through europe

(Italian version of this article)

Europe will be the product of your mind

Spring 2011 : the European Union is on the brink of the catastrophe, as Neoliberal dogmatism is imposing the diktat of the financial class upon the interests of society.
Let’s look back, before we try to understand what has to be done.

In the year 1933 in his Discours à la nation européenne, Julien Benda wrote the following words :

Vous ferez l’Europe par ce que vous direz, non par ce que vous serez. L’Europe sera un produit de votre esprit, de la volonté de votre esprit, non un produit de votre être. Et si vous me répondez que vous ne croyez pas à l’autonomie de l’esprit, que votre esprit ne peut être autre chose qu’un aspect de votre être, alors je vous déclare que vous ne ferez jamais l’Europe. Car il n’y a pas d’Être européen.

(Italian version)

In 1931 Mussolini asked the Italian academics to swear allegiance to the Fascist regime. Only a dozen of them – out of 1600 – refused to subdue. The best minds were already abroad: Piero Sraffa was teaching in Cambridge as an exile, and scholars like Enrico Fermi who were working on the most advanced frontiers of physics were already in the US.
Something similar is happening today in this country where twice in a century totalitarian barbarism has found its political shape. While Berlusconi government is destroying the public school and the University, the academic class is not less coward than it was in 1931.

I would like to talk about something that everybody knows, but that, so it seems, no one has the boldness to say. That is, that the time for indignation is over. Those who get indignant are already starting to bore us. Increasingly, they seem to us like the last guardians of a rotten system, a system without dignity, sustainability or credibility. We don't have to get indignant anymore, we have to revolt.

The financial collapse that hit the world economy since September 2008, particularly affecting Europe after the Greek crisis a year ago, has blatantly exposed the failure of the Neoliberal ideology, and has shown that the main source of unemployment and of misery is the greed of the financial class and the obsession of profit. Did you expect that the leaders of the EU listen to the urgent demand for wealth redistribution, and for a democratic change in the economic life?

Mass Zynismus

In his book The courage of truth  (Le courage de la verité), a transcript of lectures delivered at the College de France in 1984, Michel Foucault speaks of Diogenes and the other ancient philosophers known as cynicists and defines their thought as the practice of telling the truth (parresia).  Twenty-five years later, the word cynicism has acquired a totally different meaning, almost opposite: the cynic is someone routinely lying to everyone, especially him or herself.