February 15, 2018
Fascism is back in Italy and its paralysing the political system | Roberto Saviano
Parties on right and left are urging people not to talk about an incident in which six immigrants were shot. They are afraid of alienating an increasingly xenophobic electorate
Fascism is back in Italy and its paralysing the political system
Parties on right and left are urging people not to talk about an incident in which six immigrants were shot. They are afraid of alienating an increasingly xenophobic electorate
Late last Saturday morning, 3 February, news started to come in from Macerata, a small county town in central Italy shots had been fired from a moving black Alfa Romeo 147. On Facebook, the mayor encouraged everyone to stay indoors because an armed man has opened fire from a car.
A couple of days earlier in Macerata, the body, cut up in pieces, of a young woman, Pamela Mastropietro, had been found in a suitcase and a Nigerian drug-pusher, Innocent Oseghale, had been arrested for murder. Oseghale is still in prison, accused of contempt and concealing the corpse.
But to return to that Saturday: uncertainty reigned only very briefly before the first pictures began to circulate of a young man by the name of Luca Traini, picked up by the carabinieri, the Italian tricolour draped around his shoulders. There are six wounded, all immigrants. Shots had also been fired at the headquarters of the centre-left Democratic party (PD) in Macerata. Shooting at immigrants, the fascist salute, the tricolour what more do you need to call what happened by its true name?
So why did the Italian media have such trouble defining what happened as a fascist-inspired terrorist attack? I was immediately put in mind of a tweet that Matteo Salvini, the leader of the Lega Nord, the xenophobic party allied to Silvio Berlusconi in the forthcoming elections, had posted two days prior to the attack, referencing the death of Pamela Mastropietro and the arrest of Oseghale: What was this worm still doing in Italy? [] The Left has blood on its hands.
The moral instigator of the Macerata attack was then Matteo Salvini, who for years now has been sowing hatred without a thought for the consequences of his words. But why such timidity from the media and other politicians?
The act of a madman; Lets not talk fascism; Keep quiet so as to avoid it being exploited. These are some of the comments that were made some immediate and off the cuff, but others cool and considered. Very few politicians talk about the victims of the attack because to take the side of the immigrants means losing votes. Only one small party, the Potere al popolo (Power to the people), straight after the attack visited the wounded in hospital. Wilson, Jennifer, Gideon, Mahamadou, Festus and Omar are their names, all very young people trying to make their way in Italy.
Social phantoms always emerge in moments of crisis. Hatred of the foreigner is the result of a lethal cocktail of bad politics, irresponsible information and economic crisis. Now in Italy all bearings have been completely lost and a climate of endless electoral campaigning has triggered a chain reaction that no one seems able to keep in check: the entire political campaign is focused on the subject of immigration.
Immigrants are perceived as the prime reason for the longevity of the economic crisis and even of the risk of attacks taking place. Though it should be noted that the only attack that could be considered a genuine massacre has been perpetrated by an Italian against foreigners.
But you might have read this before, certainly in Italy it crops up in articles that end by saying: But if Italians are afraid, there must be a reason for it. Its almost a waste of time providing data and stressing that immigration is not a crisis, but a phenomenon that, when managed responsibly and with foresight, we are able to control.
A waste also to note that there exists something called good practice and that there are excellent examples we could follow. Its also pointless to comment on the falling crime rates because, someone will assert and they will have much less trouble than I do at sounding a popular note that if Italians feel at risk there must be a reason for it. Today, feelings whatever they are are more important than reality.
And then there are the voices of caution: care should be taken not to attach too much importance to a violent episode. The more I talk of migrants, the more I am accused of encouraging hatred of them. Its a kind of back-to-front logic: how is it possible, I wonder, that if I relate what is happening in Libya in the detention centres, if I speak of the mud-slinging machine against the NGOs who are operating in the Mediterranean, I manage the opposite of what I am trying to achieve?
Even if you explain that migrants are a fundamental resource in an Italy that is demographically moribund, I hear the earnest plea: keep mum, dont mention it, find something else to do.
The stories that are told about migrants are the result of electoral calculation and one that has emerged to fill the space that has always belonged to the Lega Nord and which the Five Star Movement (M5S) has slipped into with a new narrative, one that goes as follows: right and left no longer exist; what does exist, though, are Italians with problems and who come before everyone else.
After the attack, something happened which in Europe up to now has been unprecedented: Matteo Renzi, secretary of the PD and Luigi Di Maio, leader of the M5S, urged everyone to keep silent about the events. Why? So as not to lose the votes of the xenophobic electorate: this is their fear, the consequence of a now vacuous political system.
Does not the fact that Luca Traini, the terrorist who opened fire on unarmed individuals simply because they were Africans, and who had been a candidate for Lega Nord, tell us that Salvinis party is putting up criminal and violent extremist candidates for election? Absolutely not it tells us something that is valid about all the parties, and that is that there is no longer any substance to them, that they can no longer field candidates on the ground because they have now lost all contact with the real world.
