Button up

The France Soir correspondent in Rome, Ariel Dumont, has just been sacked for being anti-Berlusconian. This isn't what the paper says, of course. The editor talks about the need to rationalise its overseas representation for reasons of budget and denies any pressure from the newspaper's owner. France Soir is controlled by 23-year-old Alexander Pugachev, the son of the Russian oligarch Sergei Pugachev, the 605th richest man in the world, ex-Chekhist and close friend of Putin. Berlusconi, by sheer coincidence, is also a close friend of Putin, in what passes for friendship among people of this sort.

By further coincidence, the newspaper has also sacked Natalie Ouvaroff, its Moscow correspondent, who has been less than gentle recently with the feisty bare-chested salmon wrestler from St. Petersburg, the man whose reputation may not be besmirched, or else. The dinky badge to the right, by the way, belongs to the KGB ans may once have adorned young Vlad's lapel, or wherever they used to wear these things.

Still, things could be worse. Getting the sack isn't much fun, but it's better than being shot in the head.

Sticks, stones, words, lawyers

That Berlusconi and his associates don't trust certain magistrates hardly needs repeating. But it's odd how much faith they put in the due process of law when they're trying to shut up someone inconvenient. SB's already brought cases against newspapers in Italy and abroad, so far without success, but that isn't as important as establishing that acts of criticism will lead to substantial, even crippling lawyers' fees to prove their legitimacy. Now one of his right-hand men, Renato Schifani, a Sicilian lawyer and the owner of one of the senate's most splendid comb-overs until the Forza Italia image police got their hands on him, has decided to take Antonio Tabucchi, the author of, among other books, Sostiene Pereira, to court for an article he wrote for L'Unità, the ex-PCI that's already being sued by his long-time boss, SB. Tabucchi, whose name often pops among Nobel candidates, has been accused of besmirching Schifani's character, something the man does perfectly well for himself whenever he opens his mouth. Presumably Tabucchi mentioned some of Schifani's former associates, usurers, Mafiosi and the like, and didn't stress firmly enough that a man should never be judged by the company he keeps. If that weren't the case, of course, we'd hardly need to dig into Schifani's no doubt crystalline past for proof of unwise associations. I'd have thought the hands of a man who lends his professional skills to keeping the half-pint Buffoon out of jail were already quite muddied enough.

PS The word Berlusconi wasn't recognised by the spell-check of the computer I'm using to write this. It proposed, as an alternative, Lusciousness and an adjective referring to conifers. His old chum, the self-exiled 'socialist' crook Bettino Craxi, produced similarly improbable results, including Praxis, Cranium and Craving. There's a thesis here...

Filth two

An addendum to yesterday's post about the holocaust denier who teaches at Rome's La Sapienza university. There's been a bit of a kerfuffle about it as a result of the Repubblica article, with the Dean threatening suspension and the ricercatore demanding liberty of expression, while claiming that what he thinks and what he teaches are two different things. The Billy Bunter defence option, in other words. Given the moral bankruptcy of much of the Italian academic world, riddled as it is with nepotism, corruption, plagiarism and sheer incompetence, it certainly isn't hard to believe that he thinks one thing and says another, though I'd have thought it was an odd line for someone whose subject is philosophy of the law to adopt. But the real scandal is not that one sad sack has some odd, and clearly indefensible, opinions, whether he keeps them to himself, or blogs his arms off about them, or spouts them to a classroom of university students. The real scandal is that the man moved from the university of Teramo to La Sapienza in 1991. Since then he's taught one course (in March 2009). The number of students on the course? One. One student in 18 years. In the UK, and I imagine the rest of the world, this might not seem that strange: a researcher is expected primarily to research and only secondarily to teach. In Italy, though, most researchers have significant teaching commitments, which help to disguise the dreadful paucity of their research activities in both quantitative and qualitative terms. This man, whose name I won't bother to provide - because to be googleable is to be alive -, has been receiving a substantial salary for at least 18 years. A friend of mine, who works at the same university, recently found herself teaching English to a group of more than 200 students. She has been teaching dozens of classes this size, and larger, since 1985, as a mother tongue language teacher, or lettore. Unlike ricercatori, lettori aren't considered part of the academic staff, so my friend probably earns less than half the amount our holocaust-denying chum does. I wonder what the Dean has to say about that.

