For their reading, the survival of daily newspapers rests on well-turned-over insights, on-site correspondents and, above all, on topics of general interest.
Themes always reiterated, even without the support of the news. One of these is numerical immigration, we don’t count its branches. But what do we want? Wars are not waged to move borders – social peace, if there ever was, is lost. It is in fact irrecoverable when there is a slender peninsula that exceeds sixty-one million inhabitants, one less than the other willing to give up anything in view of a dubious acceptable coexistence: and this is Italy, empty houses of life and filled with too many things; houses deserted from all superfluous and teeming with life, with noisy, ambiguous life.
It is ridiculous that there are sermons to make Italian families have more children, but there is a ghostly metaphysical reason. The individual man generally has a shortage of desire to die; the man-nation does not tolerate the idea of extinction. It tolerates well the extinction of environmental life, on which its duration in time depends, but criminal models would not be enough for its survival as a national community. Yet the Romans are perfectly extinct (those who are still called so Mommsen called them “Italians of Rome”) and according to Koestler also the twelve tribes of Israel. And the native Italians – capable for one time only of throwing on the world, given birth by a poor Tuscan peasant girl, the hypostatic figure of a Leonardo, and of thinking about politics with the determination of Machiavelli – have a good turn, for other centuries, with stroller: they will be as big as cemetery lizards. And this peninsula will have other masters, someone who would plant the cemetery of Pisa with cauliflowers out of hunger, others who out of fanaticism would blow up San Petronio to pull us up a minaret. Because history is like nature: it does not care for anything or anyone, it swallows and undoes everything, it is Sheòl and not a museum …
I can say this as an amateur of philosophy: if, on the other hand, I start thinking about immigration as a citizen without ideological blinders, a reflection can be the following, in brief thoughts. A state lacking in justice like ours, which continues to welcome, at the pace of the current year, maritime immigration from Africa and air land from all possible East (soon the Romanians alone will touch the million, the Turks tremble) in less by ten years it will have ceased to exist as an identifiable state entity. To the extent of the growth of uncontrollability and anarchy, region by region, city by city, Italy would become unlivable. The reduction of passably drinkable water resources and the frenzied increase in water consumption are enough to blow up the entire social system. Hygiene has also become a threat.
Not even a subdued doubt in the pan-media chorus that welcomed with jubilation the statistical information of the sixty-one million reached thanks (that’s right: thanks) to the sperm that comes from the sea. The sperm, if you don’t stop it, makes a biological bomb: what are you happy about, fool? For fear of being few, one operates in the sense of identity suicide, a prelude to disappearing.
The breaking of the uniformity of religious faith is welcome, as long as there is dispersion and variety of groups (in Italy, according to Introvigne, there are about seven hundred) and not the unbalancing pressure of the strongest of all (Islam) which has millions of followers , already all present and aims to convert, certainly not to resign themselves to living together. Talibanism has no borders.
Italy is (better to say: it has been) unspeakable urban landscapes and marine and alpine landscapes of Mozartian beauty. The loss of agricultural land and free space to promote housing at any cost, house after house, ugly neighborhoods, condominium ghettos, and limitless asphalt traffic is a spiritual defeat. Those who do not hate the truth can understand.
The right to political asylum is neither automatically nor objectively applicable; it is always questionable, and removing it from the Constitution would avoid useless and never disinterested controversies. Governments move along practical and cynical lines. Even bloody hands can claim asylum and immediately obtain it from ideologically similar governments. There is rarely an agreement for certainty of merit: demonstrable rights by those who do not even give certainty of name and origin there are none. You can recognize and satisfy only the anonymous eternal stomach that is hungry. And then?
Ungovernable, even from Utopias, is this world of crowds moving towards no possible world.
By Guido Ceronetti, Migrants and sermons, Editorials 2009, La Stampa Turin