My name is Salif K.
Where are you from?
From Senegal.
And your family lives there?
Yes, in Senegal.
My life has been a bit difficult. Before coming to Spain, I lived in Greece.
I left my home country in 2010 to go to Greece, and I stayed there for two years.
Then I went to Germany. After Germany, I went back to Italy, and finally to Spain.
I have suffered a lot in all countries. I was in Greece for two years.
No, five years, sorry. I was imprisoned for two years because of my irregular administrative situation.
When I got out of prison, I received an expulsion order forcing me to leave the country immediately.
I crossed the border with everyone, that's when I went to Germany. I go there, I apply for political asylum.
The answer to my asylum application was refused after a year and a half because they considered that I was not entitled to asylum because I was Senegalese.
They gave me a red card, valid for two years. When I finished the process, they told me to leave there too.
I was advised to find a lawyer to appeal, but I gave up and left Germany, because there was nothing to do:
either you have papers and the possibility to work, or they keep you in a centre.
That's when I went to Italy. It is true that there are many Senegalese in Italy.
We Senegalese are usually street vendors, but things were not easy. I spent two or three years in Italy,
but I didn't understand the language and there weren't many job opportunities, nothing at all.
After Italy, I came here. In Spain things are going well for me, for the moment.
The far right, since Spain is an entrance door to Europe, and it's also in the border to Africa, where a lot of people in irregular situation come
they are using their hate speech against migrant people. And it's growing a lot in Spain.
We also have to highlight something: in an economic crisis, in a sanitary crisis, too,
people who are native and are in a vulnerable situation, adhere to this far right discourse to blame migrants.
I think the far right is here, they never disappeared. It remains and now it's growing. Their politics have always been playing people off against each other.
They see themselves as better than others, they see themselves as the ideal people. They are generally White, hetero people.
They don't only discriminate migrants but also other collectives. They don't like feminism, they don't like homosexuals, lesbians
They come from Franquist times, they believe it and they will continue with that discourse. Many people have lost their humanity
and have normalized that discourse, they have normalized for example the deaths on the borders because they are "the others".
"They are not persons, they are invading us, we don't care if they die on their way."
The far right has always been using the same strategy, everywhere: First the dehumanisation of migrants, and then the criminalisation.
When we talk about far-right we need to make a difference between the Parlamentary far-right,
and the radical right, which is the far-right that doesn't renounce to the use of violence to reach their political goals.
And here we can find the neo-nazi groups, or the neo-fascists.
On the other hand, inside the Parlamentary far-right, we find this far-right that, at least in a formal way,
accepts the rules of the game of democracy, although their goal is wearing it down and dynamite it from the inside.
And here we find the traditional far-right, the one with "God, homeland and family", traditional, ultraconservative.
And the new radical, populist far-right. In the traditional far-right we find Fratelli d'Italia, Vox, for instance. And in the new far-right
we find Salvini, the AfD or Marine Le Pen, who is the leader of this movement in Europe.
The origins of the new radical, populist far-right can be found in France, right after May '68,
when far-right intellectuals noticed that leftist ideas were way more attractive for the youngsters than the right winged ones, that were old-fashioned and outdated.
They began a renovation process for the far-right. Several think tanks were born, for example GRECE, led by Alain de Benoist,
who is the ideologist of all this new radical, populist right.
They studied the enemy, the left, very well, and they took leftist referents, for example Gramsci, and the cultural hegemony concept.
And they noticed that they didn't have to aspire to governments, that were still very far from them,
but instead it was in their interest to try to penetrate in society in all posible ways.
They did it and now we can say that the bigot-tubers have this as their ideological origin: Alain de Benoist and the new radical,
populist right that was born in France after May '68.
He was the ideologist of all the cultural battle that we are seeing right now. And of the political incorrectness, and of wanting to be seen as anti-system,
which is actually an anti-politics thing that is, as always and as all the far right, serving the economic elites.
