Each week a new italian scandal emerges from the investigations of the judiciary. For politicians who are under investigation, of whom the prime minister is the leader and a perfect example, this happens because the judges are "Talibans" and have in mind some subversive project. Obviously politicians cannot say that corruption has reached such a level in Italy that now the mud comes out from everywhere.
It's the obvious result of a political class that after pretending to condemn the corrupt politicians of the first republic recycled and justified them in any way, and approved a series of laws which effectively defend and encourage corruption. Could not be otherwise with a premier who on his lack of morals has founded his personal and political fortune. Berlusconi is obviously not all the evil of Italy, although he is a pretty good representation of it. The opposition has not done much better when it was in government. And civil society has responded only partially, a conscious and shocked minority while the majority simply watch TV and drink any reassuring lie broadcasted.
On regime's tv all is well as usual, but in reality the landscape of Italy today is shocking: big phone companies that launder money on behalf of the mafia with the senators and MPs under the direct control of criminal organizations, reconstruction contracts on national emergencies to cousins and friends who laugh about the dead of earthquakes, a premier who without made up laws would be already in prison and who to avoid going there will do other similar laws, and so forth.
To give a true picture of today's Italy we would need Pasolini, or a rewriting of Dante's Inferno, but in the moral and cultural desert in which we live we have nothing like that. We have rivers and air polluted with impunity, we have a Minister of Education who wants nuclear propaganda in schools, politics, mafia and corruption that had become the same thing while the country remains in serious economic crisis and with poor prospects for the future , and the real risk of going bankrupt as is happening in Greece.
The judiciary is not the solution to every problem and sometimes takes decisions profoundly wrong, as with the sentence against Google for the case of the video of a disabled boy beaten at school. A ruling that may open the door to a systematic censorship of the web as in China or Iran, which incidentally is part of government projects. Or just look at the curriculum of the Rome prosecutors, who routinely filed for years all investigations of corruption that went to their offices.
Italy rots, decomposes, festers, and yet we must not delude ourselves thinking we have reached the bottom of the abyss. Along this road the fall can still be very long and painful. Some signs of hope comes from people who try to take back politics, in its truest sense: as the manifestation of the Purple People or the immigrants' strike on March 1. Italy in fact is not only a country increasingly rotten, criminal and corrupt, but also a country increasingly racist.
But there's nothing to worry about, after all. It's just reality. On television, where now it is forbidden to talk about politics, it's all good as always.
Francesco Defferrari
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