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If only we were really “beasts”

This article is published in issue 15 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until April 12, 2022

A week of war not quite far away and of hate crimes even too close. But in the redundancy of TV, newspapers and the Net, humans never seem to be the culprits, but the mysterious inhumans. Instead, we should all be required to never say “inhuman” about a crime again, since we are the only ones to commit them. Never again to define war, genocide, ethnic cleansing as “bestial”: no other species, between heaven and earth, uses cannons, fire, barbed wire. Not to repeat “we are beasts”, “they are beasts”, in the face of the massacre of a woman’s body or of an entire community, given that beasts kill to survive, the exact opposite of what we do, since the times when Cain turned a donkey’s jaw into a weapon to kill his brother. And the opposite could never have happened.

Settled into the nourishing heat of our home life, blood-soaked screens both attract and scare us. They are a hypnosis that stuns us and a warning that keeps us alert. Because we recognize, in the violence that the news offers us every day, the constant threat of the living species that breathes next to us, the closest of all the others, ours. The only one capable of declining cruelty in so many different forms. Both when he wears the planetary clothes of a czar out of time, out of control and without gaze like Vladimir Putin, who orders the carpet bombing of Ukrainian cities, including refugees on the run: more blood, more pain, more glory. Or in the domestic ones of any neighbor, like that fellow Davide Fontana, 43, from Milan, a two-lire banker and a double identity, who kills with a hammer and then cuts and then burns and then freezes the body of the man for 69 days. ex-girlfriend Carol Maltesi: more blood, more pain, more compensation for the injured male’s narcissism.

MILAN – Davide Fontana responsible for the murder of the pornstar Carol Maltesi aka Charlotte Angie, image taken from her Linkedin profile (MILAN – 2022-03-29, Cattaneo Alberto) ps the photo can be used in respect of the context in which it was taken, and without the defamatory intent of the decorum of the people representedCattaneo Alberto / ipa-agency.net

By summoning animal ferocity, we try to hide our own, how this little lexical fraud could be enough to protect us from the truth that instead concerns us.

Violence is human and almost always male, it is so in the detail of the single murderer who attacks a body, almost always of a woman. And in the catastrophic war, where villages and cities are pulverized by armies.

The root of the damage is in the power of the male. In the social male, the one who governs the rules and routes of the world, who invents hypersonic missiles, phosphorus ammunition, thermobaric bombs to destroy better and faster and faster. And it is in the single male, the one who through crooked childhood or poisoned frustration, chases, besieges, torments, kills his victim, all he needs is a simple hammer, multiplied by cruelty.

Never as today do we see this correlation between the crime story and the history of blood red as clear as today. The killer will end up on trial. But the generals? Other males of high prestige, after preparing and riding the war, will make peace. To be secured – according to the same logic – with other more sophisticated weapons than before, more expensive than before. Always regretting past massacres, to prepare future ones.

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Source: Vanity Fair

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