Dietrologia and buonismo

Of course I read the Italian papers online this morning as I do every morning; in fact, the news of Osama bin Laden's death first came to me through La Repubblica. I read the news, editorials and comments. The comments section show that copious Italians doubt that Osama was killed, others (with the Vatican) maintain that he should have stood trial and that no one should rejoice for a death.

Well, I'm rejoicing. The Italians I am referring to exhibit two characteristics that are not rare in Italy: dietrologia and buonismo. The first is loosely a kind of conspiracy-theory view of the world, the second a view that if we were all just nice to each other everything would be just fine. Needless to say, these two isms are often used against the US. To wit: respectively, the US lies and is a fraud; and the US is evil, violent and warmongering and the world would be fine without it (and the Jews, of course).

The two characteristics have the little shortcoming that they do not adhere to reality. Others may lie and dissemble, but that doesn't mean that you are a priori honest and objective and all-knowing. Obama may be lying, I don't wholly discount that possibility- but he has more cred than the average guy with his limited sources of information and his axes to grind. As for the buonismo, anyone past the age of 25 who still thinks human nature is benign and the world by default is a sort of Eden deserves a good ole swift kick.

Update May 4, 2011- There's an interesting blog post on today's Repubblica which attempts to counter, or at least question, the opinion (and it isn't only the Italians who have said this) that Osama should not have been executed. The journalist Franceschini reminds his readers that toward the end of WWII Mussolini and his mistress were summarily executed by the Resistance, then exhibited at a gas station in Piazzale Loreto in Milan (you can see the picture here), hanging upside down. Yet the Italians trace the foundation of their Republic to the events surrounding this (the taking of the Milan), so much so that the 25th of April (which just passed) is a national holiday. I am often disconcerted by Italians' forgetting (or even worse, selectively remembering) their past.

My own mind went back to Hitler and the unsuccessful attempts to assassinate him. Who would not rejoice at such a successful attempt?

An Italian looks at WWII

Have you ever heard the expression "I can't say enough about x person or x thing"? Well, this is a case in point. Except that I can't say enough bad things about Roberto Rossellini's Paisa'.

The movie is part of a three-film Criterion collection, called The War Trilogy, somewhat pretentiously. The two other films are Rome: Open City and Germany, Year Zero. Both of which I had already seen. So I saw Paisa' last night, and I'm still angry. Seldom have I witnessed such bad faith in cinema, a medium I love and consider an art to all effects.

The film is a neo-Realist treatment of the Allies' advance up the Italian peninsula, from debarking in Sicily in 1943, on through Rome and central Italy, ending up along the Po river in the North. One word describes it all: anti-Americanism. With a dash of anti-British sentiment for good measure- to the extent that he considers the British at all, almost as if they had nothing to do with the liberation of Italy, as opposed to the uniformly heroic/modest/effective/salt of the earth partisans.

The story is told in six episodes. In two of the six episodes, one third of the movie, there are two GI protagonists who are so drunk that they literally fail to recognize Italians they previously had extensive dealings with. Besides drunkenness, the GIs are ungrateful to the helpful and cooperative populace (what happened to all the Fascists?) as in episode I, prejudiced and dismissive (calling the Italians Eye-ties and Paisan), corrupters of women (in six months, Roman women go from being sweet and innocent to being seasoned whores), coarse, loutish, and none too bright.

The only American who is positively portrayed is a Catholic chaplain who is being hosted in a monastery, where the monks are in crisis about the presence of two heathens in their midst, namely, a Protestant and a Jew. Especially (you guessed it) the Jew. The good(?) brothers decide to fast at their common meal for the salvation of the souls of the two heathens. The finale of the episode, which left me incredulous, has the Chaplain thanking the brothers for their lessons in serenity and peace and all that good stuff. Hell, I could be serene and peaceful if I lived in a monastery, too. How convenient for a bunch of males to live in a monastery in times of war. And how absolutely distasteful that Rossellini presents these anti-Semitic monks (and by extension, the Catholic Church) in an angelic light, exactly one year after Nazi-Fascism practically destroyed European Jewry. With the non-intervention of Pope Pius XII.

And what did the Brits do as the battle was raging? According to the middle episode, they sat on a hill with their binoculars observing Florence from a distance and chatting about its monuments in a snotty voice, as if they were tourists, while the Fascists and heroic partisans fought it out. Read: it was really the partisans who liberated Italy. Many, many Italians still believe this pathetic lie to this day.

