When I conquered Greenland many years ago in Risk, I found myself catapulted into a new and fantastic world where everything was white. At that time, a controversy had flared up in Western academic circles regarding the fifty phantom Inuit words to describe the word “snow”. In reality, it was later discovered that there were only two words: QANIK, snow in the air and AUTsnow on the ground.

When I reached latitude 80 North, I left my red tank to continue on foot, and already on that first reconnaissance I miraculously escaped an attack by a bear, after having mistaken it for a AUT. I quickly realized that the priority was not so much the number of words to describe the word “snow,” but rather understanding the different shades of the adjective “white.” After months and months of looking, I finally began to see, and then I matched my findings with the Inuit words that described this complexity.

The first word was QINU, the whitest white possible. I shivered unconsciously when I learned QALUQSIQ, white “snow”, different from NUNACIQ, white “ice”. I was very surprised when I learned two fundamental words in that context: PILIRAQ, white with shades of yellow, and BLIZA, white with shades of blue. Then again SIVULIQ, white of the clouds, and finally QALLUNAAT, white man.

This anecdote from my life came back to me when, many years later, I read a couple of articles in which Ernesto Galli della Loggia criticized the inability of us Europeans to take negative thinking into consideration.*. While the war in Ukraine and the genocide in Gaza were raging, the journalist of the Corriere argued that we had become incapable of recognizing the existence of evil, war, the adversary, blinded by the illusion of always finding a justification for a new compromise, just to maintain peace at the expense of our values.

Yet, after the end of the Cold War, positive thinking and political correctness had seriously compromised those same democratic values ​​that GdL invited to defend with weapons. There was no other explanation why the European Union had effectively abolished the possibility of engaging in politics within it: any national leader who expressed dissent from the official EU line was marginalized, rather than assimilated through real dialogue. This way of doing things had a direct (and in my opinion, negative) influence on the outcome of at least one of the ongoing wars. Our problem was not having forgotten the “evil” as Galli della Loggia claimed, but having erased the entire vital scale of gray that separated it from the “good”.

In this regard, some time before the writer Enrico Remmert had expressed a similar concept**when he recalled Mark Twain’s amusing and brutal opinion of Jane Austen: “Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I feel like digging her up and smashing her skull in with her own shinbone.” Remmert’s statement was not against Austen, but a praise of “bad writing” against the cloying do-goodism of those years.

The first step to readmit that kind of mentality and writing into our European parliamentary and literary arc was to return all the different shades of gray to our values. I knew this well, after the accident many years before in Greenland, when I had risked my life for not being able to read a similar gradation.

*Corriere della Sera, July 31, 2024 & August 18, 2024
**Corriere della Sera, April 2, 2020