Patriarchy is not Italian

Dear Director Feltri, Minister Valditara is perhaps not completely wrong: patriarchy does not exist and violence against women occurs more and more often by non-EU citizens. Why stone him, having told the truth? …

Patriarchy is not Italian


Dear Director Feltri, Minister Valditara is perhaps not completely wrong: patriarchy does not exist and violence against women occurs more and more often by non-EU citizens. Why stone him, having told the truth?

Demetrio Pellegrino

Dear Demetrius,
intolerance towards the truth is the distinctive feature of our era. Anyone who tells the truth becomes a public enemy and is painted as a monster, an insensitive individual, as well as racist, fascist, sexist and so on. Even the Minister of Education Giuseppe Valditara, who on Monday, on the occasion of the presentation of the Giulia Cecchettin Foundation, dared to declare that patriarchy is extinct and that violence against women should not be considered a crime of the white male but rather also and above all non-EU citizens, ended up in the media meat grinder, as happens to anyone who does not adapt to this vulgar conformism of thought. Either you give in or you’re a bad person.

And I must admit that I admire the courage of this man, who, not being stupid, was perfectly aware that his words would have unleashed, even more so in that specific circumstance, an uproar but, despite this, the head of the Education Department did not he stood back and expressed his thoughts, which are not a simple opinion, but rather a photograph of a reality. A reality that the left does everything to conceal, hide, alter, in order to make the prejudice that the white male is the only one guilty of every type of violence, including that against females, obviously, dominant. Arguing that this is not the case, that is, that the white male is not disgusting, that he cannot be criminalized, that there is no collective criminal responsibility, inevitably leads to the accusation of sexism, of denialism, as it touches and violates a dogma imposed by political correctness. Hence scandal and indignation, media trials, stigmatization and condemnation.

Yet Valditara has plenty of reason to sell and even to give away. It is not he who historically establishes the death of patriarchy in 1975, with the reform of family law which equated in every way the figure of the wife and mother, therefore of the woman within the family unit, to that of the husband and of the father, therefore of the man. A progress made necessary also to adapt family law to the Constitution which already established the total equality of rights and duties of men and women. It is historians, sociologists and jurists who conventionally indicate this date as the date of death of patriarchy. And Valditara is also right when he underlines that “the women’s question cannot be resolved by fighting against patriarchy”, a patriarchy which in fact does not exist except as an ideological approach to the topic of gender violence. The minister did not deny that residual cultural legacies of chauvinism persist in our country and added that we cannot pretend not to know, if we really want to combat violence against women, that phenomena such as rape are increasingly linked to “forms of marginality and deviance in some way resulting from illegal immigration”.

Moreover, it is precisely the non-EU citizens who come from Islamic countries who harbor the belief that women are inferior to men and that the latter can use them as they please, as if they were an object, even enjoying the right of life and death over his person. Patriarchy is not Western, it is not European and it is not Italian. It is Islamic. Anyone who rejects this truth is intellectually dishonest.