"Venture those people who do not need heroes ..."

(To Adriano Tocchi, President of ANPd'I Roma)
19/05/16

Unusual events, like the one that saw protagonist in Palmira in Syria Specnaz Alexander Prokhorenko, ignite our emotions for the human drama, arouse our admiration for extraordinary courage and contribute to restoring substantial value to expressions such as "hero", "homeland", "flag", relegated for many to the wardrobe of useless things , from the ideological delirium of Brecht and his sixty-eight heirs.

Hero is a word of uncertain etymology but that in its original meaning indicates who stands above the others as powerful, strong, of noble lineage. The figure of the hero is present in all mythologies and responds to the need to concretize the history, life and social and moral aspirations of a human group in the figure of a being that combines in itself the attributes of divinity and humanity.

Already for the Greeks and the Romans the term quickly passed to designate a man or a woman endowed with courage and tenacity such as to risk and - almost always - offer the supreme sacrifice of their lives to lead a virtuous enterprise, capable of living and die for what exceeds the dimension of finiteness and contingent: a flag, a lineage, an ideal. The hero thus embodied the civil virtues of fidelity to the lineage, of courage, of the spirit of sacrifice and for that very reason he was associated with fame, understood precisely as imperishable glory. Ultimately, although the concept of hero had by now become detached from the original meaning of demigod, the idea of ​​immortality still gravitated in the semantic area of ​​the term, as a reference to the non-transitory part of man.

The hero also played an eminently educational role in that, due to the qualities he embodied, he represented a model to be imitated, an edifying example to be pointed out to ordinary mortals. However, this meaning of "hero" is directly and ideally linked to the concepts of combat and sacrifice that current society tends to forget, setting them aside as anachronistic values ​​and not functional to its development. Starting from the last post-war period, in fact, the term has become obsolete, abandoned as meaningless: an expression inadequate to evoke and suggest to the imagination of the masses.

Only recently, in our country, the word "hero" has been dusted off to pay homage to our fallen soldiers in so-called missions peacekeeping. On this occasion, the term "hero" has taken on its ancient meaning, connected with courage, sacrifice, military status and the figure of the soldier in arms has once again become a sign of civil virtues and dignity for the nation.

However, the current use of the term "hero" reflects the inclination of the company for weak values. The current heroes do not contemplate the traditional model of being out of the ordinary that, with an extreme gesture, consciously wanted, even if in a different way meditated, faces situations that will lead him with certainty to the loss of his own life.

Heroes like Enrico Toti, Nazario Sauro, Salvo d'Acquisto (photo on the right) are luminous examples of conscious and intentional sacrifice in the name of a faith. No longer current, however, and therefore kept in a dusty niche in the same way as a historical relic. 

More often, currently, albeit with well-known exceptions, ignored by those who would have the obligation to detect and exalt them, our soldiers who fell in the stabilization missions are instead "dead for reasons of service": on a mine, hit by stray bullets, in attacks. And heroes are also considered the victims of the Twin Towers, the Bataclan Theater or the London Underground. Heroes because, innocent, they died or were seriously injured as a result of dramatic events, which, in the collective imagination, represent attacks on humanity. Virtual heroism, the latter, which is realized only on an interpretative level: those victims, with their involuntary death, in the consideration of the most, have saved the rest of humanity that has not fallen into the same misfortune. A bit like the sacrificial victims of ancient Greece: Iphigenia had not spontaneously chosen to be led to sacrifice to placate the wrath of Artemis, she obediently obeyed the will of her father. A condition that appears to be quite different from that of those who, like recently Specnaz, is aware of the imminent sacrifice of life.

In the first case it is the situation that makes the hero: a situation of potential danger, when it takes the form of a real destructive event, turns into a hero who voluntarily or even involuntarily found himself implicated in that circumstance. Certainly, those who agree to work as reporters in a theater of war and even more so whoever fights that war fight the risk of not returning home anymore. But even in this case we speak of a figure far removed from that of the hero of the tradition who, hic et nunc, exposes himself with a voluntary act to a certain danger regardless of his own finite individuality, as drawing from that part of himself that has contiguity with the divine.

Without wishing in the least to undermine the sacrifice of thousands of innocent people who die doing their duty, the cue serves to reflect on a trend of our times. Today, where everything is measured in the concreteness and duration of individual existences, where the call to the divine, in the best of meanings, is confused with social dedication, the transcendent is proscribed and the demands of progress impose directives based on the exclusive objective and priority of efficiency, the "beautiful gesture" and that "divine madness" that inspired it no longer find a place.

Most likely today's heroes offer the face to the "weak" vision of a world capable of supporting itself only on "politically correct" motivations, on ideals accepted solely because they are socially shared and appropriately "lukewarm". Heroes for a world that does not need heroes unless they are random and unwilling.

Faced with this meaning of the term "hero" one could plead: "better a hero for causes of service than a total moral flatness; better this model than those who propitiate us with football ”.

Others, like us, instead insist, rebel and continue to believe that we can ask for more, at least as an ideal reference. We believe that the attribute of hero should be reserved for those who have really "surpassed themselves" by showing that man is a creature of Earth and of Heaven, a wonderful mixture of finite and infinite: from East to West.