Death and the state

Last December I posted on the case of Eluana Englaro, an Italian woman who had been in a state of vegetative coma for the past seventeen years, following a car accident when she was twenty. After years of legal to-ing and fro-ing, buck-passing and prevarication, her father, Beppino, finally obtained permission last July to discontinue treatment and allow his daughter to die, in accordance with her own verbally expressed wishes. 

When I wrote my post, the Minister of Welfare, Maurizio Sacconi, a man who had previously shown no marked religious inclinations, was threatening to close the clinic in which the treatment - a pharmaceutical substance providing nutrition and preventing dehydration - was to be withdrawn, despite the fact that Italy's supreme court, the Cassazione, had authorised its discontinuance. According to Sacconi, the state could neither condone nor authorise murder. In any case, said Sacconi, as the self-elected mouthpiece for the Vatican, Eluana's life belonged not to her, but to God.

Since then, and despite a public consensus that, perhaps surprisingly, ignored the anathema of Italy's increasingly vociferous pulpits and sustained Beppino Englaro's struggle, the situation has developed into one that threatens not only the right of one woman to die but the entire democratic structure of Italy, such as it is. Over the last few day, flying in the face of Italy's president, Giorgio Napolitano, and the warnings of constitutionalists, Berlusconi and his government have been involved in an attempt to improvise a one-paragraph law to 'save Eluana'. The attempt was interrupted by her death, yesterday evening, two days after treatment had been stopped, as a result of cardiac arrest.

It may be the case that some of the people who fought and shouted and legiferated for Eluana's body to be medicated and watered, washed and treated and turned two, three times a day, for her hair and nails to be clipped and her bodily wastes removed - it may be that some of them genuinely believed she was alive in some meaningful way, and that the right to die should be denied not only to the sentient, as is still the case in Italy, but also to the mindless larva Eluana had become. And there's a sort of sentimental absolutism about that position that might even be worth respecting if it weren't applied so readily, and so cruelly, to those who don't share such a belief and abandoned with such alacrity when the body in question is that of a pope or potential saint. 

It may even be the case that some of the religious figures who are now praying that their ever merciful God forgive Beppino Englaro - defined, with infinite understanding, as 'both judge and executioner' by the Vatican house organ today  - it may be that some of these cardinals and bishops actually believe in the sanctity of life so certainly, so irrefutably, that even the mechanical ticking-over of a body incapable of thought and emotional response is considered to be a life worth living, whatever the views of the body's owner, now irretrievable, and of those closest to them, their family and friends and loved ones.

But it certainly isn't the case that Berlusconi - who announced that Eluana was 'still able to have children' as though fertility and the ability to be impregnated were the final measure of a woman's value -  cared one jot about Eluana's right to live. And it certainly isn't the case that politicians like Gasparri and Mantovano, who, until a handful of years ago, belonged to a party that claimed direct descent from a regime that denied not the right to die but the right to live to hundreds of thousands of Jewish fellow citizens, and homosexuals, and communists, and gypsies, have the interests of Eluana Englaro in mind when they scream 'Murderer' at her father. 

Because it isn't the dignity of life that's being defended here, but the vulgar and unseemly - for want of a stronger word - interests of a caste. And when that caste, in its efforts to subvert the constitution and with the assistance of a power-obsessed clerical hierarchy, is prepared to take advantage of the lingering death of a woman and the suffering and civil conscience of her family, it isn't difficult to recognise who's standing on the moral high ground.

Seventeen years

Earlier this year I wrote a brief post about a man called Giuliano Ferrara. Ferrara really isn't that interesting, except as an over-exposed example of chronic brown-nosing that would take some beating even in Italy, and I wouldn't bring him up again if I didn't have good reason, believe me. But I mentioned the grotesque buffoon at the time because of his typically vulgar reaction to a court decision to allow Beppino Englaro to finally cease the forced nutrition and hydration of his daughter, Eluana, after seventeen years in a state of vegetative coma. That was 15 July.

Five months later, Eluana Englaro continues to have food and water pumped into her, against the wishes of her family and against the expressed wishes of Eluana herself, when she was in a position to express wishes. During these five months, Beppino Englaro has been forced to negotiate an obstacle course of such deliberate, appalling cruelty, masterminded by the Vatican and with the all-too-willing connivance of its representatives in the Italian government, on both sides of the political divide, if such a distinction makes sense any longer in a country in which the most basic democratic rules are flouted daily. A campaign designed to prolong the agony of a man whose only interest is his daughter, supported by some of the worst Italy and the catholic church has to offer, from Ratzinger to Binetti to Ferrara and their merry gang of fundamentalist hypocrites. The final straw came yesterday, after the Supreme Court had, once again, given the go-ahead for treatment to be stopped. Minister of Welfare, Maurizio Sacconi*, ex-socialist and with the moral apparatus of a sea-urchin, announced that government funding would be withdrawn from any clinic that dared put the court ruling into practice. This was greeted by some cardinal whose name I can't be bothered to look for as "a reasonable and sensible decision", immediately making him a candidate for slow rotting in his own hell. 

