A brief premise

The author of these lines has been in the past, I would say for a long period, a sympathiser of the “left”, even the extreme left I dare say. This is always bearing in mind the fact that it happened when, to some extent, one could still speak of a division between “left” and “right” in Italian politics, and assuming it actually makes sense to say one is “left-wing” or “right-wing”. Only the passing of the years, in fact, has taught me that ideologies too (it matters little which ones) have always been used by “true” power to command and subjugate the peoples of the entire earth. The latter, conversely, have sincerely embraced the roles offered to them from time to time, often even at the cost of their own lives and those of their loved ones. This brief introduction is solely so as not to receive, from the usual four lobotomised morons, the usual epithets they have been trained to use, like Pavlov’s dogs, against anyone who thinks differently from the current narrative of political correctness.

An Italian story. Or perhaps not

It was the 17th of February 1992 when the then almost unknown public prosecutor Antonio Di Pietro obtained an arrest warrant from the preliminary investigating judge Italo Ghitti for the engineer Mario Chiesa. Chiesa was president of the Pio Albergo Trivulzio care home, as well as a prominent exponent of the Milanese PSI (Italian Socialist Party), following an investigation begun the previous year which saw him personally involved in an affair of administrative corruption and kickback payments. It was only the needle in the haystack and very soon revealed a ring of bribes that had been practised throughout the country for years, but which everyone pretended did not exist. The investigations widened and, following the general elections of early April that year, which were disastrous for all parties (excluding the Lega and Leoluca Orlando’s La Rete), there was a succession of accusations, resignations and, in some cases, even suicides of both politicians and businessmen (among others the former president of Eni Francesco Cagliari and the businessman Raul Gardini, president of the Ferruzzi-Montedison group, both involved in the “Enimont” bribe affair). In little more than a year an entire political class was swept away, party leaders foremost. There were also several death threats against Di Pietro himself (a character, moreover, who was anything but flawless. But it would take too long to discuss him here). The investigations, by now extremely numerous, even involved the Guardia di Finanza (financial police). Only the old PCI (Italian Communist Party) seemed to be only marginally touched by this wave of scandals. But, in reality, the reason why it was not directly involved is quite another. I shall return to this later in this article. All this led, as we shall soon see, to the end of the First Republic, to use a journalistic expression.

Fozza Itaia

I remember perfectly an evening in 1992 when some friends and I were walking around the streets of Rome chatting. At a certain point, in the San Giovanni area, we all noticed some billboards displaying the full-screen image of a smiling baby with the words “Fozza Itaia” (childish pronunciation for Forza Italia, Go Italy) written above. We all immediately asked each other the same question: “What on earth is this? It looks like a football slogan!”. Even if the admen later denied it, no one will ever remove from my mind the idea that they were, so to speak, the technical test broadcasts for the new, already planned party that was to be founded in January 1994, after his entry into politics in October of the previous year, by a Milanese entrepreneur: Silvio Berlusconi. The reason why, today, years later, I believe those billboards were not accidental is that a little over two years earlier, exactly on the 9th of November 1989, the Berlin Wall had fallen. Since then, it was decided elsewhere that the European political order had to change and that Italy in particular had to make way for a new political class. This class was to replace the old one which, albeit corrupt and corruptible, had the great sin of being made up of authentic politicians, i.e. men whose training had been truly political and who, in their own way, still cared about the general good of the country. In other words, those who still held a concept of a multi-polar and non-globalist world and whose vision of power relations still reflected political, social and moral “values” belonging to the development of previous centuries had to be swept away. The end of the 20th century, on the contrary, was to pave the way for those unifying and thought-cancelling principles which still today act as the guidelines for recent international developments. Precisely for this reason, what I am summarising here is perhaps not (as I wrote above) entirely an “Italian story”. And this is true both as regards the history of “Tangentopoli” (Bribesville) and the entry onto the field (as he himself used to say, borrowing the term from his beloved football) of this character, as controversial as he was atypical in Italian politics. For better or worse, the politician Berlusconi, absolutely inseparable from the entrepreneur, characterised about 17 years of Italian politics and society: from the official foundation of his Forza Italia in January 1994, until the 12th of November 2011, the date of his “forced” resignation as Prime Minister. That resignation, as I noted at the time discussing it with my friends from the aforementioned evening in 1992, was in reality a fully-fledged “coup d’état” by the then President of the Republic Giorgio Napolitano* (perhaps the worst President the Italian Republic has ever had alongside the current one) and the international political and economic community. The latter was the true instigator of what Napolitano practically did. In all likelihood, the entrepreneur Berlusconi was blackmailed. Mediaset shares began to lose their value, nosediving throughout 2011, losing a whopping 45.5 per cent by August alone. And things certainly didn’t go well for them in the immediately subsequent years either. Created in 1987, it was worth 4 billion at the end of 1996, the year it was floated on the Stock Exchange, only to reach 30 billion at the beginning of 2000, with the advent of the Internet. Since then, however, it has been a slow, inexorable decline down to the roughly 1.7 billion today, less than half of what it was worth at the time of its flotation 27 years ago. In practice, Goldman Sachs & Co. made it clear to the Cavaliere that the time had come to hand over the reins of command. And so began the Monti era.

