Massimo Fini

q:it:Massimo Fini (1943- ), Italian journalist, writer, playwright and actor.

Quotes

  • Barack Obama, Nobel Peace Prize winner, has stated that he ‘does not rule out a military strike against Iran’. Israeli President Shimon Peres, Nobel Peace Prize winner, has said: ‘An attack on Iran is getting closer’. Why don't we also give a Nobel Peace Prize, posthumously, to old Adolf Hitler?
  • Bruno Vespa was a journalist who served the First Republic completely and utterly; as the bard of the Christian Democrats, rewarded with the position of director of TG1, he was subservient to his masters and real employers, namely the various secretaries of Biancofiore, and whose only act of courage in a life spent as a servant was to admit that he was one when (but it was already the last days of Saigon) he said, “My reference publisher is the DC”. Bruno Vespa is to the First Republic what Mario Appelius is to Fascism. admitting that he was when (but it was already the last days of Saigon) he said, “My editor is the Christian Democrats”. Bruno Vespa is to the First Republic what Mario Appelius is to Fascism.
    • Carlo Tavecchio, the new president of the Italian Football Federation, has been fiercely criticised for making an unfortunate joke: he referred to a black player as a “banana eater”. (Good heavens, you can't say anything anymore; our vocabulary, as in Orwell's “1984”, will soon be reduced to a “newspeak” made up of ridiculous euphemisms). However, his initial proposals for reform, reducing the number of players in each team to 25, with at least eight coming from the youth academy and no more than two non-EU players per team, are consistent and, although they focus on different objectives, they are all moving in the same direction.
    • Le quattro mosse per sanare il calcio dall'overdose mortale, Il Gazzettino (September 19, 2014)
    • That this is a feminine era, or at least a unisex one, is also evident in the fact that men have lost their characteristics of linearity, straightforwardness, frankness, loyalty and therefore virility. They have become ambiguous like women. They speak with a forked tongue, deceive, set traps and snares. They no longer respect rules or norms, they no longer know or recognise logic or the principle of non-contradiction, they have lost their sense of right and justice (to which women are resistant, as for them no rule can have greater value than their own vital instincts). In other words, man is abandoning the artificial world he has built for himself, without being able to rediscover the natural world. We are faced with feminised men and masculinised women, who have taken only the worst from each other. We have all become homosexuals.
    • Dizionario erotico, manuale contro la donna a favore della femmina, Marsilio, 2000.
  • There is a man in Italy, w:Adriano Sofri, who was sentenced to 22 years in prison for the murder of a police commissioner outside his home, after nine trials, one of which, in a case that is extremely rare in Italy, was reviewed, thus enjoying the maximum guarantees that a state can offer one of its citizens. Yet Sofri served only seven years in prison and, without being able to take advantage of the normal benefits of the law, which do not kick in after only seven years out of twenty-two, he has been free for some time and writes in the most important left-wing newspaper, La Repubblica, and in the best-selling right-wing weekly, Panorama, and from those columns he lectures us daily and is honoured and paid homage to by the entire intelligentsia who, despite all the court rulings, considers him, a priori and by divine right, innocent.
  • Yet war has played a decisive role in human history. Both from a political and social point of view and, perhaps above all, from an existential point of view. It satisfies deep urges and needs that are generally sacrificed in times of peace. War allows us to legitimately release the natural and vital aggression that is in all of us. It is an escape from the frustrating daily grind, from boredom, from the sense of futility and emptiness that, especially in affluent societies, takes hold of us. It is adventure. War evokes and strengthens group and team solidarity. We feel, and are, less alone in war. War blurs the differences in class, social status and economic status, which lose their importance. We are all a little more equal in war. War, like military service, university and regulated games, has the quality of waiting time, of suspended time, the end of which does not depend on us, to which we surrender ourselves totally and which frees us from all personal responsibility. War brings everything, starting with feelings, back to the essential. It frees us from trappings, from the superfluous, from the useless. It makes us all, in every sense, leaner. War gives enormous value to life. For the simple reason that it is death that gives value to life. The real, close, imminent risk of death makes every moment of our existence, even the most trivial, intensely precious. Although it is painful to say, war is a unique and invaluable opportunity to learn to love and appreciate life.
