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Not all squares are the same for the Left
02.11.2020
NOTE - This column is about the demonstrations against the lockdown that have taken place in many Italian cities in recent days. The Italian Left, so quick to point the accusing finger at the current “cruel dictator” who starves and oppresses the people in a foreign country, in this case sided with the government and against that part of the Italian people the Left has always despised. A part that, unfortunately, is increasing day by day.
The Italian media hypocrisy has no borders. National journalists, until yesterday, glorified the Black Lives Matter movement which literally devastated the United States. Also up until a few minutes earlier, they praised Navalny’s unauthorized demonstrations against the Russian government. On those of Naples, Milan and Turin, on the other hand, they used a hanging rhetoric, invoking the cannons of Bava Beccaris [1]. Protests, even violent ones, against Trump and Putin are fine, against Conte not - and, obviously, they have been lukewarm in Hong Kong, because the Italian government is still a Chinese puppet. It seems that the lives of traders and small business owners “don't matter” (they don't matter). Because we are talking about exasperated people who are losing everything and are not in the least helped by the state.
While in America the Greek-American political consultant, George Papadopoulos, tweets “Naples. Italy. The Italians are fighting against a totalitarian government ", [here] a certain Antonello De Pierro, journalist and president of the “Italy of rights” movement, (sic) writes "I am a democratic but if it were my responsibility I would give the order to shoot”. Practically, the guns of Bava Beccaris that killed eight hundred people in May 1898, in Milan, during the protests over the increase in the price of bread, did not come off an inch, despite these alleged “democrats” who write articles indignant against Putin or Lukashenko.
And, unfortunately, there are also journalistic “fiction”. On the protests in Naples, the media chorus immediately wrote "there is behind the Camorra". But there is an important cue in the choir. Roberto Saviano [2] wrote: no, the Camorra is not involved, it is desperation, while De Luca [3] is throwing the blame on the people for his mismanagement of health care. The Campania writer is not exactly the latest arrival when it comes to Naples and the Camorra. The Gucci shop window in Turin was not smashed by demonstrators, but by two Egyptians who had nothing to do with it.
Violence must always be condemned, but condemning it is always a bit hypocritical, because, as Mao said, revolution is not a gala dinner and it cannot be done with such kindness. The Gandhi-like non-violent revolution, which I believe to be the best as it is most effective, would also be demonized. Civil disobedience, theorized by the American writer Thoreau and implemented by the Mahatma, consists in disobeying and not paying taxes. Traders should therefore not lift a finger, but raise the shutters. And don't make [even] half a receipt, requiring payment only in cash.
Is it really inevitable? At the moment, yes. Because it seems that the current government, with the excuse of Covid, has declared a war on small business comparable only to the one that Lenin and Stalin waged against the kulaks, the small landowners of Tsarist Russia. For now, there are no executions, but a sneaky method is used to induce starvation death. But the mainstream media chorus is beginning to invoke the repression it condemned until yesterday, when it was applied by totalitarian governments. Indeed, someone is beginning to say that after all “the dictatorship works better”. That someone is not just any gentleman, but the “spiritual father” of the government, Beppe Grillo [4].
Covid has been the pretext in various parts of the world to weaken, if not abolish, democracy, as stated in a study by the University of Oxford published in the journal Law and the Bioscences last September 29:
countries with weak democracy such as Italy have seen the transition to a regime and press freedom, among the lowest in the Western world, undergo a further collapse.
But even the most ferocious dictatorships have an eye for the economy: China has decided that Covid “no longer exists” - and almost certainly not, given their transparency - to revive the market. Our regime, on the other hand, is destroying it. One wonders if Conte really doesn't want to sell off the country to multinationals or his Chinese friends.
[3] Governor of Campania, of which Naples is regional capital.
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Original column by Andrea Sartori:
Translation by Costantino Ceoldo
