After the sharing of intimate videos, the culture of lynching and hatred that politics taught us

By Carlo Bollino

In the end they succeeded. For years political hatred was confined to party media. Then it spread into the chamber of Parliament and, finally, flooded social networks. Now it is infecting the whole of society. The horrifying story of private intimate videos, shared as if they were trophies of “investigative journalism,” shows that collective hatred is passing the maximum alarm level.

That individual who fished them out of some sewer of the internet and distributed them with pride, hiding behind a hypocritical mission of “justice” (perhaps Taliban justice) must be denounced and brought before a court, because nothing he has done has anything to do with the right to information. It is violence and nothing more.

First of all, those videos are evidence of a criminal offence and the women who appear in them are only victims. Those intimate scenes were certainly recorded without the knowledge of their protagonists, and that alone constitutes a crime. Whether the male protagonist did this deliberately (who, if only for a minimum sense of aesthetics, would have done well to avoid it), or whether he too was recorded without his knowledge, will be determined by the police and the judiciary.

Then it must be discovered how those images ended up on the market, where they had been circulating for at least a year, while today the criminal responsibility of the person who, at the end of the chain, distributed them everywhere, committing in turn a long series of criminal offences, is clear.

But the most shameful part of this horrifying story is the public’s reactions. Thirsty for revenge and fed by indescribable hatred, a large part of public opinion sided with the person who distributed the images, instead of standing on the side of the women, who were first deceived in their privacy and then morally humiliated in public.

Wretched moralists began to condemn them for what they did in the exercise of their individual freedoms. Many even applauded the “courage” of publishing the videos, as if public lynching were the just punishment for the “immoral” behaviour of their protagonists.

We are all saints when we pretend to judge the sins of others. But when morality is used as an argument of public justice, then we move into the territory of fundamentalism, the same fundamentalism that often feeds terrorism as well.

But all this hatred, unfortunately, is not accidental. Politics has cultivated it for years and we, the media, together with politics, are just as guilty. It is the hatred that until now found its loudspeaker on social networks and that, for several months, has also flooded into the streets, because it is so great that the internet is no longer enough to contain it.

Lynchings in the streets, carried out by hysterical boys and girls who chase deputies and their family members with eggs and insults, are uncivilised scenes, unworthy of a country that experienced this kind of persecution during 45 years of regime. Back then there were no mobile phones to film the scenes and everything happened within the walls of interrogation rooms, but the origin of the hatred was not very different from today’s.

It is as if the class war had broken out again.

They are fascist scenes that we see in the streets of Albania. Identical to the scenes of Mussolini’s squadristi or Hitler’s Nazis before they took power, when they wandered the streets of Italian or German cities in search of enemies.

It is the culture of the people’s trial, which does not pass through institutions but takes place outside someone’s home and where, to condemn a person, no real evidence and guilt are needed: the perception that he is guilty is enough. Exactly as the person who distributed the intimate videos did: he felt he had the right and the duty to do it!

Exactly as, unfortunately, also happens in some trials where indications begin to be considered evidence and, awaiting a real verdict, suspects are kept locked up in prison, being treated in reality as presumed guilty, instead of being treated as presumed innocent.

And here everything connects. Hatred and slander, repeated endlessly by politics, have infected society. And that hatred has produced thousands of self-appointed judges: people of the people, ordinary people who feel they carry the right to lynch their neighbour. Just like some prosecutors, judges, police officers and journalists, infected too by this supposed sense of moral superiority, who end up feeding the same culture of public lynching.

If so much hatred and intolerance are the distinguishing features of the new Albania, then we must all commit to changing them. Because this is much worse than the old Albania.