Home » The left and anti-US sentiment: where does the ambiguity about Putin’s Russia come from?

The left and anti-US sentiment: where does the ambiguity about Putin’s Russia come from?

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The left and anti-US sentiment: where does the ambiguity about Putin’s Russia come from?

The last sensational example was that of the vote on the motions regarding communications to Parliament by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in view of the EU Council on 15 and 16 December. The document of the M5s wanted by the leader Giuseppe Conte accuses the government of “total acquiescence to Washington’s indications” and asks not to send more weapons to Ukraine because the “crucial issues” are different: “Security, to be guaranteed to all, and the protection of Russian-speaking minorities”.

If the Moscow version is amplified in Italy by TV and parties

In short, a version of events, that of the 5 Star leader, similar to that of the Kremlin, according to which it is the Ukrainians who persecute the Russians (the Russian-speaking minorities, in fact) thus forcing Moscow to intervene in their defense. The motion remained isolated – on the positions of the M5s there are, for now, only the “small” members of the Italian Left-Green Alliance, while both the Democratic Party and the Third Pole voted with the majority to continue supporting the Ukrainian resistance – but indicative of how persistent and unshakeable pacifism declined in the version of anti-Americanism and anti-Atlantism is on some leftists. The left that Conte wants to snatch from the Democratic Party. It is also for this reason, it must be said incidentally, that the question of the war in Ukraine has so far been absent from the congressional debate of the Democrats.

The point on anti-US sentiment in Maran’s book

As to why Italy is the country on the Atlantic axis and therefore of the West in which the penetration of Russian propaganda (Putin’s “rights” and the United States‘ “wrongs”, starting with NATO’s “provocations” on the borders with Russia, etc.) is more profound and pervasive, even on TV, is dealt with by the beautiful book by Alessandro Maran (MP from 2001 to 2018 on the lists of the DS, the Democratic Party and the Civic Choice) entitled In the mirror of Ukraine, a letter to a friend on freedom and peace, on Italy’s place in the world and on Italians (new dimension, pp 153, 16 euros). Written in the form of a letter to my friend Salvatore (a real friend of the author: on the other hand, who among us does not have a friend who since last February 24 has launched himself against the United States, as if they were at war, defending the ” sacrosanct reasons” of Vladimir Putin’s Russia?), Maran’s book is a very useful and agile historical examination of the international order established after the Second World War, an order which from Marshall on guaranteed Europe 70 years of peace, economic prosperity and expansion of civil and social rights. But the heart of the book is, in our opinion, precisely the case of Italy, where the first ingredient in a cultural soup that has stratified over the years is identified by Maran in the anti-American prejudice: «In Italy, as we know, there are at least three anti-American currents: right-wing, leftist and Catholic; in other words, there is anti-Americanism as nationalism, as anti-capitalism and as a protest against modernity».

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Welding is the lack of liberal culture

The deep nucleus of these different kinds of anti-Americanism, however, is only one: “the extraneousness or distrust towards the liberal democracy in whose sign it has been possible to develop, luxuriant and irrepressible, the American civilization of the masses”. But it is above all on the left, where accounts with history have been made rather summarily, that anti-Americanism is still tinged with ideology today. On the other hand, it was Barbara Spinelli who spoke of “negotiated forgetfulness” and of “claiming reminiscence” to describe the substantial vacuum of thought on the historical significance of 1989 (a good part of the PCI leaders accepted Achille Occhetto’s Turn out of necessity and not by real conviction: hence the difficulty in coming to terms with the criminal past of the communist regimes).

The enduring effects of “campism” on the left…

It is the same forma mentis that during the Cold War led the voters of the PCI and of the other minor parties of the left to embrace the so-called campism. «Campism once referred to the so-called ‘socialist camp’ led by the USSR, or China, or both – writes Maran -. The concept was quite simple and was linked, in its own way, to the revolutionary tradition. On one side was imperialism, the American one, of course. On the other hand there were the non-capitalist countries, for many even “socialist”, which “objectively” contrasted, with their mere existence, the full unfolding of imperialist aggressiveness”. of the left have in short remained mired (even out of nostalgia “for when we were young”, who knows) in that vision of the world: those who oppose imperialist America always have some reason.

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