The latest news is that, after having sought legal advice, a clinic in Udine is prepared to, finally, satisfy the wishes of Eluana and her father, with a team of anonymous volunteers taking medical responsibility. 

*Sacconi's wife, in the meantime, is president of Farmindustria, the association that protects the interest of the pharmaceutical industry.

Sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me

I started writing this post over a week ago. This is what I said.

Italy took one more large step towards an effectively fascist regime the day before yesterday with the approval by the senate of a bundle of legislative measures labelled 'security'. They look like a knee-jerk reaction to recent acts of violence committed by 'foreigners', but this isn't the case for a number of reasons, which I'll talk about below. The measures are part of a xenophobic plan designed by the Lega to placate its electorate and, shamefully, supported by its allies in parliament in order to ensure the tenure of the current government. Perhaps 'plan' is too grand a word for the illiterate blatherings of Bossi and his gang of small-town bullies and petty bureaucrats from the imaginary land of Padania, but the effect they're likely to have is much the same as other 'solutions' dreamed up in the recent, and not so recent, past.

Italy is now the only country in western Europe in which a government minister (Bossi) can refer to immigrants as 'bingo bongo' and maintain, indeed reinforce, his position, and in which an MEP (Borghezio) can continue to be regarded as a politician after being convicted of criminal violence inspired by racial hatred. People seem to have become used to the presence of these people, which is the most worrying aspect of all, because indifference is precisely the humus that allows new laws of this kind to pass without protest, or sufficient protest. 

Let's take a look at the new measures. Immigrants who apply for a permesso di soggiorno (permit to stay) will be expected to pay a tax of between 80 and 200 euros for the privilege. Those without a permesso di soggiorno will be denied medical care, and any doctor or medical worker who provides it will have the right to report the patient to the police. The same goes for anyone who assists an illegal immigrant to send money home to his or her country. Citizens (Italian) will have the legal right to form bands to patrol the streets to protect themselves and fellow citizens from violence.

And then I gave up, nauseated, but also side-tracked by the Englaro case and the odd display of skewed values the two events seemed to reveal of Italy. The life of a brain-dead woman had suddenly become more valuable than that of the many hundreds of thousands of workers without whose daily contribution the Italian economy would grind to a halt. Eluana, it seeemd, had the right to live, the right to medical treatment about to be routinely denied Mohamed or Luis or Maddalena (except that, for Italian politicians, the only immigrants to have names are the ones who wipe their grandmother's arse or clean their shoes for them). And I was side-tracked too by the news that a Northern League mayor in the Friuli region had issued an ordinance that, alongside the usual ban on burkas, obliged all restaurants, including ethnic ones, to serve traditional Friuliano dishes, and by Wendell's post on a little financial incentive being offered by fascists in Basilicata to ensure that the names Benito and Rachele live on. In case you don't know, these are the first names of Mussolini and his wife, last seen hanging by their heels in Piazzale Loreto. And I thought, Look on his works, ye mighty, and despair. 

Vulgarity

Remember Giuliano 'Tubs' Ferrara? Obese man wobbling naked along a beach to rescue foetuses? Ex-communist, turned foot-servant/mouthpiece/toe-rag to Craxi (corrupt ex-PM, dead in luxurious Tunisian exile on the run from justice), then Berlusconi (currently rewriting the Italian judiciary system to avoid a similar fate), and now Ratzinger (I say no more). A man whose deepest instinct is to run to the support of the strong. His latest attention-seeking exploit is to ask people to leave bottles of water outside the hospital where a woman called Eluana Englaro has been lying in a vegetative state for the past 17 years. Her father has finally obtained permission to remove the tubes that have been providing the body of Eluana with food and water since a car accident in 1991. You'd have thought a little respect was due to a man prepared to fight for his daughter's right to die (something she did - to all intents and purposes - almost two decades ago). But you've have reckoned without Ferrara. A man for whom one family's tragedy is another's photo-op.

Still, it looks as though Tubs - after his mind-boggling failure to win a seat in parliament - has just scored another resounding own goal. At the last count, and despite TV news coverage to the contrary, no more than a dozen bottles of water had been left at the hospital. And most of those were half-litres.

Sardinia shafted

If you'd like to enjoy what's left of the natural beauty of Sardinia (see right) before the entire island is converted into a 'fitness centre' you'd better get a move on. That's right. Berlusconi's glove puppet just became governor. New boy Cappellacci is to Berlusconi as Medvedev is to Putin, so don't expect surprises. In fact, their relationship - in both cases - reminds me of a rather offensive joke about a bad ventriloquist who used to put his hand up his nephew's arse and tell him to keep his mouth shut. Except that Putin and Berlusconi are clearly considered rather good ventriloquists.

A few days before Eluana Englaro died, some gobby cardinal criticised polls indicating a substantial majority in favour of her death by saying that Italians weren't that stupid. He was wrong then, but he's been proved right now. 

(OK, the second picture's actually Dubai, but you get the idea...)