From conference to dress rehearsal for political intimidation: this happened yesterday in the heart of the Federico II University in Naples. An afternoon of shoving and broken microphones, an outcome that was anything but unpredictable from the very moment when the great southern university had chosen to host – despite appeals for this not to happen – an event with clearly propagandist aims and, in terms of content, pro-Russian, without, moreover, adequately guaranteeing the pluralism of opinions and the minimum rules of cross-examination.

Let us start with the facts. The event ‘Russophilia, Russophobia, Truth‘, organised by the Associazione Nazionale Partigiani d’Italia (ANPI), featured Alessandro Di Battista and Professor Angelo D’Orsi. For more than two hours – several present reported – the audience watched in silence a one-sided narration of the Ukrainian conflict: a reinterpretation, in the words of those in the audience, ‘manipulative and Third Worldist of history‘, in which ‘the bad guys are only the Westerners and Ukrainians and the good guys are only the Russians‘. No protest, no disturbance. Not even when the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella, described – again according to the accounts of those present – as a ‘warmongering servant of capital’, ends up in the crosshairs.

Then, at the end, comes the gesture that in any normal university would represent the physiology of the debate: a few dozen young people – including activists from Ora, Liberi Oltre, Radicali e Azione and members of the Ukrainian community – ask to be allowed to ask questions of the speakers.

That’s when the climate changes. When someone then dares to ask for clarification of Professor D’Orsi’s controversial participation in a Russia Today gala in Moscow, in the presence of Putin, the situation degenerates.

Shoving, threats, enforced silence

The answer is not confrontation, but force. “At the violent and angry reaction of the self-styled anti-fascists,” recounts one of the participants, ” we protested by exhibiting the T-shirts in the colours of Ukraine that we had hitherto hidden under our jackets. From there, the degeneration: shoving, threats, attempts at aggression. Pluralism suddenly becomes an incident. The questions, a provocation. The hall, a territory of conquest like the Donbass for Putin.

A boy, Alessandro Riccio, who had climbed onto a table ‘in a desperate attempt to be heard‘, was yanked and risked falling. “I had to scream to stop the ‘partisan comrade’ who had put his hands onhim,” testifies those who were next to him. Meanwhile, the president of the Italian Radicals Matteo Hallissey was surrounded and attacked by other militants, guilty of asking Di Battista and D’Orsi about their relations with the Putin world. Some even try to drag him out of the hall. Antifascism, law and order version.

The students’ testimonies to our newsroom speak for themselves: microphones broken, shouting, hands on them. A peaceful flash mob treated as an enemy raid. Dissent turned into a threat to be repressed. And the university – which should be the place where questions are encouraged, not punished – reduced to a complacent backdrop.

The paradox is that it is precisely those who proclaim themselves heirs of the Resistance, guardians of anti-fascism, sentinels of democracy, who forcibly deny a peaceful protest. Instead, in the end, it is the pro-Ukrainian youth present at the meeting who shout ‘Now and always resistance‘. “We, the liberals, did it”, the testimony underlines, “because the battle of that time lives again today in the courage of the Ukrainian people and in those who fight for democracy“.

The fascism of the (former) antifascists

The scene that remains impressed is unfortunately that of a university where questions are not welcome, contradiction is experienced as an affront and dissent is physically expelled.

We of L’Europeista therefore want to put a simple – and anything but rhetorical – question to the rector of the Federico II University in Naples: if the university first becomes the place of complacent propaganda towards a bloodthirsty regime, disconnected from the facts, and then the place of silence imposed by push and shove, then what remains of its role as guardian of knowledge and understanding? Who guarantees, inside those classrooms, the minimum rules of confrontation? And above all: to whom does the Federico II answer when a ‘wrong’ question is treated like a foreign body?

The problem obviously goes far beyond the Neapolitan episode. It concerns a professional anti-fascism – that of the ANPI – reduced to an identity label, ready to slide into a caricature of what it claims to fight.

Marco Pannella spoke of the ‘fascism of anti-fascists’. Not even he, perhaps, would have imagined such a distressing drift: after decades spent as vestals of the partisan movement, one morning those of the ANPI (together with Di Battista, just think) woke up and put themselves at the service of the invader.