I can't say I am not surprised by the overbearing victory of our local criminal tycoon Silvio Berlusconi (ecstatic face in tiny picture). Honestly I thought he didn't even want to win. Besides I thought the center-left was more in control of the transition.
The fact remains that the center-left, kicked out of power after only one miserable year, with its ineptitude has paved the way to five more years of Berlusconi's invincible domain of criminal activities, peculations, embezzlements, conspiracy, collusion with Mafia, dumbing-down TV shows and all the rest.
Freed by the soberness of his former allies, such as Casini, now out of the games, and strengthened by the huge support given (as customary in time of disappointment toward politics) to the xenophobic party Northern League, Berlusconi will have no limits. Everyone is guessing it is going to be really tough on a country already crippled and falling like Italy, that still had to recover from the past five years of Berlusconi's governance (since the year of center-left governance in the middle basically served nothing and accomplished nothing.)

I wonder if this defeat will finally make the idiotic arrogance of the leaders of the center-left (grinning face in tiny picture) go away. You would think that losing with almost the 10% to Berlusconi again should do it. But I have a hunch that not few of them are actually happy of the outcome.
First of all, with their moronic single party they racked the 33%, which within the italian left is quite enough power in few hands. But most importantly, with this election they managed to erase from the political scene the "extreme" left, the green party and communists (serious face in tiny picture), which for the first time in thirty years or so are going to be out of the parliament.
I think back at the Democratic Party they couldn't dream anything better than being left as the only left, even if they have nothing of the left except the desire to be in control and the arrogance of those who think they have a exemplary, romantic past.

Well, Italy is screwed anyway, economically but more importantly spiritually and morally. The majority hates to be italian, others who love to be italian do so for the worst reasons. Everyone seems ready to sell everything only to get out of debt and buy a new car, a new political season, a favor. The political oligarchy is disgusting from the first to the last man not only because they are so corrupted, because they are always the same faces, because they are not capable of doing anything good that lasts, because they are a burden to this country, dragging it backwards against happier forces of conservation and change (both badly needed by this country).
They are disgusting because they are a mirror inside which our worst face reflects itself. I am sick of looking at that mirror, actually.

This illustrates very well the totalitarian tendency which is implicit in the anarchist or pacifist vision of society. In a Society where there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behaviour is public opinion. But public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity of gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law.

-- George Orwell, Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver's Travels, 1946

"Create new post" says the blogging interface. Yeah, it's been a long time since I have last discussed the Italian politics and I would love to reopen that scary box. It's not like there aren't things to talk about, since the departure of Berlusconi and the advent of Prodi. The funny verminy stories about the Vicenza U.S. military base being the more juicy of them. I just want to clarify that my avoidance of said subjects does not depends on a major sympathy felt for the new rulers. In fact, if possible, my sympathy is even less for Prodi's government than for Berlusconi's, because I know this sort of guys better, and I recognize better the indulgence of which they enjoy, and the lies that they spread. Even if they're more honest, if a concept like honesty would ever be possible in politics and particularly in the Italian politics. Besides it would be much more interesting and useful to criticize the "friend" than the "enemy", if one would still believe in criticizing politicians.
The thing is, after having hoped for so long for the fall of Berlusconi, everything still seems so hopeless in the Italian panorama that one doesn't really finds a reason to sweat for how rotten things are. They are just rotten, that's all. What's worse, they are rotten while having more energy or initiative. And I always felt that the little that was left of good in Italy was so because of a lack of initiative and energy.

Another issue that I would love to bash on everyday, sort of like aioros does, is the one of the childish and ludicrous and hypocrite and mafia-like ways of the Italian journalism, which, every single hour of the day and almost without exceptions proves itself to be composed of individuals well-intentioned to dumb their fellow citizens down --a inch more every year until they'll touch the rock bottom and below, into total unconsciousness.
It's hard to find the necessity of all the everyday collections of naked women aside of the news titles, of all the collections of commonplaces and condensed knowledge without anything left of intelligent --or of all the news item like this one, that are totally irrelevant even under a sociological aspect, and only are there for morbid insensitivity.
But everything falls into place when one simply realizes that the global project is seriously the one of total unconsciousness, so there's really nothing new or special about the Italian journalism. It just is journalism. Tiredly dragging us all towards a future when the only arbiters will be the empty words of taste and not the written laws.