Ultimately, Vox is not far-right. Vox is the nominal far-right. They are like others, like Trump or LePen. They follow their steps, they don't have any originality.
Human nature is like this: it always tends to find simple answers to the difficulty of fronting problems that have complex structures.
This also feeds back into a nationalist feeling. Countries where, in the past, nationalist culture was quite powerful, in moments like this it re-emerges.
Because these are countries that in many ways tend to conservative ideas. They are not open to change.
I always put an example: my grandfather, in a remote African village, can have access to an iPhone, but he can't find a pill for a tooth pain or a headache.
So Capitalism does that: gives access to consum. In moments of economic crisis it happens that the most vulnerable collectives are used by the far-right.
They focus all their discourse to them as scapegoats. The media play a crucial role too, in this criminalisation.
From the sensationalism that often highlights crimes committed by migrants. They drop things without any proof.
We have seen many times that something that happenned in other part of the world, they spread it as it had happenned in Spain.
The media are the speaker of the far right, because they pick up those speeches and disseminate them.
Every news with a criminalisation of migrant people are broadcasted by them to the people, and that's very negative.
I think a media has the obligation of educating. And if it doesn't ducate, if it disseminates those messages, is a media that criminalises those people.
Berlusconi has the monopoly of he media because he was a media businessman, and also, when he came to power, took control of the public media.
And in this mediatic empire, he set the stage for what we are seeing now, on large-scale.
Berlusconi normalised that Mussolini had done a lot of good things, for example. This was something that many people thought in Italy but you couldn't say it.
And he normalised having a fascist person in the debates, a no complexes, self-declarated fascist person.
All these things have also come to Spain and to other places in Europe. Berlusconi came to power thanks to his pact with the Lega Nord, in the North of Italy,
and Alleanza Nazionale, that was later refunded into Giorgia Meloni's party, the ones who came from the fascist party.
He broke the pact, which we now call the cordon sanitaire.
There was this pact with all the parties that had defeated fascism, from the communists to the Christian Democracy, to isolate fascism.
It's hard to find a media which has no funding from big companies. There are economic interests behind
and the far right will always be with the economic elites. Therefore it's easy to have a laundered far-right discourse in big media.
We already know that the media are in a ratings war. There's also an interests war. Jean-Claude Michel, a French writer and philosopher,
used to say that he doesn't like to appear on the media. He doesn't like the TV because it's a showtime space that obeys a binary way of thinking.
There is no place in these traditional, not alternative media, for critic thinking. It doesn't exist there,
because they obey to ratings, and people like very much, let's say, to see blood. People like lynching, and voting speeches, something superficial.
My name is Amina and I come from Afghanistan.
I have been living here for seven months because of war, insecurity and threats that endangered my life in my home country.
I must also say that my profession as a teacher in Afghanistan contributed to this risk.
We came to this course to learn how to sew. We have been learning for months and we are very happy. But we are worried.
When we leave here we won't be able to find a job, or work anywhere because we are foreigners.
That's why we are a bit worried, because as foreigners we don't have a work permit here.
We don't have a work permit and even if we did work, we wouldn't get paid, we wouldn't get paid, that's why we are so worried.
I want women to be listened, not abandoned. Support women, it's the most important thing for them, because we are in foreigner land, we are migrants.
We, Afghan women, are very opressed. Nobody listens to us, nobody supports us, but this association does.
I wish that there were more than one. I wish that they were everywhere, not just one place. I hope that some day they were in my own country.
We know that there, unfortunately, women are very opressed. We can't study, we can't work and we, who are here, can't do anything either.
I can't do anything, to be honest, that's why I'm asking you to support women. We want to learn from you, thank you.
Thank you for coming, I am Serdal Din, a dressmaking teacher. I work in this association of migrant women and people with disabilities.
We are in the sewing class with the Afghan students. Sometimes workshops are very expensive, this one is free.
