The great history of the world we live in is made up of the sum of the individual stories of the people who inhabit it. Some of these stories, however, end up becoming History with a capital S by themselves, assuming the most often thankless role of a symbol, and many times it is the symbols that change the course of things.
The horrific murder of the Labor MP Joe Cox could become one of those stories that change the course of a country and, in a globalized era, of the whole world, because even if the silence of the political forces has respectfully subsided, by suspending the campaign on the Brexit referendum, the emotional wave of the crime spread throughout Europe.
The hand that killed Jo Cox, 42 and two children, in fact, belongs to a British citizen, one of those who would like to close the doors to the rest of the world. It belongs to a man named Thomas Nair and, but here the conditional is mandatory, he would be a supporter of neo-Nazi groups who, before hitting Cox, would have shouted "Britain First".
Cox was one of the faces of the Bremain, of Great Britain's permanence within the European Union, and his murder changes the cards on the table, giving strength to the "No" front, and it is a circumstance that may appear cynical, but in reality it is not, which today the markets, which try to anticipate the course of reality, are all recovering after a black week.
In the face of these moments, you keep thinking about how the course of history is altered, directed in a cruel and inexorable way by the choices of a single person, by some obscure extra who stands as the protagonist of the film of world history, more often than not with a single act of violence and madness. It leaves you wondering what the world we live in would be like without certain sudden folds, whether it would be profoundly different or not and even if there really is a possibility that the things that have happened may not happen. after all, what historians call Cleopatra's nose, to refer to imponderable and unforeseen events, has dotted the entire journey of humanity.
We have all read in school textbooks that the First World War began on June 28, 1914, when the Yugoslav nationalist Gavrilo Principal killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in the Sarajevo bombing. Would a conflict have existed even without this crime or would a different, peaceful solution have been found to the tensions that were agitating Europe?
They are useless, unverifiable, almost rhetorical questions, yet one cannot help but ask them. How would the political history of Italy have evolved if the kidnapping and the crime Moor, in 1978, had not put an end to the prospect of the historic compromise? Or what would have been the resonance of the civil rights movement in the United States if two of its most prominent leaders, Malcom X e Martin Luther KingWere they not killed?
And again, going backwards, because history has always been made this way and there has always been someone in the world who thought that certain ideas should be killed, what would have become of Rome Caput Mundi if in 44 BC the conspirators who hoped to save the Republic had not laid the foundations for its end by killing Julius Caesar?
And again the murder of Ghandi, in 1948, when the father of the Indian nation was assassinated in New Delhi by Nathuram Godse, a radical Hindu fanatic. Or the Matteotti crime which, in 1925, definitively sanctioned the rise of fascism and its definitive transformation into an untouchable dictatorship, willing to do anything to silence dissent.
Or again, how would relations between Israel and Palestine have evolved if not on the evening of November 4, during a rally for peace, Yitzhak Rabin wasn't he assassinated by Jewish extremist Ygal Amir? Or how the United States would have changed if the president Kennedy Hadn't he been assassinated in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963?
The history of the world we live in hangs by very thin threads which, like human lives, can be broken at any moment. Jo Cox's murder may have just addressed a piece of our history, but at a price that it's about time our species stopped paying.