So where the occasional political observer goes these days, when he feels all the tiredness of the worn out scenario he knows already? It probably goes to the blogs, the last throes to be felt by the dying collective body -- thanks God and the CIA and the NSA for inventing them.

There isn't a day going by that we don't read on the news about some Italian citizen somewhere in the world being kidnapped. The numbers are quite impressive, as this search in Google proves. The cases are countless between 2005 and 2006.
Why this happens? According to the media, they're all accidental stories from the third world with nothing in common one with the other except the Italian nationality of the victims. They seem to be all criminal acts and not political or terrorist acts: their sole purpose is for the band of kidnappers to make money out of it.
From Venezuela to Nigeria (today), from Afghanistan to Yemen or Palestine, it just so happens that Italians constantly fall in the hands of kidnappers.

The truth of the matter (or, better, my opinion) is that some voice must be circulating among criminal or clandestine organizations today: the Italian government pays good.
Troubled by a scuffling and weakling political oligarchy, insecure on the international scenario, the average Italian government nowadays pays very good money to have its citizens back.
The result? Italian citizens are being kidnapped and released, more and more.

Mind you, it always happened: but now it's becoming kind of alarming. So let's ask: how and when this trend began?
Well, apparently it all began in January 2004, when Silvio Berlusconi was prime minister, and in Iraq two Italian girls working as volunteers were kidnapped. Some times after their liberation, someone leaked to the press that the Italian government, down with popularity and in a hurry for some good news, had paid one million dollars for the liberation of two girls. At a certain point Berlusconi even tried to make us believe he had pledged the million dollar from his own pockets. Which is ridiculous because the guy is a notorious closet stingy.

What is paradoxical, is that in Italy a particularly cruel law exists against kidnapping made by local criminal organizations, which 'freezes' the money of the family of the kidnapped to discourage exactly what today on an international level is happening, the diffused sensation that kidnapping and Italian citizen is rewarding.

Finally, I believe that this instructive story proves once again that when someone in charge is addicted to popularity, and would do anything to keep it, very often the highest price is paid by everyone else. The post ends here. I'm not very satisfied with it but there you go.

Apparently some reactions to the story of the possible 2006 election fraud in Italy: justice is investigatiing, the parliamentarians are fighting over it, and Berlusconi is accusing the communists. Everything is OK.
What will actually happen? Nothing, of course, nobody is kidding here.

Right after the elections, in the spring of 2006, italyisfalling.com stated clearly that the supposed defeat of Berlusconi (who was losing with an incredibly slight minority at the senate and in fact coming out very powerful when everyone thought he was done for) could in fact be considered a positive outcome for him, in a very difficult moment for the country.

During the astonishing night and day after the vote, with Berlusconi calling for a recount and even for the invalidation of the elections before the results were out, we, with many others hinted at possible electoral frauds, although not in the sense Berlusconi was tactically and hypocritically suggesting.
The results were not coming out, with unexplainable delay: and when they did come out, they had numbers completely different from the exit polls, which is always a sign of rigged elections (Cf. Diebold/Sequoia U.S. elections 2000-2006).
That night Berlusconi was still nominally Prime Minister, and his faithful minister for Home affairs, Pisanu, was in complete control of the vote count. Twice he left the control room during the night to go to report to Mr. Berlusconi at his mansion, with a highly irregular if not illegal procedure. Nobody ever explained why he did that, or what the long delay was for.

But, do you know what happens, right? If you cheat not to win when everyone is expecting you to loose, but you cheat to loose the less possible, you make it very hard for your opponents, the winners, to call you on your responsibilities. Just like for the 2006 midterm elections in the U.S.: The winners cannot be too harsh on the losers, something the citizens wouldn't understand. And also, calling for a fraud with the risk of not being able to prove it, could actually turn out to be the worst possible way to win, and, in the Italian case, to start a new government with a hard way to go.
This is probably why, during the night of the elections, the Italian winning leaders declared their victory with the most harried, stiffen expression on their faces, apparently with the intention to never publicly discuss again what really happened during that night.

