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.

At the flea market I always end up poking among old photos and postcards. Not that I usually buy anything. I just pass by and occasionally stop and look at the old portraits, and wonder: is that the same humanity I am part of?
All the faces and bodies in the pictures seem so different. What was phony back then, and what was sincere, and what was a caricature. Everything seem to be made of another material. Some of the ladies look like my grandma looked like, a little. But she was real. They seem to be invented by someone else. Some of the men seem to have bodies out of proportion, probably due to the unusual fashion.

Few days ago I was at the flea market of Bollate (Milano), located just next certain horrific "modern" projects that plague that lousy part of the town. There, just like in any other italian flea market actually, the pictures of the times of fascism were the majority. And not only pictures: statues, posters, memorabilia.
Mussolini and his acolytes were everywhere, in pictures and on any little thing from those times. Buttons, pins, boxes, the usual. And there were also other pictures, where no "fascist authority" was present but, in small details like a black handkerchief in a pocket, or a military hat, or a certain advertising in the background, or a certain way of the men to pose in front of the camera, everything still spoke about the times of fascism in Italy.

The times of fascism. That was when my miserable falling country manifested the will to make of its typical cowardice and its worse defects an implacable force. It happened that once and we are still thinking about it.
What was that force? it was a gigantic, inevitable, shameless, black Mafia that pervaded the country and screamed itself from the balconies and the bullhorns instead of hiding in the villas or at the outskirts of town. It sung songs, and wrote poems on itself, and celebrated its new order as if people had expected it for long, when in fact nobody had expected it. Like any other mafia, it brought injustice disguised by justice, and ferocious illegality by peace and order, lies by adamant truths. It got rid of all the other mafias because there ought to be only One-National-Mafia.
Then it faded away, leaving behind    the bare bones of a raided country,    starving, deadly wounded and corrupted forever and covered with shame.

And evidently it also left behind a stubborn army of nostalgic individuals that went on sharing the shreds of that propaganda for decades, passing on the mania to sons and nephews, until today.
Such were the memorabilia at the flea market: in the end, a nauseating collection of phony poses, of silly objects, of unintelligible dialogs of mysterious faces ornamented with propaganda chasing you away from the stalls, able to extend their rule over the past memories for absence of concurrence.

-- in picture, above: one of the few glorious almost-non-fascist pictures found at the flea market. Unless the little boy's hat is in fact the very fascist military d'annunziano alpine hat of his father.

-- First part of the disclaimer (Italy-oriented):

According to some stupid Italian law, call it law of mafia or law of hypocrisy, it seems that I should post somewhere on this website the following disclaimer:

I corpodibacco, author of this darning blog, am not a journalist, and this blog is not a newspaper or nothing of the sort.

So, there, I just did it.

Why? I have no idea. Must have something to do with freedom of expression. But, what's wrong with being a journalist in Italy?
For example, I can write: "Silvio Berlusconi is a mafioso", or "the Italian banking system is a criminal association", or "the pope is a miserable crook", or "Italian pop music isn't even good for my dogs": These are opinions I have, and I can express them, at least according to the Italian Constitution, article 21: "Everyone has the right to freely express thoughts in speech, writing, and by other communication."

But, if I understand it well, if I was a journalist I could not write "the pope is a miserable crook" without being able to prove that the pope is a miserable crook, which isn't easy. Not being able to do so would cost me the expulsion from the Mafia of Journalists (which in Italy goes under the funny name of "Order of journalists", where all the journalists are put in order), because I'd be just offending the poor guy. Of course this thing makes no sense whatsoever. Why is the miserable crook offended only if I speak as a journalist and not if I speak as a citizen? And why should a journalist be part of a Mafia of Journalists anyway?
Oh, my country.

In the end, it all comes down to this: how do you prove your opinions? How do you demonstrate that you feel that a banking system is a criminal association? I am not speaking of actual criminal acts (there must be plenty of them though), but just of the opinion one might have on the matter, that the simple way by which our banking system is conceived makes it de facto a criminal association.

