Giorgio Agamben: “THE COUNTRY IS SLIDING INTO UNPRECEDENTED BARBARISM.”
This is another Giorgio Agamben’s speech addressing the Senate, published on YouTube on December 7, 2021, in Italian,
Translated into English by Lena Bloch, Italian transcription by Arturo Bandini.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — -
Agamben:
“Before going into the decree law that the Senate is called to vote on, I would like to remind parliamentarians of a statement of principles that is known as the Nuremberg Code. We are in 1947, at the time when the Nuremberg trials were being held of the doctors who, during the Nazi period, were guilty of serious crimes, carrying out experiments, at times lethal, on inmates in the concentration camps and executing the eugenic policy of the regime to the extreme consequences. It is on this occasion that the court, faced with the obvious excesses of medical power, deemed it necessary to formulate a statement on the ethical and legal principles that should regulate the relationship between doctors and human subjects. And this is precisely what we call today the Nuremberg Code. The declaration begins by stating that in this relationship the voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential and that this consent must be exercised freely, that is, I quote the words of the code, “without the intervention of any element of coercion, deception, duress, exaggeration or any other form of obligation or coercion”.
I wonder if we are in the presence today of such voluntary consent. Why have I evoked this statement? Because I believe that today it is more necessary than ever to understand that medicine and politics must be clearly distinguished, and that scientific reasons cannot be evoked to justify measures that are by their nature necessarily political. I think — and I address this to the senators — I think it should make you reflect on the fact that the very first example of legislation in which a State intervened in a compulsory way on the health of its citizens… well, this example was the law on the protection of the German people from hereditary diseases that Hitler had passed in 1933 as soon as he came to government. This law led to the formation of special medical commissions that decided to force sterilization on four hundred thousand people. Medicine has the task to cure diseases according to the principles that the Hippocratic Oath irrevocably commands, and that are now being transgressed in essential points with the authorization of the Medical Association.
Here, think if by making an undoubtedly ambiguous and indefinite pact
with governments, medicine surreptitiously places itself in the position of legislator: not only this does not benefit the health of individuals, but it can lead and in fact is leading to unacceptable limitations of their freedom. With respect to which medical justifications offer the ideal pretext for an unprecedented control of life. I ask myself: is it acceptable that for a disease with (according to what just has been said by Professor Palù) the lethality of 0.2% — is it acceptable for a disease of this 0.2% lethality that a whole country is shattered, terrorized and limited in its freedoms of movement, work, etc.?
I come now to the decree on which you are called to vote. I think you should know, as it has been now established by authoritative international scientific sources, that the vaccine, according to these sources, does not protect against infection and that after a couple of months the spread of this disease among the vaccinated equals to the spread of this disease among the unvaccinated. Hence the need (which should make anyone with common sense think twice) for a third dose, and tomorrow, why not a fourth, and so on. If the vaccine is effective, why is there the need for a third dose and possibly even more? Faced with this evidence, instead of questioning the effectiveness of the policy enacted so far on the issue of vaccination, the government, assisted in this by increasingly irresponsible media, has preferred to do the worst thing you can do in a society — that is to divide citizens into two mutually hostile classes: the vaccinated, carriers of a Green Pass, but in constant mutation (now it is Super Green Pass, tomorrow it will be super super super green pass), on the one hand — and the others, defined with a negative term reminiscent of the “non-Aryans” of the fascist legislation of 38, called “no-vax”, hastily “no-vax”. (“Antivaxxers” in some countries — L.B.) After the sowing for almost two years the terror and fear there is now the sowing hatred and discrimination, accusing, without any basis, those who have chosen not to vaccinate of inflicting damage on those who, being vaccinated, should feel themselves protected but clearly do not feel so at all. A society divided like this, based on hatred and insecurity is not a free inhabitable society. I believe that our country is slipping into a barbarism that has no precedent in its history. A barbarism in which every day I am finding more and more of what Primo Levi called “the shame of being a man”, “the shame” that is, to use his words, “that something unjust and inhuman has been irrevocably introduced into the world of all things that exist”. It is in the name of this shame that I ask Senators to question themselves and think long and hard before voicing their consent to an unjust and inhuman bill.”
