Cassandra Voices

Category: Global

  • Brazil’s Struggle for Life is a Global Concern

    The year began darkly in Brazil. On January 1st, 2019, Jair Messias Bolsonaro was sworn in as President of the largest and richest nation in South America. In his inauguration speech, Bolsonaro stressed his commitment to liberate Brazil, ‘from socialism, inverted values, the bloated state and political correctness’, and called for ‘Brazil above everything, and God above everyone.’[i]

    This far-right authoritarian presidency represents a new era for the nation, featuring unrestricted attacks on environmental protection, human rights movements and social inclusion. Dismissing democratic ideals, his neo-liberal philosophy envisions opening protected reserves to the agribusiness and extractive sectors; reducing crime through liberalising gun possession; and recovering the Judeo-Christian tradition, by marginalising vulnerable groups.

    This new era threatens not only the rainforest and minorities but also democracy, and the world´s fragile climate.

    (c) Fellipe Lopes

    The effect of polarising discourses on an impressionable population

    Bolsonaro was elected in October 2018, vowing to fight corruption and reduce criminality, using an iron fist. Almost fifty-eight million electors supported his messianic message, elevating him to power.

    Removed from any understanding of the complexity of social justice and inclusion, the former army captain promises oppressive power, with armed force on the streets.

    At first sight, his election was a response to a growing disillusionment with the political system. Countless politico-financial scandals and institutional corruption have brought many Brazilians to a stage of hopelessness. People were angry and disenchanted by previous administrations. Voters looked to a saviour, and demanded change, in the shape of this warlike army captain.

    Bolsonaro’s polarising and polemical rhetoric spoke to the fear and dissatisfaction of millions. His campaign manipulated these sentiments, attacking opponents, and promising economic prosperity alongside ultra-conservative Christianity. This formula gained traction through social media and WhatsApp groups that relentlessly spread his message, as well as disseminating fake news about opponents.

    In the past, as a member of the Congress he has openly approved of torture[ii], offending women, indigenous populations, black people and the LGBTQ community. He has made homophobic, xenophobic, racist and misogynist remarks his hallmark.

    Some of his outrageous statements include[iii]:

    • ‘‘The Brazilian cavalry was too incompetent. The American cavalry showed competence in exterminating their Indian populations in the past, nowadays they don’t have this problem anymore.’[iv]
    • ‘I had four sons, but then I had a moment of weakness, and the fifth was a girl.’[v]
    • ‘I would not be capable of loving a homosexual son … I would prefer to see him die in a car accident.’[vi]
    • ‘You can be sure that if I get there [the presidency], there will be no money for NGOs. If it is up to me, every citizen will have a gun at home.’
    • ‘The scum of the world [referring to refugees] is arriving in Brazil as if we didn’t have enough problems to solve’[vii]
    • Trying to invade the West and subject us to this aberration.’ – caption of a video posted on his official Facebook page.[viii]

    His well-publicised hate speeches did not discourage people of all economic classes and social groups from voting for him. On the contrary, the lack of political correctness brought comfort and emboldened those in step with such a tone.

    Many of his supporters interpret the aggressive messages embedded in his speeches as speaking truth to power, or as bringing down the hypocrisy of political correctness. They dismiss the dangerous violence in his words and gestures, including the celebrated simulation of firing a gun with his fingers. This reveals the submerged prejudices of many Brazilians. As a society we must recognise these, and transform in order to move forward.

    This is a period in which the language of political leaders, such as Bolsonaro and Trump, paves the way for the dehumanisation of certain social groups, including indigenous populations, women, black people, LGBTQ community and refugees. These groups are confined to zones of social and political exclusion, in landscapes of abandonment and forgetfulness; dispossessing their lives of intrinsic value and meaning.

    With Bolsonaro’s signature of presidential decrees, his worldview expands into attacks on environmental reserves and wild animals, leading to ecological death.

    (c) Fellipe Lopes

    The disastrous first thirty days

    Only a month in office,[ix] and the new head of the Brazilian state has already signed numerous problematic presidential decrees into law, sided with fascist regimes such as Israel, Italy, Hungary and America, and nominated untrustworthy ministers.

    Among the most alarming is the transfer of powers over indigenous territory to the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Agriculture. Brazil is already the most dangerous country in the world for environmental activists.[x] This move, alongside the demonization of activists amidst a culture of impunity, is likely to foment further violence, and expand deforestation.

    The agribusiness lobby has also managed to reduce bureaucratic oversight in obtaining environmental licenses, with the objective of further deforestation and expansion of agricultural plantation and mining in the Amazon.

    Amazon River (c) Bartholomew Ryan.

    In 2018, the country registered a 13.7% increase in deforestation, the heaviest annual toll for a decade[xi]. With the eradication of NGOs, this is likely to break further records over the coming years.

    After lifting controls on deforestation in the Amazon region, in response to lobbying by the agribusiness and extraction industry, the administration has been hit with its first major humanitarian and ecological crisis.

    On January 25th a dam, constructed to facilitate mining, collapsed[xii] in Brumadinho, south-eastern Brazil, releasing a toxic wave of mud which swamped human lives, houses and surrounding rivers. So far at least thirty-four people are known to have died, with nearly three hundred missing. This is not the first mining dam to have collapsed in the region. Three years ago, the city of Mariana and the Sweet River was engulfed by a similarly deadly tide, containing waste from a nearby iron-ore mine. This was the worst ecological crime in Brazilian history.[xiii] Vale, the company responsible for both disasters, has not been held to account for the Mariana disaster, and continues its activities, without regard to environmental laws.

    A day prior to being hospitalised to remove a colostomy bag, the consequence of a stabbing at a presidential campaign rally in September 2018, Bolsonaro flew over the disaster zone with his Environmental Minister, and mining lobbyist, Ricardo Salles. Despite creating a crisis management office and deploying the armed forces in support of rescue missions in the area, the president referred to the disaster as an ‘accident’. He refuses to commit to prosecuting Vale for its crimes against people and natures. This is in stark contrast to the iron fist he vows to wield against organised crime and corruption.

    The president´s environmental discourses and measures are a deadly combination whose impacts will have global repercussions. The Amazon forest plays a key role in maintaining the world’s fragile climate. Its complex ecosystems is vital to sustaining life, including human life, on our planet. Accelerating its destruction is catastrophic for us all.

    Yet the reality of climate change is deemed an ideology and ‘Marxist plot’[xiv] by the incoming Minister for Foreign Affairs, Ernesto Araújo.

    The first thirty days also included withdrawal from the UN Migration Pact, signed in December 2018; a decree simplifying restriction on gun possession; and an award to Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Brazil’s most prestigious medal for foreign dignitaries, among other disastrous measures.

    Now a financial scandal has erupted involving Bolsonaro’s eldest son and recently elected senator, Flavio Bolsonaro. This political dynasty won the trust of the electorates with a high moral tone, guaranteeing to sweep corruption away. This revelation, however, of suspicious payments and cash flows, involving Flavio Bolsonaro, his former bodyguard and driver, and Bolsonaro’s wife, is pointing to money laundering, and staining their reputation. The Supreme Court Justice suspended the investigation at the request of Flavio Bolsonaro, but it may resume in February.

    (c) Fellipe Lopes

    A ray of hope

    We are yet to comprehend fully what the social impacts of the 2018 election will be. Already, it is widening existing fissures within Brazilian society, and distancing people on opposing sides of a political chasm. There is conflict and separation, blaming and shaming. Nevertheless, all of us are permeated by the same toxic atmosphere.

    Whatever we agree or disagree on, Brazilians share a common future. We are tied together, with each other, and with the whole planet. The destruction of our forests and pollution of our waters is the erosion of our social fabric and the pollution of our bodies.

    An exploitative economic and political system which disdains to acknowledge the inter-connectedness between all life is destined to collapse eventually. But this failure has a human cost, and brings untold suffering.

    To avoid our social and ecological death, we must view the world with awakened eyes, re-humanising our vision to see nature and people as one. Then we will revere the intrinsic value of all life.

    We need real leaders to invest our trust in to guide us through these dark times. It is time for politicians to unite us under a common vision of justice, sustainability and inclusion. Let us hold hands and bring to life an understanding of our humaneness.

    The feature image by Vitor Schietti was awarded first place in the national contest Como somar num mundo em conflito in 2016. It was taken in Jericoacoara, in the state of Ceará, in 2013. The other images were kindly provided by Felipe Lopes and Bartholomew Ryan.

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    [i] Dom Phillips, ‘Bolsonaro declares Brazil’s ‘liberation from socialism’ as he is sworn in’, January 1st, 2019, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/01/jair-bolsonaro-inauguration-brazil-president, accessed 28/1/19.

    [ii] Fernanda Trisotta, ‘”dia que Bolsonaro quis matar FHC, sonegar impostos e declarar guerra civil”

    Leia mais em: https://www.gazetadopovo.com.br/politica/republica/o-dia-que-bolsonaro-quis-matar-fhc-sonegar-impostos-e-declarar-guerra-civil-8mtm0u0so6pk88kqnqo0n1l69/

    Copyright © 2019, Gazeta do Povo, accessed 18/1/19.

    [iii] Eliane Brum, ‘How a homophobic, misogynist, racist ‘thing’ could be Brazil’s next president’, October 6th, 2018, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/06/homophobic-mismogynist-racist-brazil-jair-bolsonaro, accessed 18/1/19.

    [iv] Chico Mares, ‘#Verificamos: É verdade que Bolsonaro elogiou cavalaria norte-americana por dizimar índios’, December 6th, 2018, Lupa, https://piaui.folha.uol.com.br/lupa/2018/12/06/verificamos-bolsonaro-cavalaria/ accessed 18/1/19.

    [v] Bolsonaro: “Eu tenho 5 filhos. Foram 4 homens, a quinta eu dei uma fraquejada e veio uma mulher”, April 6th, 2017, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cp1GdBx32CM.

    [vi] Untitled, ‘DEPUTADO JAIR BOLSONARO FALA DA ‘PROMISCUIDADE DE PRETA GIL’ E DECLARA QUE ‘SERIA INCAPAZ DE AMAR UM FILHO HOMOSSEXUAL’ EM ENTREVISTA’, June 7th, 2011, Extra https://extra.globo.com/famosos/deputado-jair-bolsonaro-fala-da-promiscuidade-de-preta-gil-declara-que-seria-incapaz-de-amar-um-filho-homossexual-em-entrevista-1980933.html, accessed 28/1/19.

    [vii] Untitled, ‘Ouça entrevista em que Bolsonaro chama refugiados de “escória” e sugere infarto a Dilma’, September 21st, 2015, Jornal Opção, https://www.jornalopcao.com.br/ultimas-noticias/ouca-entrevista-em-que-bolsonaro-chama-refugiados-de-escoria-e-sugere-infarto-a-dilma-46313/, accessed 28/1/19.

    [viii] Jair Messias Bolsonaro, January 6th, 2019, Official Facebook Page, https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1340804376068545&id=211857482296579, accessed 28/1/19.

    [ix] Elizabeth Gonzalez and Luisa Leme, ‘Tracking the First 100 Days of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’, January 22nd, 2019, American Society / Council of the Americas. https://www.as-coa.org/articles/tracking-first-100-days-brazilian-president-jair-bolsonaro, accessed 28/1/19.

    [x] Lilian Campelo| Edition: Juca Guimarães, ‘Report: Brazil is deadliest country for environmental activists; 57 killed in 2017’, 1st of August, 2018, Friends of the MST, https://www.mstbrazil.org/news/report-brazil-deadliest-country-environmental-activists-57-killed-2017, accessed 28/1/19.

    [xi] Dom Phillilps, ‘Brazil records worst annual deforestation for a decade’, November 24th, 2018, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/nov/24/brazil-records-worst-annual-deforestation-for-a-decade, accessed 28/1/19.

    [xii] Manuela Andreoni and Shasta Darlington,  ‘With Hundreds Missing Following Burst Brazil Dam, a Frantic Search for Survivors’, January 26th, 2019, The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/26/world/americas/brazil-dam-break.html?action=click&module=Latest&pgtype=Homepage, accessed 28/1/19.

    [xiii] Folha de sa Paulo, ‘Year Of Mud, The Heavy Toll Of Brazil’s Worst Ever Ecological Disaster’, March 11th, 2016, World Cruch, https://www.worldcrunch.com/green-or-gone-1/year-of-mud-the-heavy-toll-of-brazils-worst-ever-ecological-disaster, accessed 28/1/19.

    [xiv] Rute Coelho, ‘Minister calls climate change a ‘Marxist plot’, November 16th, 2018, Plataforma,  https://www.plataformamedia.com/en-uk/news/politics/interior/minister-calls-climate-change-a-marxist-plot-10188562.html?target=conteudo_fechado, accessed 28/1/19.

  • Out of Sight, Out of Mind: The Migrant Crisis

    I raise myself into the UNHCR’s prefrabricated 10×20 ft unit; directly in front of me is the 5×4 latrine I was looking for. Occupied. I’ll have to wait, glad, in fact, just to be cool.

    I turn my attention left to the man whose workplace is this metal container, a stocky Afghan, with thick, combed, black hair. I’ve seen him before, here and around the camp. There is a warmth about his demeanour – he has a smile that makes you want to smile – offset however by an expression alluding to something more cerebral about his character. His deep set eyes haven’t escaped my notice, and ever suggest his mind is attending to thoughts which, evidently, prompt less than a continuously cheerful disposition.

    I’m a little bit nervous, I suppose. So I lean against the cool interior, the idea being that a casual comportment will mask any anxiety I feel, now that I’m in this man’s space. Its thirty-five degrees outside – ‘hot’, I gasp, and raise my eyebrows. He nods in jovial agreement.

    Now more comfortable, I look around the room. A shaded white room, with laminate flooring, the equidistance of the wall-to-wall-to-ceiling dimensions induce feelings of claustrophobia, though he seems comfortable. He stands to one side, elbow on the sill of the window, two dainty tables and an equally dainty chair to his other side.

    On one of the tables I spot something about which in the past I’ve been curious; so I now take the opportunity to query the small packages stacked on the collapsible tables to his left. He gives them a glance, and then his eyes revert to me, once more. Fifty food packages, I now understand, for the fifty unaccompanied children, currently residing in Camp Skaramangas – the parentless refugee children ten kilometres north-east of central Athens.

    I look at the packages and I look back at him again, alert and no longer leaning. ‘What’s … the story?’ I nervously query, the idiomatic expression revelatory of more than mere linguistic dissonance. He is himself a refugee and it is experiences such as these that remind us that this does indeed warrant its own respect. He paces a little and tells me of the children whose parents may not have made the journey – they could be dead, back home. Silence.

