Filth three

A very brief addendum to yesterday's addendum (I hope you're keeping up). I'm sorry to see that 8 million people ignored my advice and watched Nick Griffin on Question Time. Spineless as ever, I also watched an excerpt, but on the Guardian website so it may not count, given that the Guardian, like London, has been ethnically cleansed by decades of liberal readers. I wasn't impressed. Now I see that Griffin and his chums are complaining (in what Jan Moir would no doubt call an 'orchestrated campaign') that the programme wasn't 'fair'. Like most playground bullies, Griffin was the first to run to teacher complaining that the odds were against him, which usually means they were not actually in his favour. But the best bit was when he used the classic 'My Dad's better than your Dad' defence with Jack Straw. Griffin père apparently fought in WW2 (no, on our side) while Straw's father was a conscientious objector. Was this relevant? Not at all, unless you're a hate-mongering pseudo-patriot (so, in this case, yes). I'm surprised he didn't rub a bit of dirt on his knee and say he'd been pushed into the fence by Bonnie Greer.

Dressing up

A new 'security' law, which only looks like a knee-jerk reaction, is about to be passed here in Italy. Like most laws of this type, it protects - or is intended to appear to protect - the law-abiding citizen from the other, almost certainly not a citizen, who presumably ought to be abiding elsewhere, obedient to some other less-civilised legislation. One of the nastiest of the many nasty provisions in the new decree is that it allows citizens to gang up, don uniforms and strut around the place enforcing, you guessed, the law. This doesn't mean they'll be muscling their way into boardrooms or bank headquarters or mafia hideouts, after the real criminals. They just won't have time. They'll be too busy hanging round parks and council estates, patrolling the odd bus station in their fabulous outfits, a pot pourri of home-tailored Nazi fantasy gear (cue Prince Henry) with a touch of Tom of Finland for good measure. The cute little symbol at the top of the post is some nonsense that means a great deal to shaven-headed thugs who think they're the master race and absolutely nothing to the rest of us. But it might be worth memorising it. Because if the person who's kicking your head in has got one on his bicep, either tattooed or sewn on by his granny, you haven't got a leg to stand on (ouch!). He'll be legal.

Shit, scared

Ave fellow thugs

The back in the middle of this picture belongs to someone called Don Giulio Tam. He defines himself as an 'itinerant Jesuit' but he's actually one of the gang of break-away catholic traditionalists, headed by Lefebvre and recently re-admitted to the fold by Ratzinger. He looks as though he's calling for order or maybe directing traffic in this picture, but what he's actually doing is making a Roman salute, the kind Mussolini made fashionable all those years ago, to a group of right-wing extremists (sorry, Forza Nuova) in Bergamo. What with Archbishop Robinson et al, it looks as though, for the Vatican, blackshirts are the new black. 

These must be prayer sticks.

Sticks, stones, names

I'm linking to a post I started some days ago but only published today, which you might not otherwise notice. It's about the new security laws in Italy. Here it is. This is a subject I'll be returning to, I just know it.

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. 

Good riddance, Joerg Haider

For Mario Borghezio, a great European is dead. 

Trust the teller, not the tale. 

Football

You may have noticed the conspicuous absence of football from this blog. One of the funniest, and most shocking, moments at the start of each new academic year is the one in which I'm outed by students as someone who honestly couldn't give a shit about the sport. Not one shit. Well over 60% of Italians, regardless of age and sex, are overwhelmingly interested, on the other hand, and generally find it far easier to accept me as an atheist (which is actually no worse than being protestant) than as someone whose indifference to calcio is infinite. 

Having said that, I'm very interested indeed in football as a phenomenon (and, I admit, I'm often fairly interested in footballers as, well, fit young men in shorts). And so I've been fascinated by the political hoop-jumping occasioned by last weekend's episodes of violence as Naples fans trashed trains on their way to Rome to 'support' their team. It came as no surprise to discover that among the 'fans' to be arrested for vandalism and worse, far worse, were more than 800 convicted criminals, which, in Naples, means the Camorra. Add to these the numerous apologists of fascism, the most common gesture in the stadium being a raised arm, and it's a wonder Italy hasn't invented its own word for hooligan, instead of using ours.

It's a truism that politics and football are intertwined in Italy. It can't be any other way when the prime minister is also the owner of the country's biggest teams, routinely wheeled out at election times as though the entire team were not only his employees but testimonials to his political wisdom. It would be easier for a politican in Italy to express indifference to football than it would for an American candidate for president to announce that s/he was agnostic, or didn't believe in free trade except when it took American jobs. In fact, the line between religion and football is pretty permeable. Maradona, before becoming a pro-Castro, coke-snorting porkie, was up there with Padre Pio on the wall of every pizzeria between Formia and Salerno.

Why am I writing about this now? In response to the news that ex-Lazio player Paolo Di Canio wants to manage West Ham. Di Canio made a name for himself on the pitch not only as a footballer but as one of the most rabid supporters of Mussolini in a world where fascism is the norm. That's him in the picture, displaying his armpit. Just what West Ham needs.

And yes, I do remember where I was when England won the World Cup in whenever it was.1964?  Bored stupid in the back of the car as we drove home from a family holiday in Ventnor.

Racist lunatic arrested

Good news from Brussels (and how often do you hear that?), as one of the most laughably despicable figures in Italian politics gets picked up by police after attempting to take part in an illegal demonstration against the 'islamisation of Europe'. Mario Borghezio, the ranting turd to the right of the photograph, is a member of the Northern League and, to Italy's shame, a European MP. He became known some years ago when he began to disinfect the train seats used by black women so that Italians could sit on them without dirtying their nylons, an action that should have led to disgrace and political oblivion but, among leghisti, had the opposite effect. He's the kind of person you remember, and remember avoiding, from school: the playground bully who picks on the really really weak then runs to teacher for protection. He despises authority when he's preaching to the racist rabble who support him, yet invokes it the minute he's in trouble (you can enjoy the vision of him bending to knuckle-lick the pope on his rudimentary official site). He's all in favour of violent 'solutions' when addressing the mob, and was once arrested for having set fire to the shanty home of some Romanian immigrants during a torch-lit march, a fire from which the Romanians barely escaped with their lives (two months in jail, never served), but a snivelling crybaby if anyone slaps him. And as an Italian Euro MP, he's among the highest-paid politicians in the world. Poveraccio.

UPDATE: Diddles wasn't given a glass of water for five whole hours. Altogether now - Poveraccio.

She's mad for Jacko...

If you'd like to know a bit more about a certain Denise Pfeiffer, media consultant to Silver Ring Thing (see previous post) and erstwhile lingerie model, click here.

Believe me, you won't regret it. (And it's worth taking a good look round the rest of the Ministry of Truth site as well.)