The election of Ignazio La Russa as President of the Senate in mid-October last year had already sparked off controversy and negative reactions with a clear prevalence of opinions critical of the fact that the second state office has a declaredly (neo)fascist pastas clearly emerged from the analysis carried out on the issue.
In recent days, La Russa, responding to the words of the co-director of LiberoPietro Senaldi, declared that the attack in via Rasella “was not a very noble page of the Resistance” to then affirm: “No, far from it, also because those who were killed were not sinister Nazis of the SS, but it was a band of semi-retired people, a musical band”.
Already in 1996 the newspaper wrote a series of articles describing the military column as made up of elderly people with little or no weapons. And precisely on that story the Italian judiciary condemned the magazine for defamationin a lawsuit brought by the surviving partisans.
It is therefore natural that the statements of the President of the Senate, in defense of Giorgia Meloni, who only a few days earlier had claimed that the 335 dead of the massacre of Fosse Ardeatine – the response of the Nazi regime precisely to the attack in via Rasella – had been “massacred just because they were Italians“, have unleashed a storm.
Ignazio La Russa, who already on Friday when his story of the Nazi musicians in via Rasella had begun to circulate had intervened with a note to clarify that he had not defined the partisan action “inglorious, but one of the least glorious”, yesterday in the face of criticism he then apologized. Almost. “I have no difficulty in specifying that I was wrong in not pointing out that the Germans killed in via Rasella were Nazi soldiers but I thought it was obvious and obvious as well as notorious”.
In this regard Ezio Mauro, former Director of Republicwrites that yes one consolidated tactic, which proceeds between provocation and dissimulation. The main walls of the system are forced, their resistance is tested, the national awareness of the limit is measured, continuously moving it further, to delegitimize anti-fascism as a founding value of the country.
Interpretation with which they appear to be Most Italians agree. Or at least a good part of the Italians who have expressed themselves online about it.
In fact, from our analysis of online conversations (social media + online news + forums and blogs) relating to La Russa, a sentiment emerges, the share of emotions and, precisely, feelings contained in online verbalizations, which are clearly negative.
In these days, just under 34,000 citations for La Russaby over 4 thousand unique authors, whose contents have involved (like + reaction + comments and shares) more than 232 thousand subjects. Volume of online conversations that generated a potential reach, the so-called “opportunity to be seen” (i.e. the opportunity they theoretically had based on these volumes of conversations to be exposed to content related to the flood), of over 7 billions of views on the topic.
We reasonably estimate that the effective reach stands at 350 million impressions, of actual views of content related to the topic in question. In practice it is as if, theoretically, every Italian had seen about six times a content in this regard.
Of these, one of the contents that has become more viral is an article by Republic on the affair. An article that involved just under 5,000 people and had, according to estimates by Semrush, a platform often used for researching keywords and online ranking data, more than 206,000 visits, spreading virally online on social media, on other online newspapers and elsewhere, as the infographic summarizing the data from our analysis shows.
In short, it really seems that online Italians have accepted the invitation of the writer who survived the Holocaust to protest. Is that the President of the Senate has missed yet another opportunity to demonstrate the neutrality that his role imposes on him.