As it is free, I have the possibility to support all the students as much as I can.
The women with disabilities, the Afghan women who are here... All these women without economic resources have suffered a lot during the migration process.
Other sewing workshops cost money, but not this one. So far we have supported two thousand women, training them in a profession.
They come here, we have specialists in psychiatry and psychology, they come to talk to them. We have a lawyer and a specialist in Farsi, Mrs. Arzu, Arzu Evin.
And we don't want this place to close, we don't want that to happen.
Is your project going to end.
Yes, it will end. It's a very sad situation, we don't want it to close. When they come here they learn a profession.
As in other places they ask for money, they can't pay for it. We don't want this place to close and we hope that you will help us.
One of the main goals of Giorgia Meloni's government is making a big operation of historical revisionism, to launder fascism.
We can see the big importance that the Italian government gives to what they call the cultural battle,
because the different Culture Ministers in Meloni's government, use to quote Alain de Benoist as a big referent. This ideologist of the new radical, populist right.
Her party, Fratelli d'Italia, is a party that we call post-fascist, because it has a fascist root. Its symbol is actually the Fiamma Tricolore, which is the symbol of fascism.
But they have done a fase washing process. They are not like the neo-fascists, who are this violent far-right that directly beats migrants on the streets,
giving the Nazi salute, but it's a party that drinks from fascism.
It is a modern fascism which, however, has the same identical foundations: patriarchal, sexist and racist, fundamentally racist.
My story begins in July 1989, in the countryside of Villa Literno, in southern Italy,
white Italians killed a South African refugee, Jerry Essan Masslo,
who was not recognised by the Italian state, even though he was escaping from apartheid, as a refugee.
He was killed by robbers, but also by criminals who did not want him to fight for his right to a better wage.
That event triggered a very strong, very broad, almost spontaneous movement of associations, parties, men, women
and we organised and I was among those who organised the event, taking part in a huge anti-racist demonstration
on 7 October 1989, in which we asked the government for new laws, laws to protect workers,
people who were being exploited, to ask for guarantees for asylum seekers, something that did not exist in Italy at that time.
The end of fascism. On 28 April Benito Mussolini was assassinated, executed, I think that is the correct term, by the partisans.
But fascism did not come to an end. Because during those years, from 1943 to 1945, Italy was divided into three parts:
a part that joined the resistance, to which we owe a great deal;
a part that joined the Germans, who occupied us and founded the Republic of Saló, the Italian Social Republic;
and the larger part, the indifferent population, the one that pretended not to be fascist, stayed at home.
If they had a fascist uniform they burned it, threw it away, destroyed it,
if they had a bust of Mussolini they destroyed it, but the mentality remained the same.
Firstly, many real criminals were not punished, and I give an example.
General Rodolfo Graziani, the colonial exterminator in Libya and Ethiopia,
who killed even with gas, or had hundreds of thousands of people killed even with gas,
and who then became the commander of the army of the Republic of Saló, spent a few days in prison, then was released
and became the president of the Italian Social Movement, which was the heir party of fascism,
with the tricolour flame... but, let's say, the party that is the origin of the current Fratelli d’Italia.
All the institutions, police chiefs, prefects, commissars, remained those of fascism.
Now, how is it possible to change the institutions if you don't replace those who run them?
The right has always had racism as a basic, fundamental element.
It is a failed, misguided, losing conception that has no future.
The right wing builds its own symbology on this, the right wing creates its own cosmogony
and, in my opinion, it is a return to fascism, to an idea of real fascism.
The Lega used to work a lot on the idea of an independent North, and so on.
Then they grew quite a lot thanks to the attacks on immigrants, particularly against Muslims, using the fear of terrorism,
saying that it was the fault of a few, but that everyone had to be punished, everyone had to be kicked out.
Then they played a lot with a statement, they grew up with: “Italians first”.
