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Thursday, August 04, 2011

Domenico Pacitti talks to Indro Montanelli

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Pacitti: Do you think things can change for the better?

Montanelli: I’ve now lost all hope. In this country I’ve already seen too many transformations that ended up transforming nothing. I am the age I am, so I saw fascism – I saw it all. When we were very young – I was just 12 – we grew up with the conviction, which later turned out to be illusory, that we could do something worthwhile and that we could even make something worthwhile out of fascism. Slowly but surely we all became outcasts, because fascism came into being as totalitarianism and became a parody of totalitarianism. It wasn’t even a serious undertaking. It became serious for other reasons when Italy went to war, but it was really a farce. It got called totalitarianism, but it was totalitarianism Italian-style and therefore something negotiable. Everything was negotiable. Then, when we lost all hope in this regime, we went back to democracy. We were still very young even then and we saw this democracy transform itself into a partitocracy, that is to say into a mafia system. You see, Italy always predominates over everything it does in the name of myths and sacred things and then it corrupts them. It corrupts them and renders them parodies. You give Italy Jesus Christ and you get the Roman Catholic Church. I’m not sure if I’m making myself clear here. I mean, there’s nothing you can give Italy that doesn’t at once become a parody of what you give it. And so this means that there’s something in our blood.
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Pacitti: Yes, there’s quite a collection of axioms whose function seems to be to preserve the status quo, discourage people from challenging convention and prevent counter-arguments from ever getting off the ground: “We’re all sinners”; “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone”; “Don’t be a moralist”, and so on.

Montanelli: Yes, it’s true. The Church is responsible for this.

Pacitti: Some of our readers might be wondering how it is that a country with the Vatican at its centre can have this sort of problem.

Montanelli: Well the Church never has conscience problems because it is the Church itself that resolves the matter. The Italian sinner certainly doesn’t have any remorse, because once he has confessed his sins he is at peace with himself again. That’s the way it is. But this doesn’t apply to everyone. Italy too has its exceptions.

Pacitti: And this obviously doesn’t just apply to practising Catholics.
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Montanelli: Look. In line with Freudian reasoning, the great desire of Italians to enter Europe is the hope of becoming a European colony. So the idea is – bring your laws to Italy, tell me what they are and impose them on me. That’s what it’s all about. Nobody says this, but that’s the way it is. The reason is that we have long since lost all hope of being able to solve our own problems. We are incapable of making a true reform, absolutely incapable. So we hope a German legislator will come along with a regiment behind him and impose the reform by kicking it into us.
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Montanelli: Not really. I have always turned my back on Italian culture. From the very first moment I became a university student I had an overwhelming feeling of rejection for Italian culture and also for the language in which it was written. I found that it was a mission that had betrayed its duties, and the duty of a culture is a missionary duty of mixing with people and propagating culture. If it does not do this, then what does it do? That’s when I realised that it was a mafia. And it was a mafia which confronted me with the choice: Either I enter the mafia, in which case I can aspire to a university chair, etc. If I don’t enter the mafia, then these people will crush me. They didn’t get the chance to crush me because I escaped by choosing the path of journalism.
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Montanelli: Look. In Italy we believed – not me personally but this new political class that followed the universal flood of Bribesville – that in order to simplify political life, in order to reduce it as in Britain it would be best to have just two parties. One was the majority governing party and the other the minority opposition that would have to wait its turn. They thought that a single new law, the majority law, would suffice for this purpose. Well we did it, we introduced the new law and on paper Italy is divided not into two simple parties – that would have been too much to ask – but into two blocks of parties: the centre-right and the centre-left. Now within both the centre-right and centre-left the old parties have been reborn. Rather, they have multiplied. We now have forty-two. And what do you do in a stable majority that has forty-two wandering parties that ally themselves with one party one minute and with another the next?
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Montanelli: The 1947 Constitution was drawn up as a mark of hatred for a dead man. It was a constitution that was in polemic with fascism, which was dead. Fascism had given rise to an absolute prevalence of executive power over legislative power. It was the government that commanded because Mussolini was in control and parliament counted for nothing. In order to reverse what Mussolini had done with fascism, they did the opposite. That is, they gave all the power to parliament and stripped the government of all its power. And that’s how what was born was born. Well, you can’t draw up a constitution in polemic with a dead man. It’s sheer madness. But if you said those things at the time – and I said them – you were considered a fascist. They said we wanted to perpetuate the fascist system. So what was to be done? To reduce and simplify Italian political life is the silly prejudice of poor dreamers who have no contact with reality. The Italian reality does not allow this. It simply does not allow this. If you create two blocks, the same parties you wanted to abolish are reborn within them. And here they have been reborn exactly as they were before. So what are we changing in Italy? In order to change Italy you would have to change Italians. And who can do this? Where are the powers?
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Montanelli: We have a political madhouse that nobody can understand. There is the constant fundamental desire to paralyse executive power. The Italian I like is the anti-Italian – the only acceptable Italian. I would describe myself as an anti-Italian.
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:)

# posted by intcoex : 9:19 AM

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