Information in the free world

My thanks (or should that be thnaks?) for this to Cynical-C Blog. It's good to know that independent journalism is alive and well and educating its viewers in all corners of the free world. The hint of irony you may be able to detect in this remark has everything to do with the decision of the RAI to cancel a news programme called Ballarò (on Rai 3) in order to make room for a brown-nose-fest on the main channel to celebrate Berlusconi handing over the keys to the first houses to be built for the victims of the L'Aquila earthquake. Whether they want them or not. It will be interesting to see if Toady-in-Chief Bruno Vespa dedicates any air time to all those people who won't be housed yet a while, not to speak of those who would prefer not to live in factory-built 'ecohouses' in the middle of nowhere. But why spoil a good mood, especially if it belongs to the Capo?

By the way, those of you in Italy who feel like a day out on Saturday could do worse than spend it in Rome on the march to defend a free press in Italy. That's what I said. A free press in Italy. As Gandhi once remrked about western civilisation: I think it would be a good idea.

Shut yo' mouth, Part Two

Silvio Berlusconi has just taken the extraordinary step of suing Repubblica on the grounds that the ten questions the newspaper has been asking him (click to embiggen above or see here) since the Papi-and-Noemi shit hit the fan last February are 'diffamatory'. His argument, or that of his weasel-faced legal adviser, Ghedini, is that the questions are 'rhetorical' and designed 'not to obtain a response' from Berlusconi but to 'insinuate in the reader the idea that the person "interrogated" refuses to respond'.

This is the kind of casuistical horseshit lawyers are paid to produce - it ought to be clear to anyone that Berlusconi's refusal to respond is not an 'idea' but a fact - so we shouldn't be surprised. What is surprising is that Berlusconi should have chosen to kick up a legal fuss now, with Repubblica beginning to feel more and more like a voice in the wildnerness here, the RAI increasingly weakened by external and self-censorship and personnel changes, and his own house rags ever more virulently on the attack, slavering and snarling like cornered rats.

The last straw appears to have been a recent piece in which a number of articles from highly-regarded foreign newspapers are quoted, describing the man as a sex-dependent tin-pot dictator in the claws of the Russian mafia. SB, who continues to insist that he has brought nothing but lustre to the image of Italy abroad, a claim that would be laughable if it weren't so readily believed and repeated here in Italy, seems to have decided to try and clamp down on the right of Italian journalists to refer to the work of their colleagues in other countries, isolating the country even more.

In the meantime, the Viagra-riddled geriatric's plans to get a little Vatican cred by dining with some cardinal or other amid the rubble of L'Aquila have been blown away, possibly by Bossi's recent attacks on the Church, guilty of taking a soft line on immigration (!) and attacks on the Vatican-controlled publication Avvenire by the Berlusconi-controlled rag magazine Il Giornale. Let them fight it out among themselves, say I.

Shut yo' mouth

Earlier this year Freedom House placed Italy 73rd in its liberty of the press league table, classifying the country as 'partly free', a status it shares with Turkey, Burkina Faso and Haiti. This is hardly surprising, given that 80% of the population receives its information exclusively through television, almost entirely controlled, either institutionally (RAI) or personally (Mediaset), by the prime minister, Silvio 'Papi' Berlusconi.

It will be interesting to see what effect the refusal by the RAI to show the trailer of a new film, Videocracy, will have on next year's Freedom House tables. Made by Erik Gandini and distributed by Fandango, one of Italy's most courageous and culturally alert film distribution companies, the film looks at the the past thirty years of television in Italy and the sidereal shift produced in its cultural role by the growth and eventual dominance of Mediaset.

The RAI has refused to broadcast the trailer on the grounds that Videocracy is not really a film at all, but a political message, transmitting an unequivocable criticism of the government, a line of reasoning that would also exclude from the definition of 'film' the work of Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock, not to speak of Rossellini, Godard, Nanni Moretti, Ken Loach and a hundred others. The RAI, given its well-known 'pluralism' (as in blind subservience to power), has decided that showing the trailer would require a second trailer to be shown, of a film that presented the opposite political viewpoint. It's clear that such a film not only doesn't, but couldn't, exist without the retroactive cancellation of Mediaset and, oh joy, of Berlusconi himself.

