“I have not heard from Minister Crosetto, I have read his statements in the newspapers, and I have not received any notification of measures,” Vannacci told Morning News on Channel 5.
“I have been replaced, as of midnight today, but I have not been removed from my post,” he said.
His book, The World Back To Front, has been selling well on Amazon in Italy amid a surge in social media support and sympathy for his views.
Crosetto is a strong ally and personal friend of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, but several other members of Meloni’s Brothers of Italy (FdI), and numerous right-wing politicians and officials, have defended the general’s right to speak his mind under the Constitutionally sanctioned principle of freedom of expression.
Culture Undersecretary, art critic and polemicist Vittorio Sgarbi was the latest to express that view on Saturday night.
Sgarbi, who heads his own independent libertarian party, Renaissance, said that Crosetto had not read the general’s book and should have left the decision to discipline up to the army top brass.
Deputy Prime Minister, Transport Minister and right-wing League party leader Matteo Salvini, meanwhile, on Monday had made contact with Vannacci, according to League sources.
“Today there was a phone call, a very cordial one, between Salvini and General Vannacci,” the League sources said.
The centre-left opposition Democratic Party (PD) has said the general’s rights do not extend to denying some people’s existence while the Italian Left (SI) has likened FdI members’ defence of the general to cult satirical film character Doctor Strangelove’s doomed attempts to control his kneejerk Nazi saluting arm.
Green and Left Alliance co-spokesman Angelo Bonelli said the openly homophobic, racist, misogynistic and anti-environmentalist views voiced by Vannucci also lie at the heart of Meloni’s FdI.
“Freedom of opinion has nothing to do with General (Roberto) Vannacci’s book: the fact that an army general should talk of gays as people who aren’t normal, or that people are going too far in defending Jews and all the history of the Shoah, or that saying sh*ty Jew is normal, has everything to do with our Constitution and with the Mancino Law (against reconstituting the Fascist party), and not with freedom of thought,” Bonelli, a historic Green leader, said.
Green and Left Alliance co-spokesman Angelo Bonelli said: “... this has nothing to do with freedom of thought but rather with Article 3 of our Constitution (which states: ‘All citizens have equal social dignity and are equal before the law, without distinction of sex, race, language, religion, political opinion, personal and social conditions’).” (Photo: ANSA)
He responded to FdI organisation chief and MP Giovanni Donzelli, who said on Sunday that although he recognised that the defence ministry was right in opening disciplinary action against Vannacci, his rights to freedom of expression were protected by the Italian Constitution.
Donzelli, he said, is speaking for Giorgia Meloni, just as Vannacci, as a general, represents the army.
“Donzelli is trying to give us a lecture on freedom of thought by defending the general. This has nothing to do with freedom of thought, but rather with Article 3 of our Constitution (which states: ‘All citizens have equal social dignity and are equal before the law, without distinction of sex, race, language, religion, political opinion, personal and social conditions’).”
Bonelli said that Galeazzo Bignami, another FdI member and deputy transport minister, and Donzelli, were defending Vannacci “because his positions represent the heart of what Brothers of Italy has always been and what is has built its electoral consensus on”.
“In a normal country we would not have Bignami in government and Donzelli as Meloni’s deputy.
“In the United States, Eric Fanning, an out gay, was the head of the army, but for Donzelli it is freedom of thought to say ‘sh*ty Jew’, ‘abnormal homosexuals’ and all Vannacci’s other discriminatory insults.
“What does Meloni have to say, does she think the same as her deputy Donzelli?
“Brothers of Italy is ever more similar to Alternative for Germany (AfD), that party which (the late Silvio Berlusconi’s) centre right Forza Italia party would be disgusted to have as an ally in (next year’s) European elections.”
In response to Zan, Donzelli repeated on Sunday afternoon that the PD cannot decide what people can say or write.
“Zan, I’m sorry to tell you that in the Constitution it is not written that the task falls to you or the PD to establish what can be written or said.
“Is that hard to understand? The day on which you stop insulting us, we’ll ask what we’ve done wrong.”
Elsewhere, the Ubik bookshop in Castelfranco Veneto on Monday, had a clear message for anyone hoping to buy the book from them.
“We kindly ask customers not to ask us for (Roberto) Vannacci’s book,” a sign in its window read.
The owner, Clara Abatangelo, told ANSA, she had no intention of stocking the divisive publication.
“We don’t have it because it is self-published, but I wouldn’t sell it anyway, because I could never ask my black employee, or my homosexual colleague, to satisfy a customer who asks for a book in which it says that they are people against nature,” she said.
ANSA