    ‘It’s very sad,’ he quickly concludes, in that way you would hope someone in charge of dispensing such basic essentials to parentless children, in a refugee camp, would, before moving on. He sits down onto the chair. ‘That’s awful,’ I concur trivially. Contrasted with my own, now no longer casual, attempt to compose myself, his expression, his tone and his body language exhibit a capacity to appreciate the gravity of what has prompted, for me, little else than a compulsion to muster an appropriate response, unsuccessfully, and in lieu of it arising naturally.

    Contemplating such human horror can of course be difficult for the onlooker, such difficulty being only amplified when it relates to utterly innocent children. One is witness to a human experience of which a claim to understanding would amount to no less than impertinence – our empathic powers curtailed given those experiences which cannot be graphed in the thin air of speculation.

    But despite this, perhaps even in spite of it, one also feels constrained to recognise no mere accident – innocent children, recall. A symptom of an injustice, a failing, a signature of what is wrong with the world; and in its symptomatic nature what is at once intangible, becomes oddly tangible.

    A human experience so far removed from my own becomes that which I feel compelled to pronounce should not be. Momentarily unhinged, a witness to the unspeakable, sense making becomes the urgent prerogative of our sociality. Yet the process in which this encounter with horror gives way to the attempt to determine it as an injustice, brings with it the unsettling self-consciousness of the futility of one’s reaction to so unspeakable an experience, even hypocrisy, as injustice is decried from the comfortable position of distance. Some moments later I am finished with the facilities and nodding a goodbye to the UNHCR man, before exiting back out to the midday sun.

    I remember first entering Camp Skaramangas following a brief induction in a petrol station café, outside the camp. A smoking area, on the platform and amongst the petrol pumps created an atmosphere that rules were, here, suspended. In the café we introduced ourselves before discussing the details of what we would be doing as volunteers in the refugee camp, nearby.

    Through a gate guarded by the Greek navy security services we walked onto the port and into the camp, gravel crunching below our feet. Few people could be seen, although it was an area wherein over two thousand people resided, in the many white steel units we could now see before us – a truly cosmopolitan setting with people from countries including Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Iran, Sudan and more. I was of course quickly on good terms with a fellow volunteer from Coventry. We walked into the camp and we were guided through the areas in which we would be working, and shown the facilities we would be occupying. A few early risers could be seen dispersed walking to and fro.

    Young men, the likes I had previously visualised in the images of refugees ‘marching’ along European railway tracks (the connotations of an invasion framed with such percipience) strolled casually by; women and men pushing trolleys of watermelon, appeared busy, as children, similar in appearance to the young Alan Kourdi whose body appeared on our screens in what seems now like a moment in history, either aided their elders or ran around guilelessly in the early morning hours, as children do.

    Nervously, we tentatively followed the coordinator’s lead, meeting a few volunteers on the way – a mix of Spanish, English, Norwegian and Dutch accents filled the air.

    Then could be heard the tones ringing out from the residents, an altogether more foreign sound. Suddenly the nervousness I was feeling, given these new surroundings, began, as we paced through, to transmute into something else. Amid what I superficially took to be more and more foreignness, I felt myself becoming quite self-conscious. And in fact, I now felt foreign.

    An uneasiness began to settle, as I became conscious not only of the colour of my skin but my attire, my sunburn, my lanyard which felt all the more pathetic an officiation of my presence. I was entering a space wherein I found faces, half-familiar, having seen them on television and in the news, looking back at me, and I was aware of this.

    I suddenly felt like an imposition. There was a feeling I could not shake. Although I was there to help, my being, my presence, felt as though it was imbued additionally with something less benign; taking time away from the everyday goings on of European living to offer my aid to an ‘otherworldly’ situation. Basically I began to feel anxious that people might be looking at me with some bitterness, as a Westerner.

    Of course, I quickly met residents who expressed such a welcome that thoughts of their being bitter, or resentful, were not only quashed but gave way to an understanding of their having a diametrically opposite disposition; additionally for anyone who may have viewed my presence with bitterness, albeit in silence, I am inclined to suspend judgement given an understanding of the as good as warrant such bitterness has at its disposal, in view of the both historical and current catastrophes for which the West is deeply responsible, and in accordance with which the lives of many have been coerced.

    In any case the feeling was there. Introduced to the impoverished conditions of those on the Athenian port (all of whom have a story of struggle, if not travesty, and such uncertain futures, that their capacity to endure, nevertheless, is nothing short of remarkable), I was conscious of how I represented a life which they did not enjoy.

    That subtle feeling of anxiety, embarrassment, shame, which in the coming days I would be able to suppress (given the very flattering gratitude of the residents, not to mention the self-congratulation to be enjoyed in the company of my fellow volunteers), seemed to allude to some tacit recognition that my presence truly was less than benign. And, there was a feeling that despite appearances, despite the fact that in volunteering I may have appeared to care, I represented a way of life the hypocrisy of which was more typically manifest in the choices I made to more often than not, not so much as give them a second thought. It quickly felt a bit superficial.

    The fifty children, parentless, and who spend much of their day roaming around what is little more than a barren car park on what was once an Athenian shipping port and whose vulnerability can be all the more sickeningly contemplated should one consider the likelihood of the near presence of human trafficker’s, may indeed prompt one to conjecture that the world is bereft of justice.

    But in the absence of provisions, recognition of such injustice seems as pertinent as an acquaintance with the same may be brief. Of course there is the work of the Afghan of the UNHCR, for example, with the unaccompanied children, providing for their desperately needed conditions of growth, the food packages of course being the most basic instance of initiative, in this regard. But my volunteering hardly compares, and truth of the matter is that following the feel good experience I of course did just look away.

    I spent the morning and early afternoon of my last day volunteering in Camp Skaramangas with the children before having lunch with a number of the volunteers and residents. Volunteers come and go so you do not say goodbye to the children.

    So many goodbyes would be cruel, never-mind the psychological impact. So I just said goodbye to friends in the early afternoon, and then left the camp and its over two thousand residents. A number of hours later I was standing on a runway having just landed in Sofia airport, slightly dazed amid unfamiliar voices, and struck by the attire, but particularly the moustaches, of a number of my fellow eastern European passengers.

    It was roughly 9 pm and I was at this point keen to get to my hostel sooner rather later. From the runway we were guided into the airport, through the glass doors and into a large square room which led to a number of steps at the top of which was Bulgarian Passport control. We shuffled into the room, fatigued couples not speaking, children re-energised now they were finally off the plane.

    Airports and the security therewith have a way of making us all feel suspect. But being a young Irish man, and landing in Sofia, from Athens, any nerves were on this occasion eclipsed by a rather indulgent self-confidence, my being a man on the road. I stood upright, passport in hand and shifted determinately amongst my fellow travellers toward the security personnel above.

    But five minutes, then ten minutes, then twenty minutes went by, and as the man fashioning the perm came to lose what was at first his amusing quality, and as retaining posture became tiresome, the experience as a whole quickly enough became all the more frustrating. It appeared as though very little progress was being made and I came to question the old fashioned border checking that I had not been accustomed to in Western Europe.

    Had it not been for the language barrier I might have made more of an effort to engage in the mutterings of those in my company. Increasingly frustrated, I started to observe the minutes go by on my watch, arm rigid. Perspiring ever so slightly now with the frustration, and with my passport in hand, waiting freely to access Bulgaria, what an utterly ludicrous image I was.

    Craving my counterfeit cigarettes, purchased only that morning from an entrepreneurial resident of Camp Skaramangas there I was, shamelessly agitated at what was a forty minute wait for my rightful access to a country, a right so shamefully taken for granted.

    People wait years to get through European borders, and not for a holiday; good people who I had only that day had lunch with, and who had only a few hours previously expressed gratitude for my efforts in the camp, efforts the sincerity of which I could not now help but think was void.

    Given the mere hours that passed, the dictum ‘Out of sight out of mind’ came to mind, as my supposed concern for the horror of such vulnerability encountered only that morning rather belatedly reminded me of what is worthy of our frustration. Failing to uphold, satisfactorily or efficiently, my right to free travel through borders, I found myself naturally irritated – as a European citizen, I expected better. Not so for those without that birth-right. They can continue to wait.

    When I tell people this story they offer consolations: at least I volunteered – apparently enough to neutralise the fact that even should such an effort imply that I view the residents of Camp Skaramangas as equals, my behaviour suggests otherwise.

    Of course, I can hardly be expected to live frustration-free, given the comparative triviality of whatever situations may arise. Nevertheless, the alarming rate at which one can forget, immersed, once more, in those comparatively trivial struggles, intimates what little hope there might be for those who most need the attention of others.

    For the issue is all the more unsettling given the effectiveness of nullifying any concern we might have for those who must wait, through their being removed from our field of vision, as people close by.

    In a political atmosphere in which it is often suggested that it is migrants who pose a threat to ‘our’ way of life – Hillary Clinton being amongst the most hypocritical of recent voices for this sentiment – efforts to cast our eyes away from those on the shores of Europe and to the concerns of those individuals, who through the fortune of birth are entitled to expect better in life, portends the upholding of human inequality as an increasingly more likely and well-sustained global state of affairs. For of course, should we not look, we need not be concerned: out of sight, out of mind.

    Did you know that Cassandra Voices has just published a print annual containing our best articles, stories, poems and photography from 2018? It’s a big book! To find out where you can purchase it, or order it, email admin@cassandravoices.com

  • Into the Arms of America

    I am sitting on a Frontier flight, a low-cost U.S. airline – basically the American Ryanair – my girlfriend beside me and Tiziano Terzani’s book, Lettere contro la guerra (Letters against the war, 2002) in my hands. We are flying to Seattle. I capture her attention by nudging her with my elbow to read and translate a passage in which Terzani describes, very accurately, what we nowadays refer to as ISIS. The letter I am reading is dated September 14th 2001, just three days after the Twin Towers attack on 9/11.

    I suddenly realise how one just needs to travel in order to know different cultures and realities; to understand the inefficiency of anti-immigration policies now regulating the movements of mankind. Something is just not working. Terzani understood this after a life spent in Asia, where he was a war correspondent for several European press agencies. He interacted and talked with politicians, philosophers, soldiers and even Afghan jihadists, trying to understand perspectives unknown, misunderstood or veiled in mystery.

    People put in charge of handling and regulating immigration often treat travellers with unprovoked skepticism. Is it that they have never left their native countries and experienced life abroad?

    The week before our flight to Seattle, I was detained for three long hours in Denver International Airport. They brought me to one of those small rooms that make you feel guilty even if you have done absolutely nothing wrong.

    I was subjected to an intimidating interrogation by American Immigration, and after document and visa checks, fingerprints and a retinal scan, I was told that I could not pass through because I had not booked a return ticket to Europe.

    I had not booked a return flight because I did not yet know the duration of my stay, but I assured them I was aware of the three month limit. The guards informed me that my ESTA visa requires a return flight.

    Though I have never travelled inter-continentally before, I was made aware of these types of issues. Many friends had told me of their experiences, so I carefully checked online and asked around to be sure I had everything needed for travel into the U.S..

    How could I have forgotten to check these important details? Tired and stunned by the long flight, I gently asked the officer where it was indicated that I must have a return flight. She only reiterated that it was ‘mandatory’, though I could not find it written anywhere.

    Was I being bullied? Was an Italian musician not their ideal tourist? Perhaps it was my lack of cash in hand that appeared suspicious. Whatever the reason, if a return flight is mandatory to enter the country, should it be tucked away in obscure small print?

    I next attempted to text my girlfriend so she should know I had been detained by immigration, and was running late. The guard accused me of lying and promptly confiscated my phone, arguing that I was not allowed to text while in their custody.

    They demanded I purchase a return ticket, as my backpack was meticulously inspected. The agent, half-smilingly, asked me why I had a backpack full of music gear. I explained I was a musician carrying a portable studio in order to record an album. He suggested I might attempt to work as a D.J..

    They proceeded to ask me a plethora of questions about my girlfriend, and any additional contacts I had in the U.S.. Eventually, they found me a return flight to Europe for $3,000. They insisted that I purchase it immediately in order to be given leave to enter the country. But I refused to buy a flight at that price, so they found me a $300 flight to London, which I agreed to purchase.

    Once I received my return flight confirmation, they completely changed their tune, wishing me an amazing holiday in the USA!

    Denver’s airport is located in a clearing east of the city. From the big windows, through the summer mist, you can lose yourself for miles in the outline of the Rocky Mountains. Ironically, the sound of Native American flute and drum music hums through the corridor. I find that strange, for obvious reasons of cultural and actual genocide. My contemplation of the vastness and beauty of the country I had just landed in was being spoiled by the long wait in a small cold, sad interrogation room.

    After such a welcome, I expected to find a heavily-guarded country; some sort of gigantic Switzerland, but the reality is far more chaotic.

    Areas of Denver around Capitol Hill and Broadway are full of homeless people, completely abandoned to their own destiny. There are so many of them. This is a city within a city, where people protect themselves from the burning June sun in the shade of trees. I understand even more the enormity of this country.

    Dublin, where I live, is now sadly notorious for having a homeless emergency, and this problem is evident all over Europe. But beside what I met in the U.S., it is nothing.

    Walking around town, I met various strange souls and colourful characters, which just seems to be the norm. It is as though the ‘American Dream’ shoots out in all directions, with no clear destination. There is obviously the ‘freedom’ of becoming a high level manager, or a careless financial broker with limitless riches, but then there is also the ‘freedom’ of living with empty pockets.

    The homeless pitch their tents pretty much everywhere in the big cities. In Seattle, for example, all along the coast, tents surround every column supporting the Alaskan Way Viaduct above.

    We can donate to homeless charities, and those organisations still exist, so we can help them on an individual level. But the problem is more visible than ever, and it does not seem like there is a way of escaping this social pattern.

    The Western Empire, that is the United States, has exerted enormous influence over the world over the last seventy years. Ultimately, however, its interests do not align with humanity, including American citizens.

    Supporting the idea that there is a general disregard for people, is the great American drama of discriminatory healthcare. If you can afford to pay thousands of dollars for insurance, you can have the very best, overpriced, innovative treatment in the world. If you cannot, you risk bankruptcy by paying prohibitive fees, or suffer in silence.

    Low income individuals can still apply for Medicaid, which is government-funded healthcare. They are, however, lucky to find anyone who will go ahead with it due to the excruciatingly time-consuming billing process.

    There is an unacceptable lack of government-funded healthcare in a state which, only this year, under Donald Trump’s administration, invested $700 billion on ‘defence’ programs. Are new and more powerful weapons to be the highest aspiration of the richest country in the world?

    To justify this level of government spending, you will always need an enemy. But throughout its history, the most powerful army in the world has always prevailed. Is immigration to be the new enemy? This would make sense when taking into account the devastating possibilities of modern warfare.

