Italian
There is a ghost that haunts the media squares of Italy, and it is the ghost of moralism disguised as civic engagement. The recent debate on the pardon for Nicole Minetti has uncovered a paradox that deserves to be analyzed with the coldness of a surgeon and the memory of a historian: how is it possible that the so-called libertarian and progressive forces have become the fiercest guardians of public shaming?
The story of the former regional councilor is well known: a trajectory that took her from the seat of an honorable, unblemished politician to a final conviction for aiding and abetting prostitution and embezzlement. More than three years in prison. A verdict that, for many, was not just a legal sentence, but yet another opportunity to strike at those who can no longer defend themselves.
To understand the depth of today’s hypocrisy, one must turn back the pages of time to May 25, 1895. On that day, in London, Oscar Wilde was sentenced to two years of hard labor. The charge? “Gross indecency.” Judge Willis, in delivering the sentence, even expressed regret that the law was too lenient. He would have preferred to apply an old statute, already abolished by Wilde’s time, which provided for the death penalty.
His books were banned and no longer sold, his plays removed from the billboards, family ties — wife and children — forever severed. Justice was equal for all and Wilde was convicted, but above all exposed to public reproach. The strict puritanical justice of the Victorian age had triumphed, silencing the brightest voice of his generation.
Today we look at those events with a sense of deep shame and injustice. Yet, if we shift our gaze to the present, we find the same exact mechanism of social exclusion and persecution. The real scandal does not lie in grace — a tool of humanity provided by our legal system to balance the rigors of a justice that does not always coincide with equity — but in the reaction of those who, for an ideal mission, should defend the individual from the grip of the State.
Why do progressives, always ready to invoke guarantees for those with dissenting opinions or for comrades who make mistakes, turn into unyielding inquisitors when the subject in question does not belong to their political aesthetic? On one hand, the defense of individual freedom as an absolute dogma. On the other, the demand for a penalty without discounts, almost as if wanting to punish not the crime — already sanctioned by the courts — but the person and what they have represented.
A matter of mirrors, then. If Wilde’s fault was to challenge the customs of a hypocritical era, the “fault” of Minetti seems to have become the mirror onto which a certain politics projects its moral failures. Raising the shield of scandal against a grace means denying the possibility of a reparative oblivion, the same one that today, posthumously, we grant with extreme ease to the English playwright.
We should express the same disapproval for those who today raise media dust where, instead, the right to clemency reigns. Because if justice becomes just a weapon to bring down the opponent or to please the “popular sentiment,” then we are no different from the Victorian judges who destroyed Wilde. The codes change, the names of the crimes change, but the reflection of those who cast the first stone remains, unfortunately, the same.
