|
|
Deterring democracy in Italy Domenico
Pacitti talks to Noam Chomsky Pacitti:
Billionaire media magnate Silvio Berlusconi was recently elected
premier at Italian general elections despite a welter of serious
criminal accusations and conflicts of business and political
interests. It would appear that Italian electors are less
interested in moral issues and more interested in what they think
he can do for them. Chomsky:
Well, why do you think that’s different from Britain and the
United States? Pacitti:
That’s what I was hoping you would explain. Chomsky:
Well the answer is that it isn’t different. Pacitti:
Can you elaborate? Chomsky:
We had an election here a few months ago. Now, I don’t know
about Italy, but here the population is polled very extensively,
so we have a pretty good grasp of public attitudes. There is, in
fact, at Harvard a project called “The Vanishing Voter
Project”, which I hope tells you something. It does extensive
polling analysis to try to determine why the voters have been
losing interest in elections over the past twenty years. One of
the things they measure is the sense of helplessness, that is,
that you feel you cannot do anything that will affect the
political process. It hit a new high this year, far beyond
anything before. Right before the election about 75 per cent of
the population felt that there was no election at all, that it was
just some kind of game being played by rich contributors, party
bosses and the media. The whole public relations, or advertising,
industry was crafting candidates, training them to use certain
gestures and produce certain words that the research industry
showed might increase the number of votes. But they didn’t mean
what they said and you weren’t supposed to be able to understand
what they said and it was all meaningless, just some kind of
public relations game. Pacitti:
And do you feel then that what is happening in Italy is similar? Chomsky:
Well as far as I can tell it is very similar, but I don’t know
Italy as well as I know here. This is a tendency which was led by
the United States and Britain and goes back to the early part of
the century. It was very natural that it should be in more
democratic countries. There was a recognition back in the 1920s
– I think hitting other countries later – that you can no
longer control people by force. The countries were becoming more
democratic. The franchise was extending. The British Conservative
Party – we have their internal records – realised by the First
World War that there was no longer any way to keep the general
population out of the electoral system. They realised they were
part of a union that was going to be a broadening of franchise and
therefore they had to turn to what they call political warfare.
It’s called public relations, meaning propaganda, to try to
control people’s attitudes and thoughts and direct them to other
concerns and keep them all out of the political arena since you
could no longer simply control them by force. The same was done in
the United States. In fact, there was a huge growth of the public
relations industry right around that same time for the same
reasons. In the most advanced, more democratic societies, there is
good reason to believe that as a society gains more freedom,
propaganda takes the place of violence as a means to control
people. Pacitti:
Berlusconi is on record as having a list of criminal offences with
actual convictions. But because of the Italian law of statutory
time limitations he has not in fact served any of those sentences.
A recent book lists fourteen criminal cases against him. It
confirms that in the last decade he has received three prison
sentences totalling six years and five months for corruption,
illegal financing and false accounts. Chomsky:
By US standards that’s a triviality. Pacitti:
In 1990, Berlusconi was found guilty of perjury for denying his
membership of the P2 Masonic lodge, an anti-Communist organisation
which used Italy’s security services for political ends. His
conviction was one of many later annulled by a general amnesty.
Alleged US backing of P2 would appear to confirm what you’re
saying. Chomsky:
Exactly. Italy, as far as we know, has been the main target of US
efforts to undermine democracy since the Second World War. There
was great fear in the 1940s that the Left in Italy would win a
democratic election. In 1948 particularly, there was great concern
that the Left, which had a lot of prestige – I mean, it
supported the resistance against Fascism and those were important
things in those days, and it had backed labour unions – were
going to win the elections, and the US had plans. I don’t know
if you know this, but the National Security Council’s first
planning body, NSC1 [see the first, 1947 memorandum
in “History of the National Security Council, 1947-1997”] was
concerned with how to undermine democracy in Italy. That was
considered to be the problem at the time. And they concluded that
they could undermine democracy by withholding food – and I
don’t have to remind you that people were starving at that time
– reinstating Fascist police, which they did, undermining unions
and a whole variety of techniques of that sort were used. But then
it was concluded that if this doesn’t work, if Italy
nevertheless has a Left political victory, the US will call a
national mobilisation, will begin to support paramilitary
activities in Italy against the government. The National Security
Council won, and that continued until the seventies and maybe
beyond. I mean, we only know until the seventies because that’s
where the documents stop. That includes supporting P2. So the
effort to undermine Italian democracy goes back very far. Compared
with this, Berlusconi isn’t making plans to carry out military
activity to overthrow the government. What’s going on isn’t
correct, but in terms of the efforts to undermine democracy it’s
not a major thing. And it’s the same here. Clinton didn’t
happen to have a lot of trials for corruption. But just look at
his record. But look at Reagan’s record and just look at some of
the people in the Reagan administration [1981-89]. Pacitti:
There’s more than a suspicion here in Italy that Berlusconi
obtained heavy backing from the Sicilian Mafia at national
elections. Chomsky:
Yes, but where did the Sicilian Mafia come from? It didn’t arise
from nothing. The Mafia was, as you know, destroyed by Mussolini.
