President Sergio Mattarella on Friday
quoted Primo Levi in his speech for Holocaust Remembrance Day
Saturday, saying"the history of deportation and concentration
camps cannot be separated from the history of fascist tyrannies
in Europe: it represents their foundation taken to the extreme,
beyond all limits of the moral law that is engraved in human
conscience".
The Italian president said that "with these words, Levi carved
out the judgement on the roots and prime responsibility of the
most serious extermination, organised and planned against women
and men defined as inferior races, the most serious carried out
in the history of humanity."
Speaking at the Quirinale presidential palace during an early
celebration of the "Day of Remembrance" entitled "The Righteous
Among the Nations", Mattarella went on: "The ideologies of
racial superiority, the religion of death and war, predatory
nationalism, the supremacy of the State, of the party, over the
inviolable right of each person, the cult of the personality and
of the leader, were deadly viruses, man-made, that spread
rapidly, infecting a large part of Europe, unleashing barbaric
instincts and plunging the entire world into a disastrous and
ruinous war".
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