What's more, recognising that most people know what they know from their TVs, it claims that, by linking the prime minister to the country's most important commercial television company, the film not only brings up the thorny, and unresolved, issue of conflict of interest - already a cardinal sin in post-free Italy -but also suggests that "by means of the television the government could orientate citizens' beliefs, influencing them in favour of the government and ensuring their consent". Well, duh, as Homer might say.

Mediaset, needless to say, has also refused to show the trailer.

Partiality

Italian state television has room for just one programme of investigative journalism. It's called, all'inglese, Report, and it's presented by Milena Gabanelli on the minority channel, traditionally controlled by the left in the political carve-up that characterises all aspects of Italian life, RAI Tre. Each week, the programme examines some area of glaring injustice in Italian life, usually establishing that responsibility lies with an unholy alliance of politics in the widest sense and organised crime. Not that it's always unholy; if there's a third element with its nose in the trough it tends to be the Vatican. During the last series, Gabanelli and her team investigated the 'social card', the Anglicism invented by Berlusconi and his finance minister, Giulio Tremonti, to describe a sort of pre-charged credit card to be issued to the poorest Italian citizens. It's not exactly money because it can't be used where the cardholder chooses, but only where it's accepted. It's also an extremely good way of keeping tabs on people's spending, which can't be a bad thing for the man who not only controls the government and much of the media but also has a large slice of the country's advertising under his sticky little belt. 

But the thrust of Report wasn't so much the essentially undemocratic nature of the card, or the fact that so few people were entitled to it and that, of these, even fewer had received it. It was that the creation and distribution of the card generates a substantial amount of more or less invisible earnings, and costs, for a variety of bodies, state and not, involved in the process. It's a bad, incompetent and possibly corrupt use of public money and whoever stands to gain won't be one of the nation's poor. This hasn't stopped Berlusconi patting himself on the back about it these past few weeks. It's just one of the ways in which, according to SB, Italians are rendered immune from the international economic crisis as a result of his quick thinking and Tremonti's even quicker fingerwork on the accounts. OK, there are the usual nay-sayers. But who, after all,watches Report? Certainly not PDL voters.

In the finance ministry, however, the programme has touched a more delicate nerve. Tremonti (ex-tax lawyer, specialised in fiscal evasion and with an office in Switzerland) has made an official complaint to the parliamentary commission responsible for keeping an eye on the doings of the RAI. He hasn't complained about the facts presented in the programme - he can't, because they're all true and supported by documentation. What's irritated him is the programme's 'philosophy'. Apparently the information presented is 'partial'. The interviews have been 'edited'. The aim of the programme is to discredit the economic policy of the government. This is unacceptable, given that the RAI exists to provide a 'public service'.Two thoughts come to mind. The first is that, while self-deluding politicians all over the world probably identify government policy with public service, few would express quite so clearly the notion that public service broadcasting should exist purely and simply as a medium for defending - indeed, extolling - the activities of the government in power. Try telling that to the BBC. The second is that one of the right-hand men of Berlusconi, a man who has made a gross and vulgar art out of lying to the public by providing 'partial' information and 'edited' versions of the truth with an almost Stalinesque panache, is in no position to accuse Gabanelli - or anyone else - of being biased. 

All hail, all hail

Two interesting news items in the Italian press today. The first says that Freedom House, which evaluates press freedom throughout the world, has classified Italy as 'partly free'. It's at 71st place, alongside Benin and Israel, a surprisingly high position given the parlously servile state of most Italian journalism. The other item is a no doubt independent poll on how much Italy adores its tinpot duce Berlusconi. His popularity rating is now at 75%, putting him higher than Obama and approaching the dizzy heights of unquestioning adulation enjoyed by, well, Kim Jong-il. Whose country, coincidentally, also does rather badly in the Freedom House charts.