But why am I going over this today, months and months after the vote?
As it happens, far from home this Sunday afternoon I was watching for the n^th time in my life a rerun of Stagecoach (with its beautifully translated Italian title Ombre rosse, "Red shadows") on channel 7. During the commercial break I switched on the third channel were a journalist, Enrico Deaglio, was telling about his new documentary, Uccidete la Democrazia!, "Kill Democracy!" about the supposed electoral fraud of the 2006 Italian elections.
Wow. For a while I forgot about the Ringo Kid and Dallas and the rest of the bunch, doctor included, and listened to him, amazed.

This journalist was explaining how, for the first time in our history, the 2006 political vote counted one million and a half "white" vote less than the projections. The "white" vote are all the voting papers where the voter didn't mark anything, no name or symbol. Those votes don't count and no one can claim them for its party or coalition.
The journalist argued that, because the drop in the number of white votes was considerable and homogeneous all over the country, no matter if coming from a "red" or "blue" region, this could play as fair evidence that something strange happened at a superior level, in Rome, at the ministry of Home Affairs where all the local results converged to be counted.
Small cities have been counted where, said the journalists, the Home Affairs reported an absurd, unsound zero "white" papers. This in a disillusioned country were the "white" vote is always on a rise.

So, while Berlusconi was calling for a fraud perpetrated by "communists" on a local level, supposedly it was him, in Rome, perpetrating a fraud using the "white" papers for his own party and this way reducing his loss considerably, later finding himself in the perfect position to undermine the new weak government.

All yet to be proved, of course. But asking questions seeming the only logical way to approach the truth.

I switched back to "Red Shadows": The doctor was smiling: He had just managed to assist the successful birth of Mrs. Mallory's newborn baby girl, and in silence was getting back to his bottle. Around him admiration and gratitude were expressed with the same silence. He was obviously in need to get back to his usual condition of dealing with the world: getting stoned. Nobody could patronize him about that anymore, because he had done dutifully right.

I always sympathized with the doctor, like I think every decent person who ever watched this legendary film did. I wished my country was a little like him: always stoned (as it is), but capable of getting out of it when necessary.

Yes, struggling for once to make right what is wrong before getting back to the usual lovely state of drunken stupor: That would be a chance for the falling country.

I wish we wouldn't have to write about Berlusconi anymore, but it's impossible... Politically wise, Berlusconi is the equivalent of someone who crashes a party, ruining everyone's business but his own, and who his therefore forever talked about in all the subsequent parties.

This will probably be commented by many Italian bloggers, but, anyway: Apparently, the day before being kicked out of office Berlusconi wrote a letter to all the Heads of State of Europe, to undermine his successor's credibility as his last official act in public office. By doing this, he also undermined the remains of Italian credibility, although that's obviously none of his concerns.
According to L'Espresso, Berlusconi wrote to Blair, Zapatero and co. something like this: "I am going away, but I will be back when the votes will be recounted. I am the one who won the elections, and if I'm going away it's only because of the faulty Italian electoral system."

It must be noted that Berlusconi's government "corrected" the italian electoral system few weeks before the vote, so he can't blame anyone but himself. Also, in the meantime votes have been recounted finding nothing, no Florida case. But that's not the point.
The point is, if Italy was a Democracy, such a thing would not be possible. There would be enough respect for the rules and for the vote to keep one's personal resentment out of the question. But Italy is not a democracy, it is a oligarchy¹, and in the oligarchic mode of rule the going down families are always allowed some little dishonest see-you-later trick.

_{1. I know, I've said that before, what do you want. Everyone has his own obsessions.}

Every country has its own rhetoric to endure. In Italy, after twenty years of Fascist bombastic rhetoric, and fifty years of hypocrite anti-fascist rhetoric, and ten years of unbelievable Berlusconi's rhetoric, it seems like we're back to the anti-fascist one, which undoubtedly is the lesser of the evils. But, how much sick the rhetoric about the Resistance can make me?

It doesn't really bother me when it comes from our politicians: "our Constitution was born from the Resistance against fascism", "in the Resistance are the roots of our Republic", "Democracy wouldn't exists in Italy if it wasn't for the Resistance": for those voices are as weak as they are remote to me. Sure, they can be heard more distinctly now that Berlusconi, that hideous prick, is not in charge anymore, but to me they're just meaningless symbols used to draw their phrases to their ends, they don't count.

