09 June 2022 10:16
Until recently, Alessandro Orsini was just a secondary character, one of those interchangeable – and more or less serious – experts who populate the sets of Italian political talk shows. From Monday to Sunday, from early morning until late at night, the show never stops. To make the machine turn, therefore, it is necessary to bring to the fore new faces, but also recurring characters.
With his soft voice and the gaze of an eternal, slightly dreamy student, this 47-year-old professor at the prestigious Luiss private university in Rome, specialist in “sociology of terrorism”, already belonged to the second category, despite a curriculum littered with controversy and controversy. But the invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces on February 24 made him change his status, to the point of becoming a real star.
How? Going further than the others on a particularly delicate issue: the defense of Russian politics through the denunciation of NATO and all forms of aid to Ukraine, all in the name of non-alignment and pacifism. Since the outbreak of the war, and several times a day, criticism of him has focused on Kiev and those who, trying to help Ukraine, have prolonged the massacres. Meanwhile these continued to increase.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskii? “If it becomes an obstacle to peace, it must be abandoned” (La7, March 21). The defense of democracy? “I prefer that children live in a dictatorship rather than die under bombs in a democracy” (Rai 3, 5 April). Civil liberties in Russia? “I have colleagues in prison in Russia, how can I be in solidarity with them: by spreading NATO propaganda? I will have the moral duty to help them by fighting against NATO propaganda ”(La7, 7 April).
Embarrassed by the utterances of this teacher who was beginning to ruin her reputation, Luiss released a press release for the first time on March 4 to remember her “full solidarity with the Ukrainian people” and to dissociate herself from her professor. But yet another slip, on April 30, in which he goes so far as to rewrite the origins of the Second World War (“When Hitler invaded Poland he did not want World War II. It happened that European countries created military alliances, each of them which contained an article 5 of NATO “), led the university to decide the definitive closure of the Observatory on terrorism of which Alessandro Orsini was the head. Now he’s just a lecturer, which doesn’t stop him from continuing to use his academic title, while on TV – where he obviously continues to be invited – he portrays himself as a martyr. On May 10 he even went up on the stage of the Sala Umberto theater in Rome for a public reading, “Ukraine, the causes of war”, which was sold out. On the 23rd he was in Livorno, and other dates should follow, while rumors predict an imminent entry into politics …
Wave of convictions
If it were just a coincidence, Professor Orsini’s parable would be just another demonstration of the excesses of Italian television, where the perverse logic of talk shows pushes people to constantly highlight the most caricatured points of view, to the point of absurdity, with the aim of making more noise than the competition. But here nothing of the kind: of course, Alessandro Orsini has progressively radicalized his speeches, but the fact is that the openly pro-Russian positions that he expresses are anything but isolated in Italy.
Suspicions of corruption, journalists affiliated with the Kremlin (including Nadana Fridrikhson, employee of the Zvezda television, owned by the Russian defense ministry) regularly invited, Russian officials who speak without a real opponent … Italian TV, since the beginning of the war, has she is shown particularly welcoming towards the standard-bearers of Moscow’s propaganda.
May 2nd during the program White area the Russian foreign minister, Sergej Lavrov, had been able to denounce Ukrainian “Nazism”. And when the conductor, Giuseppe Brindisi, objected to him that Ukrainian President Zelenskii himself was of Jewish origin, he was able to safely state: “Hitler was also of Jewish origins, this means nothing”. Vladimir Putin himself then called the Israeli prime minister to apologize for these misplaced words, transmitted to Italy without the slightest reply.
Aired on Rete 4, a channel of the Mediaset group, therefore belonging to former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, who never hid his friendship with Vladimir Putin, the interview with Lavrov sparked a wave of condemnations. The secretary of the Democratic Party, Enrico Letta, spoke of an “unbearable propaganda spot”, while the Parliamentary Commission for the security of the republic (Copasir) has launched an investigation into suspected Russian infiltration into the Italian audiovisual system.
Of course, now Professor Orsini has become a little more discreet and officials are rarer, but the pro-Russian tune has not stopped playing, especially since it unquestionably meets a certain echo in public opinion. On May 15th, during the broadcast It is not the arena (on La7), when the presenter Massimo Giletti asked the Russian journalist Dmitrij Kulikov: “But you Russians are guests only on Italian television?” , he replied without a shadow of hesitation: “Yes”.
(Translation by Stefania Mascetti)
This article was published by Le Monde.