The accusations against Montanelli go beyond his fame as a "big pen"

Yesterday master of journalism, today champion of evil to be colored. But the faults of the "great Indro" are serious and documented (and perhaps it is fortunate for him not to be here to give an account) (photo: Jacopo Raule / Getty Images) They are saying about the statue of Indro Montanelli in Milan many things. The debate, for the most part, is between those who consider the journalist a pillar of contemporary Italian cultural history and believe that therefore, despite his mistakes, one cannot oppose the celebration of a professional. And who, while recognizing the professional Montanelli, underlines how the so-called "mistake" - buying a 12-year-old Abyssinian girl, marrying her and having sexual intercourse - was too much even in the 1930s, and therefore today it is right that the memory of the great Montanelli remains in all its grandeur, but without a statue.

Here, both of these versions of the controversy are wrong. Because if marriage with the child - which we should not be afraid of branding as a practice of racism and rape - is already in itself an indelible stain in the journalist's life, there are many other aspects that characterized his career in those years and in the following decades that instead of redeeming that mistake they only amplify it and give it a background. And therefore totally rewrite the mainstream history of his figure.

“ you will never be of the dominators, if not we will have the consciousness that is exactly our fatal superiority. With the negroes not we make friends. You can't. You must not, ” wrote the journalist in 1936. It was still the Montanelli fascist , attracted by Benito Mussolini, and close to the regime, from which he walked away physically, but the ideas, the seed of which, were in some way in his head for the rest of your life. Because the only way you can explain his contributions came from a distance of years from that youthful experience, written original or return, on that stage of life, without ever being distanced from the actions they have committed.

it Was the year 2000, for example, when an article told of the “leasing” with which he had bought seventy years before the twelve-year-old abyssinian, branded as “ idiots ” those who do not recognize as that part of the world at the age of 12 was already women and 20 already old. In 1995, however, in the course of a controversy with the director of the jewish faith of Tg2 Clemente J. Mimun on the cover of his newspaper, The Voice that laughed about the nazi-fascism, Montanelli wrote an editorial in which she wondered how the jews entered into this discourse, because even Hitler had never been able to deny that they too are part of the “ white race ” . A delirium confusing that on one hand seemed to almost absolve in any way the German dictator from his crusade, anti-jewish, the other fell into the usual error of the mold nostalgic of the talk of breeds.

In the 60s instead of the journalist, commenting on the riots for the inclusion of an african-american at the university of Oxford , wrote that the uprising in the country was a mistake, “ however, this error and this injustice have been an excess of defence-inspired by a concern that, unfortunately, is legitimate: that of safeguarding the biological of the white race ”. Always in those years, however, Montanelli releasing an interview in Le Figaro Littéraire, in which he said : “ Ah! Sicily! You have Algeria, we have the island of Sicily. But you are not obliged to say to the algerians that they are French. Us, the aggravating circumstance, we are obliged to give the sicilians the quality of Italian “. Many newsstands of the island displayed signs announcing that they would no longer sold newspapers containing his articles, making many of Indro Montanelli, a precursor to Vittorio Feltri more than the symbol of the great Italian journalism.

these Are only some of the episodes, scattered in time, of the figure and thought of the great Indro Montanelli . Testimonials that make the marriage colonialist with a twelve-year-old only a piece of a puzzle much larger, where at the passing of the decades continued to emerge traces of racism , suprematism , antimeridionalismo . Traces of the Origin of the fascist, in fact. The question is more exact then the one with which Mimun had finished his outburst in 1995: Montanelli is still fascist? A doubt that, reread the literature of today, it appears legitimate. Also for the shadows that are there on the parts more exalted character, as the militant anti-fascist after the rupture with the regime which in retrospect seemed to be more of a façade element, and on which the journalist never accepted clarity.

All of this can be defined as a symbol of freedom, an example for Italy, a figure to idolize a symbol like a statue? The answer is no, and it is even more so today, in the weeks that finally the uprising, which anti-racist began in the United States with the death of George Floyd has taken on a global character. The statue of Montanelli, the already cumbersome in a city that likes to tell about himself as a champion of civil rights and which, moreover, has erected this statue, only a handful of years ago, it becomes even more cumbersome today. If the statue wants to tell us about side exceptional journalist Montanelli and make them an icon, its imbrattatura is part of the same process of character analysis, a critical analysis aimed at revealing the dark sides. The statue soiled with red that we have seen in the last few hours it is then perhaps the best way to deliver it to the memory the figure of Indro Montanelli: a person who has made the history of Italian culture of the Twentieth century, but a person with many stains.