    • Elogio della guerra, Marsilio, 1999.
  • In fifty years' time, books such as The Force of Reason will be viewed with the same horror with which we view Mein Kampf today, and we will wonder how it was possible.
    • La missione di Oriana: americanizzare tutti, Il Gazzettino (April 9, 2004)
    • When Jews claim to be God's chosen people, they actually create the racism of which they will later become tragic victims, because if my people are chosen by God, it is clear that all other peoples are second-class peoples.
    • YouTube at minute 3:46 (October 19, 2011)
  • Theologians, both Christian and Muslim, especially in the Middle Ages, have always been struck by the power of money and the devastation it can wreak on the human soul. More secularly, orthodox Marxists have condemned it as a “means of appropriating other people's money”. Psychoanalysts liken it to excrement, because of the pleasure derived from both expelling it and retaining it.
    • Il denaro sterco del demonio, Marsilio, 1998
  • The fate of the West seems to be condemned to turn, in a painful twist of fate, the line that Goethe puts into Mephistopheles' mouth in Faust: ‘I am the spirit that eternally wants evil and eternally does good.’ The paradox of the West is to believe itself to be Good, to eternally desire Good and to eternally do, in a sort of heterogenesis of ends, Evil. And the fundamental flaw lies precisely in this Manichean distinction between Good and Evil and in the Promethean claim to increase Good at the expense of Evil, wiping it off the face of the earth, when in reality Good and Evil are two sides of the same coin and grow together, the greater the Good, the greater the Evil.
    • Il destino dell'Occidente sembra quello di essere condannato a capovolgere, in un doloroso contrappasso, la battuta che Goethe nel "Faust" mette in bocca a Mefistofele: "Io sono lo spirito che vuole eternamente il male ed opera eternamente il bene". Il paradosso dell'Occidente è credersi il Bene, di volere eternamente il Bene e di operare eternamente, in una sorta di eterogenesi dei fini, il Male. E il vizio di fondo sta proprio in questa distinzione manichea tra Bene e Male e nella pretesa prometeica di aumentare il Bene a spese del Male, cancellandolo dalla faccia della terra, mentre nella realtà Bene e Male sono due facce della stessa medaglia e concrescono insieme, tanto più grande è il Bene, tanto più grande sarà il Male.
      • Il vizio oscuro dell'Occidente, Marsilio, 2002
  • The editor of Il Foglio, [Giuliano Ferrara], is so blinded by his neoconservative ideology that he fails to realise that by promoting Oriana Fallaci's crude anti-Islamic racism, he is paving the way for all other forms of racism and, sooner or later, for a resurgence of anti-Semitism, which will be very difficult to combat if anti-Islamic racism has been endorsed.
    • La Fallaci e l'accusa anti-islam, Il Gazzettino (May 30, 2005)
  • The day of the Big Bang is not far off. Money, in its extreme essence, is the future, a representation of the future, a bet on the future, an inexhaustible relaunch of the future, a simulation of the future for use in the present. If the future is not eternal but has its own finitude, we, at the speed we are going thanks to money, are shortening it vertiginously. We are racing headlong towards our death as a species. If the future is infinite and unlimited, we have mortgaged it to temporal regions so far away as to render it virtually non-existent. The impression, in fact, is that no matter how fast we go, or rather precisely because of this, this orgiastic future constantly recedes before us. Or perhaps, in a circular motion, Nician, Einsteinian, typical of money, it is coming up behind us, laden with the immense debt we have burdened it with. If, as we believe, the future is a non-existent time, a figment of our imagination, as is money, then we have staked our existence on something that does not exist, on nothing, on Nothingness. In any case, this future, whether real or imaginary, expanded to monstrous and dreamlike dimensions by our imagination and our madness, will one day fall upon us as a dramatic present. On that day, money will no longer exist. Because we will no longer have a future, not even one to imagine. We will have devoured it.
    • Il denaro, sterco del demonio, Marsilio, 1998.