Strano is as Strano does

The name of the caterwauling, gesticulating oaf with the slice of mortadella hanging from his lips is Nino Strano, the place - alas! - is the Italian senate. Nino Strano is insulting Romano Prodi and his supporters in the way that comes most naturally to a man of culture, by calling them 'faggots' and 'pieces of shit'. Strano says he has gay friends – I hope that's no longer the case. He lost his seat at the last election but has been chosen as a candidate, by Berlusconi, for the European elections later this year. Remember, in Italy, we don't get to choose who we vote for; that's the job of the party, which just knows better. We give carte blanche to each political party to make its own decisions about who should represent us. In his efforts to clean up his act defend his honour, Strano is threatening people who show this film, including YouTube and individual bloggers, with legal action. Which is why I'm posting it here. And which is why I'm asking anyone who reads this and also has a blog to post the same film. It's a small thing. But so is Nino Strano.

Press freedom in a democracy. Lesson one.

Dario Franceschini, the new PD leader, though probably not for long, suggested  a couple of days ago that the unemployed should receive some kind of indemnity payment from the government. I thought they already did, or at least had the right to do, but apparently I was wrong. There were vaguely positive murmurings from left and right, possibly because it looked like the kind of thing Obama might propose, so it's a bit of a vote-catcher and it never hurts to be associated with one of those. 

But Berlusconi immediately ruled the proposal out. Not because it was unfair, or because the funds weren't available. His argument, in pure Silvio fashion, was that it would encourage employers to sack people. These people would then pick up their dole cheques and be re-hired illegally at lower wages. What kind of brain does it take to come up with that kind of scenario? (Yes, this question is intended to be rhetorical.)

He also said that Italy is the only democracy in which state television criticises the government in power with impunity. (If only this were true.) He's obviously been taking lessons in democracy from Putin. Oh yes, his latest word on the economic crisis. He admits there is one, but insists that the media exaggerate it. Which media? Not, one assumes, the huge swathe of it owned or controlled by the grinning buffoon himself.

The Dark Ages

The home of Martin Rynja, the director of Gibson Square, which plans to publish The Jewel of the Medina, was attacked by Islamist arsonists yesterday. You can read about it here.

Announcing the publication of The Jewel of the Medina earlier this month, Mr Rynja said he felt such books were important in a liberal democracy. "If a novel of quality and skill that casts light on a beautiful subject we know too little of in the West, but have a genuine interest in, cannot be published here, it would truly mean that the clock has been turned back to the dark ages. The Jewel of the Medina has become an important barometer of our time," he said.

Gagging order

If you'd like to know more about the absurd case of satirist Sabina Guzzanti being prosecuted for "contempt of the pope" and, more generally, the state of freedom of speech in an increasingly myopic Italy, there's a very useful article in today's Guardian online. You can read it here.

Mug shot

If you've spent more than a few days in Rome you'll probably have left the traffic of Largo Argentina behind you and paused by the turtle fountain in Piazza Mattei and thought, for a moment, how wonderful it must be to live there and wondered how that might be possible, and smiled to yourself. You might have taken out your drawing stuff and sketched the way the boys reach up to guide the turtles towards the water, the turtles already free of the guiding hand. After which, on your way to the heart of the Ghetto along Via della Reginella, assuming - as I do - that you're book-lovers, you'll have paused a few dozen yards away, outside a bookshop to see what its trestle table has to offer. Usually, it's a rum bunch of history books, fiction, a sprinkling of philosophy, mostly, but not entirely Italian. You may have decided to see what else the bookshop has to offer and wandered in. If you've bought anything, which is likely - because you can't resist - you'll have met the bookshop's owner, Giuseppe Casetti, a tallish, slim man with long off-white hair and a slightly guru-ish air about him.

Casetti's a character. He's been kicking around Rome for decades in one form or another, usually, though not only, as a bookseller. He's an anarchic sort of figure, linked to a series of artists, and movements, and events, and organisations. He was a friend of Frances Woodman, the American photographer, who killed herself when she was 23, when he called himself not Giuseppe, but Cristiano; he's half-poseur, half-benefactor, poised between nostalgie de la boue and an eye for the main chance. He's dabbled in politics, and the art world, and made friends and enemies as people do. He's not as pure, or as radical, as he imagines himself to be - he's sentimental, for one thing, about the working class, and vain: I saw him at a Patti Smith concert some years ago in the Roman arena of Ostia Antica, swanning before the stage in a long white robe - but these are venial faults.

