Unnecessary remarks Meloni could have avoided, revealing letters and bombastic rhetoric that should be condemned regarding the migrant crisis

I am not writing to Zagrebelsky about his letter to Meloni, because there is no such letter: Zagrebelsky did not write it. Someone put the words in his mouth, and many found it so plausible that they circulated it as genuine. I don’t like Zagrebelsky; he’s a bad teacher, one of those outspoken Turin blowhards – the sort whose voices are very resonant but shrill – who provide the soundtrack to the worst illusions and nonsense of the ‘best of the young’, whom he chases after just as older individuals full of reckless hope do. I say this because, apart from the despicable demagoguery with which the anonymous author uses words like ‘profiteering’ in relation to a radically mistaken but understandable political stance taken by the Italian government, this apocryphal letter is not wrong on this occasion.

The government’s stance on Schengen – even though it was essentially endorsed by many European governments, even though it was shared by the Danish socialist prime minister, even though it was well-received by the Italian public, and even though it was politically understandable in this murky pre-election climate – was a demagogic blow in the style of the Zagrebelsky imagined by the forger. There was no ethical need for it. On the contrary, it was a move completely detached from the mainstream pro-European course of a government that has performed well on immigration. And the bombastic exploitation of sympathy for the young boys and girls who died whilst swimming and for those hastily repatriated by Sánchez, with the complicity of the very same Morocco that had deceived them – these poor wretches of Ceuta, victims of an intolerable narcissist in Washington and a half-criminal in Rabat, bestowed with the grotesque title of king, another Ubu – should not be used for an easy, all too easy, ideological attack against a reckless political act.

Meloni will have to come to terms with her conscience as a stateswoman, a mother and a Christian. Zagrebelsky’s followers – who have nothing to do with this letter – may one day be informed of further deaths and will write about 7 October and Ukraine, in a fine letter to Conte, the man of genocide and stable peace founded on the surrender of heroes, which we await with bated breath. Meanwhile, there is Europe as it is, and it is not waiting around for long. Merz wants to save Germany from the AfD, a Nazi caricature enjoying enormous popular success, which has grown menacingly, particularly in the territories of the former GDR, and has spread to the largest country in Western Europe thanks to demagoguery surrounding illegal immigration; Mette Frederiksen must ensure that even her conservative and moderate allies in the governing coalition do no harm, and her electoral success – as well as the determination with which she told Trump to get lost over Greenland – depends on firm stances on illegal immigration, which is perceived as a threat not only in Italy; As for France, it is best not to speak of it: equality, fraternity and liberty are being put to the test and, for that matter, even the police under Macron, a liberal, played their despicable part in Ventimiglia. Meloni is having to deal with a grotesque General Catenacci and with Salvini, a demagogue in disarray who is stirring up trouble to win a few votes and re-establish his legitimacy within a Lega that has long since had enough of the ‘Papeete man’ and his unchecked powers.

Statesmen have reasons for behaving very badly indeed, reasons unknown to the anxious hearts of humanitarian academics. Sánchez, for instance, cut short his holidays to insult Italy, just as he insulted Israel in the recent past, in the name of a ‘solidarity’ that his predecessor Zapatero understood to mean a barrage of gunfire – again in Ceuta – rather than the Italian Constitution and the usual Don Milani; and to repatriate the Ceuta survivors with boundless efficiency, in cahoots with those who had sent them there to benefit the election campaign of the MAGA movement and Trump: something even more despicable than the demagoguery of the anonymous, imaginary professor. All matters which the academic letter, though not written by an academic, glosses over. Is this not how demagogues are educated too?