Bigotry, Racism fuel Creeping Fascism in Berlusconi's Italy

Posted on 27 November 2008. Tags: Fascism in Berlusconi's Italy, Italy, Mayor Giancarlo Gentilini, Rome

“The fascists of the future will be called anti-fascists.”- Winston Churchill
“Universal education is the most corroding and disintegrating poison that liberalism has ever invented for its own destruction.”- Adolf Hitler

In a brilliant and prodigiously effulgent expose of the situation in Italy, Stan Moss calls it “a strange mix of racism and authoritarianism is surfacing in Berlusconi’s Italy”.

The author’s “strange mix”…is pure unadulterated FASCISM. Berlusconi used the Murdock model to come to power on the wings of a media empire. He got the wind on his back from a motley crew of bigots and racists

Racism+Authoritarianism=Fascim=Naziism
Islamophobia: Fascist Italians Demolish Verona Mosque
Immigrants are now officially b-citizens.
“I wanted our streets cleansed of all the ethnics groups that are destroying our country”. He taunted the immigrants that “piss in our streets”. “Let them go and piss in their own mosques”, he barked, adding “I don’t want to see any blacks, browns or greys teaching our children”…(Mayor Giancarlo Gentilini).
best way to deal with such protests is to infiltrate them with agent provocateurs and shoot (or beat) at random (former Home Secretary (and later President) Francesco Cossiga).
“The security forces should massacre the demonstrators without pity, and send them all to hospital. They shouldn’t arrest them, because the magistrates would release them immediately, but they should beat them up. And they should also beat up those teachers who stir them up. Especially the teachers. Not the elderly lecturers, of course, but the young women teachers.

“Today in Italy, the traditional fascist hatred of the Jew is increasingly substituted by a hatred of Muslims, all of them, children, women and men. Today Muslims in Italy are not so differently represented as their Semitic brothers were during the time of the Fascio and the Eia Eia alala.”

Stan Moss’s article correctly points out the inherent racism in Italian society now consecrated in Roman Law. However the entire article is a reflection of the current worldview of good journalists–it fails to mention the “I” word even once. It is a fact that the primary brunt of Italian racism in directed towards North Africa and towards Muslims.

Watch it, Italy: A strange mix of racism and authoritarianism is surfacing in Berlusconi’s Italy by Stan Moss

As parallels are constantly drawn between the current economic climate and the 1929 crash, we can at least hold on to the certainty that Europe is now a profoundly democratic place.

Italy, however, is a peculiar case. Since Silvio Berlusconi’s landslide victory last April, it’s as if the country started to passively give the nod to a disturbing series of populistic and semi-authoritarian measures. Whether it’s style, rhetoric or actions, whatever the government is doing is increasingly greeted by a collective shrug. The result is that Italy’s standards of democracy are lowering fast.

Berlusconi’s victory wiped out of Parliament the radical and green left and dropped the decimated centre-left into a morass of petty infighting. That allowed the Government to hit the ground running. Propped up by the type of anti-immigration rhetoric that Britain would only tolerate if the BNP were in power, the new Italian executive agreed to some seriously draconian legislation. Immigrants are now officially b-citizens. One measure, for instance, requires their expulsion the moment they get a criminal record – and the grounds for appeal are strictly limited. In the meantime, reports of immigrant-bashing and racist incidents, in some cases involving the police, are just piling up.(http://mymarilyn.blogspot.com/2008/11/watch-it-italy.html). Watch it, Italy: A strange mix of racism and authoritarianism is surfacing in Berlusconi’s Italy by Stan MossInsanity in individuals is something rare – but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.
Friedrich Nietzsche

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.
Friedrich Nietzsche
“It does not take a majority to prevail … but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.” –Samuel Adams

ROME (AFP)—An Auschwitz survivor warned Friday that “history is repeating itself” in Italy, where Roma, or gypsies, face state-sanctioned discrimination 70 years after the notorious racial laws here targetting Jews.

“Everything started with the census of Jews and the terrible consequences to which this led us,” recalled Piero Terracina at a conference marking the anniversary of the framing of the racial laws.