    As Vladimir Putin suggested in an interview with Oliver Stone, war at this level will have no winners, conflict between nuclear powers can only end with the destruction of the planet.

    Millions of people are now on the move around the world: seeking employment or just a more fulfilling life; or trying to escape the horrors of war, racial and political intimidation, or like me, simply visiting a partner.

    How can the rest of the world look towards the West with hope if these are the social dynamics? How can we pretend that this so-called democratic society of America is  the leading example of humanity, and not an arrogant menace?

  • Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš Appears Oblivious to Our History

    Andrej Babiš is a chameleon. At one point you see him on a poster beaming out a jovial smile, or handing sweet pastries at an election rally; then you watch him giving interviews to international media full of resentful claims, while ‘representing‘ the views of our country.

    So who is he and how did he get elected? Ironically, he is not originally Czech, but from Slovakia. First and foremost he is a businessman who claims to bring order to our political situation.

    An average Czech person would say a lack of political experience does not matter because he is a rich already, and hence would not be dependent on the post to generate wealth for himself. Many also believe his business experience is going to prove useful.

    But let us focus on his most recent activities, which caught the attention of Le Monde and The Guardian. Anyone can see that he is playing to the narrative of fear and hatred which chronically follows the refugee migrations. Unfortunately, a considerable number of Czechs share his views, at least according to polls. Most have forgotten how, even in recent history, Czechs have sought refuge from political persecution and economic stagnation.

    To be honest, it is surprising that people from a country with a long history of seeing people flee political oppression can show such close-minded thinking. Mr Babiš claims, which I sincerely hope do not represent the real views of people, certainly do not help improve their understanding.

    Not only are his claims manipulative, they also tend to be misleading. ‘Britain has always been an ally of the Czech Republic‘, he recently asserted; yeah well, our small country’s requests for help to our ‘ally‘ fell on deaf ears twice last century. First before World War II when the British and French conceded the Sudetenland under the Munich Agreement with the Nazis, and then again after the War when the Soviets were permitted to take over.

    Funnily enough, Czech people do not actually have much to ‘fear‘. The Czech Republic is not a place where many migrants want to settle. It is merely a transition state and to this date, only tens of people actually have actually sought asylum.

    From time to time, Mr Babiš does raise important issue, such as when he draws attention to the blood money that smugglers are making. But most of what he is saying is nonsensical, such as persuading potential migrants to stay in their countries of origin. The fact these people have decided to leave with little hope of returning demonstrates the severity of their predicament.

    That is a predicament Czechs went through multiple times throughout our history, when many were forced to leave their homes and families behind, bribe a smuggler and hope that the bullets miss their bodies when they climbed over the barbed wire fence, and run for their life – all in the hope of a better life.

    How can Mr Babiš turn a blind eye to our history and speak on the behalf of Czechs? And even if there was no historical context to rely on, do his arguments about dividing ‘our culture‘ and ‘their culture” stand up to scrutiny? I don’t think so.

    I have to give him this though, he might be on to something when he says that the media fails to report on the important issues. The ‘if it bleeds it leads’ approach in reporting certainly does not invite an average person to dig deeply, and see what lies under the surface.

    That is how you find yourself around a family table, listening to strong opinions (mostly based on news headlines) with people actually not knowing and/or not wanting to know any more. But before you let his complaints about the state of media impress you, I dare you to guess the name of the Slovakian businessman who owns the widest-circulating Czech newspapers?

    I would love to think that the close-minded and history-oblivious views Mr. Babiš throws in do not represent the majority of people’s views, but I actually don’t know. I may myself be in a sound chamber, and do not tend to surround myself with close-minded people. So I tend to think that the situation over here is not so bad.

    Then again, our feeble chauvinistic president Miloš Zeman was re-elected last year, supported by Mr. Babiš, who speaks to the international media and goes to Brussels with the kind of views I have set out. It is incredibly unfair of him to represent our country (blissfully unaware of the paradox that he is not even Czech) and offer these ideas, completely ignoring the history of Czechs and of Europe itself.

  • Post-Truth: People of the Lie

    Morality is the basis of things and truth is the basis of all morality.
    Mahatma Gandhi

    Donald Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani was recently asked whether his boss had a case to answer arising from the conviction of his former associate Paul Manafort. He responded with the not-altogether-original, but nonetheless all-too-convincing argument that ‘truth is not truth.’ It seems we have entered a virtual reality nightmare.

    Of course times passed have been consumed with other disturbing ideologies such as, Social Darwinism, racism, Fascism and Communism. More recently we have seen neo-liberalism reign supreme, giving rise to Francis Fukayama’s foolhardy vision of an End to History.

    Just as Marxists shibboleths about the inevitability and finality of Revolution ignored reality, the neo-liberal world order is disintegrating before our eyes, a point which Fukayama now concedes; recently he meekly acknowledged there had been a decline in faith in democratic institutions, and that democracy was now moving backwards.

    So perhaps Post-Truth will be a passing affliction. Alas I doubt it.

    Post-Truth, or truth decay, has been coming for a while and its origins need to be traced as it dictates the activities of the Trump administration.

    I – Post Modern Nonsense

    First came the purveyors of nonsense, and incomprehensible prose, the Structuralists and Post Modernist poseurs of the Sorbonne.

    They united in rejection of universal values, while espousing a gospel of relativism, thereby ditching the inheritance of the Enlightenment. This led to the dismissal of evidence, rationality, science, rigour, precision, and all the integrative forces that holds society together.

    Noam Chomsky in this context wrote a passage worth quoting in full:

    It’s entirely possible that I’m simply missing something, or that I just lack the intellectual capacity to understand the profundities that have been unearthed in the past 20 years or so by Paris intellectuals and their followers. I’m perfectly open-minded about it, and have been for years, when similar charges have been made — but without any answer to my questions. Again, they are simple and should be easy to answer, if there is an answer: if I’m missing something, then show me what it is, in terms I can understand. Of course, if it’s all beyond my comprehension, which is possible, then I’m just a lost cause, and will be compelled to keep to things I do seem to be able to understand, and keep to association with the kinds of people who also seem to be interested in them and seem to understand them (which I’m perfectly happy to do, having no interest, now or ever, in the sectors of the intellectual culture that engage in these things, but apparently little else).

    Since no one has succeeded in showing me what I’m missing, we’re left with the second option: I’m just incapable of understanding. I’m certainly willing to grant that it may be true, though I’m afraid I’ll have to remain suspicious, for what seem good reasons. There are lots of things I don’t understand — say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way that Fermat’s last theorem was (apparently) proven recently. But from 50 years in this game, I have learned two things: (1) I can ask friends who work in these areas to explain it to me at a level that I can understand, and they can do so, without particular difficulty; (2) if I’m interested, I can proceed to learn more so that I will come to understand it. Now Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, etc. — even Foucault, whom I knew and liked, and who was somewhat different from the rest — write things that I also don’t understand, but (1) and (2) don’t hold: no one who says they do understand can explain it to me and I haven’t a clue as to how to proceed to overcome my failures. That leaves one of two possibilities: (a) some new advance in intellectual life has been made, perhaps some sudden genetic mutation, which has created a form of “theory” that is beyond quantum theory, topology, etc., in depth and profundity; or (b) … I won’t spell it out.”

    It is, in other words, nonsense on stilts, that degrades our culture. But it has gained traction, and power, and should not be underestimated.

    Relativism, which should never have gone beyond those flaneurs, has been hijacked by the Populist Right, including Climate Change Deniers, Anti-Vaxxers  and Creationists, who insist on balanced coverage for their ludicrous views, each one as ‘valid’ as the other, in Post Modernist hell. This reaches an apogee in the churning garbage emanating from spokespeople for the Trump administration, especially the deranged President himself.

    The gospel of relativism brings contempt for truth, reason and evidence. It entails the rejection of scientific methods, order and the Rule of Law.

    The first point to note about Post Modernism is that it encourages distrust in established truth, and generates an atmosphere of looseness and imprecision, where arguments are accorded even and equal weight, even if lacking any substance. The misplaced logic is that since all views are equal, all views should be aired and taken equally seriously.

    The late David Foster Wallace described this as ‘an epistemic free for all in which the truth is wholly a matter of perspective and agenda.’

    ‘Balanced coverage’ and ‘tolerance’ of opposing points of view in the media often leads to the elevation of nonsense, or lies.

    Balance should not permit the assertion that Climate Change is a fraud. Undue weight is being accorded to marginal opinions and minority views, which simply should not be given a platform. Abandoned is the quest for an elusive truth. The media is giving a microphone to divisive extremism.

    This nonsense is creeping into our culture, our media, our law courts and is a form of brainwashing.

    Relativistic and structuralist ideas, such as the indeterminacy of texts, alternative ways of knowing and the instability of language opens the way for Trump and his acolytes to say that every word he utters should not be taken literally. Just as a text by Derrida contradicts itself, Trump similarly can make contradictory statements, from one tweet to the next.

    II – Holding to Truth

    As a lawyer I have been trained to consider distinctions between fact and opinion. I understand how an apparently established fact can actually be the product of manipulation, distortion or outright fabrication.

    In my work for The Innocence Project in Ireland I found many instances of perjured evidence, false and fabricated claims and cognitive and confirmation bias by experts, or really pseudo-experts, leading to false conclusions and erroneous convictions. Innocent people are often incarcerated on the basis of lies and this false expertise.

    In this Post Modern zeitgeist we privilege opinion over knowledge, and feelings over facts. This includes confirmation bias where people rush to judgment and follow their prejudices, rather than properly evaluating sources.

    Indeed, with regard to so-called expert witnesses I am reminded of Wittgenstein’s famous comment, itself capable of multiple levels of interpretation: ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent (Wittgenstein, 1922)

    As difficult as it is to establish the truth, and as complex as it may prove to be, we must continue to strive for it, and not succumb to relativism, or take refuge in Post-Truth nonsense.

    This pursuit is indispensable for penal and judicial decision-making, as well as the pursuit of social and economic justice. Acknowledging there truth helps inform political and personal choices arising from our interactions with banks or politicians, or indeed with respect to one’s health.

    The truth protects us against those who mislead, dupe or destroy us. Better to acknowledge ‘home truths’, and act accordingly, rather than be seduced by banalities. But it is often difficult to determine what is genuine when you are being bombarded with disinformation.

    As Pope Francis sagely remarked: ‘there is no such thing as harmless disinformation: trusting in falsehood can have dire consequences.’

    So in a sane, rational universe that is how everything should and ought to be decided. Except that is not what confronts us today.

    III – Info-tainment

    Following the degradation of so many discourses, our media is too often consumed by ideological representations of alternative truths – and at worst utter nonsense – in a misplaced quest for balance, or pandering to vested interests.

    News programmes generally adopt a Punch and Judy format, rather than providing serious analysis. We are addicted to what Susan Jacoby termed ‘info-tainment’ (Jacoby, 2009).

    In this respect it was noticeable that the intellectual level of the Clinton-Trump Presidential debates had reached a nadir. For anyone who has listened to the Nixon-Kennedy debates of the early 1960s, or indeed many subsequent electoral ones in the US and Britain, it was simply not a debate.

    It was more like an episode of the Jerry Springer show. But the vaudeville act, the circus clown that is Trump, is actually now President of the United States, having manipulated a series of communications both in the debate, and the media, which were exercises in falsity, total inconsistency, randomness and communication in proto-fascist mode: lashing out at the outsider.

    People were brainwashed into believing that he would help them. The disenfranchised working and middle class reached out to him, and he responded by appointing three members of Goldman Sachs to his cabinet; a classic instance of what Zizek terms ‘ideological mis-indentification’ (Zizek, 1989) with the marginalised voting for self-destruction.

    Print media has also dumbed down. The reasons are obvious. Vested interests have to be appeased. In addition megalomaniac owners cannot be criticised. Things are known, or suspected, but left unsaid. Independent courageous reportage, beyond The Guardian or The New York Times is increasingly rare.

    The so-called text generation, drowning in email communication and other digital ephemera, exacerbate the problem.

    Admittedly, my own emails appear like hieroglyphics – ungrammatical and unpunctuated – so I am scarcely one to talk. But in my defence, I simply cannot take the medium seriously, whereas the rest of the world seems to have lost any interest in oral conversation, or expressing themselves in permanent written form.

    The Internet is a truly poisoned chalice: the major problem is that people feel free to utter whatever they like, however bizarre, extreme or libelous. This accentuates the disentangling of truth from fiction, and facts from lies.

    The Silicon Valley entrepreneur Andrew Keen has argued that the Internet has replaced genuine knowledge, but that is undifferentiated knowledge derived from the crowd, or mob, which blurs any distinction between fact and opinion.

    Established ideas are under threat and rationality jettisoned, replaced by subjectivism, the pseudo-expert, and elevation of the opinion of the equivalent of ‘the man on the Clapham Omnibus’. As Tom Nichols wrote: ‘every opinion on any matter is as good as every other (Nichols, 2017)’; I am also reminded of William Burroughs’s famous statement that: ‘Opinions are like assholes everyone has one.’

    Another problem is information overload. We are creatures of bounded rationality that can only absorb so much. We have to filter. The Internet presents us with a cacophony of competing voices, all clamouring for attention. This desensitises, and makes it impossible to disentangle valid arguments from nonsense. In effect we are being deceived by a web of deceit, semi-fact, mumbo jumbo and plain nonsense.

    III – Bad Education

    Perhaps most disturbingly, our education system is producing ill-informed, philosophically illiterate, and indeed often genuinely illiterate children. We are operating in a post-Gutenberg Galaxy, where even lecturers and teachers generally no longer read books outside their specialisms, and are insulated from intellectual cross currents. Goethe’s ideal of a civilised education, which inoculates against fascism, no longer abides

    A partial education breeds the self-righteousness of fascism. Why appeal to true argument when your thought processes stands unexamined and your prejudices go uncontradicted? In these circumstances, the gutter press finds a ready market.

    Information is not gleaned from the close reading of texts, but from online synopses. Superficial knowledge and semi-literacy accentuate the perversion that everyone has a right to express their opinion, no matter how ludicrous.

    Let us be clear, academic degrees and education are distinct from one another. We hand out qualifications like confetti, but true education is lacking. Yet, apart from foreign direct investment, the education sector appears to be the biggest growth industry in Ireland. But what kind of person is it producing?

    We find an emphasis on narrow technocratic skills and rote learning, where teachers slavishly adhere to syllabi. Books go unread, but instead are summarised on Internet sites. The standardization of learning outcomes breeds bullshit, piled on bullshit.

