Mind your language

Productive dialogue is relatively easy among equals, perhaps because it's supported by a kind of openness that occurs when no one feels under threat and when the basic aim of the dialogue - greater understanding, a solution amenable to all - is shared. It can still be adversarial; productive dialogue isn't bland, but challenging. It challenges the listener to do at least half of the work, and often more; it recognises that speech that isn't attended to, and elaborated in silence, might as well not be spoken.

But when people feel that equality isn't there as a condition of dialogue, its nature changes. The lesser partners in the dialogue feels that insufficient attention is being given to them and their words. There's a sense of exclusion and people who feel excluded no longer trust the value of what they say. They start to shout, and interrupt, gesticulate. They become ill-mannered in order to attract the other's attention, while the other takes for granted that whatever he or she says will not be challenged, and begins to dictate. The dialogue is no longer collaborative, or even adversarial, but belligerent and oppressive. We see this happening all the time in the political arena. The people who feel powerless turn up the volume, and the volume of invective. They start to call their opponents Nazis, or faggots, or the Antichrist. The louder the noise gets the less those in power make the effort to listen. This is a paradigm of unequal dialogue.

OK, lecture over. Because what interests me is that, right now, the situation in Italy has reversed this paradigm. Berlusconi has an absolute majority in both houses of parliament, almost total control over national television, the most important means of communication, etc. yet he's behaving like a teabagger on the White House lawn. His language is consistently that of the underdog, rendered hysterical through deprivation. His opponents are, variously, communist, subversive, most recently farabutti (common crooks). This isn't the language of a man in power. This is the language of the dispossessed and the desperate.

He isn't the only one to indulge in this sort of degraded rhetoric. Renato Brunetta, minister for public administration (see picture), started his spell in office by accusing state employees of sleeping on the job, calling them fannulloni (layabouts). (I'll be looking at Mr Brunetta's lack-

lustre performance as consulente and university professor in a later post. For now, let's just say he has much to be modest about.) A few days ago, he decided to go one better than the boss and announced that the opposition in Italy was under the hegemony of an elite di merda (which needs no translation), an elite that deserved to morire ammazzato (to be murdered).

Perhaps the sort of bullying populism that SB and his government have ridden to power on makes such language necessary. In the meantime, the opposition, to whom nobody listens, measures every word.

Watch out! There's a magistrate about!

If anyone needs to be reminded just how fragile supposedly democratic states can be, a story in yesterday’s Repubblica is exemplary. It describes the plans being drawn up by the Italian secret services soon after Berlusconi’s electoral victory in 2001 to protect the new prime minister and his government from the possibility of a coup. Nothing strange about that, of course; it’s what secret services are for.

But the coup from which the half-pint Duce needed protection had nothing to do with tanks or the seizure of means of communication. No marches on the Quirinale or shootings at dawn. This coup—according to documents found by Milanese magistrates in the offices of the wonderfully named Pio Pompa (Yes, Pious Pump or Pomp, as you prefer), an official at SISMI, Italy’s MI5—was going to be masterminded by magistrates scattered across Italy (Milan, Turin, Rome and Palermo), with the help of international organisations committed to the fight against fraud and corruption.

These magistrates were suspected of trying to besmirch the name of Italy’s new leader for subversive political motives. They would do this by investigating “aggressively” his financial dealings in Italy and abroad. Interestingly, the documents don’t suggest that these magistrates would need to invent anything; the evidence of Berlusconi’s corruption and fraud simply had to be found and made available for the reputation of the new PM, such as it was, to be reduced to tatters.

The documents also suggest that an eminence grise, ex magistrate and now politician on the centre-left, was the brain behind the coup, although the details are worryingly confused here, as they are on most points. The coup would be combated, if necessary, by what the documents refer to as “traumatic actions” on the part of the secret services, to be carried out before the middle of September 2001. "Traumatic actions" organised or condoned by SISMI in the past are believed to have included murders, bombings and terrorist attacks.

SISMI, in other words, was prepared to act—subversively—against magistrates conducting legitimate investigations into the business activities of a man who was already the subject of legitimate investigation in other European countries (France, Spain and the UK). A man whose entire career was—and remains—littered with unresolved questions concerning his ties with the Mafia, freemasonry and political corruption.

Maybe this shouldn't surprise us. A few days ago at the celebration of Republic Day in Rome, the disgraced Tax Police chief, Speciale, made a point of walking across to Berlusconi, saluting him and saying: "Agli ordini, Presidente".

Democracy derailed

George Bush says that democratic reform in Rusia has been derailed. You can understand why he's worried. Rigged elections and the illegal disenfrachisement of voters. Prisoners held for years in subhuman conditions without trial. The economy held hostage by a gaggle of semi-legal oligarchs. The ever-growing threat of religious fundamentalism. Constant attacks on basic human rights. Global warming rampant and no political will to curb it.

And that's just the USA! Imagine what Putin's up to...

Berlin, Belfast, Baghdad...

Good fences may make good neighbours, as Robert Frost said, but there's little doubt that the building of a 12-foot-tall wall through the middle of a city is an indication of something more destructive than a desire for neighbourliness. Yet that's what the US army is doing in Baghdad. Its purpose, according to a press release from Camp Victory, is to "protect the largest predominately (sic) Sunni neighbourhood in east Baghdad. The wall is one of the centrepieces of a new strategy by coalition and Iraqi forces to break the cycle of sectarian violence."

A venture that begins with the stated aim of introducing democracy to a country and ends up by dividing its capital into two by night has clearly lost its way. Sorry. Changed strategy.