Italian Politician Beppe Grillo Parodies Primo Levi Poem About Holocaust
Image by getty images
Beppe Grillo, an Italian comic turned politician, refused to apologize for his parody of a Primo Levi poem about the Holocaust to criticize Italy’s government and political system. Italian-Jewish leader Renzo Gattegna called the parody on Grillo’s blog an “obscenity.”
Grillo, who heads the anti-establishment Five Stars movement, paraphrased “If this Is a Man,” which served as the introduction to Levi’s memoir about his experiences in Auschwitz.
The parody, called “If This Is a Country,” lambasted the Italian media, President Giorgio Napolitano, the Italian government and disgraced former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
Grillo, whose movement won a quarter of the votes in the 2013 general election, also ran a photo of the entrance gate to Auschwitz doctored to read “P2 Macht Frei,” referring to the secret P2 Masonic lodge, banned in the 1980s as subversive after magistrates discovered that hundreds of politicians and other elites belonged to it. Gattegna, the president of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities, or UCEI, called the parody a “criminal desecration of the value of memory and of the memory of millions of innocent victims” that “offends all of Italy.”
He said it was an “infamous provocation” used to “goad the lowest anti-Semitic sentiments and ride the popular discontent that grows stronger in these times of crisis.”
In refusing to apologize, Grillo said Gattegna was “stupid, ignorant, not very intelligent and harms the community,” according to The Jerusalem Post.
Grillo also said, according to the Israeli newspaper, “When you touch the powerful, these things surface, these lobbies, lobbies of business. It is they who hide behind certain tragedies.
“Who is behind [Carlo] De Benedetti [an Italian Jewish industrialist], who is behind the banks, behind the finance?” This financial power, the Post quoted Grillo as saying, “causes Holocausts once a year, once a month, once a day … Rwanda, the gas in Syria … the financial and banking systems cause thousands of deaths every year.”
This is a moment of great uncertainty. Here’s what you can do about it.
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news this Passover. All donations are being matched by the Forward Board - up to $100,000.
This is a moment of great uncertainty for the news media, for the Jewish people, and for our sacred democracy. It is a time of confusion and declining trust in public institutions. An era in which we need humans to report facts, conduct investigations that hold power to account, tell stories that matter and share honest discourse on all that divides us.
With no paywall or subscriptions, the Forward is entirely supported by readers like you. Every dollar you give this Passover is invested in the future of the Forward — and telling the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
The Forward doesn’t rely on funding from institutions like governments or your local Jewish federation. There are thousands of readers like you who give us $18 or $36 or $100 each month or year.
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
