The grief over the death of two of our fellow (italian) citizens in the confusing battlefield of Libya stoked again the fire of an internal political conflict that expands now without any verbal limits, and fueled a feeling of fear and closure inside our borders. Europe is falling apart, like a giant with clay feet, under the pressure of thousands of men, women, children coming from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and a lot of African countries. By now even the subtle (and often brutal) distinction between refugees and “economic migrants” is no more evoked, in front of the multitudes who camped inside controlled fences.

    Today we can also recognize as true, the words of Max Frisch (reminded by Lucio Caracciolo in an shiny editorial recently published on Limes), who stated, commenting on the post war migration of Italians to Switzerland to carry out the most menial jobs,: ” we wanted arms, men arrived “: humiliated in their primary claim to be considered as human, faces to watch, hands to shake, bodies to cure, hearts to console, people to talk with.

Reject, move, fight, are the verbs of the new Europe, trying to keep one’s quietness while being afraid of the winds of war now blowing on its doorstep. Yet Berlin’s Golden Bear was delivered to a film that celebrates Lampedusa and its inhabitants, far warm and motherly periphery of a continent without soul and intelligence.

Perhaps the suburbs, in our cities, our world, our culture will save us : open ourselves to them is not only an act of mercy, but the only way to grasp the hidden humanity still living, in spite of all selfishness and meanness, and which will rid us from the inconclusiveness of the powerful and fearful.

Communication of the President of MEIC