Falling down, Falling down!
Whenever I read the news of a statue around the world being toppled or thrown into a river or vandalized, for some odd reason I hear the melody of that nursery rhyme song “London Bridge is falling down, falling down…” You know the one I am talking about. I’ve always wondered why such a cheerful little melody accompanied the story of the collapse of a bridge, but now I can relate. I too feel cheerful at the idea of statues of perpetrators of colonialism and slavery being destroyed. Perhaps it’s finally time for the system to collapse. My fair lady!
As the Black Lives Matter movement sweeps the world, and the anger against the colonialist and supremacist past of many nations’ rages, statues of colonialists and oppressors are being destroyed. In Milan too, a statue was vandalised. The culprit was the journalist and historian Indro Montanelli, who had his beginnings as a fascist and coloniser in Ethiopia. There is a park named after him in central Milan. During his period in Ethiopia as a soldier in Mussolini’s army, he took a 12-year-old child bride named Destà. While he later reformed his fascist ways and even joined the resistance, he didn’t seem to regret his stint as a pedophile. In a TV interview in 1972 he openly discussed his child bride, acknowledging he had purchased her as his sex slave, stating: “She was like a docile animal..." and furthermore "I needed a woman at that age... I struggled a lot to overcome her smell, due to the goat tallow with which her hair was soaked". I will spare you the rest of this horror story. Unfortunately, the defaced statue has been cleaned up and there seems to be no intention of removing it or reinstating the park’s original name Giardini Pubblici or “public gardens”. In a video, mayor Beppe Sala argues that a person shouldn’t be judged by one mistake, but by the totality of his achievements. Montanelli allegedly was a great journalist and writer who defended the freedom of the press, so the child bride episode in Ethiopia should be just seen like the kind of mistake that all humans are prone to making. I like you Beppe Sala, but on this issue, you have totally failed to see the point. While I can agree that people should not be judged solely by their errors, there should not be a statue of a man who showed no remorse for having a 12-year-old Ethiopian sex slave. And more importantly, there shouldn’t be a park named after a pedophile, a park where children come to play.
In other news, while the Italian soccer season has resumed (to no live audience), gyms have reopened, and there is talk of the imminent reopening of cinemas and discotheques (outdoors only), there is still no word about schools reopening in September. The fate of 8 million school aged children hangs in the balance, as does that of their parents, and let’s face it, in most cases their mothers. The Italian school system is in dire need of reform, but, as Carlo Verdelli points out in his opinion piece in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, the Italian government has allocated only €1.4 billion of the emergency funds to schools, while it gave Alitalia, Italy’s long troubled and failing airline twice that sum. If this is where the priorities of the government lie, we’re in even more serious trouble than I suspected.
And finally, now that Europe has reopened most of its borders internally as of Monday, the next question is, when will it open its borders to travellers from non-EU countries? From what I gather, the EU is working on a reopening around July 1. According to EU Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson, countries will have to meet certain criteria in order for borders to be reopened. Firstly, countries should have COVID-19 under at least as much control as the EU average, have containment measures during travel and also be willing to let in EU visitors. (Source: Reuters). Hard to imagine which countries this will apply to with the latest outbreak in Beijing, cases spiking in South America and six states in the US recording a record amount of cases.