The tone of the controversy and disputes surrounding Valery Gergiev’s ‘forbidden’ concert in Caserta and then Alexander Romanovsky’s one in Bologna puts on spotlight two completely different trends.

The first is the scandalism of Moscow’s pranksters, ready to qualify as ‘Russophobic discrimination’ (whatever it means) the ban on Kremlin agents trying to export the narratives of miserable Putin grandeur through the greatness of Russian musical culture.
And who knows, maybe they will soon try the operation with literary greatness as well, with some indigenous phenomenon (not just Paolo Nori). Čajkovskij and Dostoevskij reduced to Trojan horses of terrorist Russia. What else?

The second trend, on the other hand, is the sincere embarrassment of peacetime-shaped liberals. Such politicians think that preventing the accomplice of a murderer from showing off his artistic talent and, while doing it, his complicity in the crime (without even needing to express it, just by waving a baton or touching the keys of a piano) appears to be an unforgivable guilt for the ‘tolerant’ (forgetful of Popper), not a dutiful and legitimate defence against hybrid warfare, which uses intentionally not the strength of the aggressor, but the weakness and contradictions of the victims to enter their ranks and confuse their heads and hearts.

Do we really want to discuss how intolerable it is to welcome the presence – even the mere presence – of those who justify the massacre of the Ukrainians by beautifully conducting the violins of the slaughtering state?
Can we really only hear the music and not the background sound of propaganda?

The first trend – title: ‘Putin is right ‘ – concerns the enemies of the national and European homelands and is the easiest to classify and also to counter – provided one can find the strength – because there is no misunderstanding who is on whose side and for what reason.

Against guys like the ex-Moscow appointed general Vannacci you can win or you can lose, but the boundaries between who is with him or against him are neither uncertain nor ambiguous. There, the border of the war is clear. He is, like Gergiev and Romanovsky, with Russia and against Ukraine (and against the country he represents in the European Parliament).

The second trend – title: ‘Let’s not exaggerate ‘ – is instead something much more dangerous and elusive: it is the tragedy and alienation of Europe and the West, which are unable to comprehend the level of the global confrontation opened by the Russian aggression against Ukraine and think to relativise it in order not to fully admit the existential challenge that this entails even for European countries far (so far) from the frontier of war.

The danger we run is precisely that of thinking ourselves (still) unscathed by what is happening between Sumy and Lviv and sufficiently sheltered from the side effects of the carnage.
A carnage that instead affects us all, not only because Ukrainians are paying for wanting to be Europeans, but also because being Europeans, not only for Ukrainians, has become the original sin that the unprecedented, unbelievable and despicable Russian-American alliance thinks it has to make atonement for all the countries between the Atlantic and the borders of the alleged ‘Russkiy Mir’.

The war is already here, let’s face it.