What a beautiful statement! Only, Italians first, and unfortunately many fell for it, means that I, the son of workers,
and the son of a billionaire, who perhaps evades taxes and takes his money to tax havens, are the same.
It's not true! I am more like Mohammed, who works hard like me, maybe more than me. He is closer to me.
Empathy is born when you meet the person, if they become your neighbour, your children's classmate, the person you go to buy things from,
the person is no longer an immigrant, the person is already... you greet them, with whom you even exchange
they become a friend, I don't say a friend, but there they are...
they become a person, precisely, they have a name and surname.
Then, however, the right, especially the right, throws the numbers at you
and you no longer see the person, but you see the numbers. So there is a sort of schizophrenia.
I saw with my own eyes in Sicily, in Puglia, in Calabria the landings
and I saw the people, the Italian citizens, not the anti-racists like me,
but the people who brought food, blankets, warm drinks, who came to help those who disembarked because they saw those suffering faces.
And it was beautiful as an image and the people arriving felt warm.
Then, however, when they ended up in the newspapers, it was the invasion, they were the ones who invaded the country.
So, I think that in Italy there is a sort of schizophrenia, you don't want to accept,
you don't want to recognise that what you see and what they make you see are two different things.
And you have to decide whether to accept what you see or what they make you see.
I am Gianfranco Schiavone, the president of ICS, which stands for Italian Consortium of Solidarity.
It is a very old association in Italy, since it was born in the mid-1990s
to deal, at first, with the reception of refugees from the former Yugoslavia,
especially from the particular conflict in Bosnia in 1992-93.
Then, in the first years of this century, it became an association dedicated to
the reception and legal protection of refugees, asylum seekers, refugees arriving in Italy.
We operate in Trieste, which is a strategic entry point on the Balkan route, not only now, but also 10, 15, 20 years ago, and always has been.
In Italy there is, I must say, a very, very fierce policy that feeds day after day attitudes of intolerance and racism,
but above all it is a policy that has an objective that we must understand very well.
the aim of the far right is to create as much disorder as possible in order to exploit it politically.
It is not directly racist, in the sense that this would be too unpleasant;
what it does is feed racism indirectly, making everything related to the life of foreigners in Italy extremely difficult,
making public services not work for them, creating a circuit of social marginalisation, creating situations of discomfort
and then exploiting these situations of discomfort politically.
In other words, it is a kind of machine to generate fear but also to generate disorder.
The slogans of the right and the far right are words about order, but in reality
the aim of the far right is to create as much disorder as possible in order to exploit it politically.
As everybody knows, the sectors of the population most affected by xenophobic propaganda are precisely
the weakest sectors of the population, the most popular sectors, which are most at risk of...
falling into poverty or are already in poverty and are most at risk of marginalisation.
That's why I mentioned before that the strategy of the far right is a strategy of disorder:
because it aims above all at these situations, that is, at these social classes, to convince them
that the malaise they are experiencing is not due to bad public management, to an iniquitous distribution of resources, to a lack of social interventions,
in short, basically and precisely to the policies of the right, but that the fault lies with the newcomers,
that they are competition and that, if these competitors were not there, the problem would not exist.
So this is a very clever strategy, we know, very clever, because you have to solve the problems of people who are in difficulty:
that they don't have a house, that they don't have a place to go, that they have lost their job, and so on.
So intervention for migrants is not an intervention that takes something away from them.
They are simple, but we live in a society of complexity, complexity is a problem, that's why we seek to simplify, simplify, simplify,
and this is a very important tool for the right: extreme simplification.
They say they are Christians...They have a phobia. Because every religion says you have to love the others as they are.
Because we are all human beings, and we want a better world, according to all religions. So beating your chest saying you're a Christian,
but you can't help people who are in a vulnerable situation, is something that doesn't match religion. It's like...
They are using it as a discourse, but they are not Christians, they are not Catholics if they can't help people in a vulnerability situation.
