IN PRAISE OF FRANCESCA ALBANESE
There is a question that visits me in the small hours, when sleep will not come and the mind turns over old stones. The question is this: “What would I have done in the 1930s, on the morning after Kristallnacht?"
Not what I say I would have done. Not what I hope I would have done. But what would I actually have done—when the trains began to run, when the neighbours grew quiet, when the cost of decency became the loss of everything?
Most of us, I think, would have done little. Not from malice. From fear. From the soft, creeping conviction that someone else will speak, that the situation is complex, that we must be 'reasonable'. Lest we forget, the ordinary is the extraordinary's alibi. And how we have clung to that alibi! How we still cling to it!
And then, every once in a terrible while, someone appears who does not cling. Someone who steps forward when others step back. Someone who speaks the name of the thing when everyone else is busy naming something else.
Francesca Albanese is that someone.
She stands before the world—alone, unarmed, armed only with law and language and a rare courage—and she says what the centrists will not say, what the foreign ministries will not say, what the editorial boards will not say. She says: "This is a genocide. And we are watching it happen."
Do not tell me that is hyperbole. Do not tell me the term is contested. She has not used it lightly. She has used it as a physician arrives scientifically at a diagnosis—not to wound, but to warn. Not to inflame, but to name.
And for that, they have come for her. Oh, how they have come for her. Smears. Investigations. Vicious editorials. Frozen bank accounts. Dispossession of the only apartment she had ever owned. The machinery of the respectable turned to crush her. Because the respectable cannot abide what she represents: a mirror held up to their complicity.
Let us, once again, travel back to the 1930s. Back to the few who stood up when the trains began to run laden with Jewish people.
There was Aristides de Sousa Mendes, a Portuguese consul in Bordeaux. He defied his own government. He signed thousands of visas, by hand, for hours, until his fingers bled. He saved more lives than Schindler. And he died penniless, disgraced, erased.
There was a German officer in Warsaw named Wilm Hosenfeld. He hid a Jewish pianist in the rubble. He did not save thousands. He saved one. But that one—Władysław Szpilman—carried the memory. And memory is "the only haven from which we cannot be expelled."
There was Raoul Wallenberg. There were the villagers of Le Chambon. There were the anonymous, the quiet, the furious few who said: “Not on my watch.”
Francesca Albanese is their heir. Not because she carries a gun. Not because she hides refugees in her basement. But because she does something equally dangerous in a world that has perfected the art of not seeing. She sees. And she speaks.
She does not speak as a diplomat. Thank Goodness she doesn't! Diplomats have given us the language of "there are arguments on both sides" and "restraint" and "proportionality." Diplomatic language is the perfumed grave of moral clarity. No, she speaks as a jurist. As a human being. As a woman who has looked into the abyss and refused to call it a "complex geopolitical landscape".
Edna O'Brien once described a character who "had the recklessness of those who have already lost everything worth losing." Francesca Albanese has not lost everything. She has her dignity, her office, her voice, her family. But she has calculated the cost of speaking truth to power. And she has decided that that cost is infinitely less than the cost of silence.
What is that cost? Let us name it. She has been called antisemitic—she, who stands on the ground of international law forged in the ashes of Auschwitz and the fires of Nuremberg. She has been called a conspiracy theorist—she, who cites every source, every footnote, every UN resolution. She has been called naive—she, who understands better than most the machinery of realpolitik.
These accusations are not arguments. They are the spittle of the threatened. Because Francesca Albanese threatens something very precious to the powerful: the right to commit atrocity without being named.
Friends, the 1930s did not arrive with jackboots and pogroms on day one. They arrived in small increments. With "reasonable" restrictions. With "proportional" measures. With the silence of the respectable.
We tell ourselves that we would have been different. That we would have been Sousa Mendes. That we would have been Wallenberg. But most of us, I fear, would have been the neighbours who later said, "I didn't know."
Francesca Albanese knows. And she refuses to pretend otherwise.
So let us praise her. Not with statues or awards she does not seek. But with something harder: with our own refusal to look away. With our own voices, raised in places that are safe for us but dangerous for her. With our own bodies, if it comes to that.
A brave woman, who was injured while demonstrating outside a US nuclear military base in 1982, the infamous Greenham Common, had told me that "the heart is a hunter for what it cannot have." But I say the heart is a hunter for what it will not lose. And what we will not lose is the memory of those who stood up when standing up cost everything.
Francesca Albanese is standing up now. In our time. In our name. Under our indifferent sky.
Let us stand with her.
Not tomorrow. Not when it is safe. Now.
[Extract from a speech in Athens on Sunday 3rd May 2026]
💔😢 Medidas de asfixia contra Cuba: Más niños con cáncer están muriendo
El descenso de la supervivencia de nuestros niños con cáncer se corresponde con exactitud asombrosa con los años más duros para Cuba, con las medidas de asfixia que se han venido incrementando.
