by Emanuele Mastrangelo

Fair judgment. For once, even in Italy.

Indeed, the final conviction in Supreme Court has arrived for the two rappers the Ghanaian Justin Owusu and his accomplice Mattia Antonio Piras. The two rappers had become the protagonists in 2017 of a disgraceful scene in the Redipuglia Memorial, in the province of Gorizia, where rest the remains of more than one hundred thousand Italian soldiers who fell in the Great War, of which 60,330 remain unnamed. Alongside them, postwar pietas also had an ossuary made for 14,000 Austro-Hungarian fallen.

The two had staged a video clip with a rap song of their own, titled “CSI, chi sbaglia impara” ("those who make mistakes learn"), prancing on the steps of the shrine, on the stone slabs below which the bones of the fallen are preserved.

“Say they're racists!”

Spread on Youtube on April 10, 2017, “Chi sbaglia paga” provoked outrage and the lawsuit rightfully came in a close second. The charge - under Article 408 of the Criminal Code - was “grave desacration”. Useless was the defense of the two rappers, who entrenched themselves behind the screen of “ artistic expression” and - of course - “racism” against the Ghanaian: “I'm sure that the treatment would have been quite different if a group of Friulian dancers with traditional scarpèts on their feet had shot the video”, Owusu's lawyer allegedly claimed. On Sept. 22, the Supreme Court filed its reasons for upholding the 8-month sentence for Owusu and 6 for Piras handed down last June.

In them, the Supreme Court clarified that the crime of desecration of graves does not necessarily require a specific offensive intent, but occurs when behavior is objectively disrespectful to places dedicated to the memory of the dead. In the ruling, the judges stressed that “piety for the dead” is a protected legal good, regardless of the defendants' intentions.

Mayor Cristiana Pisano, in July 2023, defended the ruling of the Court of Appeal of Trieste, recalling the sepulchral nature in the monument and the strict rules of the place: “if on the Shrine, which let's remember is a cemetery, for example, it is not allowed to go with the dog or on a bicycle, let alone do rap dances. The article of the Penal Code that refers to that kind of violation speaks clearly: the place should be given proper respect”.

Those “real Italians” who dance on shrines but demand citizenship

The issue of “racism” vellified by Owusu's defender is an interesting one, especially in these days of debate over the so-called “ius scholae”. Is it really enough to spend a few years on the soil of our country to earn some sort of “title of merit” with which to claim Italian citizenship? Owusu also in 2017 made a music video entitled "Italiano vero" (“True Italian”) in which - to the sound of platitudes - he supported the cause of ius soli. “I'm a real Italian, I'm a black Italian, I'm a proud Italian,” reads this song in an exotic accent and auto-tune. The rapper's “pride” had taken the form of going dancing on the heads of a hundred thousand boys who died in a war that - evidently - turns out to be completely alien to the national identity gained singing by the young Ghanaian. Who, after all, sums up his Italian-ness in having “suffered racism and eaten quantities of pasta”.

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The condemnation therefore comes at the right time: should Italy really open the ropes of granting citizenship even more, already being the European country without ius soli (which - let's remember, is a colonial law that serves to grant the children of settlers rights on the soil of the colonized country) that bestows the most? Might it not, indeed, even be the case to raise, and in addition to the most recondite and categorical NIET to this self-genocidal proposal, to also begin to reason about how it is possible not so much that a Ghanaian doesn't give a damn about a hundred thousand Italian deaths (which, after all, are not his own, do not represent his cultural heritage and historical legacy) but that with the same indifference an Italian like Piras behaves?

Is it appropriate to open a debate on what is now the most pervasive “youth subculture”, the one conveyed by trap, rap and hip-hop, “musical” genres that correctly a countercultural journalist like  Candace Owens has called not music, but “gangsta culture” (i.e., the ape-like, over-the-top, plebeian attitude of black youth gangs) created at the table as a form of catagogic social engineering: a system to lower the cultural level, aspirations, and human quality of African American minorities but also to reduce to their own level the whites who adhere to it out of conformity. A subculture that never since the days of the “screamers” in Sanremo Italian TV Rai has instead - oddly enough! - decided to push with all its forces on its programs, when instead it had literally walled off every other form of musical subculture that is artistically much more valid, from new wave to metal to electronic music.

The issue is not integrating those who come from outside - if anything, it is making sure they go back to where they belong - the issue is keeping our own people integrated, who instead, thanks to the now-increasing ignorance of our history and social engineering operations like the trap-rap subculture, clearly do not even know who they are.

[This article was published on “The Granite Inn” blog of “Storia in Rete” on Sept. 25, 2024]

[opening image: still from the video clip “Italiano vero” by Justin Owusu]
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Editor of the Centro Studi Machiavelli “Belfablog,” Emanuele Mastrangelo is editor-in-chief of “CulturaIdentità” and has been editor-in-chief of “Storia in Rete” since 2006. A military-historical cartographer, he is the author of several books (with Enrico Petrucci, Iconoclastia. La pazzia contagiosa della cancel culture che sta distruggendo la nostra storia e Wikipedia. L'enciclopedia libera e l'egemonia dell'informazione).