    As an established lecturer I have encountered increasing nonsense about balance and standardization. In the ivory tower the careful weighing up of argument has given way to an obsession with footnotes, and citation, and a narrowing in doctoral work; most baleful, is the decline of the academic as public intellectual.

    In this respect we should note the important contribution of perhaps the only acceptable Post Modernist, Michel Foucault. He argued that the more severe punishments of earlier times have been internalized, through insidious methods of control in schools, hospitals and factories.

    In a 1978 interview he remarked:

    In my book on the birth of the prison I tried to show how the idea of a technology of individuals, a certain type of power, was exercised over individuals in order to tame them, shape them and guide their conduct as a kind of strict correlative to the birth of a liberal type of regime. Beyond the prison itself, a carceral style of reasoning, focused on punishable deviations from the norm, thus came to inform a wide variety of modern institutions. In schools, factories, and army barracks, authorities carefully regulated the use of time (punishing tardiness, slowness, the interruption of tasks) activity (punishing inattention, negligence a lack of zeal); speech (punishing idle chatter, insolence, profanity); the body (punishing poor posture, dirtiness, lack in stipulated reflexes) and finally sexuality (punishing impurity, indecency, abnormal behaviour) (Foucault,1980).

    This leads to a social hygiene, wherein people are assessed not on what they have to say, or the quality of any service they may provide, but more on their attire; or whether they wear a uniform that conveys a false sense of expertise and arrogant authority; cleanliness next to a self-serving godliness. Give me someone with an occasional slovenly appearance and I see a degree of human fragility.

    Intolerance and contempt for human frailty, except of course by the power elite who act as they please, marginalises real authorities from making contributions to society.

    In our glorious colleges and universities and schools worse is happening. First and foremost there is a suppression of speech and discourse, with discussion confined within narrowing parameters, and divisive subjects omitted.

    We are in an age of conformity where obedience to authority has become a sine qua non of success. The great old days of uninhibited debate are disappearing from campuses.

    One aspect of this is the so-called ‘snowflake’ phenomenon, leading to anything remotely controversial being deemed offensive. This is used as a method of thought control, and heralds the gradual erosion of criticism of vested interests.

    Moreover, within the college structure promotion and preferment are linked to an increasingly controlled discourse, where ideas that cut across the norm are penalized. Those countervailing ideas often do not sit comfortably with elites, and are usually tinged with leftism or anti-authoritarianism, or involve discomforting truth-telling. Alas, the paradigm of discourse is neo-liberalism, and increasingly a knee-jerk conservatism, which is morphing into outright fascism.

    IV – No Platforming

    The academic community is also responsible for other outrages attacking freedom of speech. One truly sinister development is a phenomenon known as ‘no platforming’, whereby anyone presenting dissident views is barred from campus appearances.

    There are acceptable reasons for exclusion of errant views. For example the trash talk of the fascist historian David Irving, who condones the Holocaust, or at least intimates it never happened, is an obvious case in point. But he is a denier of truth, and his lies should be restrained.

    Recently the ‘no platform’ lobby barred the eminent feminist and author Germaine Greer from speaking in UK campuses, as she had argued many years ago that a man who becomes a woman can never fully understand what it is like to be a woman.

    The ‘no platform’ lobby which secured her ban was made up of transsexual academics. Take note, these are not necessarily trans-sexuals, but a lobby group. They are also proto-fascists and part of a new semi-literate cabal of arcane specialists.

    It is academic Stalinism, or Fascism if you prefer. Such groups use the immense power of blackmail, intimidation by social media and character assassination, to put fear into often squeamish academic authorities.

    V – Anti-Social Media

    Social media is unraveling our social fabric through lies, disinformation, smears and character assassination. As Pierre Omidyar, the founder of Ebay put it: ‘The monetization and manipulation of information is swiftly tearing us apart.’

    The use of trolls and bots to spread disinformation by Trump, Bannon and Cambridge Analytica undermined democratic institutions, as well as fact-based debates.

    Cambridge Analytica specialised in forms of artificial intelligence that look set to nurture a new species, a new form of human identity, who become bland consuming nodal points, and receptors of a barrage of disinformation and nonsense.

    This paradigm shift in our culture, will curtail necessary criticism and free thinking and is already afflicting the media. Before appearing on radio shows I myself have been told what I can and cannot say for fear of upsetting a vested interest. Instead, increasingly lobby groups of the most extreme nature are invited on shows and their views accorded credibility, when they have nothing of substance to say.

    We are creating a new generation of technocratic fascists: selfish, materialistic, ultra-conformist people receptive to Post-Truth. A new Dark Age looms with the Far Right gaining increasing authority, as the edifice of neo-liberalism crumbles, and social support structures are dismantled.

    Post-Truth has I fear already taken hold. The truth does not matter; what is important is convincing someone of the truth, often through advertising. Stories are planted and lines between fact and fiction disappear.

    People are buying the bullshit. The sensationalism and gossip of the gutter press is now being taken seriously. We are holding court to pseudo-expertise. Lies have become intrinsic to commercial and business interaction; The People of the Lie as in the title of the seminal book by M. Scott Peck in which he conflates evil with untruth. He contends that this undermines life and liveliness, transforming people into automatons.

    Such people are not up front but operate by covert means. Evil people, Peck argues, scapegoat others: since they consider themselves repositories of perfection, they must demonise ‘the other’.

    This leads, ineluctably, to hostility towards the foreigner and migrant, the recrudescence of tribalism, and a denial and rejection of reason; a veneration of the past and the equation of disagreement with treason; a ‘them and us’ universe.

    Evil people prevent us from exercising reasonable choices, where we grow in integrity, courage and self-esteem. Evil is also linked to a self-image of respectability and, as Peck defines it, the exercise of coercive power, often by those in authority, who undermine growth and development.

    Evil is surprisingly obedient to authority. The truly good in times of acute stress do not desert their integrity, maturity, sensitivity. They act on principle, not regressing in response to degradation, preserving empathy for the pain of others.

    *******

    Hannah Arendt would recognise our current descent:

    The ideal subject for totalitarian rule is not the convinced nazi or the convinced communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (standards of thought) no longer exists.

    The ‘People of the Lie’, the powerful and corrupt, project their deviance and criminality onto others. Morality does not apply to them, and those they disagree with are deemed enemies of the people. All that matters now is to win, and to mask untrue intentions in order to survive.

    The really important values of truth, integrity, sincerity, depth, originality, creativity are being abandoned. Alas, the lunatics have by now taken over the asylum.

    Truth is not truth. The imitation game has won. How can we retain our individuality when fact is replaced by semi-fact or worse? When we are assailed by streams of advertising; nonsensically balanced coverage; relativism and Post Modernism; bogus standards in high places; putative expertise and ass-hole opinions?

    Instead jaded rituals, religious and secular, particularly in countries like Ireland, desensitise us to reality.

    References

    Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Schocken Books, Berlin, 1951.
    Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977 (edited by Colin Gardner), Pantheon, New York, 1980.
    Susan Jacoby, The Age Of American Unreason, Pantheon, New York, 2009.
    Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertise, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2017.
    M. Scott Peck The People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1983.
    Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Keegan Paul, London, 1922.
    Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, Verso, London, 1989.

  • There is Something Rotten in the State of Democracy

    On a recent visit to Athens I chanced upon the supposed tomb of Socrates near the Acropolis. Socrates chose to remain in the city after being found guilty on trumped up charges of corrupting youth. For this he was handed the ultimate sanction of a death sentence, to be self-inflicted with hemlock. By receiving his punishment he was making a statement to posterity to the effect that the Rule of Law was of greater importance than the individual injustice being inflicted on him. The operation of the law would just have to improve, the alternative being anarchic barbarity.

    Nearby, somewhat hidden and a tad derelict is perhaps the most historically-significant structure in Athens, the birthplace and site of Athenian democracy, and thus the birthplace of democracy itself, where the impassioned speeches of the great orator Pericles (died c. 450 BCE) set the small polity on the destructive course of the Peloponnesian War.

    More recently, Randy Newman’s song about America,‘In Defense of Our Country’ from Harps and Angels (2008) expresses a cautious, pre-Trumpian optimism that the political leaders of a decade ago were ‘hardly the worst / This poor world has seen.’ But presciently he references Caligula, the emperor which President Donald Trump best resembles at the fag end of American empire. But Trump actually democratically won the Presidential election, at least the electoral college, just as Hitler achieved power through elections, before dismantling the Rule of Law.

    I have expressed reservations in the past about democracy, and I despise demagoguery. But let me construct a few words in its defence.

    I – ‘Benevolent Authoritarianism’

    A comment often attributed to Churchill is that democracy is the least worst form of government, which I consider trite, and perhaps untrue. The enlightened despot may prove more effective, as the great Franklin Delano Roosevelt showed.

    Similarly, David Runciman in How Democracy Ends (Profile Books, 2018) endorses the concept of benevolent authoritarianism. Such is the luck of the draw, however, that a benevolent oligarchy almost invariably leads to despotism of the Right or Left, and utter disaster.

    Let us nonetheless lay out the positives of what Pericles effectively pioneered. First, in the immaculate expression of honest Abraham Lincoln ‘the rail splitter’ in his Gettysburg Address of 1863 it is governance by the people. On the scene of the Civil War battlefield that would eventually end slavery he resolved:

    these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

    So it is that “we the people” are sovereign, as opposed to governance by faceless corporations, multi-national banks and nefarious corporate law firms, purchasing our political class.

    We also find governance by the people for the people in the U.S. Declaration of Independence (1776), the first modern constitutional statement of democracy.

    At least in theory. The problem is our public representatives are beholden to the crypto-fascist advocates of neo-liberalism. The Irish state, for example, is effectively run by Goldman Sachs, corporate law firms, Vulture Funds and banks for their own enrichment. The people are irrelevant, and many among the judiciary, mired in debt, seem to be in on the act.

    The people are drip-fed justifications by the establishment media for austerity, on behalf of these global parasites, and conditioned to accept inflated house prices, robber baron banks, besides substandard and ludicrously expensive rental accommodation. The abolition of pensions, and death on a hospital corridor are the new reality.

    Our Brave New World of the Internet is incubating a dangerously compliant and accepting population, reflected in Trump’s ability to win over the American people, who he persuaded to consent to their own demise. This, what Timothy Snyder called ‘anticipatory obedience’ (Snyder, 2017)  involves going with the flow of home seizures and deportation of untermenschen migrants, until at last they come for you, at which point there is no one left to protect you. As Pastor Neimoller put it under the Nazis:

    First they came for the socialist and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist then they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak for me.

    So stand up and be counted. Hopefully it won’t require you to walk out in front of a tank, but be prepared.

    II – A Final Solution

    At the Wannasee Conference of 1942 the Nazis under Reynard Heydrich decided on the Final Solution, or genocide, of the Jewish people. The transcript is available, and captured on celluloid in Kenneth Branagh’s film Conspiracy (2001).

    A modern incarnation of this is the secretive and monastic meetings of the Bilderberg Group – once chaired by our own late unlamented Peter Sutherland – where the spoils of an utterly unsustainable and unequal economic system are divided.

    The modern Wanasee meetings are no doubt attended by a phalanx of pseudo-experts, or even genuine experts, working out what to do with the troublesome poor of the Earth.

    I suspect their plan is to to undermine democracy on behalf of the world’s corporate elite. People are commodified by banks and financial institutions: there are far too many of them, and their number needs to be reduced. Liquidation can occur by degrees: beginning with withdrawal of social support and evictions, which leads to suicide, addiction, health collapse and early death. In the Third World it will be far worse for those in coastal regions when the storms hit. Meanwhile, the good ol’ boys of Steve Bannon et al will continue to reap the harvest.

    People are often ill-informed and vote stupidly. Trump was elected on a ballyhoo of promising the disenfranchised working and middle class social protection, and job creation, after stoking fears about a foreign Other. What happened both with the election and since is the most nefarious soap job since the Nuremberg rallies.

    Trump appointed to his cabinet three Goldman Sachs officials, who were responsible for much of the mess that people find themselves in the first place. He has also appointed mad dog generals, and cosies up to vile dictators. The spectre is truly frightening.

    Trump immediately set about dismantling Obamacare and tore up the Paris Climate Change Agreement. With two strokes of the pen much of the Obama legacy was lost. The smooth-talking Obama is now a political eunuch.

    The elite are intent on making ‘difficult’ decisions, which will reduce the population of the world. This will require ‘strong’ government and the maintenance of ‘public order’ when disobedience appears.

    Neo-liberal policies will certainly not be in the interest of the people who voted Trump in. As the former Greek finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis put it, ‘And the weak suffer what they must.’

    The democratic problem is that ‘we the people’ did vote for neo-liberals in Ireland and for a long time in the U.S. Even Viktor Orban in Hungary has a democratic mandate, and Brazilians have voted for a New Age conquistador in Jair Bolsonaro. Meanwhile the National Front are on the threshold of power in France. Democracy is electing fascists.

    Why? Well genuine democracy requires mass literacy and proper education, which is diminishing, as is access to accurate information. Bannon and Cambridge Analytica have used artificial intelligence to influence voting patterns, and warp the human mind. We are witnessing the dissemination of disinformation, and what Zizek calls ‘Ideological Misindentification’. People are buying the bullshit, even though, at heart, they know it is untrue.

    Nonetheless, declining adult literacy and the use of sophisticated triggers have conditioned people into buying advertising as argument and substituting soundbites for subtlety and nuance. Hysteria, semi-baked nonsense and shrillness is replacing rational discourse.

    In the Post-Truth zeitgeist appeals to emotion have replaced the importance of facts, and fascists have always enjoyed rituals and symbols. Whenever anyone talks of nationalism or the national interest I am reminded of the adage that ‘patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.’

    The Left are nostalgic and see opportunity in Austerity but, lest we forget, after the Wall Street Crash the Weimar Republic did not witness a Populist socialist insurgency but Nazism. Our present economic collapse is ineluctably leading towards a new form of corporate fascism.

    If the Left is to salvage democracy it must borrow the approach of Antonio Gramsci, the leader of the Communist Party of Italy in the 1920s, which is to construct a cultural hegemony with a receptive middle class (especially now as the distinction between working and middle class is being obliterated). This will involve an expansion of state institutions and husbandry of natural resources to bring an electable and progressive broad social democratic front to power.

    I do not think this is impossible, ‘Hope springs eternal in the human heart’ as Alexander Pope put it, but democracy needs leadership of a kind that is not apparent at this juncture.

    III – A Lost Leader

    On my plane journey to Athens I read an extract from a speech by Mr Obama about visiting the same birthplace of Periclean democracy I had visited. He expresses himself beautifully: precise, as is his want; erudite (something he is given too little credit for); and with pristine socially-democratic-convictions. But he is now disempowered, and his legacy is being dismantled by Trump.