And as if that slap in the face to perfidious Albion wasn't enough, a later episode has an American OSS man bark: "these people [the Italians] aren't fighting to defend the British Empire, they're fighting for their lives." Yes, folks, the Brits fought WWII as an imperialist war to defend their empire. And they never had to fight for their lives. Unless we wish to remember Hitler's Blitz in 1940-1941, when the Italians were still squarely behind Il Duce because they thought he might still win. Oh, and while we're at it, have we forgotten Mussolini and his (attempts at) empire and war-mongering? And make no mistake: most Italians were solidly behind Mussolini, just as most Germans were behind Hitler, his ally.

After I saw this incredibly dishonest and opportunistic film, which attempts to suck in spectators by its pseudo-realism and sentimentality, I looked at the director's bio. How did he get started in film? Why, he was a friend of Mussolini's son, Vittorio Mussolini. And he made Fascist propaganda movies. Plus ca change, Roberto.

(In the photo, a dumb, drunken, selfish, big GI with a clever, sober and noble little Italian)

Word of the week- statunitense

Our word of the week, statunitense, simply means "American." Why another word (and an ungainly one at that) to describe our national identity? Especially when the much more common "American" is flatteringly taken from an Italian, Amerigo Vespucci?

On the face of it, this is done to avoid confusion with other peoples of the American continent, north and south. But in my vast experience the people who use it most have an ideological ax to grind, which is not at all uncommon in Italy. The use of the unlovely statunitense (Unitedstateser) serves as a reminder that we in the United States are not the only Americans. This is true, as we can see by the endless flow of other Americans entering the US daily. And it serves as a reminder that we are no more important or influential than other inhabitants of the hemisphere. This is simply not true. As a nation, we are more important or influential and it is simply wishful thinking to deny this. Not (necessarily) better: more powerful.

Other things to remember about the related language aspects: americano, like all other nationalities and languages, is lower-case. The plural is gli americani, or gli statunitensi, if you must. The abbreviation of "gli Stati Uniti" is "gli USA," because "United States" is plural (as it once was here, until the nineteenth century.) The country name thus takes a plural verb in Italian.

Roberto Saviano writes a bad article

What's gotten into this guaglione? He is celebrated and admired as one of Italy's foremost mafia-busters, the author of the best-selling Gomorrah, an expose' of the despicable Neapolitan mob known as the Camorra.

Now, it has become increasingly clear to me that people are not rational. Still, you think that there are islands of rationality here and there.

But more and more, in my humble veggie way, I've started to wonder.

So a few days ago I read Roberto Saviano's short op-ed in the New York Times about the revolt of some African immigrants in a small southern Italian town by the name of Rosarno. The hideously exploited immigrants got pissed off and rioted.

Now, enter our boy Bobby. He pens an article calling the put-upon Africans "heroes." And he makes an implicit analogy between the current African immigrants to Italy and the former Italian immigrants to the United States:

"Italy is a country that’s forgotten how its emigrants were treated in the United States, how the discrimination they suffered was precisely what allowed the Mafia to take root there. It was extremely difficult for many Italian immigrants, who did not feel protected or represented by anyone else, to avoid the clutches of the mob."

Yo, Bobby. This is extremely wrong-headed. The various mafias preceded immigration. The United States did not produce the Mafia, but (some) Italians brought it here. Most people who are poor and exploited do not give in to organized crime. They do not even give in to disorganized crime.

Thus, what Saviano has said (and he isn't the first) is a disservice to the majority of poor and oppressed people throughout the world who do not resort to wrongdoing.

Today is April 25th

Today is April 25th. So what? Well, it's a national holiday in Italy. What does it commemorate? The liberation in Italy in World War II. So what happened on that day to mark the liberation of the Italians? The taking of Milan by the partisans (the Resistance).This naturally implies that Italy was (unwillingly) under the subjection of Germany and that it was then self-liberated by Italians.

The interpretation is so ingrained in the country that I myself had not noticed it until my father, a career American Army officer who was drafted right after Pearl Harbor, pointed out its fallacy. Its glaring fallacy. Italy was a willing ally of Germany and there was a vast consensus for Mussolini. The Resistance started up in earnest after the Allies' debarking in Sicily in 1944, followed shortly by D-Day in France. I do not call it principle when you jump on the bandwagon. I call it opportunism, which is the opposite of principle.

Further, the claim to having liberated Italy was hijacked by the then Communists. This is also not a historical fact, as the Resistance, such as it was, was not merely composed of Communists. There were also Catholics and others. While I do not think the Resistance was a myth as some maintain, I know that it did not liberate Italy (or France), and that the vast majority of Italians went along with the Fascists. They turned against Mussolini viciously because he lost, not because they thought he was wrong. He was summarily executed on April 28th, and his body and the body of his lover Claretta Petacci were strung up by the feet at a gas station in Piazzale Loreto (above), in Milan, where the corpses were jeered at and vilified by the people.

