From the heat of Italy

It's very hot in Rome and all over Italy, also on the beach where I am staying at the moment for a little release from the city heat.

This makes it a bit hard to think, and, still more, to write.

But I feel obliged, for some things I wrote in my previous post against the present trend of European Union: just a short hint to a "soft" totalitarianism, which has taken the place of the "hard" one ended with World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

And who could be better to help elucidate what I said than Pope Benedict?

In the Angelus of August 9 he said:

The Nazi concentration camps, like all extermination camps, can be considered extreme symbols of evil, of hell that opens on earth when man forgets God and supplants him, usurping his right to decide what is good and what is evil, to give life and death. However, this sad phenomenon is unfortunately not limited to concentration camps. Rather, they are the culmination of an extensive and widespread reality, often with shifting boundaries.

A onetime Italian political activist of the radical Marxist kind, later found guilty for having ordered one of the political killings of the Seventies (he always protested himself innocent, but it doesn't matter, I say, because he certainly inspired it), and now in a minimum security jail from where he is free to send out his writings to newspapers, having since long abandoned his earlier position for a moderate humanitarian atheism, denounced an intellectual mistake in this statement of Pope Benedict: that of jamming together phenomena that are actually different.

But are they?

Condemning and rejecting Nazism goes as a matter of course. We are all against Nazism, are we not? it was the apex of horror, how could we do otherwise.

Thus repulsion of Nazism is operated in a sort of vacuum, without the need to spend many words to give reasons for it.

This exempts from any real attempt to understand what brought to it. Or to understand what brought to communism on the other side. And see what they share, in spite of their opposition.

It blinds before the same factors that brought to them still present in our time, be it in a "soft" way.