Today I opened the website of one of Berlusconi's newspapers, Il Giornale. Some days ago there was a huge demonstration in Rome for freedom of information, and I was curious to have a look at one of those papers I never read. Well, Berlusconi says that since he started doing politics, he never even picked up the phone to overlook his immense media empire... in fact everyone knows this is a lie, a lie as big as his mediatic figure. Il Giornale is own by his brother, and here is what I found.I found an article about a declaration given by the Ministry for Gender Equality Mara Carfagna, who said she will soon make a law to ban Burqa and Niqab - two popular Islamic shrouds that let not see anything of the wearer - in all schools of the country. I was shocked at this, especially at the thought that some people may think this is a issue at all in Italy these days. I mean, I lived there for over 20 years of my life, and on and off after that, and I have never seen a Burqa or anything like that. All my muslim friends from schools were even more Italians than I am. Both me and my brother had muslim classmates that would eat pork at the school's canteen, something that I am not doing anymore since years. I have barely seen "normal" shrouds around, and I think nobody of my age would ever think this is a problem.The only time I got shocked by a shroud is when I first left Italy for a long time in 2006, and in the hyperliberal and ultra-Americanized Norway I was suddenly surrounded by Somali women covered in a fashion I had only seen on picture before. As a matter of fact, most women who dress that way are from Eastern Africa, curiously, from the same countries that were colonized by Italy until WW2. For some reason, migrants from these countries are extremely rare in Italy, which is mainly the target of immigration from Northern Africa and Pakistan, and concentrate greatly in Scandinavia. For another irony of history, these people are all victims of a bloody war that has plagued the Ethiopian borders with Eritrea and Somalia, a border being the symbol of a hatred that fascist Italy fed and exploited. The problem is that now Italy is far away from these problems, and having mostly to do with large numbers of people from Western Africa and Arabs, has forgotten that it bears political responsibility in a corner of the African Continent that has been in a terrible war ever since the Italians left. Italian rule in East Africa was rude, but there was not only that. Like in numerous other colonial dominions in the Continent, places with high ethnic, cultural, religious diversity were ruled in such a way that the foreign ruler eventually became the only factor of stability in the region - and it goes without saying, colonial rule has its own means to keep "stability". For example, Italian rule created Eritrea in a region where at least a dozen different ethnic groups have historically been living together. Eritrean troops prooved to be very loyal, and were mass employed for invading the Ethiopian Empire, a soveraign state that according to international regulations, nobody had the right to invade (all other were somehow "for sale"). Much later, after the war, the UN, who had temporarily given Eritrea to the British, decided that it should no longer exist and Eritrea became an Ethiopian province. The story in Somalia is not much different: there, the Italians had promised the Somalis (who are a huge minority today in Ethiopia) to unite them again under a big Italian-ruled Somali province. This plan died with WW2 and there has always been great tension between the Ethiopian-Somali border, and political instability in Somalia.Being so blind against the manifestation of another culture, that is being absorbed into the Italian way of living anyway (and not without problems), means to ignore Italy's own history and responsibilities in the first place, and secondly, it means ignoring what is going on in other European countries that have managed immigrations in a different way. Plus, a refugee is not an immigrant; an immigrant should be someone that wants to expatriate, and the element of exploring a new culture and a new way of living is dominant. A refugee is someone that was forced to leave his country for safety reasons. How can our law be so irrespectful of this basic difference? I have seen more veils and burqas and niqabs in a few months without even going to Africa, than the average Italian will see in his life; and the difference is that he is afraid, and I'm not. I'm not afraid of diversity. I'm afraid of bigotry and ignorance. And of a country that has a totally distorted idea of his own traditions. Maybe I'm a romantic, but I am deeply convinced that going to an organic store (or directly to the market) and buy some local vegetables with a tissue bag is an immensely bigger sign of love for your own land than any campaign against veiled women.People say veils conceal stories of women repressed from their husbands and relegated to the outskirts of society, sometimes even sexually mutilated. Maybe. But are these people really isolating themselves, or are they afraid of us Westeners? I can understand them so well, if they are. I can understand why they set up their intercontinental TV-sets and prefer watching TV programmes from the other end of the world, where there are no stupid naked women who do nothing but smile, and men who treat them like shit, and all this sponsored by the government and tolerated by the Vatican in return of political influence. I understand all those people from faraway countries that think that Italy is a decaying country, which looks very little like a democracy, and still wants to teach other people how they should live. I admire all those who, by leading a simple life, managed to have a decent life where the victims of consumerism cannot.I have always respected other people's opinions, even when they are radically different from mine. I have always been a relativist, and thought that the way I think is given by the way my life turned out, and if something had gone even slightly different, I would think different today, maybe like one of those whom I politically despise. But if a certain number of issues is just left to our interpretation, one the other hand there are some issues where factors like ignorance come into play. We are ignorant because we are kept ignorant, and ignoring the signals that should allow us to change such hideous state of mind is a crime. And we are ignorant because we ignore the world around us, just like today's ruling class is ignoring foreign press which is describing Italy as Europe's last dictatorship, together with Belarus. The best argument that the government can produce is that "the government is an institution empowered by the people itself, and criticizing it means to object one of the basic democratic principles". The reason why nobody really takes this claim seriously, I believe, is not only because of the governmental control on nearly all media, but also because people are not completely ignorant. And they know, for example, that both Belarus and, take, Nazi Germany are/were democratically elected governments, while Italians always hid behind the excuse that Fascism took power by force, as if nobody had ever been fascist.
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