I will preface this post by saying I think Silvio Berlusconi is a complete wretch. An unmitigated disaster whose personal life has been peppered by allegations of corruption and womanising which, if only a fraction were true, should have made him unelectable in the first place. But therein lies the rub.
Berlusconi was elected by the people of Italy. On numerous occasions. When it was obvious the man was a combination of clown and crook, and details of his private life were in the public realm. It is difficult to believe that anyone who voted for the wretch did so without any knowledge of his philandering and dubious business deals.
But now, like the Greek Prime Minister before him, he has been replaced by someone who has the support of the money lenders and bankers. Berlusconi’s successor, widely tipped to be Mario Monti, is a leading member of the Bilderberg Group and acts as an adviser to Goldman Sachs and Coca Cola… but more importantly for his new bosses, he has been a European Commissioner. His new Finance Minister is expected to be Guido Tabellini, his former colleague at the Bocconi University in Milan, which according to The Guardian… has supplied Italy with much of its financial elite. Great! That should fill us all with confidence.
The dancing hordes in Rome may well have been celebrating good riddance to bad rubbish as far as Berlusconi is concerned, but they should be careful what they wish for. We are at a very dangerous time for what we loosely call democracy. We now find we are living in times when NATO can decide when it is time forwhich despots they want to replace by ‘regime change’ and European bankers can veto a referendum or elections if they don’t think they will get the result they want, and topple prime ministers without paying the slightest regard for what the people of a country may think.
It is mildly amusing to see the very British newspapers who questioned Gordon Brown’s legitimacy as the prime minister of a party which had won a general election, now triumphantly proclaiming a man who has been appointed by the insistence of those who have been elected by absolutely no-one.
and Bob What isw wroing with womanizing?
GW
Quite right, Councillor, it’s getting more like Cuba everyday! Booked your hols yet?
No, not yet, although I would love to go to Cuba… as well as Cambodia, Goa, Kerala, San Francisco, Xian, France… and even Italy. What is it for you, Bognor Regis again?
Well, you know the reply to that, I’m sure.
The force that supplanted Christian Democracy in Italy is no more. After the time-honoured manner of the British Conservative Party, it was the vehicle whereby the local machines of traditionalist, religious, agrarian and related politics were taken over by committed Liberals and their voters told that they had nowhere else to go. Those Liberals were of the fiercely secular, “free”-marketeering type normal on the Continent and exemplified in Britain by Nick Clegg. Therefore, as the heirs to the unification of Italy, they were closely allied to the overtly Fascist Alleanza Nazionale, Berlusconi’s coalition partner. Extreme nationalism interwoven with extreme secular liberalism has of course been routine from nineteenth-century Germany and Italy, though the era of the great dictators, to Geert Wilders and to the present Israeli Cabinet.
National co-ordination was put in the hands of Sandro Bondi, a former Communist Party stalwart. Thus was the Berlusconi movement located firmly within the international phenomenon of a Marxism which had merely changed its ending so that the bourgeoisie won, but which had retained intact its Marxist dialectical materialism, its Leninist vanguard elitism and identification of religious or other interests as “Useful Idiots”, its Trotskyist entryism and belief in the permanent revolution, and yet also its Stalinist belief that the dictatorship of the victorious class should be built in a superstate and exported, including by force of arms, throughout the world while vanguard elites owe allegiance to that superstate rather than to their own countries. Berlusconi and his court comprised one such vanguard elite.
Others included the Partido Popolar (which also had deep Fascist roots) in Spain, the Irish Progressive Democrats, ACT New Zealand, and the Australian Liberal Party as reconceived by John Howard, to name but a few. At the centre was the faction that made George Bush its brainless Manchurian Candidate within the Republican Party while paying feudal tribute to the Clintons within the Democratic Party. Remind me, how are they all doing these days? Even the takeover of Gaullism by Nicolas Sarkozy and of German Christian Democracy by Angela Merkel would now seem to be in serious trouble.
Nevertheless, the archetype of bourgeois secular-capitalist insurgency in all its nastiness, Likud, is not only going strong, but in a classic coalition with the secular “free” marketeers who want to strip of their citizenship both an ethnic minority, the Arabs, and a religious minority, the ultra-Orthodox Jews.
The present Irish Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, Eamon Gilmore, has never left Official Sinn Féin, nor has it ever left him. Rather, he has followed and then led it as it renamed itself the Workers’ Party, which renamed itself Democratic Left, which then took over the central organisation and ideology of the Irish Labour Party. All with no confirmed decommissioning of arms until 8th February 2010, within the last 24 hours of the existence of the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning.
The ailing Fine Gael, humiliated at the recent Presidential Election, is clearly now in the sights of these Leninist gangsters. Fine Gael is riddled with former Progressive Democrats, co-operation between whom and Democratic Left first put both of them both into the Senate in 1992. The old Stickies, as the Official IRA were known, have already succeeded in turning Fine Gael, which was once known as “the Bishops’ Party”, into a vehicle for the most militant anti-Catholicism. It is even preparing to break by law the Seal of the Confessional, as has only ever been done by the regimes most violently hostile to the Faith.
And when the present President of the European Commission was Prime Minister of Portugal, he was a rabidly “free”-marketeering supporter of Bush foreign policy who had previously been a Maoist. Yes, a Maoist. Indeed, he is still just such a figure today, busily staging coups in Italy, Greece, and others yet to come.
But will any such coup be necessary in Britain? Our vanguard elite was comprised of all three of New Labour, the Notting Hill set, and the Orange Book Tendency. If David Cameron had secured an overall majority, or if David Miliband had won the Labour Leadership, then all three of those would now be in government. As it is, two of them are in government while the third spends its time undermining and destabilising the Opposition in the Government interest. Should that present Opposition become the Government, then action against that ascendancy of anti-euro Keynesians might very well be forthcoming.
Not that that ascendancy need be without allies, notably among those whom this whole process had previously dispossessed. Most of the Italian Left has been subsumed into the Democratic Party, which has elected as its President Rosy Bindi, late of Azione Cattolica and Democrazia Cristiana. Her election, together with that of her preferred candidate for Leader, is an immensely positive sign, and she herself deserves much credit for having reached out in this way, when we consider that she lost at least one close friend to the Red Brigades. Their erstwhile supporters exist on the fringes of her major new party. But its internal electoral results leave no doubt as to where its centre of gravity lies, as to what is its mainstream.
The Italian Democrats sit with the British Labour Party in the European Parliament, in a Group which has changed its name in order to accommodate, especially, those Democrats with Christian Democratic backgrounds. Let us hope that this fraternity will have a significant impact on the party famously “owing more to Methodism than to Marx”, the historic British vehicle of Social Catholicism, and still the preferred electoral choice of the clear majority of British Catholics.
Many post-War Italian Christian Democrats identified strongly with the Attlee Government’s domestic programme, although they also wished to see an Italy outside both NATO and the Soviet Bloc, a bridge between East and West. Domestically and internationally, and complete with the strong admiration for British Labour at home, such was also Jacob Kaiser’s post-War vision for a reunited Germany. A vision, sadly, never realised. Not yet, anyway.