italy: berlusconi's new fascist move - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

roachboy · 08-11-2008, 03:31 AM

i put much of this up in another thread, but decided it was worth it's own.

it is not a stretch to refer to silvio berlusconi as a neo-fascist.
this is what neo-fascist politics can result in.

Quote:

Italy Begins Military Effort to Quell Crime
By ELISABETTA POVOLEDO

ROME — Soldiers were deployed throughout Italy on Monday to embassies, subway and railway stations, as part of broader government measures to fight violent crime here for which illegal immigrants are broadly blamed.

By the time it is fully effective next week, the effort will flank regular police officers and the military police with 3,000 troops, a visible signal to citizens that the government “has responded to their demands for greater security,” Defense Minister Ignazio La Russa said in an interview on the Italian Sky News channel.

The conservative government of Silvio Berlusconi won elections in April while promising to crack down on petty crime and illegal immigrants. The new patrols of soldiers, who are not empowered to make arrests, do not seem aimed only at illegal immigrants, though the patrols were deployed to centers where illegal immigrants are housed.

“Security is something concrete,” Mr. La Russa said on Monday. The troops, he said, will be a “deterrent to criminals.”

Critics of the government have condemned the deployment as a superfluous measure that could prove counterproductive.

“Putting troops on the street sends a dramatic message that the situation is more serious than it is in reality,” said Marco Minniti, the shadow interior minister of the center-left Democratic Party, the largest opposition party.

Television news stations showed military officials searching immigrants’ suitcases at subway stations. Potential terrorist targets were also under greater scrutiny. In Milan, troops were stationed around the city’s Gothic cathedral, and in Naples they watched the American Consulate.

In the capital, troops are to be stationed around embassies, consulates and centers for illegal immigrants in outlying neighborhoods where they live. They will not be securing the city’s historic monuments because local officials fretted that the military presence could scare off tourists.

“They will only be in areas where they have no impact on normal citizens,” Rome’s center-right mayor, Gianni Alemmano, told reporters.

Critics of the effort, which was part of a larger anticrime package pushed through Parliament last month, also object to the use of troops rather than the police, saying the military is better suited for emergencies in Lebanon, Afghanistan and Iraq, where they are posted, than urban crises.

“You need to be specially trained to carry out some kinds of controls,” Nicola Tanzi, the secretary of a trade union that represents Italian police officers. “Soldiers just aren’t qualified.”

He also questioned whether the $93.6 million that will be spent for the extra deployment, called Operation Safe Streets, might not have been better used to increase the budgets for Italy’s police and military.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/05/wo...html?ref=world

1. so what we have here is something not that unlike the "security" hysteria in the states post-9/11/2001 (remember those folk with the aks and german shepards walking about subway systems in urban america?) EXCEPT that (1) there is no event to hide behind and (2) in principle a paramilitary style police organization (in the states, a consequence of the generalization of the los angeles model of police organization) is still a police organization and not the military.

so one level of problem: the involvement of the military in a domestic political operation. this cannot be good.
would you object to something similar in the states?

what is the national guard now? is it regular military or it is a semi-military force designed to prevent excess political enthusiasms from spreading into a threat to the state? if the national guard is now a part of the regular military, as a function of the right's fear of the draft, isn't there no difference between deploying it in the states, regardless of the situation, and a blurring of the line which separates military from police functions?

or are we just used to whatever happens.
on tv everything is the same.

2. this action originates with a neo-fascist/far right government
and is directed against "illegal immigrants" and other such phantom "causes" of perturbation in the otherwise perfect body of the nation of Upright Citizens.

the action has functioned as de facto official sanction for stuff like spontaneous expressions of "populist" sentiment directed against these Outsiders like beating them up and burning where they live.

naturally, this is not about depriving the Otherwise Perfect Body of Citizens of any "basic rights" now is it?

i suspect that your support of this is a direct function of the extent to which you buy the line about the "illegal immigrant" as Problem, yes?

it seems to me that this is an extension of the american right's hysterical line about the phantom "Illegal Immigrant" but cranked up in terms of explicitness. it is the logic of militia groups organizing to "defend the borders" but made official.
and it is a great case of how neo-fascist regimes operate: got trouble? blame the Internal Outsider. need support? organize Movements against the Internal Outsider. let em burn.

3. i found out about this on a soundart list i subscribe to---it surfaced across a call for a boycott of italy in response to this---apparently, the ny times article only touches the surface of what is going on.

the email exchange involved someone in berlin, in contact with a number (who knows which?) of italian-based artists who have left over the past weeks in reaction against this and related actions---the other main party to the exchange is located in south-central italy i think, away from the main urban centers--and said that while he knew this sort of thing was happening, at the same time, locally, everything "seemed more or less normal"

so from this two general questions:

how do you fashion judgments about large-scale political events if their consequences are diffuse where you are?

if you are bothered by this action in italy--and it is disturbing, both in itself and in the fact that it is happening without much in the way of "wtf?" in good old parochial america---and were to contemplate an "action"--what would you do? why would you do it?