“Information is the first tool to defend our freedoms.” With these words, Sassoli addressed the students of the Master’s program. After the ribbon-cutting, the ceremony moved to the Sala delle Colonne at the Luiss headquarters on Viale Pola, featuring speeches by Vincenzo Boccia, President of Confindustria and Luiss; Andrea Prencipe, the Rector; Paola Severino, Vice President of Luiss; Livia De Giovanni, President of the Master in Journalism and Multimedia Communication; and Gianni Riotta, the Director.
In addition to being the President of the European Parliament, Sassoli is a journalist, and even though he now holds a different role, the journalistic mindset is not easily lost. To understand the threats we must respond to, “information is the first tool we have, an information that does not serve to support politics but to make us aware of what we have and also of what we can lose.” “They want to divide us,” he added. “Yesterday I addressed all the members of the European Parliament. Why do they want to divide us? Because we are different from others, and this difference is often not understood even by us.”
“There are many words,” Sassoli continued, “that do not convey the idea well: ‘war,’ ‘conflict’ do not reflect what is happening. A few days ago, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, came to see me: we talked about the major attacks undermining our independence, which they want to compromise, and about threats based on very strong interests.”
“If we exclude the use of force in our relations with other nations, which we rule out a priori, we are left only with trying to regulate our dialogue with other actors through our rules, our laws, and our values—the values of the European Union. Because a world without rules would be convenient for many, but it is not the one in which we want to live.”
From an article by Zeta Luiss, authored by Livia Paccarié, Mattia Giusto, Simone Di Gregorio, and Michele Antonelli.