The primary concern of those who hatch a conspiracy is to conceal it behind successive screens, following the Russian nesting doll system, so that public attention focuses — and at the same time exhausts itself — on the outermost and most dazzling screens. To give an example, who killed United States President John F. Kennedy and what the murder weapon was formed the subject of decades of speculation sufficient to lead a large part of public opinion astray from the real motivations behind the American president's assassination. That the affaire xylella is part of a conspiracy now emerges even from the results of the investigations ordered by the Bari Prosecutor's Office — investigations that, regardless of their outcome (their shelving has been requested, as happened in 2019 with those ordered by the Lecce Prosecutor's Office), have once again raised the curtain on the economic interests cultivated in the shadow of the plant disease.

So much focus on economic interests risks, however, becoming yet another screen obscuring the truth. If in the Kennedy case Lee Harvey Oswald's communist sympathies and the ballistic evidence literally dominated newspaper pages, leaving little room for alternative reconstructions, in the xylella case the claims reported in recent times by the mainstream — amplified by certain members of the parliamentary and regional investigative commissions — effectively overlap with those contained in the seven thousand pages that make up the Bari judicial investigation: and all together they conveniently end up polarising public attention on interests and motives of an economic-productive nature that, in this writer's view, are merely instrumental to the real conspiracy.

What doesn't add up in the xylella case

Anyone who has had the opportunity to follow this affair closely knows full well that the conspiracy linked to xylella does not consist in the casual "management of public funds", in the unlawful "distribution of funds for managing the bacteriosis", in the articulated and varied "administrative responsibilities" or in the "fraud against farmers" arising from the intertwining of "economic returns" connected to the achievement of "enormous profits through financing, patents (and) speculation". And, above all, it does not consist in the "great foreign conspiracy" comprising the planned destruction of the Apulian olive oil industry in favour of its Spanish and Tunisian counterparts: because xylella, or whoever acts in its stead, will sooner or later bring Spanish and Tunisian olive growing to its knees as well.

The "xylella conspiracy" consists, instead, in the imposition of a regulatory framework aimed at:

• obstructing research into other possible causes of the Olive Quick Decline Syndrome (CoDiRo), such as intensive agricultural practices and the massive use of pesticides;
• combating exclusively the spread of the bacterium Xylella and its insect vector by imposing remedies worse than the disease itself, from the systematic uprooting of olive trees to neurotoxic herbicides;
• permanently altering the landscape as a prelude to the installation of infrastructure emblematic of a controversial ecological and energy transition, from wind turbines to photovoltaic panels to the Tap;
• reducing biodiversity by mandating the replanting of genetically modified mono-varieties in place of the uprooted olive trees, which will furthermore favour the spread of future plant diseases;
• standardising downward the quality of the oil thus produced, to the detriment of food sovereignty and the much-touted excellences;
• undermining the survival of small producers by replacing traditional agricultural practices and models with agro-industrial methods and systems, thereby fostering the cultural genocide that is a precondition for the globalisation of lifestyles and markets;
• last but not least, introducing divisive dynamics into the social fabric which, seduced by the clash between denialists and conformists, prefers not to concern itself with anything else.

This is a biopolitical conspiracy, duly concealed behind the screen of the controversial economic management of the xylella emergency, whose primary purpose is the elimination of individual freedom and autonomy as a prelude to the uncritical acceptance of a propaganda of terror founded on the manipulation of scientific data and aimed at the subjugation of citizens. From this perspective it is obvious that the affaire xylella constituted, well ahead of Covid, the ideal testing ground for experimenting with forms of global biopolitical totalitarianism.

When the investigations ordered by the Bari Prosecutor's Office are shelved, as the mainstream has been hastening to anticipate for weeks, the economic conspiracy thrown to public opinion will have exhausted its function as a catalyst for collective thought, and the dominant truth will once again be the one propagated from the very beginning of this affair: namely, that the sole cause of CoDiRo is the bacterium Xylella and that the most effective tool for combating the plant disease consists in fighting the insect vector, regardless of any alternative that science, or practice, may in the meantime have identified. And those who are not satisfied with this truth should be prepared to be labelled conspiracy theorists once again — in place of the real ones.