  • In the 1950s and early 1960s, Christmas was still a holiday that had something to do with the spirit and the soul. You didn't have to be Christian to believe that something extraordinary was happening on that night, which for believers was the birth of Jesus, and for others (for me, for example, who am from Russia, where we celebrate not Christ but “Father Frost”) it was something magical and enchanted, irrational and incomprehensible. We seriously believed that on Christmas Day, people were all a little bit kinder.
  • The political power of a TV network does not lie solely or primarily in the information it provides directly about politics, but in the culture it disseminates through its entire programming schedule. If in 1994 the entrepreneur Berlusconi, despite running for office for the first time and being a political novice, was able to win the elections with percentages similar to those of a large mass party such as the Christian Democrats, it was not because his three networks campaigned for him (at that time, his opponent also controlled three networks), but because for a dozen years, owning the entire private national television system, he had been able to educate Italians in his culture and preferences.
    • Sudditi, Marsilio, 2004, p. 74
  • In reality, no representative democracy is a democracy, but rather a system of organised minorities that prevail over the majority of citizens taken individually, suffocating them by severely limiting their freedom and keeping them in a state of minority. It is a system of oligarchies or polyarchies.
    • Sudditi, Marsilio, 2004, p. 55
  • Fallaci is a great journalist for the same reason she is a mediocre novelist. She is an enormous, protruding uterus that embraces a wide swath of reality. But what she gains in breadth when she writes articles, she loses in depth when she writes books.
  • The judiciary is like the referee in a football match. You can say that the referee makes mistakes, that he is unprepared, that he doesn't see, but if some players claim that he is corrupt and refuse to accept his decisions when they are against them but demand that they be upheld when they are in their favour, the game quickly ends in a brawl because, sooner or later, all the other players will behave in the same way. Metaphor aside, the social contract that holds us together is broken and we descend the steep slope of anarchy and civil war.
    • 'Guerra civile? No, ma uno psicolabile ne ha colto il clima, Il Gazzettino (December 18, 2009)
    • The writer Aldo Busi, undoubtedly one of the most talented novelists of the post-war period, failed his journalism exam. I don't think this is cause for scandal, nor should Busi take it too much to heart. Regardless of the validity of an exam such as that for journalism, the fact remains that journalism and literature are only superficially similar activities.
    • Bocciare Busi non è uno scandalo, massimofini.it, archive 1990.
  • Luigi Manconi, sociologist, political scientist, university professor, former spokesperson for the Green Party, former member of the Olive Tree coalition, unwisely appointed undersecretary of justice in the Prodi II government, after following in the footsteps of Bersani in calling Beppe Grillo a “fascist” and Antonio Di Pietro, he also labelled, by transitive property, the newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano as “close to the positions of Grillo and Di Pietro”. And if we are not exactly “fascists” for Manconi, we are still right-wing thugs. [...] Manconi, 64, is one of those happy people who were born yesterday and have the enviable ability to completely erase their past. Luigi Manconi was an important leader of Lotta Continua. In the 1970s, he took to the streets with his comrades and, in addition to smashing shop windows and, when necessary, a few skulls, he shouted “Fascist, black beret, your place is in the cemetery”, “Killing a fascist is not a crime”. [...] The truth is that Grillo [...] is frightening with his 15-20% approval rating in the polls. And so he is a “fascist”. [...] It is the fate of my generation, contemporary with that of Manconi, to have to take lessons in good political manners from those who, in words and deeds, were squadristi, and even worse.
  • But the problem is not the Americans and those who command them. It is us Europeans. It is since that day, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, that we should have understood that the United States had become, from forced allies, adversaries if not enemies. We Europeans have no interest in following the United States in its repressive policy towards the Arab-Muslim world, if only because it is on our doorstep and not ten thousand kilometres away. And in the economy, it was the Americans, pursuing the insane dream of mortgaging the future for ages to come, who caused a devastating crisis that they then dumped on Europe, even allowing themselves to blame it for a crisis that started with them and further undermining it with negative forecasts from their rating agencies. For the Americans, we have always been “useful idiots” to be used as they please.
    • Tra Obama e Romney preferivo Sandy, Il Fatto Quotidiano (November 10, 2012); available on Massimofini.it
  • Milena Gabanelli claims that ‘ordinary people don't need more than fifty euros a week’. Where does she live, in a monastery? A good bottle of wine and a packet of cigarettes already cost 15 euros a day. The moralism of the left is unbearable. And now I understand why so many people, without being crooks, voted for Berlusconi. Because by defending his criminal freedom, Berlusconi also defended, by extension, everyone's freedom from the excessive power of the state. Bring back Cainano immediately.