    This brings us back to Roosevelt, and one major problem with U.S. democracy, at least. Obama was prevented from seeking a third term by rules introduced in the wake of Roosevelt’s becoming electorally unassailable, primarily because he was obviously acting in the interests of the people. If the rules had not been changed the American public would not have had to face the unenviable choice of Hilary Clinton or Donald Trump, with the former the lesser of two evils.

    We need a new Obama, or better still a new Roosevelt, a leader with vision and with purpose. We may need many of them, but few are apparent. Direct democracy and referenda by the people are also required.

    Further, we need to steel ourselves for civil disobedience to aid in the vitalisation of our democracy.  Instead we have a spectator democracy, or passive democracy, controlled by vested interests. When the institutions of state and the state itself act criminally the obligation for citizens is to fight back in proportion to the force they are confronted with.

    We also need proper information, and since it is not coming through mainstream media, which has been bullied into submission, the new radical press is the only drip feed available for the vitalization of the body politic, alongside similarly-motivated NGOs.

    The truth is indeed in some respects the only weapon as Havel put it while imprisoned under another dictatorship: ‘If the main pillar of the system is living a lie then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living in truth (Havel, 1991).’

    IV – A False Dawn

    Ethical decisions are indeed complex: the suppression of fearless criticism is a negation of ethics. The obligation of professional ethics should be fearless truth-telling. Standing up to the power.

    Democracy dies when it denies the legitimacy of the opposition, when the Rule of Law is set aside, and when authoritarian politicians act subversively, and in a concerted fashion, to undermine civil liberties and human rights by criminalising and prosecuting dissent or opposition.

    Using the excuse of such shibboleths as national security, public order and the common good, rogue state institutions classify their enemies as criminals and subversives.

    Other characteristics of failing democracy include a breakdown in forbearance and the utilisation of constitutional hardball, such as Trump stacking and weaponizing the Supreme Court.

    Democracy is dying  because  our elected leaders rather than distancing themselves from extremists are embracing them. In fact they are the extremists. Let us be clear about this: we are seeing state fascism.

    There are insidious forms of subversion: a coup can really be governance by the grey, for the grey, where small but influential think tanks and special interests pull the strings.

    If it inconveniences these elites, the democratic will of the people is ignored, as in Greece, where Alexei Tsipras twice received a mandate to counter austerity but was ignored.

    Greeks must honour their debts even if they were induced into them by Goldman Sachs and its acolytes. The banal refrain is that Greeks do not pay their debts, but the same could be said for all the banks that have had their debts written off.

    While the Greek electorate recognised where their true interest lay, by electing a radical socialist, in most countries passivity has created a consumer model of democracy that has lost any bite.

    The real source of a failing democracy is found in vacuous digital communication, and the passivity wrought by blanket advertising. The false dawn of online democracy through social media is proving to be a chimera. The sharing of inconsequential thoughts in organisations that purport to be democratic, produce sound chambers that operate like cults as David Eggers splendid fictional book The Circle (Eggers, 2013) documents.

    A cult of mindless belonging to nothing is manifest, and it is not the only mindless cult around. We also have scientology, our esteemed religious traditions, and of course the neo-liberal cult itself.

    I fear that humans are becoming increasingly robotic, technical machines. Altruism, compassion and a concern for the plight of others is being eliminated.

    So leadership is what is needed but the Leader must like Churchill have ‘nothing to offer you but blood, sweat and Tears.’ And yet I retain faith that we will fight back against the fascism which Madeleine Albright, no less, believes has returned (Albright,2018).

    We are drifting towards this precipice incrementally, led by a coalition of interests inculcating robotic consumerism, passivity, environmental destruction and widening inequality. The democratic order has been subverted by rogue states and the corporatocracy.

    The Barbarian hordes are at the gates and a new Roosevelt must emerge to save democracy.

    References

    Madeleine Albright, Fascism: A Warning. Collins, New York, 2018.
    Dave Eggers, The Circle, Knopf, New York, 2013.
    Vaclav Havel Open Letters: Selected Writings 1965-1990, Faber and Faber 1991.
    Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, Tim Duggan Books, New York, 2017.

  • Alternatives to Italy’s Political Malaise

    Seemingly out-manoeuvred by more experienced, and ruthless, political ‘partners’, the Five Star Movement (M5S) has entered a crucial phase after forming a coalition government with the right wing La Lega. The key question is whether the issue of immigration will continue to dominate Italian political debate, or whether M5S can bring about meaningful social reforms. For the moment it is advantage La Lega.

    I – La Lega Leading the New Government

    After three months the new Italian government composed of M5S and La Lega is facing difficulties in aligning a complex mix of political leaders, many of whom are in power for the first time. The clash of conflicting ideas and constituencies, played out in newspaper articles and websites, brings to mind – not only to foreign observers – a stereotype of Italian political chaos.

    The ‘yellow’ (as MS5 are referred), having earned 32.4% of the national vote in the March election, on the basis of an economic platform leaning towards socialism, should be leading the coalition. But this mantle seems to have been usurped by the minority ‘green’ (La Lega) partner, which gained 17.6% of the vote. The has been achieved through Le Pen-ist propaganda, focusing on migration, security issues and Euro-scepticism, while winking to Trumpism (and esteem for Vladimir Putin).

    Matteo Salvini, the leader of La Lega has emerged as the public face (and sole heir of Lega father Umberto Bossi, following his forced retirement after charges of public finance misuse) of the government. He is Deputy Premier and Minister of the Interior; while his supposed ally, and interlocutor, Luigi Di Maio, the leader of M5S, is Minister for Labour and Economic Development. The factions are supposedly being coordinated by Premier Giuseppe Conte, the M5S nominee.

    Salvini has injected atavistic fears of a foreign ‘other’ into political debate, highlighting criminality and legality, loss of jobs and waste of resources, as well as undeserved social spending in a period of economic crisis. Within days of entering office he stated to the media that he wished to divert five billion euros from migrant reception and integration policies, while ramping up anti-EU rhetoric.

    In June 2018 he closed Italian ports – in particular the ports of Sicily – to the ‘Acquarius’, a ship from the fleet of the NGO ‘SOS Mediterranèe’ (MSF – ‘Doctors Without Borders’), sailing from Libya with six-hundred-and-twenty-nine migrants (including one-hundred-and-twenty-three unaccompanied minors) aboard, which had previously been prevented from entering La Valletta in Malta.

    Salvini invited the captain, ‘to continue the crusade with all its comfortable services along the Mediterranean costs’, as far as Valencia, Spain, where the new Spanish Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez authorized it to dock. He then told another ship the ‘Lifeline’ it had no chance of entering Italian ports, and went on to ask his EU partners to consider radical changes in EU migration policies.

    On August 2018, he created an internal conflict within the Italian Guardia costiera (‘Coastal Guard’), prohibiting another ship, the ‘Dicotti’, from unloading one-hundred-and-fifty migrants in Catania, Sicily, and then instigated what seems to have been a politically motivated investigation into the Agrigento public prosecutor Luigi Patronaggio on several charges, including abduction and segregation, illegal detention and abuse of public administration.

    At the end of August 2018 he met the anti-EU and Far Right leader of Hungary Viktor Orban, theorizing on the so-called Democratura, or ‘Authoritarian Democracy’, while endorsing the Hungarian leader’s policy of closing his country’s borders to migrants.

    Astonishingly, according to a majority of Italian commentators, in view of recent polls, Salvini had mastered the situation and, by escalating declarations, had emerged as a real political animal, front and centre of the political stage, to the detriment of the M5S.

    In reality Salvini has been in election mode since the formation of the government, as he awaits another opportunity to go to the polls, with surveys showing his party appealing up to 30% of the electorate. This could allow his party to reconcile with former allies, and enter a coalition with the former fascisti Fratelli d’Italia or Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia.

    II – Transatlantic Connections

    But the rapture of opinion writers can be misleading. Another Matteo (Renzi)’s recent adventures have shown the volatility of Italian voting intentions in an era of social media. Nothing should be taken for grant at this early stage in the electoral cycle.

    Certainly Salvini’s political position has been strengthened by an axis with other Populist forces in Europe and throughout the world. Apart from reciprocal cuddles with Marine Le Pen, and the muscular chest-to-chest recognition by Putin, there are also bonds with the US Presidency. This has served to legitimate him and his party.

    Salvini and other Italian right-wing parties see the 2016 US Presidential election as a sign of a shift in Euro-Atlantic politics away from buonismo, and ‘human rights-oriented policies’ deemed to be weak, inefficient and unpopular

    Indeed, Attaccateve al Trump, a book by Paola Tommasi, with a degree of notoriety in Italy, credits the dissolution of the Italian Christian Democrats with the unlikely election, ‘Berlusconi-style’, of the outsider Trump.

    Steve Bannon – Trump’s former consultant and spin-doctor – has hailed La Lega as a part of the constellation of ‘Breitbart’ (and perhaps Cambridge Analytica?) declaring with some confidence that ‘the Italian fellows are doing a good job’. Subsequently, Trump, while fomenting against Trudeau (as he travelled back to Washington from last June’s G-7 in Canada), recognized Italy as a primary political partner and warmly welcomed the new Italian policy on migrants.

    Tellingly, both governments during their first days, created a storm over migration issues. Trump followed up victory by imposing visa restrictions on migrants arriving from selected countries, which generated street protests in the principal US cities. He has recently had to cope with a reversal in public approval on account of the shameful separation of children from their parents at the US-Mexico border, and incarceration in small cages, but his wife Melania’s apparent repentance was perhaps designed to balance the effect.

    Salvini’s declarations on migrants issues also unleashed an emotional wave, expressed in national press and television, where commentators weighed in to contest human rights violations and defend the previous government’s policies.

    But, as indicated, the overall effect on voting intentions appears to have been favourable for Salvini. Recent polls suggest his anti-intellectualism, and jibes about buonism, have galvanized a significant part of population. Many appear to appreciate his ‘muscular’ approach both in internal affairs, and in dealings with EU partners.

    III – Democratic Impasse

    The Democratic Party, out of Palazzo Chigi since the March elections, ending the premiership of Paolo Gentiloni, but with Matteo Renzi still on board, have proved ineffectual in opposition. A new leadership has still not emerged, and the old one never developed a comprehensive political platform for these challenging times, apart from to say: ‘we lost, it is up to them to govern’; meaning, in essence, ‘we remain on the side of the river hoping that corpses of political adversaries will pass by’.

    The new (transitional) political secretary Maurizio Martina – appointed after the electoral collapse to keep a steady course before the next congress – has, unsurprisingly, inveighed against Salvini. In parliament there have been many pious statements from ambitious Democrat deputies attacking the approach of the Lega leader, but meaningful initiatives have been lacking thus far.

    After falling from a high of 40% in the European elections of 2014 to just 19% in the March election a perception has emerged of a distinct lack of consensus in the Democratic Party. Energy has been wasted on strategies designed to compete with other party’s web presences, without producing any visible impact or, even worse, running an ‘opposition within an opposition’, against the left wing (‘former communists’), who are castigated for not toeing the leadership’s line.

    The fallen ‘Matteo’ underestimated the ill-effects of simplistic proposals on institutional reforms, investing too much rhetoric on the efficiency and rapidity of political outcomes. He remained devoted to a Blairite ‘third way’, without any deep reflection on the future of centre-left politics in an era of shifting economic and technological plates. There were no original policies on equality or redistribution of wealth, no weltanschaung for Democrats in the years to come.

    Affected by a curious ‘Zelig-style’ syndrome, leading to the party co-opting other parties’ proposals (on immigration, public funding of politics and cutting costs of institutions), the Democrats under ‘Matteo the 1st’ shared with ‘Matteo the 2nd’ a certain ‘muscularity’ in the tone adopted towards European partners, political adversaries (within and outside the Party), bureaucracies and allegedly ‘strong powers’. But they never renounced an associations with large corporations or the institutions of European financial orthodoxy, as they sought to retain the support of a shrinking constituency of moderates.

    As a result, left-wing supporters left the party in droves, especially to the M5S. Beffa delle beffe, though not unexpectedly, at the last elections even former moderates seemed to prefer the more consistent right-wing voice of La Lega.

    The Democratic ‘Matteo’ has divided his own party – and wider Italian society – pitching two sides against one another. One derives from the Catholic Democrazia Cristiana (later Popolari and Margherita), while the other stems from the former Partito Comunista Italiano (later Partito Democratico della Sinistra and finally Democratici di Sinistra).

    Aldo Moro – compromesso historico.

    After the election, ignoring the lesson of one of its greatest leader Aldo Moro – the great exponent of compromesso storico between Christian Democrats and Communists – he refused to countenance any convergence on social issues with the M5S.

    In this depressing scenario, a strong answer to Salvini came from Roberto Speranza, the young leader of Liberi e Uguali (‘Free and Equal’), the political party that emerged from those groups leaving the Democrats before the elections, under the leadership of Massimo D’Alema, former Premier and Communist leader, in opposition to Matteo Renzi. Speranza reported Salvini to the prosecutors’ office in Rome for instigating racial hatred.

    Indeed numerous public declarations and decisions taken by the green-yellow alliance appear inconsistent with constitutional values, and international laws to which Italy is bound by treaty.

    In the ‘Acquarius’ case, as in the more recent ‘Dicotti’ case, Sicily was the safest port to dock, rather than Valencia. Any practice by Italian military forces involving returning migrants to Libya before security and peaceful conditions have been restored runs contrary to the European Court of Human Rights-stated principle of ‘non refoulement’.

    IV – What does the M5S Stand For?

    As regards the M5S, which is based on the principle of digital democracy and contesting Italian ‘cast’ politics and patronage, it is not clear what it stands for.

    Doubts have been raised about its initial roots in a project of ‘community behavioural analysis’ by one of its founders, the ‘Internet guru’ Roberto Casaleggio, who died in 2016, but whose legacy has been carried on by his son Davide, with even greater efficiency.

    M5S is associated with a private consultancy firm that seemingly derives financial gains from political information and advertising. The firm can also organize political communication and harness the vote of M5S, contrary to democratic principles enshrined in the Italian Constitution, which predicates democratic participation on political organizations, and freedom of individual political consciousness.

    A stronger juridical stance against these new forms of political organization risks having any decision being twisted to reinforce populism. Moreover, any rejection by the court of such charges would be a sign of the failure of traditional constitutional instruments.

    A finding against M5S would solidify a public perception that public institutions are anti-democratic – just as when the government was being formed President Mattarella was accused by the ‘piazza’ of inappropriate interference over blocking the appointment of Paolo Savona as Minister of the Economy.