Berlusconi the corruptor

Berlusconi certainly contributed to worsening the already shaky country of the late 1980s from various points of view. I am the first to believe that with his television channels, thanks to the complicity of characters like Maurizio Costanzo and his husband (no, that is not a slip of the tongue on my part…), he brought into the homes of Italians, who already lean towards superficiality, the worst sort of apathy and vulgarity linked to primary instincts (food, crude sex and toilet humour). It is also true that the Berlusconi persona (and this too is no coincidence) availed himself of the economic and other help of the Mafia for his business projects, which, I remind us all, is the “dirty hand” of international power. It is equally true that he was a corruptor and committed perhaps dozens of administrative and other offences, besides having taken advantage of the dual role of politician and entrepreneur, with a blatant conflict of interests, to benefit his companies through over 70 ad personam legislative measures, yielding advantages of all kinds, even to the detriment of State enterprises. Well, all this is undoubtedly true (as the many trials against him have repeatedly proven). I was certain of it years ago and I still am. However, I do not find that, despite everything, the most serious role, the one most laden with responsibility in the entire period that Berlusconi meant something for our Country and beyond, was his. Berlusconi always presented himself for what he was, without subterfuge. The same cannot exactly be said for other protagonists of Italian political and social life. And here we return to the role played, as I wrote earlier, by the old PCI during the frantic phase of “Mani pulite” (Clean Hands). As I have already mentioned, the old Communist Party, or what was left of it after Occhetto’s “turning point” of 1991 with its transformation into the PDS (Democratic Party of the Left). It is no coincidence that the name echoed that of one of the two main transatlantic parties. Just as it is no coincidence that Achille Occhetto, who in my opinion was manipulated by others, was succeeded in 1994, the year of Berlusconi’s electoral victory, by Massimo D’Alema, one of the most shady figures in Italian politics (I won’t list the various misdeeds accumulated in his long political career here). The man who was once the “bag carrier” for the old PCI politicians became a protagonist, thus forming (along with other bag carriers from other old parties) the “new” political class of the “Second Republic” (today, with the so-called “Third”, we are down to the nobodies of the Second). The so-called “left” (which has nothing to do anymore with the “values” of the “left” of yesteryear, just as today’s “right” has nothing to do with its old counterpart) in all the years it was in government, alternating with the Cavaliere, never, I say never, cancelled a single one of those 70 ad personam legislative measures he had pushed through. A coincidence? I should think not.

This one or that one, they are all the same to me

For the true power, the international masonic one, Silvio Berlusconi, himself a freemason with a membership card for Licio Gelli’s Propaganda 2 (P2) lodge (like the aforementioned Maurizio Costanzo), was needed to steer Italy in the direction that, alas, he made it take. However, the character was, so to speak, histrionic. He had the unpleasant tendency to feel he was the leading man. In other words, to do as he damn well pleased every now and then, failing to consider the fact that the masters holding him on a leash would not appreciate this “autonomy” of vision. And they made him pay for it, eventually dumping him when they realised that, besides no longer being of use to them, he was also becoming detrimental to their plans (Putin, Gaddafi, etc.). On the other side, the real masters of the steamship set up the role of fake opposition for the Italians (or better to call them, as I usually do, Italiots) by creating, precisely, a “left-wing” party, making it change its name over the years. But why did they use the old PCI (and consequently not let it get involved in “Mani pulite”)? Simple. Because the old Communist Party was the one with a capillary distribution across the territory and which, through its cooperatives, could best reach the majority of the working classes. The Berlusca would take care of the middle-to-upper bourgeoisie. When the little “left-wing” servants had started to tire out the ragged plebs, who may well be ragged but still have a stomach and can ill bear that those who are supposed to defend them sip champagne and eat caviar (remind you of anything today?) whilst blatantly not giving a toss about them, the global elites pulled the new “fake opposition” out of the hat: the 5 Stars (or 5 Stables, 5 stalle, whichever you prefer). With the latter, as I have said elsewhere, I too was taken in and gave them my vote (after about 30 years of honourably spoiled ballot papers). Clearly, I did not make the same mistake at the next election. Today, the “fuchsia-rainbow” left, as Diego Fusaro rightly calls them, are tearing their (colourful) garments on “social media” because a day of national mourning was proclaimed for Berlusconi’s death (it’s all “non in mio nome” or “not in my name”, because English sounds cooler everywhere). Aside from not caring in the slightest about the political act desired by the current puppet Government (the puppets’ jackets change, but the puppeteers remain the same), I must say I find it simply depressing that there are so many brain-dead people roaming free. I haven’t worried about the fact that they have the right to vote for a long time, since, as someone once said (I don’t care if it was really Mark Twain or not), “if voting made any difference they wouldn’t let us do it”. The king is dead, long live the king! Next in line, please.

*I had spoken about this in several articles, including here, here and here