(Opinions are for definition not provable. That's the reason why it is said that "math is not a matter of opinion". Because any mathematical sentence must be proved, contrary to what my lousy teachers at school generally maintained. This disclaimer is straying off the point.)

From the mentioned article 21, the most funny of all subsections is the subsection 2, which reads: "The press may not be controlled by authorization or submitted to censorship."
True. Instead, in this sad falling country, is apparently normal practice to intimidate journalists and political adversaries suing them for defamation or calumny whenever they express strong opinions on someone or something. Example:

journalist Y: "Sir, you have many friends who are in the Mafia. You have many interests in territories controlled by the Mafia. You get most of your votes out of those territories. As soon as you seized power, you made many favors to your friends inside the territories from which you were elected. What would you answer to those who call you mafioso?"
politician X: "Are you saying I am a mafioso? Are you implying that? OK. That's it. You're done. I am suing you for calumny."
journalist Y: "aren't you going to answer to my question?"
politician X: "No, I'll see you in court. Arrivederci" (exit)
journalist Y: (sobs)
(the following day, to put a nice gravestone on journalist Y's career, if there isn't a strike for some other unrelated journalist-category issue, most Italian newspapers would title: "outrageous attack against politicians X. Enough with this punk journalism!")

Settlements for calumny trials in Italy can pay hundreds of thousands of euros or more. And yet I never heard anyone questioning these events as mafia-style intimidations, which would be the textbook definition of what this use of the law is about.

Self-censorship seem to be the only way out in Italy. Or things like this disgraceful disclaimer: which basically states that the world is divided between journalists whose opinions must be controlled and regulated, and normal citizens whose opinions don't count and so can remain under the impression of enjoying freedoms that don't exist.

-- Second part of the disclaimer (U.S.-oriented):

Italyisfalling.com is hosted on an U.S. server, and I am well aware that in a near future, down there in the happy police state that seems to be incrementally built in place of a once great republic, someone could certainly find a reason, if only felt like it, to close down this blog along others for any vague 'threat' it suddenly might represent, according to some phony propaganda to set some new paranoid set of strict rules against the bad guys.

Thus (as a disclaimer) I assure the NSA, or the "homeland security", or any other of the agencies that could be interested, that my personal opinion of the U.S. government and its policies, both inside and abroad, is that such policies are despicable, outrageous, shameful and very often at any rate criminal.
I also want to stress the fact that I am a non-violent individual who --although being a citizen of another country-- has a great respect for the U.S. Constitution and the ideas and acts of its founding fathers (that the mentioned agencies/governments are disgracing everyday with their acts and words). I therefore assure them that my dissent (and any others' for that matter) isn't in any way assimilable to an act of terrorism or to a threat to the security of any nation in the world, let alone the most powerful of them.

Finally, I want to add (always as a disclaimer) that to equate opinions with acts of terrorism shows a logic which isn't worthy of a very stupid monkey, let alone the very evolute primate we all supposedly represent.

And this was the end of my disclaimer. Sorry it took so long, but you know how it goes with this lawyerish mumbo-jumbo.

Fortified with a small tower, marked in solitude by two tufts of palms standing out of the inside courtyard exceeding the roof, some beautiful, of Arabic kind: such are the houses where landholders resort, only for short periods, for the vintage or the sowing. Many don't bring the families with them anymore. From the simple dinettes, among unpretentious 19th-century furniture, between servants or peasants turned into servants, seems to be emanating a patriarchal affability like there was one in Veneto half a century ago. One senses though that the Idyll is treacherous... There's a great ambiguity that could be defined double sincerity, caused by belonging to two masters¹ at the same time: You witness the ritual effusions between the peasant and the master, like they were father and son. Right after that, the master drops his voice so that the peasant does not hear what he has to tell you.
If you pass in the morning, the peasants meet you joyously; one thinks: "here people leaves like in the ancient times." But if you pass at night, in the hours of bad encounters, nobody recognizes you anymore; women look down or sideways and they cover their faces to say that they haven't seen anyone if they were to be called upon to testify. Beneath the patriarchal vest are invincible silences.