    What then for the new Matteo? Time runs fast but it is too early to appreciate the impact of Salvini’s strategies, in particular if he will last better than the ‘other Matteo’ on the prow of the Italian Government ship, and in the hearts of (certain) Italians. While a significant constituency has been galvanised by what appears to be a certain strength of personality, still the percentage of Italians who have ever gone as far as voting for La Lega amounts to a mere 5.6 million, out of over 51 millions of voters.

    Far more of Italy’s citizens are seeking new voices supporting civic ideals, under a new Democratic leadership.

    A turning point might be the opposition within the M5S to common political action with La Lega. This has already been seen at local level since the beginning of unnatural alliance: in June 2018, in response to Salvin’s repeated denunciation of migrants, Mr. Nicola Sguera, a city council member in Benevento, resigned declaring ‘We hoped for ‘Podemos’, now we have ‘Orban’’; for similar reasons Carlotta Trevisan resigned her role as deputy president of the city council in Rivoli.

    At a national level their leader Di Maio has hushed up criticisms declaring: ‘I want suggestions, not complaint: now we run the government’, and recently declared in Versilia, that ‘misunderstanding and conflicts are not surprising, we will do our best’, and that ‘blockages and ‘refoulments’ cannot be made with kindness’.

    However, the recent Roman meetings of M5S, before and after the summer parliamentary recess, witnessed further grumbling by the left-wing of the movement, led by Senate President Roberto Fico, who declared, contradicting Salvini and his leader Di Maio, that ‘Italian Ports shall remain open to NGOs, they are doing an essential job”.

    Moreover, Barbara Lezzi, Minister for the South, Senators Elena Fattori, Paola Nugnes and Luigi Gallo are among the deputies showing commitment to the idea that ‘refoulments’ are not a policy appropriate for a civilised country. Fico also came out against the meeting on August 28th between Salvini and Orban, declaring, ‘there’s no political leader more distant from me in Europe’.

    Worse still, after the meeting between the two Far Right leaders and the final declarations on a common stance in Europe (with the schizophrenic Salvini supporting the Orban position against migrant re-locations in the European Union, contrary the official position of his government), Prime Minister Conte leaked to the media that it was no longer possible to have an official public position.

    V – The Reality About Immigration

    The political context could easily evolve differently between the right-wing La Lega politics and the leftist M5S, which is animated in particular by opposition to the elitist politics of the Democrats, and is still rooted in the family photo album of la sinistra italiana.

    There is a compelling argument that the whole ‘immigration affair’ is a lot of hot air, and part of a complex public relations campaign being orchestrated by unscrupulous politicians ‘senza arte né parte’ (‘without any virtue nor strong political faith’), for whom the M5S is naively providing a stage and microphone.

    Its impact is increased by the inability of Italy and the EU more generally – blackmailed in part by their own constituencies – to agree on a real and effective common migration policy.

    According to official United Nations reports, collected in the World Population Prospects – and reported in the ‘Huffington Post’ in 2017 – migratory flows into Europe from 2000 to 2010 were 1.2 million people per year, which makes up a mere 0.2% out of a population of five hundred million inhabitants (one million have arrived in the United States over the same period).

    That figure then dramatically fell to 400,000 entries per year between 2010 and 2015 due to the Economic Crisis, which led to less money being remitted to sustain travel costs from Central, Western or Eastern Africa to Europe.

    According to ‘Liberazione’, these numbers will have declined further in 2018: 8% less have disembarked on the Italian coast than in the same period last year. Data from the Ministry of the Interior indicates that 14,441 people arrived in Italy by sea in the first six months of 2018, while 64,033 had arrived in the same period of the previous year. This is not to say international migration is not a genuine issue, but it puts it in perspective.

    In 2015 the United Nations said international migration had reached 244 millions per annum, 20 millions of whom were refugees. That number had grown from 154 millions in 1990 to 175 millions in 2000. Migrations will persist as long as economic cleavages exists between rich and poor countries. The real point is the small proportion of those, about one million, actually entering Europe, the biggest economy in the world (comprising 23.8% of the world’s GDP, against the 22.2% of the US), with 500 million inhabitants, compared to total migrations around the world.

    The essential issue is how to adopt efficient, humane and stable institutions for the governance of humanitarian emergencies and economic migration to Europe.

    Instruments to deal with economic migrations are not easy to be put in place. Decisions touch on political ties with foreign states, anachronistic colonial attitudes, distribution of military and security power, sovereignty over international waters, irrational beliefs and ancient fears, as well as normative politics.

    Meaningful measures are, however, on the table for European governments to discuss. For instance, Angela Merkel recently proposed a common EU force for border control. Indeed, even in the absence of intense passions, a European Agenda on Migrations has been debated since 2013 among EU leaders, and the Migration Compact proposed by the previous Italian Government envisaged a scheme for infrastructural investment in Africa.

    In this context, the EU’s ‘La Valletta Fund’ continues to provide financial support to projects tackling the ‘root causes’ of migrations in selected African countries. The new strategy of the European External Action Service – the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the EU – includes closer ties and relationships with Europe’s ‘neighbours’, and the ‘neighbours of the neighbours’ from where migrants leave for Europe (not only North Africa, but also Sahara and Sahel countries).

    The EU social agenda, debated since 2015, also contemplates rules and measures for social integration of migrants, within a larger scheme tackling the labour concerns of all Europeans, which could reduce social tensions.

    VI – Three Scenarios

    A responsible Italian leadership would initiate debate on these issues with other EU Member States. In contrast, at the last EU Council meeting an apparent ‘political crisis’ between Conte and some EU partners (Macron, Merkel, and Borissov) was reported.

    The Dublin Regulation should be overhauled, but narrow nationalist politics is creating stasis in the Union, and the Italian government’s intransigence is not helping matters.

    The only positive news stemming from the muscular stance of the yellow-green alliance is renewed (enduring?) attention being paid to the migrant question, and to Italy as a strategic stronghold for a federal Europe, meaning the country could finally reap concrete political advantages as regards sharing the costs of receiving migrants.

    Salvini has gone so far as to warn that if the rules are not changed on migration then Italy will withdraw its annual contribution.

    It remains to be seen whether M5S leaders – presumably to the left of Di Maio – will be able to counterbalance this ‘green’ communication agenda. Can that faction defuse the ‘immigration affair’ and the radicalising narratives of La Lega? Will they succeed in reversing the positions they had to swallow to gain the levers of power, and finally make their 32% of electoral votes correspond with real political power?

    One opportunity for the inexperienced M5S and its leaders – in contrast La Lega as La Lega Norde was in local government from the 1980s and national politics from the 90s – is to implement their economic and social platform, from which Salvini’s ‘immigration issue’ has diverted attention.

    These include the reddito di cittadinanza (‘basic social income’) it promised voters, and long-standing environmental commitments, including the closure or modernisation of the ILVA iron plant in Taranto, and the blockage or relocation of the docking of the ‘Trans-Adriatic Pipeline’ in Puglia.

    The current route of the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline.

    There is also the issue of investment in social housing and infrastructures for workers, active employment policies and the restructuring of unemployment agencies, digitalisation and other services for SMEs, simplification of laws, and incentives for youth entrepreneurship.

    Recently Di Maio, now heading a monstre Ministry reuniting Labour with Economic Development (Industry), has initiated an investigation into the feasibility of basic income, against the indifference or opposition of his La Lega partners. On these points, the interests of the historical Lega constituencies and the expectations of M5S supporters might seriously diverge.

    La Lega’s leadership in the north of Italy, after years of regional and local governments, are perceived as guarantors of established commercial interests, tied to the former Forza Italia barons of the northern economy. Any M5S initiatives implying significant redistribution of public resources seem likely to create rifts.

    The more the M5S pursues social and economic priorities the greater the prospect of divergence with La Lega. But if M5S renounces these social policies they risk division into right and left factions, just like the Democratic Party before them, making its prospects in the next elections uncertain. Failure to act could generate new alliances before the next elections.

    Would this mean glory for the ‘green’ ‘Matteo’? Two scenarios present themselves to Italian citizens in the medium term. The first is an abrupt end to the coalition, involving a never-ending cycle of elections, in which La Lega pickpockets the right wing M5S votes, and attracts new voters from traditional centre-right parties; or perhaps restoring a political dowry to the prodigal son Silvio Berlusconi, and his centre-right Forza Italia heirs.

    The second scenario is a revitalized (inspired by Spain’s Socialists perhaps) ‘Democratic Party’ leadership emerging to end the short-lived Matteo II’s era in Italian politics, supporting dialogue with the M5S , under Fico, and reviving the social movements that Matteo I sank

    This could bring an end to the financial and economic stalemate which has ruined so many firms and families, unravelling a delicate social fabric so as to give an opportunity to demagogues like Salvini.

    Nothing is shaped until everything is shaped. A third scenario could play out where the M5S and La Lega develop ties at institutional levels, and become an inseparable Populist force. To the leadership of the Democrats, and the new forces emerging in Italian civil society, the hard task is to play the cards in front of them.

  • Inside the Heartland of Italy’s La Lega

    At the age of sixteen, in 2001, I took a job in a small factory which built appliances in Cardano al Campo, near Milan’s Malpensa airport. I worked there for four years.

    As with the majority of the manufacturing industries in the area, including the spring-making factory I had worked in the previous year, it was a family-run, small enterprise, with just a handful of clients. Much of the machinery dated from the first half of the twentieth century. Fortunately, as it turned out, they had invested in modern machinery that would allow them to diversify their offerings, and therefore survive the global economic crash, from 2008.

    I vividly recall the three newspapers that were delivered to the factory each morning: the Sole 24 Ore, the Italian equivalent of the Financial Times; La Prealpina, a local newspaper; and La Padania, the mouthpiece of the then rising Northern League (Lega Nord), which was allied at that time with Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia.

    I also remember my colleagues being outraged at the protestors defending Article 18, which governs labour rights, despite this being to their benefit. I heard comments such as ‘they are mainly students with nothing better to do than going about shouting in the streets and smashing shop windows.’

    Back then Northern Italy was still one of the most prosperous regions in the world, and probably still is. From 1979 to 1998, Italian industrial production actually outpaced Germany’s by more than ten per cent, and most of that was in the North. But when the crisis struck businesses similar to the one I had worked in began to cascade like dominoes.

    In that factory’s industrial district more than half of the businesses folded within five years. Today in their place are parking lots for Malpensa airport.

    II – Separatism

    Italy is a country with strong regional identities, although separatism has been rare throughout its history, apart from sporadic outbursts in Sardinia, Sicily and small Alpine enclaves of German speakers.

    When the Northern League emerged in the early 1990s it captured a lot of support in my region. The then leader Umberto Bossi was born in nearby Cassano Magnago.

    As the first cracks of an unsustainable economic model were becoming apparent – well before the earthquake hit – mistrust and cynicism towards the political establishment had become widespread. This was especially apparent among the working class in the kind of businesses that I worked for, which formed the backbone of the region’s, and arguably the nation’s prosperity.

    In the beginning the Northern League called for a federal model of government, inspired by nearby Switzerland, but the leadership soon became outspoken in their separatist aspirations. This was, however, quite different to nationalist movements elsewhere, such as in Sardinia, as the Northern League ceased to be a genuine threat to the territorial integrity of the country once they entered the labyrinth of national politics.

    Blaming Italian society’s ills on an enemy within was their main tactic for gaining support from the beginning: the corrupt political class from Rome, Roma Ladrona, the lazy Southerner and the parasitic Roma community were convenient scapegoats, at a time when political discourse had been coarsened under Berlusconi’s dominance.

    The Italian economy began to fragment in the wake of joining the euro, which did not allow for the periodic currency devaluations that had kept the country competitive. The government failed to control the price of consumer goods after the changeover, while salaries remained static. This eroded significantly the purchasing power of households.

    As the global banking system imploded, and businesses migrated to distant countries with lower labour costs, fortunes were lost, savings dried up and many were left unemployed. This coincided with a rapid rise in immigration; first from Eastern European countries such as Albania, then later from Africa and Asia.

    Almost overnight Italy became a multicultural society, and government services, especially in housing and education, were not prepared for the influx.

    The migrants who settled in Italy became symbolic of the global forces that had proved so ruinous to many. They became the new target for the Northern League, which under Matteo Salvini conveniently buried its difference with the South of Italy, re-branding itself as simply the League (La Lega), and finding new scapegoats.

    III – The New Government

    As I worked in the factory I managed to complete my high school education by night, which gave me the opportunity to travel and gain a greater perspective on the world. But I recognise from my region the kind of talk about foreigners that I hear now from Salvini, and others.

    How do we explain the rise of Salvini? In the last election his party emerged as the third largest in the country and the main party of the Centre-Right alliance, which included Berlusconi’s Forza Italia and other Centre and Right wing parties.

    After discussions which took months, an agreement was reached to form a government between the largest party, the Five Star Movement (M5S), which had insufficient representatives to form one alone, and the League. Crucially, Salvini was allowed to become Minister of the Interior, where he is in a position to implement xenophobic policies.

    Salvini seems to understand that power is increasingly located in the social media space and below-the-line commentaries on newspaper articles and videos. One tolerant commentator might find himself against ten online reactionaries, who in their normal lives may have a quite peaceful disposition. This kind of short-attention-span politics is an ideal breeding ground for racist stereotypes and armchair experts.

    When Salvini says we need to repatriate five hundred thousand illegal immigrants he receives a wave of online endorsement, despite this being a remote possibility without outrageous human rights violations being perpetrated.

    Likewise, he says that we will expel all illegal ‘Roma’, but ‘unfortunately we will have to keep the Italian ones’. The key word here is “unfortunately.”

    Of course it might just all be hot air. But he has tapped into an angry mood.

    III – Migrations

    I have been living beyond the borders of my native Italy for fourteen years now, but I am still transfixed by our dysfunctional politics as much as the next Italian, and have access to the world’s media. I have witnessed how state institutions fail and even persecute people, and could tell stories that only Italians would believe.

    Like many among my generation, born in the 1980s, I had begun to despair that politics would continue to be dominated by corrupt elites – complicit or just plain lazy members of the public administration –  and mafias with tentacles extending throughout every aspect of the Italian economic system.

    At the same time, Silvio Berlusconi’s media empire seemed to have made pulp out of our collective brains. His Forza Italia party took over from the Christian Democrats and the Craxian left-wing faction as the dominant force after the Mani Pulite (clean hands) scandal in the 1990s. But real power lay with global elites and organised crime.

    Not even the vestiges of our great civilisation and the Rule of Law could actually bring down Berlusconi. It was left to the European Community to deliver the coup de grâce. In return Italy was sentenced by its European partners to perma-austerity. Guess what: Berlusconi is still alive and kicking.