Jesus acted like an anti-capitalist. When they went to Jerusalem's market, he fought speculation and traders.
And that's what we are doing, we want a fairer world, where no one should live at the expense of others.
One of the biggest contradictions of he far right is that they call themselves Christians but their values and ideas are against classic Christianism.
This leads to, for example, considering Pope Francis an enemy for a big part of the far right.
And, in fact, the far right has supported the part of the Vatican curia which is ultrareactionary, ultraconservative, that is making Pope Francis' life a living hell.
He is a pope who often speaks very forcefully about immigration, who condemns deportations, who condemns refoulement,
who takes a stand, from this perspective, with us. But even with concrete acts, you know?
And then there are the priests, the bishops who, on the other hand, close their doors when we ask for a welcome.
They think like Salvini or Meloni. They say that we must refuse, that they don't practice charity, that they don't...
they say that immigration is a danger. Some are even far right-wingers. I mean, it's a complicated world, from this point of view.
Some see Salvini and Meloni as references, because they defend the traditional family.
Then, the traditional family of Salvini and Giorgia Meloni is a bit laughable, but they are deceiving in this respect, they are very deceiving.
If someone asks me if the Church, understood in its complexity, is progressive, my answer is no, it is not.
There are parts of the Church that are, that fortunately breathe a little within this line imposed from above,
but the history of the Church is a difficult history and it is basically a history of closure.
In reality, the right-wing political forces in Italy are taking advantage of this, that is, they know that they can continue
to nurture a traditionalist and frightened Catholicism, especially among the elderly,
who are also the most... who are the main electorate. We know that we live in an ageing society.
However, one thing is certain: that there are many cracks within the Catholic Church.
Shortly after the demonstration for Jerry Masslo, in 1990, there was an occupied, abandoned place, an abandoned building,
and there were thousands of people on the street, immigrants, who didn't know where to sleep, they slept on the street.
We went, four or five Italians, together with the president of the diocesan Caritas, Monsignor Luigi Di Liegro, to break the locks and open the building.
Fifteen hundred people occupied that building. When they asked him: “Monsignor, but this way you are breaking the law”
he answered very forcefully: When laws are unjust, it is a duty to disobey them.
Well then, I felt Monsignor Di Liegro, being an atheist, as I am and always will be,
to be much more of a comrade than many others who talk the talk and then do nothing.
One of the most important NGOs, the most important in Italy, Mediterranea, its main figure, the one who is publicly exposed, is a priest.
And he is a priest who gets on the boat to help people who are about to drown. What can I say?
We must understand that public, official positions are one thing, especially in this pontificate,
but that the social reality of the Church within the Church and also in the ramifications of the Church itself is another thing.
Catholic environments remain in practice a solid basis for the right, even if all this is in contrast to the message of the Church.
All this may seem contradictory, and in some respects it is, but it is necessary to understand this complexity.
I believe that the greatest responsibility for the growth of far right-wing parties
has to be attributed to the parties of the moderate left.
It's something that is not understood: in the places where socialdemocrats govern, they do nothing.
They do nothing, it's like they are accomplices of this system. They are doing nothing at all and people are suffering this.
It's what generates a rejection of politics. A rejection and anger hat are being capitalised by the right and the far right.
They have abandoned people, they have abandoned all the fights for the working class.
Migration, as a collective, has never been on their agenda as to think they have abandoned it.
But they did have abandoned it, because their duty as leftist thinkers, is at least, although they do nothing, at least to defend
those rights as a set of rights, to be seen as political subjects in the work field. Migrants are a labour force.
Every day there are reports that prove that even Spanish elders' benefits will need many many thousands of immigrants, just in Spain,
to keep the same social welfare that socialdemocrats defend.
So stop seeing us, or seeing migrants, as immigrants but as a labour force, as workers. From now on they will be able to include
migrants inside their struggle on the work environment.