"Ahora es el cerco energético, sin electricidad y transporte no es posible brindar asistencia médica. En nombre de nada puede afectarse la vida de un niño."
"Los médicos no hacemos milagros. Se necesita una infraestructura, recursos, medicinas, combustible. Voluntad existe, también conocimientos y personas dispuestas, pese a todo."
Una estafa cripto, una hipoteca ficticia de una tía, un crédito del Nación, el 3% de licitaciones, cobrar por una foto, como sea, lo único importante es manotear lo que se pueda.
Supongamos que existe el funcionario libertario que sólo vive de su sueldo y aceptó congelarlo dos años con inflación bianual de 200% por esfuerzo patriótico, para "poner el hombro".
Se debe sentir bárbaro al enterarse de que los Milei recibían mensualidades del criptogángster en USD.
En Argentina, funcionaron 800 centros clandestinos de detención. Desde 2006, 3897 personas fueron investigadas por delitos de lesa humanidad (se condenaron a 1231). ¿Sólo 5 genocidas por cada campo de exterminio? Claro que no, aún hay muchos más entre nosotros sin que lo sepamos.
Para notificarme, TAIANO me tiró Renaper y NOSIS, los incorporó al Lex y mandó a notificar a las partes. Es decir, le informó mi domicilio y todos mis datos personales a los imputados. Lo hago personalmente responsable de cualquier consecuencia que pueda sufrir por ello.
Tras dos años de cancherear respuestas, agraviar al que hace una pregunta incómoda y diseminar datos falsos, cuando le toca explicar sobre sí mismo, no puede evitar dar a entender que maneja fondos ilimitados:
- “Pagó su pasaje, USD 5345” (business?)
- “Luego Presidencia la invita a subirse al avión presidencial”.
- “Deslomándome en NYC, quería que me acompañara”.
- “No hablo de mi vida privada”. (Probable viaje en avión privado an Uruguay, USD 20.000).
Hay personas que predican que el país no le reconoció a Macri su apego a la institucionalidad.
Ok. Amenazas x TV con inminentes detenciones de empresarios periodísticos opositores, que dieron resultado. Megaindustria de Inteligencia ilegal, probada, documentada; llegaban reportes al secretario del Presidente. Represión de manifestaciones e invento de causas federales que quedaron en la nada, cárcel de por medio. Cortesanos x decreto y traslados de jueces amigos, que siguen hasta hoy. Renuncia de un procurador del Tesoro x presiones por un negociado con el correo familiar. Bloqueo de la UIF ante sospechas que afectaban a un banco en el que trabajó su titular. OA en manos de Alonso. Explosión de trolls oficialistas que resultó un semillero del mileísmo. Sólo para empezar.
Repensaría el concepto.
"En la guerra lo primero que muere es la verdad". La distorsión informativa en el mundo y en Argentina es enorme, goebbeliana. La Nación +,TN, Canal 26, etc. lo confirman a través de sus empleados presentados como periodistas. Voceros pagos de la CIA no lo harían mejor
🇮🇷 Los rescatistas iraníes todavía están buscando a las niñas en los escombros. Hasta ahora, el régimen de Epstein ha asesinado a 63 niñas en una escuela primaria en la ciudad de Minab.
Este triste bufón de los poderosos, que lo usarán como trapo de piso para que haga el ajuste y luego lo descartarán, se cree importante porque ataca a las y los trabajadores del Garrahan. Todo aquello que nos enorgullece, que nos da confianza en la atención de los niños y niñas de nuestro país, él lo ataca.
Mirá que Espert era guapo también…
AHORA: Comunicado de la familia de Alex Pettri (MÁXIMA DIFUSIÓN) 🖤👇
“Estamos desconsolados, pero también muy enojados. Alex era una persona de buen corazón que quería mucho a su familia y amigos, y también a los veteranos estadounidenses a quienes cuidaba como enfermero de la UCI en el hospital de veteranos de Minneapolis.
Alex quería marcar la diferencia en este mundo. Lamentablemente, no estará con nosotros para ver el impacto que tuvo. No uso el término "héroe" a la ligera. Sin embargo, su último pensamiento y acto fue proteger a una mujer.
Las mentiras repugnantes que la administración ha dicho sobre nuestro hijo son reprobables y asquerosas. Es evidente que Alex no tenía un arma cuando fue atacado por los matones cobardes y asesinos de ICE de Trump.
Tenía su teléfono en la mano derecha y la mano izquierda vacía levantada por encima de la cabeza, intentando proteger a la mujer a la que ICE acababa de empujar al suelo, mientras le rociaban gas pimienta.
Por favor, difundan la verdad sobre nuestro hijo. Era un buen hombre. Gracias.”