    Italy has been the first port of call for the majority of Africans seeking to make Europe their home, and they have been prevented from moving further afield due to the unfair Dublin Regulation of 2014. Many new arrivals have been reduced to virtual slave labourers, or become entangled in the mafias of the South.

    Meanwhile, in order to stanch the flow, the Italian government, along with its European partners-in-crime, entered into an agreement with the Libyan authorities, which has led to the establishment of internment camps for aspiring migrants, where NGOs report appalling abuses. Just last week, the European Community agreed to attempt to build further reception centres around Africa, and even within Europe. But reception of refugees by another state is on a voluntary basis, meaning nothing of any consequence will happen.

    The Trumpian use by Salvini of the migrants aboard the rescue ship the Aquarius as political pawns was an absolute disgrace, but it is worth bearing in mind that what we are not hearing about in the news is probably worse. Every minute of uncertainly for every migrant creates further unnecessary suffering.

    There are no easy solutions to the problems faced by Italy, and Europe. Migrants are entering what is already a densely populated country with an ineffective government. The absence of adequate accommodation makes migrants more visible, and an obvious target.

    George Soros is a hate figure for many Italians because of his support for migrant rights. But his proposal for the equivalent of a Marshall Plan for Africa makes a lot of sense. It would also be useful for Italians to understand that the country’s declining birth rates mean the economy will soon need more workers. But short-attention-span-politics makes that argument difficult to make.

    The hateful message of Salvini grows more powerful by the day.

    V – The Cuckoo in the Nest

    The emergence of the M5S seemed to offer the hope of revolutionary change in Italian society and politics. I followed Bebe Grillo’s blog from its inception, and it was a breath of fresh air, although I did not agree with everything he had to say.

    The appeal of M5S is analogous to the League’s. It is Populist, reflecting, right or wrong, what ordinary people think. In particular it challenges the elites.

    The question is whether the alliance which the M5S has entered into with the League is a pact with the Devil. But it was the only conceivable way for a government to be formed, once the Democratic Party stubbornly refused to enter negotiations to form a coalition. That party’s credibility faded when they embraced the politics of perma-austerity, and the sight of former leading figures like Elena Bosci cavorting with Berlusconi fills most left-leaning Italians with disgust.

    Recent polls and local election results show clearly that the big winners of the coalition have been the League, who are now the most popular party in the country. The Guardian has even referred to Salvini as Italy’s de facto prime minister, which only serves to bolster his legitimacy.

    But this is not true, and I remain hopeful that aspects of the M5S’s policies will be implemented, such as tackling the ridiculously high pensions awarded to retired officials. Grand infrastructural projects costing billions of euros, such as the Lyon to Turin high speed rail, which bring few benefits to the working class, may also be shelved. Perhaps too they can set about cleaning up the toxic poisoning of places such as Terra dei Fuochi, and just maybe challenge the extensive networks of organised crime.

    However, the agreement entered into between the parties is highly aspirational, ranging from a regressive plan for a flat tax and a guarantee of a basic income for all Italians.  It is difficult to see the government lasting very long, and the worry is that Salvini, with the wind in his sails, emerges as the big winner. Like the cuckoo in the nest.

  • The Subversion of Subversion

    Professional experience as a criminal lawyer has shaped my appreciation of the interplay between political subversion and its criminalisation. I have observed how real subversion often emanates from those state authorities inflicting punishment against the supposedly subversive.

    This has come into sharp focus since a German court declined to extradite the deposed Catalan president Carles Puigdemont on foot of an arrest warrant requested by the Spanish government. Puidgemont is alleged to have used the public purse to fund the referendum, this despite Spain’s Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy actually admitting to parliament that he had not done so. Nonetheless, he faces the charge of rebellion in Spain carrying a prison sentence of up to 30 years, despite the non-violent approach. Fortunately, the German court decided that the offence was not the equivalent of treason under German law, which requires actual violence.

    Subversion is deviation from a social construct or norm and, of course, a positive law. But the norm or law may in itself be morally fallible or sanctionable, and even subversive, an understanding state authorities generally refuse to permit.

    In staging the referendum, Puidgemont was initiating a measure for which he received an electoral mandate from a large proportion of the Catalan people. The Spanish government responded in a manner that suggested it was reacting to a violent uprising, when there was no such thing. State violence is ongoing.

    Spain has long been an aggregation of regional entities run from the centre, often in autocratic fashion. Under the Franco dictatorship (1939-75) non-Spanish identities were actively suppressed. Many inhabitants of the Basque country and Catalonia now regard themselves as belonging to distinct nations. Catalan separatism is not purely atavistic nationalism however, it also flows from a shared belief in republicanism, socialism and anarchism, and a repudiation of the political heirs of Franco operating in the ruling Partido Popular (PP).

    Throughout history states have behaved criminally and used the law to justify it, as we are witnessing in Spain today.

    The norm of Inca civilisation was the blood sacrifice of human victims. Euphemistically phrased, the norm of Nazi law was the ‘evacuation of the Jews’ or the ‘final solution of the Jewish question’. The norm of law enforcement in the Deep South of the United States until the 1950s was the lynching of African-Americans. The norm of the Irish police seems to be to frame people for sexual abuse. These norms are all anathema to fundamental human rights, but were carried out, or at least permitted, by state institutions.

    A deviant and subversive state projects deviancy and subversion on its victims. Contrary views are tightly controlled. Thus the dissident or conscientious objector is prosecuted, sometimes for treason, as a deviation from an oppressive norm. For example, Andrei Sakharov, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning scientist and dissident, was imprisoned by the authorities in the Soviet Union for subversion.

    Increasingly, protesters, leftists, and even human rights lawyers are labelled subversives by authorities subverting the institutions of the state. In Ireland politically-motivated prosecutions have been brought against elected representatives taking part in demonstrations. The Irish judiciary have to some extent resisted the subversive tide, but we may ask how long their independence will endure.

    II

    How are we to explain why more Spaniards are not resisting their government? We may assume that what Michel Foucault describes as the internalisation of punishment for deviant or unorthodox behaviour occurs. There is no need for a secret police force if people are disciplining their own inclinations to resist.

    Foucault said that the direct punishment of earlier times had been internalised, and made more insidious by the exercise of social control in schools, hospitals and factories. In a 1978 interview he said:

    In my book on the birth of the prison, I tried to show how the idea of a technology of individuals, a certain type of power, was exercised over individuals in order to tame them, shape them and guide their conduct as a kind of strict correlative to the birth of a liberal type of regime. Beyond the prison itself, a carceral style of reasoning, focused on punishable deviations from the norm, thus came to inform a wide variety of modern institutions. In schools, factories and army barracks, authorities carefully regulated the use of time (punishing tardiness, slowness, the interruption of tasks) activity (punishing inattention, negligence a lack of zeal); speech (punishing idle chatter, insolence, profanity); the body (punishing poor posture, dirtiness, lack in stipulated reflexes) and finally sexuality (punishing impurity,)

    Right-wing conservatives across the world have always been concerned about the radicalisation of youth, and seen universities as hotbeds of opposition and free thinking. This is leading to the marginalisation and demonisation of left-wing scholars, but the internalisation of control has a more dangerous outcome.

    In colleges, universities and schools we find widespread suppression of free speech and discourse. Discussion is increasingly confined to narrow parameters, with potentially divisive subjects avoided. A generation of rote learners, not critical thinkers, is on the rise. We are in an age of conformity, where obedience has become a sine qua non for career advancement, as Noam Chomsky reminds Andrew Marr in this interview for the BBC in the 1990s.

    The era of uninhibited and rambunctious debate in campuses is drawing to a close. One reason is the so-called ‘snowflake’ phenomenon, where anything remotely controversial is deemed too upsetting for the listener. This is a method of thought control, which often serves to diminish criticism of vested interests. All of these cultural factors are yielding a generation (with many honourable exceptions) who are technocratic and dangerously compliant: a growing body of amoral ‘yes men’ who willingly carry out orders.

    Moreover, within the college structure, promotion and preferment is linked to an increasingly controlled discourse where ideas that cut across dominant norms are penalised. The new paradigm is neoliberal and knee-jerk conservatism, which morphs easily into the kind of authoritarian rule we see mustering in Spain – a democracy with the trappings of a dictatorship.

    An indicator of a growing educational void in that country is the current investigation there into irregularities into the seemingly corrupt way a master’s degree was awarded to Madrid regional premier Cristina Cifuentes. The scandal has extended to another representative of the ruling Partido Popular (PP) whose qualification did not require him to attend class or take exams. The public university King Juan Carlos University has strong ties to the conservative government: he who pays the piper calls the ideological tune. Across the world, it is increasingly advantageous for academics to adopt right-wing viewpoints.

    In conjunction with a compliant Spanish media – including, regrettably, the once liberal El País – it means views offending a dominant norm are characterised as deviant or dissident, or subversive. Yet the norm itself may be subversive, as in the Spanish government’s reaction to Catalan separatism.

    III

    Treason has always been a political prosecution by the victors. Sir John Lavery’s famous portrait of the Court of Appeal trial of Roger Casement springs to mind. He was charged with high treason and executed by the British for attempting to end their rule in Ireland. Mr Justice Darling gazes down on him with barely concealed contempt. The accused looks depressed, as well he might. Casement, once the terrorist, is today held up as a hero and martyr in Ireland. One should always interrogate who is accusing whom of treason, and why.

    Sir John Lavery’s painting of the trial of Roger Casement.

    The great Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca was brutally murdered in 1936 for his opposition to the violent imposition of an authoritarian quasi-fascist state in Spain. The rebel who wins becomes a national hero: to the victor the spoils of office, including the judicial arm.

    Woe betide his enemies, such as Lorca. Ironically in the Spain Civil War (1936-39) it was traitors who murdered him: traitors against a legitimate left-wing coalition government. The Nationalists rebelled, invaded Spain from colonies in Morocco and took Lorca’s life, along with hundreds of thousands of others.

    During and after the Civil War, the victorious Nationalists charged thousands of vanquished Republicans with treason for defending a legitimately constituted state. Thus we found the subversive justice of the traitorous victors against the constitutional losers.

    High treason is generally a dubious classification intimately connected to power. The Spanish government has the power in Spain today, and is ruthlessly subverting the law for political ends.

    In an age of ascendant nationalism and irredentism, the vectors of centralisation and monolithic control are growing more resilient as transnational agencies fragment. The EU has looked on at what is happening in Spain with the insouciance of a latter-day Neville Chamberlain.

    This even after Pablo Casado the Prime Minister Rajoy’s spokesman warned that Pudgemont would end up like Catalan Civil War independence leader Lluís Companys. Companys was handed over to Franco’s regime by the Gestapo and shot by firing squad in 1940. Considering the lack of independence of the Spanish judiciary, any prosecution seems likely to be a show trial.

    At least the Schleswig-Holstein court scrupulously examined the extradition warrant against Puidgemont to assess whether the Spanish offence of rebellion was at idem with an allegation of high treason under German law. For a European arrest warrant to succeed, the court must be satisfied that there is an identical offence under domestic law. This involves a comparison of the matter and detail of the laws operating in each jurisdiction.

    The loose definition of violence under the Spanish law of rebellion indicated it was not equivalent to the German law of treason. That objective assessment has unleashed a hysterical response from members of the Spanish government and media, including El País, amidst claims that the decision was politically motivated. More substantively, an appeal has been lodged with European Court of Justice in Luxembourg.

    German courts enjoy a reputation for impartiality. But given the extremely political nature of the charge, one may wonder whether political pressure was applied to the court. The political motivation would surely have been to favour the Spanish government’s argument. So hurrah for the presiding judge Martin Probst and his colleagues Matthias Hohmann and Matthias Schiemann.

    Subversion of political objectives, where the judiciary upholds human rights, may have negative consequences for individual judges who feel the pinch of state control, seen starkly in Poland. But as Foucault observed, modern punishments act more subtly through the internalisation of subversive norms.

    IV

    An Enemy of The People is perhaps Henrik Ibsen’s most overtly political play. The premise is simple: a prominent and well-connected local engineer, whose brother is the town mayor, is asked to conduct a survey of the municipal water supply. The town in question is famous as a spa resort, attracting a great deal of tourism. But when the tests are carried out, he finds serious impurities and informs the townsfolk of the results.

    The reaction is revealing, and dispiriting. Rather than lauding his wisdom in carrying out the analysis, vested interests turn on him with ever-increasing ferocity. A storm of hatred is unleashed.

    He will destroy the local economy. Livelihoods will be effected. The industry of the town will suffer. The whistleblower is shunned, ostracised, victimised. His family is torn apart and he becomes an enemy of the people. The mob descends in all its unfettered glory.

    Those that seek to expose corruption – its multi-hydra tentacles which reach the highest levels of power – are often disposed of by whatever means necessary. They have drawn the enmity of the powerful: the ones who matter.

    Puigdemont is no money launderer or expropriator of public funds, as many in the highest ranks of the PP have been revealed to be. He is no traitor, but an elected representative who endeavoured to offer the Catalan people the chance to declare a desire for independence, only to see the attempt attacked by the central government, whose violent excesses recalls the the Franco dictatorship.

    We often see mismatches between crime and punishment. The fictional John Valgean in Victo Hugo’s Les Miserables is maliciously persecuted for his theft of a loaf of bread. On the other extreme, those companies that now systematically plunder the world’s environment and usher in an era of unheard of inequality escape punishment having manipulated democracy.

    It’s quite simple. Subversives among the corporate elite would prefer a centralised Spain. An independent Catalonia or Basque country could spell trouble for transnational commerce.

    So let us take stock and assess carefully the use of terms such as dissidence, subversion and deviance which are bandied about. Let us consider who are the real traitors.

    Rebellion may be rebellion against tyranny, or it may be a counter-revolution involving those who are resistant to genuine democracy. So let us be wary of subversion by those who are themselves subversives.

    This article was written in collaboration with Frank Armstrong and A. Reynolds.

  • A Look Inside Italian Politics

    Posterity will determine if the Italian election results of March 4th 2018 marked an earthquake that will endure in the landscape. Or will a result, apparently seismic, turn out to be like the volcano that smoulders, without ever fully clearing its throat? No one is quite sure the precise dish the electorate will be served after the election.

    The success of the Eurosceptic and unashamedly anti-immigrant Northern League under Matteo Salvini (now seemingly reconciled to preserving the territorial integrity of the Italian state), and to a greater extent, the relatively unknown quantity of the Five Star Movement (M5S) led by Luigi di Maio, combined with the decline of Silvio Berlusconi’s centre-right Forza Italia and the centrist Democratic Party under Matteo Renzi, reflects a Europe-wide populist surge; the decline of traditional parties, and emphasises the waning legacies of iconic figures of the first decade of the twentieth century, such as Tony Blair, Nicolas Sarkozy, Bertie Ahern and Berlusconi himself.

