Green Pass Editorial

Passaggio al Bosco is the publisher of my last two books. These days it is enjoying an indirect notoriety because a group of writers and artists from the usual circles of the “good” and the “cultured”, in legitimate disagreement with its editorial line (since disagreeing with ideas is always legitimate), are asking for its exclusion from a book fair.

I won't waste time defending or not defending the books and authors of Passaggio al Bosco; doing so would mean being drawn into a ridiculous discussion, as if culture had to follow a flag, nor do I know how the affair will end.

The point is that no one should allow themselves to interrupt the free circulation of ideas (given that lately there are rather few ideas around), and no one should allow themselves to censor different interpretations of history, which can instead be legitimately criticised.

The paradox of our times is that in the name of freedom, culture and wellbeing, choices worthy of a totalitarian regime are being made. I note, in fact, that it is now permitted for terrifying characters to burst into conventions and conferences and silence those who are there to speak, not with ideas but with violence and uproar. Likewise, it was considered normal and justified to restrict freedom in the face of different ideas about one's own health and the refusal to inject an alien substance into one's own body.

I want to point out that the “strong” argument for the request for exclusion is that Passaggio al Bosco, through some of its books, is supposedly anti-libertarian and against constitutional values. So, to defend freedom, they ask for censorship.

If that argument were believed to be valid, then every publishing house guilty of publishing philosophers from ancient Greece to Marx and Gramsci would have to be banned.

A person with a minimum of common sense does not put books on trial; by reading them, they learn to put things in context, integrating within themselves whatever resonates with them and leaving the rest aside. We should not think of the human being as someone to be “indoctrinated”, whether with left-wing or right-wing, fascist or communist ideas. Books should, among other things, serve to show a point of view different from our own.

Censorship and the banning of books is one of the most cowardly and ignorant acts anyone could support. It is rather like going to a conference to silence one of the guests.

For me it is an intellectual shock to think that these things still have to be restated today, just as it is shocking to think that someone doesn't want Russian works in the theatre simply because they are Russian, or as it was shocking to live through a period in which, for “our own good”, we were all under house arrest.

After the health green pass to leave the house, we will soon be faced with a cultural green pass that discriminates over what is permissible and what is not.

Regardless of all this, I am convinced that, thanks to the great intellectuals in favour of censorship, Passaggio al Bosco is better known today than before.

m.m.