“Now history is repeating itself with the screening, listing and consequent fingerprinting of Roma,” the 80-year-old said of measures targetting gypsies introduced by the centre-right government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi which came to power in May. EJ Press.org

In September, Giancarlo Gentilini, a pro-Berlusconi mayor (famous for his calls for “the right to carry out ethnic cleansing against the faggots”) said: “I wanted our streets cleansed of all the ethnics groups that are destroying our country”. He taunted the immigrants that “piss in our streets”. “Let them go and piss in their own mosques”, he barked, adding “I don’t want to see any blacks, browns or greys teaching our children”… Only two months ago, members of the ruling Northern League, including MPs, took part in the pan-European far-right gathering in Cologne, the type of event you’d want to pop to if you fancied a picnic with the NF or Combat 18. (http://mymarilyn.blogspot.com/2008/11/watch-it-italy.html). Watch it, Italy: A strange mix of racism and authoritarianism is surfacing in Berlusconi’s Italy by Stan Moss

“I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” Thomas Jefferson

Don Quixote along with Sancho Panze led a charge against an army of “Turks” which in reality were simply windmills. While the fictional character invented by Miguel Cervantes, Don Quixote was not real the perceived threat turned out be as ephemeral as the threat of the “Red Menace” of yesteryear as painted by Senator McCarthy.

One aspect of electronic, postmodern world is that there has been a reinforcement of the stereotypes by which the Orient is viewed. Television, the films, and all the media’s resources have forced information into more and more standardized molds. So far as the Orient is concerned, standardization and cultural stereotyping have intensified and the hold of the nineteenth-century academic and imaginative demonology of the “mysterious Orient”. This is nowhere more true than in the ways by which the Near East is grasped. Three things have contributed to making even the simplest perceptions of the Arabs and Islam into highly politicized almost raucous matter: one, the history of popular anti-Arab and anti-Islamic prejudice in the West, which is immediately reflected in the history of Orientalism; two the struggle between Arabs and Israeli Zionism, and its affects upon American Jews as well as upon both liberal culture and the population at large; three the almost total absence of any cultural position making it possible either to identify with or dispassionately to discuss the Arabs or Islam. Edward Said Reader. Orientalism Page 92

The siege mentality then leads of the orientalist analysis of the root-cause which leads to intellectual responses that are draconian…Edward Said

The entire Crusades were based on similar thinking “the hordes are coming, we need to destroy them”. Richard Fletcher in his new book “The Cross and the Crescent” lists narrations by authors that go back centuries.

Ammianus Marcelellinus, last of the Latin historians of antiquity, writing towards the end of the fourth century, is representative. He considers the Arabs a destructive people, who would swoop down like birds of prey to seize whatever they could find. And different in their habits too, not people like us: by means pf what today would be called cultural stereotyping, he distanced the Arabs as the unpalatable other. No man ever grasps a plough-handle nor cultivates a tree, none seeks a living by tilling the soil, but they rove continually over wide extensive tracts without a home, without fixed abodes or laws

…They wander so widely that a woman married in one place, gives birth in another and rears children far away

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlV7jIaT80A

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlV7jIaT80A]

“A black English person, or French person, or Dutch person, that’s O.K.,” said Giovanni Giulio Valtolina, a psychologist and scholar at the ISMU Foundation in Milan, which studies multiethnic society. “But a black Italian is a very new thing.”

In recent weeks, a Ghanaian man, Emmanuel Bonsu Foster, 22, was injured in Parma in a scuffle with the police; a Chinese man, Tong Hongsheng, 36, was beaten by a group of boys in a rough neighborhood in Rome; and a Somali woman, Amina Sheikh Said, 51, said she was strip-searched and interrogated for hours at Ciampino Airport in Rome. Last month, six African immigrants were gunned down in Castel Volturno, a stronghold of the Neapolitan Mafia. New York Times http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/13/europe/13italy.php

Stan Moss prolifically describes the current situation in Italy.

Next, the Government proceeded to set up ‘special’ classes for children of non-Italians at school. And while Berlusconi grabbed the headlines for calling newly elected Obama “suntanned”, only muted grumbles met his new ad-hoc law that will grant the Italian Prime Minister (himself, that is) immunity from all criminal courts. What followed was the scandal at the Parliamentary Committee overseeing the state television network RAI. Even though the committee is traditionally chaired by an opposition MP elected on a bipartisan vote, the government rejected the centre-left’s official candidate. Instead, they handpicked their own. This too was shunned by the general public as petty political squabbling.