(...) This part of Sicily is all a swinging between morose moods and human sufferings and sublime landscapes. Between arabic houses, former feuds, stony grounds and villages of Mafia solitary stands the greek temple of Segesta. With the surrounding nature it makes one of the highest landscapes humanity have. (...)

Sicily, like Greece, puts in chain who wants to watch at it from its human side, and brings instead a great lightness of spirit to whom is content to watch its beauty.

_{1. Two masters: Tradition and Mafia}

(Guido Piovene, Viaggio in Italia, 1953. Translation by Italy is falling)

Compared to today's, 1953 italian Mafia was a joke. Piovene even imagined, in the optimism of the post-war dreams, that the Mafia was about to disappear, substituted by a more modern partitioning of people: "the deathblow will be the diffusion of political opinions in Sicily. When all Sicilians will be divided according to political beliefs and not according to Mafia groups, the bonds between politics and Mafia will be severed."
Instead, starting right in those years was of course the contrary process, so that politics could turn themselves entirely into mafia to survive and prosper in the falling country.

-- In picture, above: Ralph Steadman, Tempio di Segesta, thanks to the wondrous blog "Il giornale nuovo"

Who said that Milano was a nice place? Once again, the middle class has won and we all got five more years with a new reactionary phony mayor, the slimy former Berlusconi's Minister of Education Letizia Moratti.
Another mayor who will have no problem in cutting down trees, I guess, or financing more ugly housing projects, encouraging the fashion & design mafia as long as it is not concerned with the ugly city itself, but just with the money, and so on. One mayor that will, for five more years, encourage her citizens to just keep on working hard, head down, be a little greedy, be a little racist, be a little acquiescent, and coward for the rest. Most important, another mayor that will encourage every social category, of every creed, color, political idea, to be even more sealed within its own borders and to look conspicuously to everyone else from there. Good.

Good ol' Milano. Sometimes I wonder why its citizens want it this way. I guess it is because of the extreme prgamatism of the milanese tradition, where money and houses and cars and the like are the only solid stuff we all can think of.
Well, amen. Not that I thought there were actual alternatives to this picture, I'd only love to see some new approach at it, just for the boredom it causes me.

-- In picture: the new mayor cheers us from her pit

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.

I imagine one of the countless fights between brother and sister. The boy, brought up by the father to be the next powerful mafia boss, but weak, and coward in spirit. The sister, educated to be an obedient, unpretentious wife and mother, who instead goes away to find a love and a family for herself out of the obvious men's rules, and the less obvious Mafia's rules.
I imagine him, trying desperately to be a tough guy like Papà, and ending up again and again to pester his sister, to bend her will to his. He knows for sure women must obey to men. Just as Mamma obeys to Papà. He knows Papà and Mamma toss their heads when they talk about the daughter. Father would be pleased if it was him to teach her a lesson.
But she never listen to him. She, who had a son without being married, with someone not even involved with his father's mafia clan, even comes back at him, laughing at his sorry face.

Isn't it the oldest story in the world? When someone very stupid is also convinced to be very strong or powerful or righteous?
So he spent the night in the car near her place. And in the morning he got out, reached her door, called her down with an excuse. She climbed down the stairs, showed up at the front door where he shot her in the head.
Finally relieved of not having anymore to face that obvious example of his own weakness (his incomprehensible disobedient sister) he declares to the police: "I am proud of what I did."
It's Italia, 2006.

(or, maybe it's an entire different movie. They were lovers. She was his toy. But now, stronger with the newborn son and her new family, she was threatening to sell it all out, so that'd teach him to go around playing Mafia boss. This plot would make his murder motivated by slightly smarter reasons, and meaner. And his proudness would come out from entirely different regions.
Well, you pick your favorite movie. One is less likely than the other, but they're both plausible, in this country, today)