We recall that the Northern League was born boasting contempt on southern italians and Romans. In the early 90s similar songs against southern residents in the north were daily story. But we must also ask why there is this hatred of the south.
When not singing songs of regional hate, League supporters say that the South and Rome have been funded for years by taxes of the north. That is partly true.What they forget to say is that the hundreds of thousands of young southern people who went to work in the north, often exploited for some crumbs, have enriched entrepreneurs in the north and generally the whole of northern society. Not only entrepreneurs, of course, but also all those who offered services to immigrants, from renting houses to consumer goods.
This human and monetary wealth has gone to the north rather than remain in the south, and is returned to the south only in part with money sent by immigrants to families or with the few who have decided to return. Then, thinking a moment about it, the South has not received any gifts. The redistribution of national taxes was and it is due. To this we must add the fact that the main reason why the South has become more poor than the North has been the systematic exploitation of the resources of the South implemented after the unification of Italy by the leaders of the North (with the complicity of a large part of southern upper classes).
Same story for the argument "we have always worked hard while the South has the Mafia." All Italian mafias have always had a steady and capillary economic cooperation with the economy of the North. Entrepreneurs in the North have sent toxic waste for years in the South and for years have recycled the money of the mafia. They continue to do so with great joy and if it were not for the economic cooperation of the North mafia could not even exist.
The other major argument of League supporters against the Southern immigration is that it brought degradation and crime in perfect and happy northern communities. And here is the usual mechanism of identification of crime according to the origin of a person. A thief is a thief, his area of origin is totally irrelevant to the damage that gets the victim of theft. Thieves are a small part of the poor and disadvantaged, who decides to resort to crime because they believe they cannot achieve legally the welfare they see around them. If the poorest part of northern society was composed mostly of Southern immigrants, of course they were a part of the crime. Now nobody remembers it anymore, but in the northern city of 1800 hatred on the basis of origin was addressed to those who came from rural areas, for the same reason. Impoverished peasants came to live in town and given that they were the poorest of the population, a small part of them devoted to theft, but the hatred of the citizens affected them all.
If all this history seems vaguely topical, it is because the same mechanism of perverse selfishness now works with immigrants. We Europeans have exploited and impoverished Africa and the rest of the world for centuries, we need immigrant workers because they are cheap and easily exploitable but we hate them and say that they "steal jobs", "are all criminals," "bring degradation". Now are foreign immigrants, before were southern immigrants, before were urbanized peasants. The common element is the hatred of the privileged for the poor. Because the privileged needs the poor to exploit him, but then he doesn't want him to exist, to have human rights , to live according to his own culture without complying with the master.
The criminalization of "different" is also a major counterfeiting because the crime of southern immigrants in the North has always been only part of total crime, not all of it. As now the crimes committed by immigrants are not all the crime of Italy, but only part of it. And if tomorrow all immigrants would disappear from the North as by magic, what would happen? that the North will dramatically impoverish and all the thieves will soon be of pure Nordic race.
In other European countries federalist parties were born in areas that had suffered historical wrongs by the central governments. Ireland oppressed by the British. The Basque Country and Catalonia deprived of all right in Franco's Spain. Scotland subject to England from 1700. They are federalists who also have valid historical bases. The Northern League does not have any justification for its existence, primarily because the Padania doesn't exist and never existed as a geographical entity.
It's just a party of contempt, hate, selfishness, a party of separatists who firstly gained robbing the lands of others, then gained exploiting the labor of others and then also claim to be right. League supporters would deserve to have a much poorer north, free from immigration, Southern and foreigner. But this will never happen because the truth is that even in the North they are just, overall, 19% of voters. A minority of populist hate, reactionary and ignorant, to which only the lack of scruples of Berlusconi gave disproportionate space.
Francesco Defferrari
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