  • Moro is not the imaginary saint depicted in the self-serving official iconography. [...] Moro is the man who emerges from his letters, the letters he wrote while he was a prisoner of the Red Brigades, which are the most painful and humiliating words ever to come out of a prison. The “distinguished statesman” who, when push came to shove, renounced all the principles of the rule of law, seemed to consider the state and its institutions as his own private property, and invited his party friends and the leading representatives of the Republic to do the same. The man who asks for mercy for himself but, in ninety letters, has not a word for the men of his escort, killed for him, and indeed, the only mention he makes of them is coldly bureaucratic, describing them as “administratively inadequate”. He is a politician who confirms the tradition of the Italian ruling class, ready to demand everything, even life, from the humble, but never willing, on the rare occasions when it happens, to pay personally (think of Benito Mussolini fleeing under a German overcoat, or the way in which the king and Pietro Badoglio abandoned Rome). To say these things about a man who died as Moro did may seem, indeed it is, cruel. But it is the truth. And since I wrote these things when Moro was still alive (“Distinguished statesman or poor man?”. Il Lavoro, 4 April 1978), I have no qualms about repeating them now that he is dead and other pieces are coming together to complete the picture.
    • In the ancien régime, the village assembly, made up of all the heads of families, generally men but also women if their husbands had died, decided on everything concerning the village. Albert Soboul, one of the leading historians of the years before and after the French Revolution, writes: 'The assembly voted on expenses and made appointments; it decided on the sale, exchange and lease of common woods, the repair of the church, the presbytery, roads and bridges. [...] it appointed, in addition to the mayors, the schoolmaster, the parish priest, the guardians of the harvest, the assessors and the tax collectors" [...] Another important power of the assembly was in the area of royal taxes, as it was the assembly that determined their distribution within the community and their collection. [...] Of course, in France, the villagers did not participate in the decisions taken at Versailles, but the decisions taken at Versailles took years to reach the village, and in the meantime the peasants decided for themselves.
    • Basta democrazia rappresentativa, massimofini.it and Il Fatto Quotidiano (September 24, 2022)
    • In industrial society, the elderly have no role. In agricultural society, under the ancien régime, the elderly were useful and had a function. In that society, which was based on oral tradition (writing was the prerogative of a few), they were the holders of knowledge, they knew things that were often essential for life and survival or even for simple daily administration, which the younger members of their families and villages did not know and learned from them as and when necessary. He was consulted, he was important, he was respected, so much so that, as noted by the English historian of the ancien régime, Peter Laslette, “there were those who exaggerated their age” (can you imagine someone today claiming to be older than they really are?). In today's society, the opposite is true.
    • L'età ingrata, massimofini.it, 1989
  • In September 1997, Emma Bonino, European Union Commissioner, requested to visit Afghanistan. The Taliban had no obligation to allow her entry, as the EU did not recognise their government. However, they granted her a visa and treated her with kindness and courtesy, as they had always done with guests, even during the dramatic period of the US aggression in October 2001, and as is the Afghan tradition. Emma was able to visit Afghanistan and see everything she wanted. On 28 September, followed by a retinue of 19 people, including EU delegates, journalists, photographers and cameramen, she entered a hospital in Kabul and headed straight for the women's ward, where the photographers began to take pictures and the cameramen began to film. This was extremely foolish behaviour because in Islamic culture the reproduction of the human figure is, in principle, forbidden. Just look at a Persian carpet; it is decorated with plants, animals and fish, but there are no human figures. And this was even more true in Taliban Afghanistan. After all, even in our country, you cannot photograph or film patients without their consent or the authorisation of the hospital management. The “Corps for the Promotion of Virtue and Punishment of Vice” arrived, grabbed Bonino and the others and took them to the nearest police station. For such an offence, the punishment was flogging with “sacred rods”. Bonino was explained how things worked in those parts and shortly afterwards she was released by the officials, who were perplexed and a little disgusted. They would have done better to flog her. With the “sacred rods”, of course. Perhaps she would have understood what, as a good Western radical, she has never understood: that the sensibilities and customs of others also deserve respect. Instead, she wanted to make an international case out of it and, back in Brussels, she got the EU to cut humanitarian funds for Afghanistan.