This reminds me of the often-quoted saying of Santayana, that those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In this case, they never perceived the facts correctly in the first place. It's hard for me not to connect the present sorry state of Italy to this ongoing, fundamental distortion. But then, there is no word in Italian for "insight."

More on anti-Americanism

Karl Kraus was known to have said (naughty man): "psychoanalysis is the mental illness it purports to cure."

As you know, my long (probably too long) experience in Italy has opened mine eyes to the aberration that is anti-Americanism. I can thus paraphrase that bad boy Karl and say: "anti-Americanism is the mental illness it purports to cure." How is that?

Anti-Americanism is a mental illness, in the sense that it is a thoroughgoing, systematic structure held up not by reality but by irrational, private needs. Its equivalence with its "enemy" is shown by the fact that its impulse is aggression, destructiveness, the very impulse it accuses Americans of. In other words, anti-Americanism is hatred and the consequent need to destroy.

How bad was this bad boy? Another quote: "The trouble with Germans is not that they fire shells, but that they engrave them with quotations from Kant." The Eggplant laughed its head off when it read this, being a former philosophy student.

Anti-Americanism in Italy

Anti-Americanism in Italy has a long, undistinguished tradition. It has historically been present both on the far end of the political left and right, both of which have been very strong in the country in the last century. The Vatican itself is often anti-American. This is a part of its traditional role of opposing secular power, and since we are the secular power now, it sends us oblique messages deploring our wealth and military might. Among other things.

The phenomenon is somewhat more subtle than in other countries. This is also due, I think, to the fact that Italy has a long, long history of foreign occupation by just about everyone, to which they have more or less adapted. Note the proverb: Francia o Spagna, basta che se magna (France or Spain, as long as we can eat). And the Pax Americana has definitely allowed them to eat more and better than in the bad old pellagra days. Further, not to be sentimental, but the relatively recent immigration patterns from Italy to the US ensure that many have a "zio d'America" (American uncle). Much harder to hate your own flesh and blood, at least in a wholehearted and not ambivalent way.

What this means to you, as a prospective American tourist, is that you are not going to be subjected to the frontal onslaught. But as a concomitant of their old civilization and the need to co-exist with foreigners, not to mention the very large role tourism and exports play in the economy, they have developed a good deal of duplicity in this (as in so many other areas). As an American who is half-Italian, speaks Italian without an accent and looks Italian, I can tell you that what many Italians think about America is not very pretty. More on this later.

(above right, truculent, tattooed type with sign saying in the dialect of Vicenza: Americans, you're only good at damage)

What it means to be an American

This is the title of an essay by James Baldwin, one of his very best.

You may ask, why are you addressing this in a blog ostensibly dedicated to Italy? Because, as you may have heard, and as I found out as a half-Italian American in twenty years in Europe, there is no better way to reveal your own identity than by going outside it. Talk about the compare and contrast questions we had in school...

The Fourth is also upon us. No better time then to initiate a dialogue on one of my most important experiences in the Bel Paese, the experience of anti-Americanism. Over the course of many posts, I will be exploring this phenomenon, which I find pervasive, dangerous and untenable.

For starters: how not to be an American. And here we come to another regolamento dei conti (organized crime-speak for settling accounts). Ray Drake of Davids Medienkritik, a German-American blog whose purpose is to expose and fight anti-Americanism in the German press, got severely bent out of shape by my playful but accurate comparison of one of his posts to the mindset of one Benito Mussolini. He censored the post, and then invited me to start my own damn blog if I wanted to make such "slurs" upon his character (such as it is). So there you go, Ray.

Davids Medienkritik is undoubtedly useful in bringing out a particularly virulent and unexpected form of anti-Americanism, the anti-Americanism of Germany. But he does it in the wrong way, the way of counterpropaganda. The opposite of propaganda is not counterpropaganda, but the truth. In the absence of the truth, which is a tall order, let us have the conditions and the mindset to allow a free dialogue. These are absent from DMK. There is an ultimately alienating phony consensus and sameness. It is no coincidence at all that the blog has an unmistakably right-wing drift. This impairs its credibility and its efficacy.

Better to go with Baldwin, and his subtle and soul-searching ideas on being an American. Sorry that I'm not able to provide a link for this essay; apparently not everything is on the Internet.