The left has probably not understood, or has understood too late or too little, that migration profoundly transforms society
and that dealing with migration is not a specific area, perhaps even a little marginal: “I have to deal with this too, among other things”,
but that this was the central axis of the policy and that if you don't manage it, you don't deal with anything.
Statements are not enough, demonstrations are not enough, anti-racist acts are not enough, condemnation initiatives are not enough,
because, of course, they are necessary, but if they are badly managed, there is a risk of creating even more distance, because people may feel negatively judged.
On the other hand, we need to accompany them with information, yes, but also with positive experiences. As I said,
we must first counteract this xenophobic drift with information, but also with positive experiences, so that
vulnerable people in Italy and Europe, in any case, can concretely experience that migrants are not a problem.
If the left, the moderate left, had helped and promoted effective laws and also the construction of a better culture,
we would not be facing these problems today, nor in these dark times.
Instead, terrible laws have been passed, migration has been spoken of as a public order problem,
the idea has been accepted that immigration either could not be talked about or that rights had to be granted little by little.
Many weak messages, profoundly weak and ineffective, with the result, and this is the worst thing, that working men and women,
a large part of the working classes vote for the right because, they say, the right defends us from foreigners,
as if low wages depended on foreigners and not on the fact that capitalism imposes the lowest wages in Europe on our country.
Instead of fighting together for higher wages, you take it out on those who are worse off than you.
Love Narratives is a concept that portraits the neccesary narrative strategy to build societies through love, understood as a political act.
It has the revolutionary part of bursting in a space where you can't talk about love, but hate.
To fase the hate speech, instead of making 'anti' speeches, we make this kind of speech that are about love.
If man is, by nature (and when I say 'by nature' I mean physically, not only philosophically)
has some brain resources, and a series of hormone productions, that are destinated to live in community.
That is, either we want it consciously or unconsciously, we are always going to look for community.
The lack of community is toxic.
If no one proposes a community to you, you will end entering those spaces where that proposal exists, and hatred is a toxic, community link.
It's a faster tool that does not assure the union of people who share it.
So we have big masses of people that are catalized in a very big, wide and fast way, and easy to control.
You're fulfilling all the wishes, it's like very visceral. On the other hand, community building can be frustrating.
Think that the turning point was the day that they (Vox) put a banner in a Madrid subway station, where they talk about a lady whose benefits were taken away
because of a foreigner minor. Then it started to form a ball and everything starts to work as a discourse.
The parties that are promoting hate are extremely irresponsible. And then it happens that it is a trend that is not very sustainable over time.
In fact we are now starting to reach the limits of that capacity of sustainability of hatred in society. Because hatred in society generates even more sadness.
It's not just the capitalist system with its individualism, but hatred producing sadness and also loneliness is toxic and therefore is very destructive.
Through love, incredible things have been achieved but now people talk badly about them. I aleays talk about the hippies who stopped the Vietnam war.
And they did stopped it. They were those movements. And now it seems like they all were drug-adicts, right? So hating is well seen, and talking about love is not,
because it's the revolution. Because if we built from that perspective, many problems that we have, as loneliness and sadness, would drastically decrease.
The German online media Collective uncovered, in January 2024, that in November 2023, in a city near Berlin, Potsdam,
there was a secret meeting between neonazi leaders, AfD politicians and local businessmen who paid to attend that meeting.
Martin Sellner told in that meeting that the aim of AfD had to be precisely what we were saying: laundering the neonazi ideas.
And that they calculated that they will need only 10 years for these neonazi ideas to be socially accepted.
If you carry out politics of murder, death and destruction in spaces where you are not seen, such as Spain and its borders externalisation,
while you talk about Human Rights or rights in general, but you allow, with your equipments and your money,
people to be abandoned in the desert and to die, and you don't care at all. That's cynical, and when it's denounced but nothing happens,
it leads to impunity and it makes the Overton window bigger. Because this means: "It doesn't matter”.
