“I’m sorry to be dragged into such a vulgar and base controversy, dragged into a mud fight” are the words of Antonio Scurati, guest by Fabio Fazio a What’s the weather like, welcomed with rock star applause after ending up in the middle of an affair “distant from his being”, as Fazio underlines, he who is a scholar, a professor, a writer.
And “I hope to continue to be a scholar, a professor, a writer, a family man” says Scurati immediately starting to reconstruct the story which in recent days has seen him at the center of controversy over the censorship of his monologue of 25 April which it should have been broadcast on Rai3 What will be Of Serena Bortone. A monologue that the writer instead read in Naples at Repubblica delle Idee, which then ended up in all the newspapers and also taken up by the international press.
Antonio Scurati: “The illiberal turning point has already begun”
by Raffaella De Santis
“I thought that Rai was everyone’s television” continues Scurati, “even mine, and when close to 25 April I was called, as the author of five books dealing with fascism, I felt obliged to remember the anniversary and to write a text in which I stated, perhaps forcefully, my ideas and expressed my criticisms, this too it seems like a writer’s job. Instead I was dragged through the mud by my hair.”
But how did it really go? asks Fazio. “They sent me the forms,” the writer then recalls, “I signed them, I sent them back, they sent me the train tickets, the vouchers, everything was ready until, while I was shaving, she arrived. the phone call from the host of the program, her voice was broken, we had never spoken before, and she told me: her participation has been cancelled. The most serious thing is that at a certain point of the day they tell me that the head of government he wrote a post in which he uses very denigrating expressions, trying to discredit me, to make me look like a greedy person. I don’t know if Italians realize that in one democracy This is something that shouldn’t happen, that a head of government attacks a private citizen who is also a writer.”
And he continues: “I’m sorry to be dragged into such a vulgar and base controversy, dragged into a mud fight. And then we have to answer. I was insulted in newspapers that colluded with the government, I was branded as M’s man meaning, with a vulgar play on words, that thing over there. And when then also the second office of the state, the president of the Senate, calls you a profiteer then it ends up in a vulgar and low controversy. The second office of the state should not argue, it should not throw itself at an individual, the second office of the state is the state. It’s like telling a doctor who makes money from people’s illnesses, I don’t make money from Mussolini, you make money from your work, perhaps your talent.”
And to Fazio’s question: what did you learn from this story? Without hesitation Scurati replies: “If you want to live peacefully at this moment in this country you must not criticize the government, I thought I knew having studied and recounted the dark years of fascism, but instead I understood a little firsthand that the democracy it is always a fight for democracy. We live in democracy today thanks to the struggle of our grandfathers and grandmothers.”
Finally he ventures into a writer’s metaphor: “Democracy is not a tall tree, but it resembles the vine plant, it requires constant care, you have to water it day by day, only then does it give you the magnificent wine of democracy in the end” .
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– 2024-04-29 13:09:53