    • Il Mullah Omar, Marsilio Editori (April 2011), p. 32
    • Osama bin Laden is not merely the “shadow” of the West; he is a fundamentalist, integralist, totalitarian response to a system which, despite defining itself, in good faith, as democratic and liberal, is fundamentalist, integralist and totalitarian. Because it cannot conceive of or tolerate “the other”, which, in one way or another, by hook or by crook, for reasons that are sometimes economic, sometimes ethical, sometimes humanitarian, must be brought into line with the hegemonic model that considers itself, in the words of Voltaire's Candide, “the best of all possible worlds”.
    • Il vizio oscuro dell'Occidente, Marsilio, 2002
  • Paul Tibbets is the pilot who dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. In 1985, a journalist from The Columbus Dispatch, Mike Harden, interviewed him and, in light of the appalling consequences of that bomb, asked him, “Would you do it again today?”. “Of course,” he replied, 'I was brought up to obey orders. In my day, if you received an order from someone in authority, you obeyed." I don't understand why what was true for Paul Tibbets at that time should not also be true for Erich Priebke. Why did the Americans win the war and the Germans lose? [...] If Priebke had refused to obey Kappler, he would have been a hero. But he wasn't Salvo D'Acquisto, he wasn't a hero. He was a man with the intellectual and moral depth of a servant dressed in a soldier's uniform. And I would really like to see among those journalists, opinion makers and television presenters who today act so tough and “beautiful souls” who, in 1944, would have dared to resist an order that came directly from Adolf Hitler.
    • Il Fatto Quotidiano (October 26, 2013)
  • For the first time, a prime minister has found the courage to speak clearly and bluntly to the Americans, even telling them exactly what they need to hear. Who was it? Mario Monti at the G20 summit in Los Cabos, Mexico.
  • When I appeared on television and radio talk shows, I stated that during the first Gulf War, ‘smart bombs’ and ‘surgical missiles’ had killed 32,195 Iraqi children, who are no less children than ours, I expected a reaction from my interlocutors, who would tell me that it was a provocation, that I was lying, that it was not true, that it could not be true. But they could not do that because these are Pentagon figures and therefore above suspicion. I expected cries of outrage, of horror, of disgust. Instead, nothing. Silence. The topic was glossed over and quickly moved on to Berlusconi, Rutelli, Fini, Follini, Prodi or other nonentities of politics and life. I don't think it's always indifference. It's also passivity.
    • Massimo Fini è Cyrano, Marsilio, 2005
    • I was recently awarded the Montanelli Lifetime Achievement Award, which should be presented to me in October in Fucecchio, unless it is revoked in the meantime for unworthiness, again in the name of freedom of information. I am certain that the old Indro Montanelli would not have agreed with a single word of my obituary on Mullah Omar, but I am equally certain that he would never have dreamed of blocking it. If anything, he would have laughed it off as a provocation, even though it was not meant as such. Because Montanelli was a true liberal. Back when liberals still existed.
    • Il necrologio sul Mullah censurato dal Corriere, il Fatto Quotidiano (August 1, 2015); available on Massimofini.it
  • *If he had been born in another country, Giulio Andreotti would have been a great statesman. In Italy, he could only be half a statesman, having to devote the other half to the often shady intrigues that characterise Italian political life. But at the hour of your death, we bid you farewell, “divo Giulio”, with regret. With you, a long season of Italian politics comes to an end, and, given what has come after, certainly not the worst. If the God you believed in, going to Mass early every morning, exists, he will surely be kind to you.'
  • Let it be said in passing that Richard Nixon was the best American president of the post-war period: he ended the Vietnam War, opened up to China forty years ahead of his time, eliminated the misunderstanding of the “gold exchange standard”, and was not a mafioso. But because, unlike Kennedy (who started the Vietnam War, botched the dangerous “Bay of Pigs” affair, brought the world to the brink of World War III alongside Khrushchev, and was close friends with notorious gangsters such as Sam Giancana), he had an ugly face, he went down in history as “Nixon the hangman”.