You can kill whoever you want if you do it well. "And that impunity, that narrative of impunity, seems extremely dangerous to me”.
And the governments that carry out those politics are not positioning in public, so it's extremely dangerous too.
In reality, behind the claim of wanting to define themselves as progressive there is little, there is very little.
Sometimes there is something, some positions have been clearer, more defined, but, in general, precisely what I was saying before:
there is a lack of elaboration and there is a tendency to slide towards positions, not only of the centre, but, I would say, of the strictest right,
thinking that they are more popular, more captivating, more “intelligent”.
And the most tragic thing is that, in a certain sense, they are, because in fact, when you adopt these positions,
in the end you seem to have carried out an operation to preserve your identity and your popularity,
but in reality you have only made the situation worse, because you have only succeeded in shifting public opinion towards these positions
and whoever defended them before you will have the advantage, because, if you pursue the ideas of the right,
it will always be the right that will win, because the original is always better than the copy.
If you are only a copy, I will always choose the original, there is no reason why I should choose the copy.
It's just an electoral strategy.
To legitimise what they say: that they need to join forces to somehow create a common enemy.
And there is also a structural ignorance.
This narrative is rejected or contrasted, let's say, first and foremost by disseminating correct knowledge. We, for example, are constantly
trying to organise events, initiatives, which also deal with the study of the real situation.
For example, regarding the situation in Trieste, the arrival from the Balkan Route, we publish data, we make regular reports...
We try to counteract the spread of false news, basically. We know that it is probably not enough,
but we do not appeal only to, let's say, an emotional approach, how to define it\'85 We also try to focus on very specific aspects
and to speak with data, with information, with information that is as objective as possible
in order to also address that part of the population that is perhaps a little undecided
and that does not understand whether the information they receive is true or false.
We know that it is false, that it is deliberately created, but in order to dismantle it, it is essential to first
correct this information and from there we can begin a process of revising attitudes.
I wrote a book, whose Italian title is ‘Sconfinate’, where I tell 18 stories of migrant women or women with a migrant background,
who decided not to accept the subordinate role of being migrants. They pointed out some very important things to me.
First of all, we have to fight against the oppression of our culture of origin,
which would want us locked up at home, which would want us to be obedient mothers or daughters.
Then, Italian men look at us as prey, because in Italy there is a huge spread of prostitution.
Many are looking for girls, underage foreign girls, and when they see a young woman,
perhaps attractive, who looks foreign, they immediately think she is available.
And then there is the third ring of exploitation, which is class exploitation,
because if you are a woman and also black, then you also have to be exploited.
These women could be the real future of our country. I say this for a specific reason, because those I have met
and who have managed to overcome borders, as I said before, are dedicated to other things, but also those who try
and even the young women, especially the young girls, if these women who want to be free because they are women
managed to become more visible in our country, I repeat, we men would also live better, and even my older generation would live better,
because they would see something more beautiful, more alive. And I think that this could also be a blow to the right wing. I have a lot of hope in these women.
Before the elections that Meloni won, there was a rape in Italy and a neighbour could record a video.
Meloni disseminate the video, revictimising the woman, because she was identified. And she did it because the suspect was an immigrant.
Meloni took a lot of advantage from this case, she used a fascist slogan that said "We will defend our women". This fed hatred a lot, and also fear of the migrants.
Meloni in this case also used a fake feminism in which she takes sides with women, so it seemed if she came to power,
the rapes would stop because rapes were only caused by migrants and she wouldn't let any migrant into Italy.
Of course nothing of this happened.
She is a woman, but she manages power like a man, she has taken power like a man,
in fact, she does not want to be called “the she president”, but “the he president”.
She acts like a duce, I would dare say, because in her conception, “God, country and family”,
the family is the one where men work above all. In fact, for women, the birth campaign is promoted, i.e. staying at home and looking after the children.