And how did the Mafia get reconstituted? It got reconstituted as
the American and British armies moved first through Sicily and
then southern Italy and the same in southern France and it was
reconstituted as an agency to undermine the resistance and
undermine the Left. Pacitti:
You’ve looked at the Italian question in some detail, then? Chomsky:
I haven’t done original research on it but I’ve reviewed it
with different sources. So, for example, in my book Deterring
Democracy, one of the chapters [chapter 11: Democracy in the
Industrial Societies], has something about the main, first project
of the United States and Britain after the Second World War, which
was to undermine the resistance against Fascism and to restore the
traditional system. Italy is discussed, and it’s also discussed
in a later book with new revelations. And there’s actually a
very good book which I review somewhere [World
Orders, Old and New, London, 1997]. It’s by an Italian
historian [Federico Romero, The
United States and the European Trade Union Movement 1944-1951,
North Carolina, 1989, 1992], who incidentally thinks it’s
fine that the Allied Forces should have “disarmed the resistance
and brought its Committee of National Liberation to order” on
the grounds that “free political and social movements always
inspired mistrust among the Allies” since they were “hard to
control”. Romero describes the efforts of the British and the
Americans to undermine the labour groups and the resistance
against Fascism in northern Italy. And he describes it very
positively, but he also describes it pretty accurately. Pacitti:
And the basis for this was established right after the Second
World War, right? Chomsky:
Yes – and not just for Italy. It was a worldwide phenomenon, the
same in Japan. It affected Japan, and a major study has just
appeared – it won the Pulitzer prize [Hirohito
and the Making of Modern Japan by Herbert P. Bix] – on how
the United States reinstated Emperor Hirohito after the Second
World War as part of the effort to support Fascism and undermine
the Left. It’s all over the world. Pacitti:
So traditional Italian forms of corruption are far less serious
than the US variety? Chomsky:
I’ll just mention one other example to convince you. In France,
right next door, we also had a powerful anti-Fascist resistance
and strong labour movements. The south was immediately hit with
one of the first activities, second only to Italy, to try to
undermine the unions and undermine the Left. And to do that they
restored the Corsican Mafia, in southern France, and that is the
source of the heroin traffic in the world. In order to pay them
off, they gave them the monopoly of heroin production. That’s
the same thing as French Connection, right? That’s where the
post-war drug problem originated. These are things that are
important. Simply take a look at NSC1 that I quoted. NSC1, the
First National Security Council memorandum, so very important,
calls for, as I say, if necessary, coercion – let’s say,
withholding food – and if that doesn’t work, to undermine the
election. The United States should call a national mobilisation,
but prepare for war, and should support the paramilitary
activities within Italy. Pacitti:
It follows from what you are saying that Berlusconi could have
been backed by the Mafia all the way along – and all the way
back to the US. Chomsky:
Yes, it was the US that had the Mafia reconstituted. And you know
that Mussolini destroyed the Mafia. Pacitti:
Indeed. So in Italy we’re just seeing half the story. Can I just
ask you one more thing relating to the Berlusconi issue? I know
you don’t like giving advice and no doubt you probably won’t
give me any advice on this, but there are plenty of radically
minded folk here in Italy who are wondering what can be done. Some
have taken to writing books in order to expose the full range of
Italian corruption and injustices, from Mafia and allegedly
Berlusconian forms to the more socially acceptable academic
varieties. I know you’ve placed the problem within a wider,
global context, but is there something else we could and should be
doing over here that we’re not doing and that goes beyond an
Italian context? Chomsky:
The answer to these questions is always the same no matter what
the issue is: there are no secrets that have been discovered in
the last couple of thousand years. In the case of Italy, it’s
certainly worth while bringing out the criminality, the Mafia
connections and so on – people should understand the fact. But
the question is: do they care about it? And now the big problem in
Italy as far as I can see is that people more or less know –
they may not know the details – but they don’t care about it. Pacitti:
And why do you think they don’t care? Chomsky:
They don’t care because they are under tremendous pressure –
this is not Italy but the world – to try to remove the
population from the political arena. That gets called neoliberal,
which has its core in Britain and the United States – again the
most advanced countries – but it’s spread all over, which is a
major effort to reverse what happened in the 1960s. What happened
in the 1960s was extremely frightening to international elites.
