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(en) Italy, Sicilie Libertaria #451: BLACK CROSSWORD (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Date Mon, 7 Oct 2024 11:29:36 +0300


Daily bombarded by false, biased news, commercials, product placement, subliminal messages with the sneaky intention of heterodirecting us, instilling dubious artifacts and axiomatic lies, polluting our few certainties, we have, today, few possibilities to defend ourselves so as not to succumb. The advertising spectrum of the media is not only concerned with the sale of goods and products but, also and much worse, with influencing our way of thinking, directing us towards specific commercial, political and social choices, often not at all in line with our beliefs, ethically conflicting with our assumptions, with not only electoral but hegemonistic purposes, thanks to falsehoods and traps subtly disseminated everywhere, for which it is never an exception but, increasingly, a rule to be fascinated by them, to remain subjugated, becoming their unaware victims, more or less conscious and/or consenting.

We do not know all the subterfuges and systems put in place to mislead and tame us, but we would be naive to think that the danger comes only from the media tout court. Any communicative and interactive tool can be a vehicle for attempts, never declared, to enslave us and the more we consider it harmless and genuine, therefore unsuspected, the more we will be prey. Neutrality has been banned. The most aggressive and unfair one wins.

The main indicted person in this article, unexpectedly, comes directly from the world of puzzles, considered a noble pastime, a pleasant exercise to test and train our mental elasticity and memory. We are talking about the crossword, the undisputed king of the sector and, here, in the dock.

This mnemonic game is not at all immune from manipulation, historical falsehoods and linguistic distortions. Being one of the best and cheapest ways to spend part of our free time and an open intellectual challenge, because it is believed to be a healthy learning, we face the crossword puzzle lightheartedly, without any malice and caution, driven by the pleasure of decrypting its horizontal and vertical definitions and, in the end, satisfied with having solved it, move on to something else, not at all worried, at the same time, of having stored and internalized a set of words, ideas, names, facts not exactly in the most correct and truthful way that, upon closer and more in-depth examination, will prove to be sneaky and deviant.

In those moments, focused on finding answers to more or less abstruse questions, deciphering their subtle definitions, discovering strange and elaborate synonyms, easy acronyms, alien to any vocabulary, word after word, question after question, we enter into a world apparently unknown but soon deciphered, falling naively into a trap, often totally defenseless, committed only to coming out victorious. Thus, without realizing it, more often than we imagine, solving our crossword puzzles, we are the ones who have lost, because we have just been duped, deceived, mortified, without even realizing it. Completely unaware, once the resolution is complete, we have just learned to decline a mendacious historiography, a counterfeit dictionary and a biased vision, in our case, entirely Nazi-fascist, absorbing, word after word, crossword after crossword, an interested, deceptive and continuously tampered recitation, which clashes with reality and past and present history, like a poison absorbed in very small doses that, discovering it, leaves us stunned, annoyed and, at that moment, helpless.

Leaving the reader with the burden of finding the most polluted magazines on the subject matter, because, in all fairness, not all puzzle publications suffer from this pernicious vice, let's analyze together some of the questions, more or less frequent, that we find in the incriminated crosswords. At a first quick reading, unfortunately, we do not notice the toxins spread there with both hands, with the shameful intention of getting used to all the rhetoric and pomposity inherent in the new pseudo post-Nazi-Fascist culture, fed to us in an almost scientific way, similar and worse than that which survived after the Second World War.

If we make continuous, almost militant use of puzzles, without the necessary antibodies and warnings, we will soon be prey to an unwanted indoctrination, fed to us in small poisonous doses, complementary to other much more massive ones of the same breed, inoculated in us through other ways, political, governmental, media. The black gentlemen, serial inventors of crosswords, with their minds turned to a fortunately mostly erased past, try to convert us, accustom us and convince us of the goodness of their mental distortions, not at all discouraged by the fact that we often think in a diametrically opposed way to them and in all fields of civil society. The basic idea is to confuse us, to get used to what they feed us, to make us lower our guard, to stop all attention, defense and critical attitude to bring us, soon, following a slow and pernicious pollution of the sources, having bypassed our natural defenses, to express, tomorrow, without even realizing it, ideas, positions, evaluations on ideas that are clearly antidemocratic if not worse, up to, why not?, to absolve them and vote for them.

Isn't a harmless pastime perhaps the best and unsuspected weapon, to smuggle models, stories and ways of thinking that have nothing to do with freedom, tolerance, democracy and the free exchange of ideas, of which we are proud defenders, disseminators and officiants? You will never find a crossword that will put you on alert, warning you that some solutions are completely false, arbitrary, deliberately artificial and capable of harming your knowledge and beliefs, because silence, anonymity and insistence are the best weapons of these crossword puzzlers, who have no respect for their customers but, fortunately, stay away from those serious puzzle magazines that are faithful to their assumption of a healthy pastime.

To confirm the above, let us allow ourselves a brief analysis of a sample of the Nazi-fascist galaxy scattered in crosswords, well scattered and simulated among the numbered horizontal and vertical definitions that, by no means exhaustive and only demonstrative, would deserve an entire essay. Here we only need to understand what we are talking about and unmask what is being reasoned here.

Salvatore Cassarino

http://sicilialibertaria.it
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