And then came the student strikes. Unhappy with budget cuts proposals as detailed in the White Paper on higher education, undergraduates and college students alike took to the streets in numbers. And this is where it turns sour. After scuffles erupted in Rome when a mob of organised skinheads attacked unarmed teenagers (see pictures here), the hawkish former Home Secretary (and later President) Francesco Cossiga went on record saying that the best way to deal with such protests is to infiltrate them with agent provocateurs and shoot (or beat) at random. (http://mymarilyn.blogspot.com/2008/11/watch-it-italy.html). Watch it, Italy: A strange mix of racism and authoritarianism is surfacing in Berlusconi’s Italy by Stan Moss

The Italian cabinet approved the racial laws on November 15, 1938, which parliament unanimously adopted a month later, “in a climate of general indifference,” Terracina said.

The laws prohibited mixing between Jews and “Aryans,” expelled Jewish students and teachers from the school system and imposed economic constraints, among other measures.

“Still today there are minorities at risk … even those who have been living amongst us for centuries and who have full citizenship,” Terracina told a conference on the theme, “Racism in Italy: Past and Present” at the American University of Rome. “It can still happen that we move from ignorance to prejudice, to intolerance and then to hatred,” said Terracina, who was freed from the Nazi death camp in Auschwitz, occupied Poland, in January 1945..EJ Press.org

“This is how I dealt with them when I was at the Home Office”, he revealed in an interview. Cossiga was speaking of Italy’s so-called ‘years of lead’ in the late 70s, at the height of the country’s own terrorist crisis. Between 1977 and 1979, a period of high civil unrest, several demonstrators died in dubious circumstances. Some were shot by random fire during protest rallies. Although the courts were never able to convict anyone in particular, we now officially know that the government was directly behind it. In the words of Cossiga:

“The security forces should massacre the demonstrators without pity, and send them all to hospital. They shouldn’t arrest them, because the magistrates would release them immediately, but they should beat them up. And they should also beat up those teachers who stir them up. Especially the teachers. Not the elderly lecturers, of course, but the young women teachers.”

No doubt Cossiga is pleased that only in 2001, during Berlusconi’s last stint in power, the Italian police pulled off that magnificent mix of Pinochet-style torture, mass-beating and planted evidence that stoked up the infamous riots at the G8 in Genoa. And they really did pull it off because no police officer will ever spend a minute in jail for that.

Yet, what’s most disturbing is the Italian’s sense of resignation, as well as Berlusconi’s enduring popularity in the polls. The temptation is to say that, after all, Italy is the place where fascism was invented. But it wouldn’t be fair on all the Italian trade unionists, socialists and liberals who lost their lives fighting for their freedom. (http://mymarilyn.blogspot.com/2008/11/watch-it-italy.html). Watch it, Italy: A strange mix of racism and authoritarianism is surfacing in Berlusconi’s Italy by Stan Moss

No to Islamphobia

To be a Muslim and live in Italy, particularly in the North of the country, politically dominated by the far-right parties Lega Nord (North League, a secessionist party) and Alleanza Nazionale (National Alliance, the bigger post-fascist party), is not just difficult, it is a nightmare. Recently discrimination against the Italian Muslims as well as the immigrants has risen to an unacceptable level for a European country subscribing to, and strongly supporting, the European Convention for Human Rights. I have to admit that if any other European country, such as France, the UK or Germany, would dare to discriminate against their Muslim population as Italy is currently doing, they would face a political as well as social backlash. Islam, Muslims, and an Anthropologist Dr Marranci

Dumping Orientalism Out of the various strategies employed by the Modern Orientalists is to exaggerate the problem, scare the people, list unrelated points, and join the dots in a manner that it serves their purpose of creates a rationale for their thesis or action items. Edward Said

Discarding Racism bigotry & Orientalism to the trash can of history“Orientalism” is based on hubris, bigotry, power, racism, lust for territory, and greed for resources is defined as painting an incorrect, false and negative caricature of the Orient/East/Islam and then offering “solutions” to fix the false image through crusades, colonialism, “fake sponsored democracy”, and “false sense of emancipation” that are counterproductive and have nothing to do with the reality of the Orient/East/Islam. The Muslim Jesus