You see this very strikingly, and perhaps most strikingly, in The
Crisis of Democracy. Pacitti:
It was published in 1975 and was the first major study of the
Trilateral Commission founded by David Rockefeller. Is that
correct? Chomsky:
Yes. The Commission was an elite, a mostly liberal
internationalist elite, from Europe, the United States and Japan.
And it was mostly people like the Carter administration, which was
made up almost entirely from liberals, liberal in the American
sense of social democrats and internationalists. They were deeply
concerned about what happened in the 1960s around the world. What
they were concerned about was an increase in democracy, that is,
through the 1960s parts of the public which had usually been
apathetic and passive began to get organised and began to enter
the political arena and press their demands and so on. That
included women, working people, minorities, the elderly, in
general the large part of the population which was usually
passive. They began to enter and to encroach on forbidden
territory. The way the thing’s supposed to work is that the
political system is supposed to be in the hands of private
tyrannies, private power, and that was beginning to erode.
That’s the crisis of democracy. And what they said is that
there’s too much democracy and that’s no good, it’s a
crisis, that we have to have more moderation in democracy and we
have to restore people to passive apathy. They said that they had
to prove that they were worried about what they called the
institutions responsible for the indoctrination of the young –
their words, not mine. That means the schools, the officials,
media, the churches – they were not indoctrinating people, they
were becoming too independent and thoughtful, too active, and
something had to be done to reverse this, the crisis of democracy.
Since then there have been major efforts to restore people to
their marginal existence, and this takes many forms. One form is
what’s called minimising the state within the neoliberal
framework. So remove decisions from the public arena and back into
private hands, one or another form of privatisation. Another form
is the centralisation of financial authorities. So the European
central bank has enormous authority and it’s not accountable to
parliament. Still more important is the liberalisation of finance
since the 1970s, dismantling the Bretton Woods system.
That creates what economists call a virtual parliament and
you have to pay attention to what investors say or else they can
destroy the economy. And that restricts enormously what
governments can do. But right now there are extremely important
meetings on the general agreement for trade in services. And the
idea is to privatise services, services meaning anything the
government can do – education, health, etc. And the idea is to
liberalise, meaning open them to private competition, and that’s
got to mean private control. Pacitti:
This is exactly along the lines of what Berlusconi has in mind,
incidentally. Chomsky:
That’s exactly it. But let’s remember that this is a small
part of something going on internationally, trying to deal with a
major problem that arose because of the democratising process. And
it’s showing up all over the place and in an effort to undermine
the Left. You can no longer control people by violence in the
West. You can’t just throw them into a torture chamber. You have
to find other means. One means is propaganda. Another means is
rabid consumerism, to try to drive people into massive
consumption. In the United States the economy has suffered under
the neoliberal policies, as has been the case worldwide, and is
maintained to a high extent by consumer spending. Household debt
is now higher than disposable funds. And that’s good because it
traps people, and trapped into debt you can’t do much. You’ve
got to just work harder and try not to think about it. So from
infancy children are deluged by propaganda telling them: buy, buy,
buy, and so on. The same is done with countries. The Third World
is trapped by debt which was imposed by immense propaganda from
the IMF and the World Banking Organisation. These are devices to
try to control the populations and ensure that the private
tyrannies endure. So that’s what you have to do in times of
increasing freedom. Pacitti:
Do you think the only thing we can do here in Italy is to try to
make these things clear? Chomsky:
Try to help people see what’s going on. It’s not a matter of a
little corruption here and there. I mean, that’s true. It’s a
marginal part of it. And people are correct not to be very upset
about it. This guy’s corrupt, that guy’s corrupt. So what?
What’s much more important are the deeper systematic properties
which are concerned as always to try to control the population.
One of the founding fathers of the United States, Alexander
Hamilton, described the population as a great beast that has to be
controlled. As the
major framer of the Constitution, James Madison, put it, the
wealth of the nation must control what happens. Pacitti:
And do you think we should do this by continuing to write books
and articles? Chomsky:
We have to organise; we have to organise people. There’s no
point in books if they are just read by some academics.
It’s a different matter if they reach the general public,
and are part of organising efforts, for example, the kinds that
have led finally to international actions. Pacitti:
Would you agree that it’s at least worth writing about the
Italian component of the jigsaw? Chomsky:
It’s worth writing about it if it’s part of a more organised
effort. If you’re writing something for academic readers who are
reading in the library, that’s OK. It’s OK if somebody uses
it. But the main thing is to have it used. I mean, it’s like
doing science. Can we use it to advance understanding and inquiry,
or in ways that will benefit people? If so, that’s fine. Pacitti:
Many thanks, Noam. I’m sure that our readers will find your
comments, as always, both illuminating and stimulating. * Note: This interview was published by JUST Response on May 20 2002. It was first circulated in Italian and English by Terrelibere in February 2002 and a shortened version appeared in the May 2002 issue of Z Magazine. |
