Stories and News No. 1219
Imagine. Imagine with me, for a minute, at most two. Let's imagine together, for a brief moment, that instead of Covid-19, the invader of our global community – already seriously ill and inhumanly distant – were an alien civilization. Yes, I’m talking about them, as we have almost always described and feared, with novels and science fiction films: the hostile extraterrestrials, who arrived on our planet with the sole purpose of killing us, at best, wearing us out and above all separating us from each other as minimal result, since the well-known Latin phrase “divide et impera” seems to have spread everywhere in the universe, wherever the desire to dominate others lodged. Striving to make the alternative scenario similar to the real one plagued by Covid-19, let's say that the enemy star ships landed in the notorious city of Wuhan, in China, and that the world invasion began from there. Well, I assume it is obvious what would be the inevitable thoughts (and tweets) of many, starting with the now former president of the United States – I say that without superstition with heartfelt hope. In chronological order, according to a delusional climax: first, China has sold us to aliens. Second, the Chinese are the aliens themselves who arrived here in the past, having waited until now for the right moment to launch the attack. Third, aliens do not exist, they are just the usual Chinese who want to rule the world. Inspired by the latter part of this grotesque symphony, in the interpretation of such exceptionally evident facts, the forge of negation would begin its tireless work with the following motto: if you don't know anything, deny. If you know something, deny what you ignore. And if you know you are an idiot, deny yourself. In any case, wherever the voice is able to scream its obtuse skepticism, between small screens and large monitors, a single thought would become strong, feeding on its ability to lock eyes, ears and brain: "The aliens have invaded us, exterminating more than a million of our kind, but they are not dangerous, quite the contrary. Even more died with the grasshoppers, why doesn't anyone talk about it?" Thus would be the incipit of the official discourse of the no fetishists. And it would continue like this: "We may easily live with enemy extraterrestrials thanks to herd immunity, even if we are not sheep yet, but give us time and we will finally be able to bleat together, in an orderly and compact way. They, not us - you have had the opportunity to identify them through our active disinformation service as do-gooders, immigrationists, relativists and fake pacifists – want to lock us up in our neighborhoods through areas and at home with a heartless lockdown, by imposing the blacksmiths of the new world order." Needless to say, which exponent of his own vanity and personal gain, would exploit this condition of uncertainty. Matteo Salvini's cry would become: "Do you want to close the Earth's orbit to prevent aliens from entering and leave the ports open? Why the aliens are stopped and the migrants may come in?" Then, on days with pleasant weather, people who need to vent their atavistic hate against someone, whoever might be on the way, would take to the streets to protest. But protest against whom? No, I'm serious. That is the question that would arise spontaneously only once on the street: who is our enemy today? And while the rioters would despair in vain in order to find the fundamental answer, here would come the police in anti-riot gear. So let's go to the fight, let them see at home, on and off line how angry we are. Angry with ourselves, first of all. Do you know what I think? That in the face of such a scenario, the aliens would look each other, and after briefly discussing it they would rush back to the spaceships to never return. "It’s not worth trying to conquer a species like this", would say the captain of the mother ship. "An influence would be enough to pit these humans against each other..."
My new book: A morte i razzisti (Death to racists)