And now he's in big trouble. Some years ago, he bought a bundle of moulding photographs from one of the people he buys stuff from; photographs that, apparently, had been thrown away by the police, dating back to the 50s and 60s. All kinds of stuff: mug shots, booty. He sat on them for years, finally deciding to organise a show in the space next to his bookshop, the ironically-named Museo del Louvre. He called on an old friend, Achille Bonito Oliva, to write the catalogue. Bonito Oliva, logorrheic as ever, obliged, citing Warhol and Nam June Paik. The show was set to hit the road two days ago. An article appeared in la Repubblica to pave the way.

It paved the way for someone from the Ministry of Fine Arts and, hot on his heels, the police. The photographs have been seized, along with Casetti's computer and papers of all kinds. His entire stock has been confiscated, the shelves stripped, searches conducted behind them, as though the bookshop were owned by Al Qaida. Casetti is being treated like a criminal, interrogated, demeaned. I imagine that at some point they'll be taking his photograph, full face and profile. He's become the unwilling centre of his own show.

Casetti's not worth the effort the police appear to be putting into this case. It's as though some nerve has been touched. Official carelessness perhaps. Casetti's past as a flip-flopping fellow-traveller of the left. Culture, the great pretender, to which one responds with a gun. Bonito Oliva, convinced of the centrality of art and of his own centrality within it, sniffs a rat. He's going to be 'writing something about it.' In the meantime, a bookseller who has done nobody any serious harm, whose endeavour to keep alive an ember of modernism in a resolutely post-modern world is touchingly heroic, finds himself in a bookshop without a book.

Dear Editor

I thought I'd write to La Repubblica to point out that the rest of the world (pace the horrified wailing of the Italian media) is actually not that interested in Ratzinger's failure to show at la Sapienza. On the assumption that it won't be appearing in tomorrow's edition, this is what I wrote:

Contrariamente a quanto detto da quasi tutti i giornali e telegiornali italiani, la rinuncia del papa di presentarsi all'inaugurazione del anno accademico della Sapienza ha avuto pochissimo risalto nei media internazionali, almeno quelli di lingua inglese. L'assenza del papa, per motivi squisitamente politici, e lo scompiglio creato all’interno del mondo politico sono affari che riguardano il Vaticano e il governo italiano e poco altro. Meglio così? O l'amore proprio nazionale vuole che anche i piccoli disaccordi di famiglia attirino gli occhi del mondo intero?
(Contrary to what has been said by practically every Italian newspaper and programme, very little attention has been given by the foreign press to the pope's decision not to appear at the inauguration of the academic year of the Sapienza. The pope's absence, for purely political reasons, and the upset this has caused in political circles interest the Vatican and the Italian government and practically no one else. This is no bad thing. Unless, of course, Italian amour propre would prefer every family tiff to draw the attention of the entire world?)

If it isn't published, I will, of course, claim to have been censored. Even better, I might just withdraw the letter first and then claim to have been censored!

Red bull? Papal bull? Plain bull...

Thanks to the efforts of one humourless Sicilian priest (Father Marco Damanti, if you care), who's played the blasphemy card and scared Red Bull into compliance, you'll no longer be able to see this harmless advertisement on Italian television.

Never mind, you can see it here.

Free speech

In today's Guardian, Brian Klug makes an interesting point about the brouhaha surrounding the Oxford Union's decision to invite two fascists - who shall here remain nameless - to participate in a debate on free speech. He points out that if these two have a right to contribute to the debate then so has he, and so have you, and so has everyone else. And if they don't have a right, then that right can't be denied them.

So what are they doing there? Other than advertise the Union and its attention-seeking president, whose name I shall also not provide.

Italy rules OK. OK?

Two reminders yesterday that the autonomy of the Republic of Italy isn't a given.

One. Rome's court of assizes decided that there was no case to be made against the murderer of Nicola Calipari, the Italian secret service agent who was shot while helping kidnapped journalist Giuliana Sgrena leave Iraq. Who was the murderer? An American soldier called Mario Lozano. Whatever the truth behind the events of that night (and without a trial it's unlikely we'll ever know what happened), it's hard not to see this as an act of capitulation to the United States government.

