On Returning to Italy and Leaving Democratic Civilisation

It's barely worth writing about the installation of dictatorship in Italy; all the usual suspects from the highest to the lowest, all the ususal excuses about emergency and temporary and experts and technicians and Europe.  So take it as read that Italy is a representative democracy only in name, as were the countries of the East, and the countries of the past under Fascism and Communism.

Never and then never will direct popular democracy be permitted to operate the levers of power, no matter how large our group in Parliament nor how formally constitutionally guaranteed.  The sensation of wanting to vomit reading and listening to the usual suspects' mellifluous self- righteousness  or peremptory condemnation of populism and non-party movements is longstanding and widespread.  "You haven't understood" charming and capable Italians of various backgrounds and sophisticated skills and statuses would tell me as I enthused over formally democratic rights and obligations.  I have now.

Just as an example in a multitude of repressive measures being introduced, no political grouping not formally composed into a political party conforming to hierarchical organisational structures  and with a juridical personality will be permitted to stand for Parliament; nor will such a grouping be able to access  any state political funding for propaganda or for election expenses (it is a source of distaste that any grouping, party or no, should have access to tax-payer funding, but let that pass, as the scandal of the intertwined banks and parties must be allowed to pass).

The internet is now policed and condemnation of people and policies is defined as insult: criticism is permitted,  the definition of which is left open to the complainant or the authorities.  Behaviour during the 20th century is not to be  considered relevant - re-opening old wounds not being conducive to the imposition of the national peace.

Unemployment is described as youth unemployment though what is youthful about being 40 and without work?  Never worked?  This is infantilisation and policy-driven removal of basic economic and social activities.  Of a piece with the destruction of political and civic claims and deriving from the same source - European policies and governance structures.

Any threat to these last will be met with a response that breaks any rule, denies any choices, permits any authoritarian outrage.  The images of demonstrators from the Milan social centres being beaten with truncheons are up there with the squadristi.

The response of civilised Italians is as it has ever been: the rientro nel privato  - the withdrawal into private worlds mediated by networks of friendship and kinship - of the established, the carefully orchestrated emigration of the younger generation to education and work in the rest of the world until return is needed by this private world.

"We told you," say those from the prestigious English and American universities,  from international institutions, from well-to-do lifestyles of unblemished propriety, from firms and industries insulated from the economic disaster by a kind of economic version of this self-defence against pillaging elites.

After three weeks in London the engulfing criminality and pseudo-justification of democratic perversion on coming back here makes England's equivocating with a continued membership of the European Union look irresponsible.  There is nothing  for England in membership of the European Union.  There is no reform, no return of powers, nothing to be renegotiated.  The kind of renegotiation outlined by David Cameron denies the foundation and purpose of the European Union.

Leave.  Leave while your sins and failures are still, just, your own.  You don't want what we've got.