But, when it's from voices of friends, people I know, or bloggers whose writing I enjoy (sometimes), I really have problems with it.

With my friend R., for example, I just stopped arguing about it, because the Resistance it's just so perfect a myth in his imagination there's no possible actual debate about it. In his idea, if you have objections about the absolute relevance of the Resistance against Mussolini in our lives (something that happened sixty years ago), you are probably someone who would not fight against Fascism now, if it showed up again.
Bad argument, you know? Because, what do you know, really? Maybe fascism will be here and you won't recognize it because it will have a face friendly to you, and unfriendly to me. It will be called like your favorite party, or your favorite website, and you will be in the crowd clapping. Life is so unpredictable.

And Babsi: "The history of Italy cannot prescind from those sentenced to death [in Fascist prisons]" (it never did, actually); "This country is really ugly because its memory is short and it doesn't respect those who founded it (...) I sort of despise those who do not honour communist partisans"
Communist partisans. No thanks, I do not honour them. So, Babsi, despise me, please.
Not that I think that their contribution and sacrifice to Italian History it's not important. It obviously is, although there was Liberal and Christian partisans involved too. Most remarkably, there was the considerable help of U.S. and U.K. in the matter too: 'cause without their help against the Nazists, no "Resistance" alone would have make any difference. So if you want to honour Communist partisans, it means you should also honour the American and British flags, or generals, which is probably something you don't want to do in this particular moment.

It's not like Fascism and the fight against Fascism are the only things that existed in history, anyway: because romantic and generous events (whether the idea we have of them is plausible or not) are countless. Should we feel them all?
Personally, I have better dreams.

No, I don't honour Communist partisans: because I did not come into this world to honour anybody. This sort of honouring is a waste of time and a bitter lie to me.
I think you can only respect and honour someone you knew personally. Stendhal, for example, honoured and respected, in his own words, "only one man: Napoleon". For the good reason he knew him in person, because there is no another way to judge anybody.
Sure, you can sympathize and dream and wonder and be thankful to many persons you read of. I am thankful for the existence of a bunch of characters from the novels I read, for example.
But this social and political "honouring" and "respecting" is just sick hypocrite demagogic bullshit and it deserves all possible mistrust.
If I was living at Mussolini's times, it would be different. But I'm not. Fascism, for me, is all that wants to submerge me in its rhetoric. Disney, for example. Football teams. The fight against Cancer, against Terrorism. The heroes of the Resistance.

I don't feel this urge of constantly picturing myself among the partisans to feel I'm less privileged, or to imagine that I actually have enemies, or that I don't live in the privileged world that keeps all the rest in poverty as I do, or that I am not unfit to the battle as I am.
I'll leave these chimeras to those who enjoy them. Let me live my times without this lie, please, 'cause they're hard enough.

Finally, about the point made by all the mentioned rhetorical phrases: I couldn't disagree more. Italian democracy it's not based on the Resistance against anything. The Italian Republic, as it was born from the hashes of Fascism and WWII, it is based on the complete surrender to Mafia, the American ideology, the Atlantic Pact, and all sort of various patronages (the Vatican, camorra, 'ndrangheta, magistrates, Unions, corporations, FIAT, nepotism as a method, etc): it is based on the strict limitation of any individual freedom outside of these patronages.
Second, it is based on the Yalta divisions, according to which Italy was a country to be split among the communist party and the democratic-Christian party, with the latter at the government and the former at the opposition. Berlusconi's perfect dream is Stalin's dream. A country where, as noted already, nothing was supposed to change, ever, because the equilibrium among west and east Europe was too weak to stand an authentic Italian democracy. Stalin didn't want it just as much as Truman didn't.
Third, Italian democracy is a lie, because Italy it's not a real democracy but an oligarchy (I think I have remarked this point already). So, am I supposed to be thankful for this oligarchy? Because there's still freedom and a little justice, should I honour those who froze this country under this oligarchy with its phony factions?

Sure, I go under a lot of pain when I see our Constitution tore apart by the arrogance of folks like Berlusconi.
But not because this Constitution, and this mafiosa parliamentarian democracy, are something to be thankful or respectful for. It's only because, as experience teaches us, the worse is always to follow, that's all.