Two. Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, Vatican's secretary of state, announced that people should 'stop it'. He was referring to Curzio Maltese's inquiry in la Repubblica into how much the Vatican costs the Italian state. The most recent instalment, published a few days ago, looked at the ora di religione, obligatory in all Italian state schools although not for students, who can, if they or their parents wish, opt out. This isn't as easy as it sounds. The hour of religion (i.e. catholicism) is always timetabled mid-morning, rather than at the start or end of the school day; those students who choose not to take part - some of them as young as six - are usually told to 'wait in the corridor'. Alternatives? There are no alternatives. Comparative religion? Stop it!

This is already bad enough, in a country which now has half a million children from other countries and cultures in its public educational system, not all of them catholic. What's worse is the way the teaching of the hour is financed. Religious teachers are chosen by the local bishop, side-stepping the time-consuming and exhausting obstacle race of national competitions all other teachers have to undergo. They're paid, though, by the state, and their salaries cost something like €1 billion a year; in terms of occult financing to the catholic church, this is second only to the otto per mille scam I've posted about before. Not only that - they have tenure in a country where a significant part of the teaching is conducted by precari, teachers, often in their forties or fifties, who struggle from short-term contract to short-term contract, their holidays unpaid, their pensions rights undermined, their chances of a mortgage or bank loan seriously restricted.

Finally, as salt in the wound, they're actually paid more than their equivalent non-religious teachers, as a result of laws passed more than 25 years ago, laws that are still being contested in Italian courts by their lay colleagues.

No wonder Bertone wants Maltese to shut up.

Just in case you haven't already come across it, I've linked to the site of MediaWatchWatch. This is what it's all about:

MediaWatchWatch was set up in January 2005 in reaction to the religious campaign against the BBC's broadcasting of Jerry Springer: the Opera.

We keep an eye on those groups and individuals who, in order to protect their beliefs from offence, seek to limit freedom of expression. And we make fun of them.

If you have any information, email The Monitor.

---

Rant and let rant?

I was recently forwarded this.

We all have to sign a petition to force Google to remove from their websites lists the website:
http://www.jewwatch.com

This site is devoted to anti-Semitism, hate of Jews and so, with false articles and researches.....It is one of the first website appearing when searching Jew on Google!

To force Google to remove this website, we need to gather at least 500,000 signatures.

We already got 272,000 signatures. We need 200,000 more!

Please sign the petition at: www.petitiononline.com and spread it to all your friends.

I haven't clicked on the site, which sounds not that dissimilar to the numerous hate-fests that riddle the web, directed at pretty much any definable minority from Roma to gays to liberals and visited, one imagines, by people who already share the views expressed and enjoy the sizzle of seeing them on their screens and of feeling they belong to their own grubby little tribe.

Certainly, it makes me uncomfortable to think that it should appear so quickly on Google searches. But it makes me even more uncomfortable to find out that half a million people can render a site effectively invisible by forcing Google to take it off their listings. Censorship is a double-edged weapon and I'd be very worried if, having used it to remove this undoubtedly loathsome site from circulation, it were then used against, say, Joe.My.God or any of a thousand other sites or blogs that represent ideas unacceptable to large swathes of the public. It surely wouldn't be difficult to find 500,000 rabid homophobes only to happy to sign that kind of petition.

In the long run, it seems preferable to let the ranters rant than to lose the chance to express our own opinions and beliefs without being hounded into obscurity.

Freedom is as freedom does

An interesting article in today's Slate about bloggers' rights and the recourse made to British libel laws by those who feel that a post has caused them scorn, derision, social alienation, or loss of face with "right-thinking" individuals. Johann Hari, the journalist who supported the war in Iraq and then, er, didn't, and Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov, part owner of Arsenal, have both called in lawyers to defend what they fondly imagine to be their good name against impertinent commentators. The good news is that it hasn't worked. They might have been able to close down individual sites but the cause has been taken up by other bloggers and both Hari and Usmanov are now seen as enemies to free speech. This might be water off a Russian oligarch's back but it can't be welcomed by a liberal journalist.