What We Are Not, What We Do Not Want — Ginevra Bompiani

Written by Ginevra Bompiani on her blog Tramontana, English translation by me.

“A poem by Eugenio Montale, written in 1923, “Non chiederci la parola” ended like this:

“Exactly today we can tell you, / What we are not, what we do not want.”

These verses come back to my mind these days and it seems to me that I have no other words to explain what I don’t like in the world that is growing inside and around us.

It happens, for example, when I try to make some friends hear the shrill sound of deception and mystification that I detect in every public word. Since nothing else is mentioned, it is needless to point out that I am alluding to the talk of Disease.

“But will you admit that the Disease exists?” they say to me.

Sure. Even if its origin is uncertain, its spread surprising, the measures to deal with it debatable.

“And do you acknowledge that it has claimed 130,000 lives in Italy alone?”

So it seems, even though the Health website recently admitted that of those deaths only 3,000 can be confidently attributed to Covid.

“But something had to be done?”

Of course! And in my opinion, it hasn’t been done. There has been no investment in public health nor in health locally, not only in the past two years but not even now, with European funds, no reduction of pollution, through measures of immediate and lasting impact. The measures taken seemed to be mainly aimed at frightening and blaming citizens, as if they were ‘plague-spreaders’: just as is being done now with those who do not want to vaccinate….

“But will you admit that the vaccine has contributed to the reduction of infections?”

I hope so, even though its effectiveness has an uncertain duration, immediate adverse effects and likely high level of harm in the future.

“But then you’re against the vaccine?”

I’m not against vaccines (I’m vaccinated myself), but against their blackmailing coercion. I’m happy that the malaria vaccine has been found, which is a far more serious scourge for Africa than Covid, but I don’t think a green pass will now be made to force Africans to vaccinate. We will try to convince them that the vaccine works and that it is in their interest to take advantage of it….

“But the green pass…”

The green pass seems to me a very serious and unjustified coercive pressure, and as has been said by others before me, I do not believe that its purpose is mass vaccination (of uncertain and temporary usefulness), as much as the control of the human community, the last (or further) step towards the detailed, political and commercialized control of our activities: work, study, travel, culture, leisure … Each of us is being apprehended in every movement that challenges loneliness and destitution, in every gesture that tends to widen the tiny spot on which we hold our feet. And in fact there is no end planned to these measures, but a continuous moving of goal posts, which moves from month to month until the people become used to the pendulum between privilege and deprivation (the pleasure with which people welcome their privilege is a great support to this incongruous measure).

“But who and why would do this?”

The “who” is surely varied, the “why” is perhaps because the climate problem has long since found its secret and convincing explanation: not the abuse of the Earth and its resources, but the number of living people! Against which there are two ways: reduce their number or reduce the number of resource users. And here, both the pandemic and the green pass are two unparalleled if insufficient tools!

“So, in your opinion, is there a conspiracy?”

I don’t believe in conspiracies, I believe in the convergence of interests and passions (such as, for example, that which produced, after World War I, the birth of fascist thought and dictatorships).

“But do you think someone in this convergence would have caused the pandemic!”

Words fail here…. I don’t know if the pandemic escaped a laboratory or was created there, I don’t know if its spread exceeded expectations or met them, I don’t know if someone manipulated, and who and how…. I only know ‘what we are not and what we do not want’: we are not crazy, demented, fascist, Nazi, hysterical… we are not guilty of either the pandemic or the infections, or any other fault related to them… we are not in bad faith, we are not hostile, we are not prone, we are not overly optimistic… And we do not want to listen to the rustle of lies, the authoritarian consensus, the one-track thinking, we do not want to be turned into a commodity, even less into waste… We are not and we do not want… That’s all.

This conversation never happened. None of my friends ever asked me these questions.” — Ginevra Bompiani