The American masterpiece after 1945 was to make the European states semi-colonies, without ever making them feel like such. From four dogs on the street they transformed us into chain dogs, without ever hitting us with the stick, and indeed, rewarding us with very tasty ossi bucco. America was to Europe as the McCarthyite father was to his obedient son:

«You are free, my son. Repeat!».
“I’m free, dad”
“Bravo! Here’s a green “Roma Sport” bike with coaster pedal.”
«It’s beautiful, dad, thank you!»
«You’re welcome, Franchino».

During the Cold War, when the Iron Curtain was solid, the chain was nevertheless long enough to tolerate much more freedom of thought than today. The Hegemon would never have allowed us to enter the communist orbit, but even in the darkest times, we Europeans benefited from large margins of psychic independence, and when the Wall fell in 1989, we thought that the future would be characterized by more total freedom. Pious illusion! When the Bad Guys were no longer up to par, the Good Guys amplified their worst defects, justifying them with the need to defend dehmocrahziah.

The Hegemon provoked wars that caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, but we still remained convinced that the Bad Guys were always elsewhere. Meanwhile, as the alliance of Good expanded to Eastern Europe, the chain became shorter and shorter, and our psychic freedom increasingly limited.

A sentence by Aldo Cazzullo in the Corriere dated 5 October 2024 caught me off guard:

«It has never happened that a democracy started war against another democracy. But we tend to forget this.”.

When I don’t grasp, I need metaphors. I swam on it, I worked on it, and then I slept on it, and finally I found the right one: man killed three strangers, but was always respectful towards his neighbors. We tend to forget this too.

In Italy, in October 2024, the Tam Tam of war against Evil became increasingly pressing. Ukraine was collapsing, battered by the Russian army and Western propaganda. On the Middle Eastern front, Netanyahu’s Israel had just decapitated Hezbollah, and was turning its baleful frown towards Iran. As in other agitated periods of the past, an irresistible glycemic spike transformed some journalists into keyboard crawlers.

This is what Danilo Taino wrote in the Corriere of 4 October 2024:

«In a world pushed towards chaos by aggressive powers (…) Deterrence cannot be left to diplomacy alone (…) Ukrainians and Israelis fight (…) against unprovoked aggression (…) Two conflicts whose outcomes will also be decisive for the future of our lives, for democracy, for free economies, for international coexistence (…)”.

It was just missing 5) the future of the Shrew, 6) the extinction of the Vespirtillo, and 7) the disappearance of the Bolivian Chinchilla Rat.