the intention.
With this methodology, criticism of the policies adopted has been passed over in silence and dissent has often been literally criminalized, relegating it to a factor of disturbance of the unity of the people, gloriously on the march in defeating the pandemic.
The problem with this narrative is that, when it begins to be confined to Italy alone, as it is actually happening, we will be condemned to become an island completely separate from the rest of the world, closed to the return to life and the flourishing of the economy, abandoned to ourselves and socially, culturally, mentally, economically regressed.
Already Sanchez and England announce the arrival of the endemization of the virus, the need to live with it without nullifying the social fabric. Bloomberg echoes them. And already within the European institutions the same idea is beginning to settle.
What will happen then? That, quite simply, when the whole world reopens to life, while in Italy we will be reduced to living under a cloak of pandemic terror artificially kept alive, no one will hesitate to rush to the rescue of our disastrous society: not there. 'European Union, nor the other countries which have returned to life are not already able to understand the meaning of the more restrictive measures in force in our country.
The restrictive measures, at the end of the pandemic on a global scale, will strangle what remains of our economy and our psychic balance, without being able to expect any more support since at that point the damage will no longer be caused by the pandemic but by bans and by a certain pernicious Covid-zero culture.
It is therefore time for a serious and severe counter-narrative on the pandemic, which, drawing on exactly what other countries are doing, highlights the contradiction, and the objective danger, of some restrictive measures that are objectively condemning us. It is time to give the coronavirus the right media space and not let it drown any other news.
In international press reviews, the pandemic is present but does not occupy seventeen pages of the newspaper or twenty minutes out of thirty of the news, it does not indulge in parapornographic terms or horror stories: in Italy, in fact, there is only Covid , which envelops everything and everything swallows, just like the Camusian plague. Covid colonizes sport, invades culture and entertainment, engraves itself in the local news. A black eddy that swirls over our heads, narrowing every horizon and eliminating every perspective.
Precisely for this reason, it becomes necessary to break this flow, alter the imbalances and the supporting architecture, make fear return to the nook that belongs to it.
Do you really think that, in a gloomy climate of oppression and limitations, emotional now even before legal, restaurants, hotels, tourist routes, museums, concerts, cinemas will return to crowd? An exhausted, submissive, subjugated social body by this narrative of death is afraid of its own shadow and often can't wait to take refuge in the comfortable warmth of home, far from a world that it imagines as being traversed by the ghosts of contagion.
When a few days ago, during Tg2 , the minister of tourism, Massimo Garavaglia, tried to make people understand how, while not underestimating the contagion, it is necessary to return to live, precisely in order not to find ourselves suddenly cut off from everything. wandering in a black desert of misery, the mayor of Florence, Dario Nardella, who is also the mayor of a city of art very penalized by these measures, immediately rekindled the refrain of pandemic fear: and to think that the cities of art, statistically, they are the most affected and massacred by certain measures, annihilated in the tourist indicators.
Yet no one here says that Covid does not exist, that it is not dangerous or other similar nonsense: but at the same time, exactly as Spain, Bloomberg , England and many other countries or civilized commentators claim, it is time to become aware of the fact that from a on the other hand there is not only Covid and on the other hand it is necessary to reconcile health with economic, social and mental survival.
Mental too, yes. The statistics are disheartening. More and more young people accuse mental and emotional illnesses, self-harm temptations or a vocation to commit suicide. What world are we building? A chilling world, prone, fearful, gloomy, gray, devoid of any color and beauty.
A world of pandemic communism in which only equal distribution of misery and mental distress will triumph.
The post It's time for a severe counter-narrative, because no one will come to save us from pandemic communism appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL https://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/e-tempo-di-una-severa-contronarrazione-perche-nessuno-ci-verra-a-salvare-dal-comunismo-pandemico/ on Fri, 14 Jan 2022 03:51:00 +0000.