They are all right | Small trip among Santoro’s candidates for the European elections: “Putin does something important for all of us”

This is the Friday 15 March 2024 issue of the newsletter Everyone is right, written by Stefano Cappellini. To activate your subscription click here

The more or less declared Putinism of many active voices in the Italian public debate has been discussed for two years. The accusation is always rejected by those directly involved with disdain: McCarthyism is denounced (from the name of the senator Joe McCarthywho in the 1950s led an indiscriminate persecution of Americans suspected of being communists), the proscription lists, the attack on “critical thinking”.

Yesterday Michele Santoro he presented some of the candidates who should run in the European elections in his list ‘Peace, land, dignity’, which contains a lot of this “critical thinking” and respective thinkers. Let’s go check it out.

Let’s start with Benedetta Sabeneauthor of the book Ukraine, counter-history of a conflict. Beyond Western myths and we read from the introduction: “Having to repeat ‘I condemn the Russian invasion, I support the Ukrainian people’ before even expressing my thoughts began to remind me of the reassuring and cloying prayer that, like good children, we recited before sleeping and eating to do happy mum and dad”. Sabene writes: “The dichotomy between the Western democratic system and Russian autocracy has a propagandistic connotation, and even less works in the case of Ukraine, whose political system is very far from constituting a liberal democracy.” Sabene also has an opinion on the topic of the denazification of Ukraine: “I will try to explain why neo-Nazism in Ukraine represents a global unicum.”

Sabene has many similarities with the writer Nicolaj Lilin, another possible candidate, who claims that not only Kiev, but also the Baltic countries are full of Nazis. According to Lilin, interviewed a few days after the Russian attack, “Russia’s war is not a war, they are limited local operations.” Special operation, the term that the Russian regime media uses for the massacre in Ukraine: Lilin does not read the Western press that serves NATO but certainly watches Moscow TV. Lilin manages a “daily update on the special military operation” on its web channels. Again Lilin: “It is not an invasion, but a message directed to the West.” Putin doesn’t trust couriers. Lilin, known for having published a supposedly autobiographical novel, Siberian educationwhich proved to be less credible than a two-euro note, concludes: “Putin’s authoritarian regime is a thousand times more democratic”.

Another candidate, the historian Angelo D’Orsi, a few days before the invasion he gave an interview to a website to hope that the Russian intervention would last long enough “to teach the Kiev government a lesson”. From the stage of a Communist Refoundation party (by the way, the secretary Maurizio Acerbo is also on the list) D’Orsi said: “Putin is doing something for all of us, he is trying to oppose the most sinister unipolarity.” He deserves thanks. For D’Orsi, Putin is only wrong in having fallen into the trap of the West, which pushed him to attack. A thesis certainly shared by the candidate Pino Arlacchiwhich on Done he wrote: “Russia’s armed reaction was certainly an excess of self-defense that in a certain sense played into the hands of Western antagonists.” Write it down: excess of self-defense. In an interview circulating on the web Arlacchi claims that “Ukraine is just a pretext, this is not a war between Russia and Ukraine as we are told by the Western establishment, it is much broader, it is a war between the USA and Russia ”. The infamous proxy war, which denies Ukrainians even the dignity of fighting for their own freedom and turns them into American puppets. Arlacchi has a recipe for the end of the conflict, leaving to Putin what belongs to Putin: “The outcome can only be a recognition of a factual reality, even without negotiation”.

The candidate Vauro, known for the cartoons in which he represents Zelensky with the hooked nose of the Jews, says: “I don’t give a shit who Putin is. At this moment my belly and my head are with the children of Donbass, who have been experiencing the war for 8 years.” Guest of Corrado Formigli in an episode of A clean sweepwhen asked why he strongly condemned the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 and not now Putin’s, Vauro he responded like this: “We have a row of Hitlers who are convenient for us. Some will say that the Russians pay me, but why should I enlist? I am not joining either Putin or Biden.”

The candidate Fiammetta Cucurnia claims that “weapons destined for Ukraine ended up in the hands of Islamic terrorists”. He was keen to share with the Italians a statement from the Tass agency, the Russian regime’s press agency, according to which “the Ukrainians were building the nuclear bomb”. In the initiative at the Ghione theater in Rome, ‘Forbidden Peace’ organized by Santoro shortly after the invasion, which was in fact the first major casting on the list for the European elections, Cucurnia said from the stage: “Since everyone speaks on behalf of the democrats , I want to put myself in the shoes of the ugly and dirty ones, and speak on behalf of the evil empire.” An excellent self-introduction.

If you think that Santoro has gathered the best of Italian Putinism, you are just a McCarthyite.