A friend of mine, a history lecturer at the university, while questioning a clueless student, was told that on September 11, 1973, both Salvador Allende and the Twin Towers fell (perhaps if I had mentioned that my aunt also has her birthday on that day, they would have said the same about her birthday): Beyond the laughter, this anecdote makes me think deeply about time and its relativity, even in our way of constructing a coherent vision of the world: what if it's not just a proposition, but what is said every time, every year, about another date: April 25 ALWAYS? The struggle for our liberation, surely, did not end that day in '45, and we have continued as long as we still joyfully celebrate it. Today, December 12, there's nothing to celebrate, but we cannot help but reflect.
If commemorating it were merely an attempt to convey the mental, emotional, and social states of that time, we wouldn’t be able to relive even half of that experience every time we remember the massacre, a symbol of all the others. My memory, and I believe that of many, is not about creating awareness, educating those who do not know, shaping civil individuals with respect for bourgeois democracy and its laws, pacifists in times of massacres, which, by the way, have never ended. Every time someone remembers Piazza Fontana, Piazza della Loggia, the Bologna Station, Reggio Emilia, Reggio Calabria, etc... no matter how liberal and democratic, even heads of state and presidents try to play it dirty, showing themselves as victims, just like back then, they unwittingly reaffirm another truth: an account that is still open, beyond any judicial proceedings, beyond any possible conviction. Because History has never been closed, is not closed, and will never be closed by trials. You cannot close a chapter whose protagonists have only passed their human misfortunes or wrongdoings onto their children, like in a good family saga. Those who died are not victims of a perpetrator, but fallen in the struggle for human liberation, even if some of them were unaware they were leading it. It is no coincidence that other massacres and above all other struggles have since appeared on the horizon and will surely re-emerge, and the reasons will always be fundamentally the same, no matter how we might cloak ourselves in post-modernity or other fleeting trends.
December 12 reminds us every year that the State has NEVER been us. And that for ages, each of us has been fighting above all for our own life, not just to live it, but to reclaim it in our own hands together with others.