It is the man who brings home the money and the woman has to be faithful and obedient.
Then it is said that they criticise Muslims, but more than Muslim countries, we are in the same order of ideas and perception of the world.
Feminists scare Meloni but, above all, they scare the whole right-wing world and particularly right-wing men, and not only right-wing men.
They are afraid of them precisely because they question the dominant patriarchal role.
I repeat, in the 60s and 70s, above all, feminism managed to get very important laws passed in our country,
on the interruption of pregnancy, on divorce, the family state, the abolition of the crime of honour,
the one that allowed that, if you killed a woman, your partner, wife, daughter, because you suspected that she was with another man,
your crime would be punished in a lighter way. But it was abolished in ‘81, a barbaric rule like that and there is still...
Rape was not considered a crime, but a crime against morality.
So, if at that time Meloni or people like her had been at the head of the government of the country, had ruled the country, we wouldn't have all these rights.
Every day we have a good group of minors arriving in Trieste, even at a very young age, and who tend not to stay, but continue their journey
because, in reality, the final destination is to reach relatives and contacts, also their parents, but often only relatives living in other countries.
Why do these minors leave? Nobody asks this question and we really should ask ourselves this question.
Surely the minors leave because in some countries, I am thinking of Afghanistan, which is the country with the highest number of people in Trieste,
there is a deliberate decision to make the minor undertake the journey
in order to remove him or her from the consequences of an adult life considered unworthy of him or her.
In order to give the future adult a better life, it is even preferred to expose him or her to enormous risks, but it is considered that if he or she stays, the risks are greater.
It is not that there is no awareness that the child could suffer violence or even die during the journey;
there is awareness, but it is felt that it is better for the child's well-being.
I'm very optimistic because I believe there is very interesting future,
because the far-right speech in some sectors, many of their things are being discovered to be lies.
For example with the DANA, we saw a lot of spreading hoaxes everywhere, and how people have been dismantling everything.
In many places such as schools or the streets, we see diversity,
there are people from different origins who are together in the streets, the parks, the schools too.
And we are also working in this sector, the education, and all others.
There will be generations and generations with more presence of native people and migrant origin.
And that mixture is going to be very beautiful for Spain, to combat racism.
We have a marvellous future ahead.
I often go to schools, as I said and mentioned, to talk to the boys and girls
and the classes have changed, they are now mixed and there is no racism in the classrooms.
They are the same class. That's my classmate, I study better with him, I don't like him or dislike him,
I don't care if he's black or white, if he comes from China or Italy, I don't care at all. This is the future.
There is this awakening of young activism, it' powerful, and it's up to everyone of us: to be there or not. You have to choose.
I've had the opportunity to do some talks in some high schools. I'm saying because I have experienced it:
I have always been surprised about their mature and anticipated answers. Many people say that youngsters today do nothing.
No, I have a different opinion. They are aware. So I see a lot of interest and concern, especially when we are talking about Africa, that is near and far at the same time.
They have a lot of questions. They are concerned so they have it in their power to change tomorrow.
I don't think that people want the end of the world. I also think people really feel sad and lonely.
And I don't think that is what advanced society wants. So it will have to come a time where the Good and the ways of working trough community and love,
triumph over other much less satisfactory choices. I'm an optimistic, yes. I need to be, if not, how could we change anything?
There is an African saying that goes: "The river never forgets its origins". We humans must remember our roots and our nature.
Our way of being is to move, to migrate, searching everything that we don't have. For many reasons: humanitarian ones, economic ones...
Or just for a good life or freedom. Nothing in life lasts forever nor is permanente. Everything tends to change.
I am convinced that the time will come, that the path will open up and we will have to decide which side to be on:
on the side of those who want to keep the world as horrible as it is, or on the side of those who want to build a better world.
I repeat, perhaps because I want to say goodbye with optimism and because I do not intend to resign myself,
but I believe that those who want a better world have the upper hand.