Yesterday Il Fatto Quotidiano dedicated an entire page to the Manifesto for the West, the collective volume published by the publisher Guerini e associati edited by Giuseppe Valditara and Giampaolo Azzoni. For Il Fatto, it would be a “commercial for the West” based on scientifically inconsistent grounds. In what sense they are so is not clear from the article: the thesis is not argued, just as the interview accompanying it with Franco Cardini adds nothing. The distinguished professor also does not seem willing to engage with the contributions of the book. Above all, the distortion of the volume’s theses is striking.
To give an example, it is said that it states that colonialism and totalitarianism are only a “stumble” in the history of the West. False! The Manifesto talks about phenomena that contradict Western values. In fact, it is precisely these values that have allowed the West to critically read the dark pages of its history. In short, Il Fatto’s piece is anything but a serious, critical, argued review faithful to the content of the book. The authors care little about bringing the discussion to the scientific and cultural ground on which the Manifesto stands.
Is what comes out of this still journalism or is it something that resembles, not even too metaphorically, the Stalinist method popular in the old Soviet Union? In this work of delegitimization, with a quick and superficial investigation done on the web, Il Fatto even discovers (sic!) that some signatories of the Manifesto would be “very loyal and appointed by the dicastery” in various commissions. It even goes so far as to feed readers the fees, which are negligible, received for their technical and consultancy work. Obviously, it omits to say that these are not “friends” or passing characters, but among the most eminent representatives of national academic and scientific culture, who absolutely cannot be defamed as opportunists or mercenaries.
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There is also another substantial point to consider: the Manifesto is not born by chance, as a political marketing tool, but with the noble aim of outlining an organic vision of political reality and giving substance to the concrete government policies that should be implemented. Does the current political crisis not also depend on the lack of this surplus of cultural elaboration, on the deep awareness that has always accompanied the great seasons of history in the past? And is this deficit not precisely one of the deep causes of the crisis of the left, whose reference intellectuals are now mostly showmen or strongly ideologized writers and journalists who, closed in their self-referential world, can no longer interpret the world around them? A serious discourse that would not deserve to be thrown into chaos as the newspaper of Travaglio has done once again.
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