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About the “Green Pass” decree
28.07.2021
[Translator note: Two prominent Italian philosophers, Giorgio Agamben and Massimo Cacciari, tell us their well-founded concerns about the decree of the Draghi government, establishing the so-called “Green Pass” starting from 6 August: the certification that allows vaccinated people to use trains, buses, theaters, gyms, preventing all the others. It was called in English, because the simpler Italian “laissez-passer” was too Nazi but the principle is the same. We can only associate ourselves with the concerns of these two philosophers who are running to be hated once more for their conflicting opinions.]
The discrimination of a category of people, who automatically become second-class citizens, is in itself a very serious fact, the consequences of which can be dramatic for democratic life. We are facing it, with the so-called “Green Pass”, with unconscious lightness.
Every despotic regime has always operated through practices of discrimination, at first perhaps contained and then rampant.
It is no coincidence that in China they declare that they want to continue with tracking and controls even at the end of the pandemic. And it will be worth remembering the “internal passport” that citizens of the Soviet Union had to show to the authorities for each trip.
Then, when a political exponent comes to address those who do not vaccinate using a fascist jargon such as “we will purge them with the green pass” there is really to be feared that they are already beyond all constitutional guarantees.
Woe to it if the vaccine turns into a sort of political-religious symbol. This would not only represent an intolerable anti-democratic drift, but would run counter to the same scientific evidence. Nobody invites not to get vaccinated! It is one thing to argue the usefulness, however, of the vaccine, another, completely different, to keep silent about the fact that we are still in a phase of “mass experimentation” and that on many fundamental aspects of the problem the scientific debate is completely open .
The Official Journal of the European Parliament of 15 June this year he states it clearly: “It is necessary to avoid direct or indirect discrimination against people who are not vaccinated, even those who have chosen not to be vaccinated.”
And how could it be otherwise? The vaccinated can not only infect, but can still get sick: in England out of 117 new deaths, 50 had received the double dose. In Israel it is estimated that the vaccine covers 64% of those who received it. The same pharmaceutical corporations have officially declared that it is not possible to predict the long-term damage of the vaccine, having not had the time to carry out all the genotoxicity and carcinogenicity tests. Nature has calculated that it will still be physiological for 15% of the population not to take the vaccine. So we will have to stay with the pass until when?
All are threatened by discriminatory practices. Paradoxically, those “enabled” by the green pass even more than the unvaccinated (which a regime propaganda would like to point as “enemies of science” and perhaps proponents of magical practices), since all their movements would be controlled and never could learn how and by whom. The need to discriminate is as old as society, and it was certainly already present in ours, but making it law today is something that the democratic conscience cannot accept and against which it must immediately react.
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Original column by Giorgio Agamben & Massimo Cacciari:
Translation by Costantino Ceoldo