    But the widely-bandied term ‘populist’ tells us very little, and is often used simply to dismiss the popular appeal of a party by those opposed to its objectives. In a recent European context it has become shorthand for increasing xenophobia, and outright racism, triggered especially by the refugee crisis of 2015, and associated with the ‘strongman’ leadership of Putin’s Russia.

    M5S has been criticised both within Italy, and in the international media, for reflecting prejudices commonly expressed in Italian society. On the other hand, there is often a failure to recognise the determination of the Movement to clean up Italian politics, particularly in their southern electoral strongholds.

    Roger Cohen of the New York Times crudely dismisses M5S, lumping them with the Northern League, as one of the ‘out-with-the-bums parties’, and linked to Europe-wide ‘angry illiberal movements’. An apparently “illiberal” approach to immigration may largely be explained, however, by the responsiveness of M5S policies to the concerns of supporter, rather than any racist demagoguery emanating from its leadership.

    Such criticism also ignores how Italy is the first port of call for the majority of refugees who take the Mediterranean route into Europe, and how other states are not rising to the challenge of accommodating more new arrivals.

    M5S offers a new political formula that could easily have continent-wide ramifications. They promote technocratic expertise, with an emphasis on sustainability at a local level. The ‘five stars’, refers to the party’s five core values: public water access, sustainable transportation, sustainable development, a right to Internet access, and environmentalism. These founding principals clearly distinguishes them from the Northern League, and authoritarian regimes in Poland, Hungary or Russia.

    One of their most important rules is that any political career is a temporary service: no one who has already been elected twice at any level (local or national) can be a candidate again. Elected representatives put a proportion of their salaries back into a micro credit fund for small businesses, and reject campaign contributions. In short, M5S is attempting to inoculate itself against prevailing corruption, and ‘strongman’ leadership.

    But whether M5S can simply focus on discrete objectives and local issues, while ignoring national, regional and global institutions, is doubtful. Environmentalism can morph into short-term nimbyism. Moreover, without being corrupt or paternalistic, an elected representative may offer a course that is not instantly popular in a direct democracy scheme but may prove wise, and popular, in the long run.

    There are parallels with the current political constellation in England (if not the wider United Kingdom), where the Northern League plays the character of UKIP, the Eurosceptic right the Tory party; Forza Italia assumes the part of a Europhile Tory rump; the Democratic Party is represented by ‘New’ (an increasingly obsolete description) Labour ; and the Five Star Movement (less the political nous of a veteran such as Jeremy Corbyn) reprises the role of a Euro-doubtful Momentum.

    But of course Italian politics is unique in many respects. This is a long-legged country with characteristics of an ‘Asiatic’ Mediterranean, and a ‘Germanic’ North, as well as its own, often intoxicating, Latin inheritance. There is enduring, embedded, wealth alongside grinding, endemic poverty, mainly below the Mezzogiorno, but increasingly found in all major urban centres. The significance of Milan lying at a latitude closer to London than Palermo should not be discounted.

    II

    In many respects Italy is a fractured polity and unstable democracy, which emerged out of a long fascist dictatorship (1922-45) under Benito Mussolini, and wartime alliance with Nazi Germany. During the Cold War most governments lasted less than a year, and featured a revolving cast of roguish characters, foremost sevent-time Prime Minister, and twenty-seven-time minister Guilio Andreotti. In that time Italy’s Communist Party was the largest in Europe (with a membership exceeding two million under the astute leadership of Palmiro Togliatti), which despite not participating in governments held the feet of the ruling elite to the coals.

    The Master and his Apprentice. ©INTERNATIONAL PHOTO/LAPRESSE 12-06-1984 ROMA SPETTACOLO NELLA FOTO: SILVIO BERLUSCONI E GIULIO ANDREOTTI

    Corruption has long been the bane of Italian politics, particularly in the south of the country. Between them the Neapolitan Camorra, Calabrian Ndrangheta and Siclian Cosa Nostra have maintained fiefdoms the like of which are unknown in other Western European country, with tentacles reaching into the rest of Italy and beyond.

    The endurance of organised crime can be traced to the Allied conquest of Italy during the Second World War. The fascists had kept local chieftains under the thumb, often by simply imprisoning them without trial. But just as de-Baathification in Iraq after the invasion in 2003 unleashed underlying, atavistic forces, similarly, across southern Italy after 1945, gangsters entered a vacuum left behind by a decapitated state.

    Only after the fascist prisons were thrown open, and shadowy American Intelligence figures such as ‘Lucky’ Luciano arrived on the scene, was a humanitarian crisis averted. Reliance was placed on old networks of patronage to feed the population, as Norman Lewis’s account in Naples 1945 illuminates. Italian democracy has been counting the cost of Allied authorities ‘looking the other way’ ever since.

    'Lucky' Luciano.
    ‘Lucky’ Luciano, unlucky Italy.

    Any journalist investigating their affairs whether in Italy or elsewhere, as the recent likely contract killing of Slovak journalist Jan Kuciak and his partner Martina Kusnirova reveals, must be aware of the dangers. Investigating judges  require huge security details; even then some, such as Judge Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992, are still assassinated.

    The scene of the Massacre of Capaci where Giovanni Falcone, Francesca Morvillo and their police escort were killed by a Mafia bomb. 23 May 1992.

    The Mani Pulite (clean hands) judicial investigation into corruption of 1992 brought the false dawn of a Second Republic. Electoral laws were amended and the Christian Democrats, which had provided the Prime Ministers to all bar three post-war governments until that point, disappeared entirely.

    However, a corrupt deck was merely shuffled, and many Italians lost faith in politics altogether during the lost decade (2001-2011) of billionaire Berlusconi’s showman leadership. His clownish antics provided a front for deepening corruption, while the television media he controlled provided a drip-feed of light entertainment, football and titillation that kept the patient Italian public in a mildly delusional state. Here M5S politician Alessandro di Battista reads out a court ruling against a former longtime aide to Berlusconi and the founder of Forza Italia, Marcello Dell’Utri, who is in jail because of his links to the Cosa Nostra.

    https://www.facebook.com/dibattista.alessandro/videos/1444836532295073/

    The period since the end of the Cold War also witnessed a steady rise in inequality, and the effects of the economic crisis, beginning in 2008, continues to be felt. In 2017 the bottom 30 percent of the population was at risk of poverty and social exclusion. That is up from 28.7 the previous year.

    Berlusconi also coarsened political debate, bringing respectability to the expression of prejudice against foreigners living in Italy, thereby providing an obvious scapegoat when times grew hard.

    III

    In a wide-ranging account, Delizia – the Epic History of Italian Food (2007), John Dickie describes Italian food at the turn of the twentieth century as ‘local rather than national, whereas French cooks were armed with a uniform terminology – coulis, hors d’oeurvres, potage – their Italian counterparts spoke a variety of mongrel food dialects’.

    Dickie continues: ‘The history of Italian food after unification is the story of the relationship between these proud local food cultures, and the dream of bringing all of Italy to one table, thereby creating a national cuisine to rival that of France’. This fragmentation reflects a prevailing loyalty towards town or region, rather than country or nation.

    The history of the pizza is instructive. It shares a provenance similar to Greek pitta and Turkish pide, as part of an extended family of Mediterranean flat breads. The author of Pinocchio, Carlo Collodi (1826-90) dismissed this Neapolitan dish as ‘a patchwork of greasy filth that harmonises perfectly with the person selling it’. The Margherita pizza, named in honour of Queen Margherita’s visit to Napoli in 1889, represents the colours, red (tomato), white (mozzarella cheese) and green (basil), of the Italian flag. More importantly, its name accommodated the people of a city, renowned for poverty and disease, within the new nation’s gastronomy.

    Dickie likens the Margherita’s propaganda value to Princess Diana embracing AIDS victims. But Napoli’s waste management problems continue to this day: in 2015 Europe’s biggest illegal dump –‘Italy’s Chernobyl’ – was uncovered nearby. The greasiness of Italian politics, like the layer of mozzarella on top of a pizza, has long held in check progressive forces of green and red.

    Despite Italy’s relative novelty – unification only culminated in 1871 – this is an old country. The architectural layers found in almost every city are a daily reminder of past glories. Italians generally seem unmistakably Italian, no matter where they are from on the peninsula or islands. Notwithstanding regional variation, there is a quintessence to life across the land. Bureaucracy and conviviality represent the poles of annoyance and enchantment any resident or outsider negotiates.

    The nation’s varied constituents were never static aboriginal communities. A central location in the Mediterranean, pointing into Africa but firmly lodged in Europe – the Alps were the ‘traitor’ of Italy according to Napoleon –  has brought migrant waves since time immemorial. Anyone who is anyone has spent time here, from Hannibal to Lord Byron and Gore Vidal.

    It is now the main entry point for Africans who aspire to live in Europe. Italy took some 64 percent of the 186,000 migrants who reached Europe in 2017 through the Mediterranean route. It took the majority of these migrants in 2016 too. The current surge is unprecedented but there is no end in sight as looming Climate Change threatens further mass movements of peoples. Recent new arrivals join five million foreign nationals already living in Italy. It is estimated that there are as many as 670,000 illegal immigrants living in the country.

    Desperate people are being trafficked across the Mediterranean aboard flimsy vessels, while the European Community washes its hands. The Dublin Regulation (2013) ordains that any decision on refugee status falls for determination in the country where a person first lands, unless family reunification is involved. Many Italians argue other European countries are not sharing the burden, and they have a point.

    With a prevailing sense of being overwhelmed by immigration at a time when the economy is still in remission, predictably, extremism is on the rise. Berlusconi broke taboos that many politicians now habitually cross.

    On February 5th Luca Traini, a former candidate for the Northern League, was arrested after targeting African migrants in a two-hour drive-by shooting spree in the Marche city of Macerata. This came days after the discovery there of the body of an eighteen-year-old Italian woman, allegedly killed and dismembered by a Nigerian immigrant gang. The threat of further bloodshed is acute.

    In its aftermath Silvio Berlusconi called for the expulsion of thousands of migrants, while League leader Matteo Salvini said ‘those who fill us with migrants instigate violence’.

    IV

    The Five Star Movement is the sulphur in the Italian political wind, whose promotion of direct participation of citizens in the management of public affairs through digital democracy could provide an example well beyond Italy. But in any situation where an electorate is ill-informed by a media dominated by vested interests this can have dangerous consequences, no matter how progressive the core ideas of any movement. However, the despondency of some commentators regarding the capacity of the Internet to inform, as opposed to trigger prejudice, may be misplaced in the long term.

    M5S propose a fusion of green and red politics that should have admirers beyond Italian shores: they embrace theories of de-growth, and support ‘green’ employment. The need to stop polluting Italy’s environment is recognised, and they call for an end to expensive ‘great works’, including incinerators and high-speed rail links. They aim to raise the quality of life and bring about greater social justice.

    But the thorny issue of their approach to the European Community remains, which is closely connected to resolving the immigration imbroglio. Somewhat disconcertingly, after a ballot of members a decision was made to join a political group in the European Parliament which also contains UKIP. The option, however, of joining the Greens/EFA group was also discussed, but was unavailable due to that group’s prior rejection of the idea.

    For a country like Italy to leave the Community would be a hammer blow from which it might not recover, at least in its present configuration. Moreover, in a globalised world it is surely impossible for any one country, especially one so unstable as Italy, simply to go its own way, at least with a democratic government. Removed from the European mainstream, Italy could easily fall prey to authoritarian government, which is part of its political DNA.

    ©Daniele Idini

    Leading members of M5S have at times offered inflammatory views on immigration, in particular Beppe Grillo, its animating spirit. On 23 December, 2016 he wrote on his blog that all undocumented immigrants should be expelled from the country, and that the Schengen Accord, allowing free movement of people between signatory states, should be temporarily suspended in the event of a terrorist attack.

    Grillo seems to have been panicked by the terror threat. In the wake of the 2016 Berlin attack and the killing of a suspected terrorist near Milan he wrote: ‘Our country is becoming a place where terrorists come and go and we are not able to recognise and report them and they can wander all over Europe undisturbed thanks to Schengen’.

    On 21 April 2017, Grillo also published a piece questioning the role of NGOs operating rescue ships off the coast of Libya. He suggested they may be aiding traffickers. Grillo’s comments raise serious questions over whether M5S will calm the growing scapegoating of immigrants in Italy. While his views may reflect what many Italians feel, it is surely incumbent on a politician to lead rather than follow, and not to exaggerate any threats.

    Fortunately the M5S is a broad church, and Grillo, while still influential, is not their leader in parliament. Last year Luigi Di Maio called for ‘an immediate stop to the sea-taxi service’. He also said he would support a referendum for Italy to leave the Eurozone and would vote to leave. In January 2018, however, he reversed his previous position. What appears to be the relative abatement of the terror threat will, hopefully, go some way towards calming the fears of many Italians. But other European states must recognise that preserving the European Community will require a sharing of the refugee burden.

    V

    In his 1963 account The Italians, Luigi Barzini endeavours to explain why his countrymen have historically failed to coagulate into a singular nation.  Firstly, he points to ‘rapid and enthusiastic acceptance of changing political fashions and of foreign conquerors which made all revolutions irresistible but superficial and all new regimes unstable.’ This might be identified in the enthusiastic post-war approval of Communism, and the earlier groundswell of support for Mussolini’s Fascism. The MS5’s embrace of digital democracy has been dismissed as a political fad in the era of the Internet.

    Secondly, Barzini found ‘an art of living as if all laws were obnoxious obstacles to be overcome somehow, an art which made the best of laws ridiculously ineffective’. This reflects a permissive attitude towards organised crime, which M5S are at least seriously challenging.

    Finally he averts to ‘the certainty that the most inflexible government could, in the long run, be corroded from the inside.’ This final point is important in terms of understanding the reluctance of many among M5S to work with other parties to form a government. It is also reflects the cynical response of many commentators to the efforts of the M5S leadership to form a government. Italy requires meaningful reforms and this will require deals to be done, even with the Northern League, who are surely no worse than Berlusconi’s cronies. It is unfortunate that the Democratic Party, with whom M5S should have most policies in common, have expressed a determination to remain in opposition.

    It would perhaps be wise to recognise that politics is the art of the possible, and that reforming a political system as dysfunctional as Italy’s will take considerable time, but at least the priorities of M5S appear progressive in terms of social justice and sustainability. Perhaps most important are the precautions the Movement are taking against ‘strong man’ leadership, which could be a template for other political systems to follow.

    Frank Armstrong is the content editor of Cassandra Voices.

    Featured Image: Daniele Idini