“Hitler was right”: Massini attacked at the Turin Book Fair

A man in his 70s attacked the writer during the presentation of his book on Hitler's 'Mein Kampf'

ROME – Stefano Massini was attacked at the Turin Book Fair. A man pulled him by the collar of his jacket and pushed him and shouted in his face: “Hitler was right, you communists without cross-examination are disguising history and are rewriting it. But now we can finally tell the truth “. The man, aged around 70, attacked the writer and author, a writer for the newspaper Repubblica, and a well-known television face for his Thursday stories on the Piazzapulita program on La7. At the Book Fair he was presenting his work ‘Mein Kampf. From Adolf Hitler’ on the rise of Nazism. Security intervention necessary to remove the man.

THE SYNOPSIS OF THE BOOK

Primo Levi wrote that nothing is more necessary than knowledge to avoid the repetition of tragedy, especially if it slowly takes shape in the progressive seduction of the masses. A century after Adolf Hitler dictated his political manifesto in a cell in Landsberg am Lech, those pages have become one of the symbols of absolute evil, and as such subjected to the secular anathema that he made a banned book. But this cone of shadow, the result of a Freudian removal, contributed to increasing its mythology until, in 2016, Germany decided to allow its distribution in bookstores again precisely to dismantle the legend and perceive its echoes in the present, with the awareness that nothing can destroy horror more than the critical sense, and therefore the reconversion of the monster into the perimeters of reality. Yes, because ‘Mein Kampf’ is ultimately just the autobiography of a delusional thirty-five year old in search of scapegoats and existential outbursts, with the aggravating circumstance, however, of a marked propensity for empathy, at the dawn of a twentieth century that in the charism he would have elected his own apotheosis. From this formula, repeatable and still emulated at every latitude, comes the urgency to confront ourselves now more than ever with a text that has never died, capable of re-proposing itself under different brands and colours, especially in an era in which propaganda has branched out online, and it now reaches us widely.