Nowadays, when a politician, a journalist or an intellectual starts out with statements such as: Whatever you think about immigration, they must realise that they are acting irresponsibly. In a period as delicate as the one we are living through, no flippancy can be tolerated. On paper, on the small screen and on social media, each and every word should be weighed and weighed heavily.
Roberto Saviano is the author of Gomorrah: Italys Other Mafia
March 1, 2018
Emma Bonino: Italy’s pro-Europe, pro-immigrant conscience 0
by MeDaryl • Cars • Tags: Europe, Italy, politics, World news
The former foreign minister, activist and politician has radical ideas for todays Italy
Forty years ago, Emma Bonino fought to secure abortion rights in Italy in the shadow of the Vatican. Her campaign involved hunger strikes and a three-week stint in jail.
These days, the former foreign minister, activist and candidate for parliament, is waging an equally difficult battle in support of migrants and in defence of Europe, two ideas that seem radical in todays bitter political environment.
There is, Bonino says, an invisible thread that connects the causes of her life.
You can look at the fights I have waged with this point of view: I support a democratic liberal order and believe in the centrality of the individual, his rights but also his responsibilities, she says.
Those ideas, she adds, are under threat.
Bonino is an icon in Italy. Her supporters might call her the conscience of the country.
While she is not realistically hoping to win next Sundays national election, if Bonino and her party More Europe do well, she will win 3% of the highly fractured Italian vote, a result that would give her control of her own parliamentary group. It would also grant her a fair amount of influence in the event that the election ends, as many expect, with the creation of a grand coalition government between the centre right and centre left parties headed by two former prime ministers, Silvio Berlusconi and Matteo Renzi.
The 69-year-old has gained momentum over recent weeks, despite the fact that her ideas including granting citizenship to immigrants run contrary to the prevailing winds in Italy, where migrants are increasingly the target of political vitriol, and where Brussels has been blamed for the countrys economic woes.
In an interview in her small rooftop apartment, which has a terrace overlooking St Peters Basilica, Bonino a lung cancer survivor admits she is frailer than she once was, but is driven by passion for her politics and concerns for the country.
If I look back 50 years ago, if you look at womens rights, I cannot even recognise my country, the change has been enormous, she says. That doesnt mean it is all done. On the contrary, rights are a process, and if you dont care for them, you can lose them from morning to night.
She has been thinking about the banality of evil, the term coined by Hannah Arendt, the political theorist who examined the rise of Nazism, after she saw a viral video of an elderly Italian woman harassing a black man on a bus while other passengers looked on.
Arendt explains how one small sign happens after the other that no one cares about, and then you suddenly find yourself in hell, she says.
The signs that are worrying Bonino are escalating incidents of political intolerance on the left and the right, racist attacks that are not adequately challenged, the lack of resilience in institutions, and the mediocrity of leaders.
She was disturbed by two recent incidents of violence against women, and how differently the murders were treated in the press based on the race of the suspected perpetrators: one, a migrant from Nigeria, and another, a white Italian.
There is no excuse for this kind of thing, she says. There are many things you can do to counter this phenomenon: public speeches, videos, talking in schools, exactly like the entrepreneurs of fear use. It is not true that we dont have tools to react, we are simply not using them in an assertive way.
One of her top political priorities is giving legal status to hundreds of thousands of migrants who are in Italy illegally, much as Berlusconi did in 2000.
She is convinced that Europes demographic challenges and low birthrates will, eventually, give European capitals a wake-up call about their need to welcome immigrants.
Sooner or later, we will recognise that we need them, she says. For the moment the political mood is so bad, so unhealthy, that there is no way to talk rationally.
While Bonino is not worried that Italy might leave the EU, she believes that the constant targeting of Brussels as the source of the countrys problems will have a long-term negative impact.
Its very simple. On one side you have Putin and on the other side you have Trump. You have China and south of the Mediterranean is on fire. If this is the new landscape, if we go on as 27 small states, each on his own, where do we go? she says.
If we continue with blaming Europe, we will never make it better. It will stay as it is, like a boat taking water. So in the end, the boat will sink out of inertia, she adds.
Bonino has her share of gripes with the EU, particularly in its handling of the Libya crisis. She condemns, as a stark violation of every sort of international convention, the manner in which Italy has sought to keep migrants from entering the continent.
We know that the ones who are saved [by the Libyan coastguard], that they are lost forever, and that no one knows what their life will be, she says. We know we are sending them back to hell, we know the conditions of the detention centres they keep. I dont call that a success, I cannot call that a success.
In contrast to her fight with the Catholic church 40 years ago, Bonino can, these days, count on at least one ally: Pope Francis.
The two, she says with a grin, are in touch. We have some connections, so we pass messages quite often, through friends.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/26/emma-bonino-italys-pro-europe-pro-immigrant-conscience