    • Il Mullah Omar, Marsilio Editori, 2011
  • I have gone blind. My career as a writer and journalist is over. I have gone blind. Or, to be more precise, I am partially blind or “visually impaired”, to use the convoluted language of doctors. Basically, I can no longer read and therefore cannot write either. For a writer, this is the end, if you like, and in its own way romantic, but I would gladly have spared myself it.
  • Once, several years ago, Indro Montanelli, expressing his disgust at the softness and weakness of Christian Democracy, which softened, incorporated, exhausted and ultimately neutralised any opposition, depriving it of all satisfaction and dignity, showed me a photograph, set in a small silver frame, which he kept, like a a holy card, as others do with pictures of their mother or wife and children, on his desk at Il Giornale. To my surprise, I saw that it was Stalin. “It would have been fun to fight him,” he said.
    • Sudditi

Ma quel dì Giulio difese lo Stato

L'Indipendente (December 16, 1995)
  • It is shameful that even today the Christian Democrats are still being accused of the only occasion on which, by sacrificing their leader, they demonstrated that sense of statehood that they have always been accused of lacking. What did Moro ask for? In those letters, the “distinguished statesman”, the man who had governed the country for over thirty years, asked the state to renounce the principles on which it was founded, its laws and its institutions in order to save his life.
  • In any case, the government, led by Giulio Andreotti, and the Christian Democrats, with the decisive support of the Italian Communist Party, decided to say no to the blackmail of the Red Brigades and Aldo Moro. It was the only way forward. [...] The very survival of the state was at stake. What would the Red Brigades have done if the government had given in to blackmail? They would have kidnapped the first Mr Rossi who came within their reach and started all over again. A downward spiral would have begun, leading only to the dissolution of the state and the victory of the terrorists.
  • In any case, if there were any doubts about the “line of firmness” at the time the events took place, today there can be none. It is no coincidence that terrorism began to lose momentum after the Moro case and dissolved within a few years. This proves that the line of firmness was right not only from an ethical and legal point of view but also from a practical one. If we had listened to Craxi, Mancini, Signorile, Pace, Liguori and Deaglio, that is, the entire area that flirted with terrorism, today Renato Curcio would be the master of the country.

Fioravanti, at least he paid, but many others...

Il Gazzettino, 8 August 2009.
  • If there is one case in which the sentence has been served in full, it is that of Fioravanti. He was 23, little more than a teenager, when he was arrested and imprisoned, and he is now 51, a mature man approaching old age. He spent the best years of his life in prison, which no one can give him back, just as no one can give back the lives of his victims. It was a fair and sufficient punishment, at least according to the principles of our Constitution. Having declared himself neither repentant nor dissociated from his terrorist past, which includes other murders, which he admitted [...] Fioravanti did not benefit from the substantial reductions granted by the infamous 'reward legislation' that released murderers who were certainly much worse than him from a moral point of view after only a few years in prison, but he was released only in accordance with the general principles of our legal system.
  • The Constitution establishes that punishment must aim at the re-education of the convicted person and their reintegration into society. This is clearly not possible if they remain in prison until their death. This is why even life prisoners can be released from prison if they have served 28 years, behaved well and “in such a way as to make their repentance credible”.
  • The certainty of punishment is not undermined, or even almost nullified for some crimes, by these general, fair, just and humane principles, but by the abnormal length of our trials, which means that the majority of crimes (especially financial, economic and those against the public administration, in short, the crimes of “the powers that be”, politicians and privileged citizens) fall under the axe of the statute of limitations. This already unsustainable duration has been exacerbated in the last fifteen years, after Mani Pulite, by a series of so-called “guarantee” laws with which the Code of Criminal Procedure has been crammed and which, in reality, by ensuring the statute of limitations, only guarantee the impunity of the aforementioned gentlemen.
  • The certainty of the law is not called into question by the fact that Valerio Fioravanti, after paying his heavy debts to justice, is out, but by the certainty that countless other criminals will never pay their debts, albeit less heavy ones.
This article is issued from Wikiquote. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.