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Interesting, yet very scary article at BBC today on the newly implemented "citizen patrols": they seem mostly to be made up of neofascists and even wear fascist-like uniform and ensigns, pride of extremely racist views and even make fascist salutations.
Just some pics so you get the idea:
When is Italy going to be kicked out of EU?
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9 comments:
Why did you omit the picture of the much more innocuous looking Veneto Sicuro?
As for Italy being kicked out of the EU, note that they are responding to crime by migrants. The people in the pictures appear creepy but what is more alarming is the refusal to acknowledge
behavioural science.
I've read of policies to allow migration from outside the EU to plug labour shortages.
Now, it is well documented that groups have different crime rates, and rates of academic achievement.
Suppose it were established that certain behavioral traits -- such as law abidance, impulse control, criminality, and so on -- were differentially distributed between populations beyond a reasonable doubt, and moreover that these differences could not easily be remediated with non-genetic means.
It would be rather foolish to fill up your country with people who were 10X more likely to commit crime, no?
And indeed, low activity variants of MAO-A, and testosterone do in fact vary amongst ethnic groups. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3455741
Perhaps even more well documented is that iq at a group level predicts various social & economic outcomes. The highest achieving groups are Ashkenazi Jews and East asians.
The gene variants (rs2760118-C on SSADH, rs324650-T on CHRM2, and rs760761-C on DTNBP1, for example) which have been tied to IQ are not distributed evenly among the populations sampled in the Hapmap.
With that in mind, having an immigration policy that favors immigrants from low-average-IQ groups seems crazy.
Yet acknowledging that is verboten, regardless of how well it predicts outcomes.
http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2009fallacies.pdf
Based on the current orthodoxy, you could replace low birth rate Italians. This assumes they are interchangeable, and if they are, maybe it will all work out. But what if they're not? What if the black-white IQ gap is as much a function of nature as it is of nurture? We know that low IQ correlates with a boatload of social pathologies. What would become of Germany if it became half-African over the course of the next 100 years? Would it go the way of Zimbabwe or South Africa?
Why did you omit the picture of the much more innocuous looking Veneto Sicuro? -
Precisely because I wanted to convey the same scary feeling I got when reading the original BBC article: that with these criminal squads, the fascist militias are back in the streets, just like in 1920.
The Lega Nord are as fascists as the others (otherwise they would not have been in coalition for so many decades already) but just they do have some more sense of image: they are modern fascists, who just pretend to be less blatantly racist and nostalgic of the 20s and 30s.
As for the situation of a fascist Italy within EU, there is a clear precedent: Austria. Austria was ostracized in EU when it was ruled by the fascists. In italy the fascists have been in power for many years already, there is virtually not press freedom (as it's all in Berlusconi's hands), and now this?! WTF?! Get out of my sight and join Putin's bloc!
As for the rest I'm not even willing to argue those fallacies with an obvious fascist at MY blog. Get lost!
Maju,
They may well be. What if the migrant's are causing higher levels of crime though? Options seem to include:
1. Tighten migration, including asylum seekers.
2. Increase police numbers (rather than having these citizen groups filling the perceived void?).
Look: I even avoid some of my relatives essentially because they are fascist or close to. There is a war between Humankind and Fascism and I know where I stand: if you stand with Humankind's enemy, please get lost and throw yourself by a cliff, thanks.
Woot?!
Fascism, the archetypical fascism of Mussolini, took the country with a bunch of followers... and the sanction of the real powers: King, Church and most of the wealthy.
In the case of Spain, Fascism was fed by the ranks of the most rancid conservatism. Falange was a tiny party in 1936, with one seat in Parliament or so, but Franco incorporated all the conservatists (CEDA and Carlists) into it.
Fascism is essentially a bourgueoise coup. Even in Germany, where it had more followers and was indeed more militant, in the fascist sense of the word, it could only achieve power because of the support of the right and the shameful passivity of the socialists, all united against the only alternative to Hitler that had widespread support: the communists.
What brings fascism to the streets is socio-economical crisis and the fear of social unrest and/or revolution. I will not say it's necessarily engineered by the establishment, but more or less is that way.
Plus Fascism has been somewhat strong in Italy all this time: Alianza Nazionale is a fascist party (that has now vaguely recycled its discourse) that was ostraciced in the Cold War but is now almost all the time in power at the shadow of Berlusconi (who is the inventor of telefascism btw, later copied by Milosevic's Serbia).
Here there are fascists too: they are small and would be weak would they not be supported by the police. They make death threats, vandalism and pitiful demonstrations of a bunch of people brought from Madrid to insult us Basques with their criminal banners. By the moment almost only that... but it looks like it could escalate any day.
The rulers are happy with them and think they can control them. They, being "people of order", are content to collaborate with the status quo... until they become stronger and can take over.
Beware!
You are very wrong. They may have learned that they have a risk in some cases (Hitler) but that all others behaved like good dogs: keeping the working class in jail (even when in the streets) and promoting the interests of the wealthy through state intervention.
Some people from "Anglosaxonistan" seem to think that Fascism only happened around WWII but that's very much wrong: we have been thrown modified versions of it all the time and remember that several fascist regimes allied of Hitler, notably Francoism, just allied with the USA at the first occasion and kept going like normal.
The "problem" the global elites had and still have with some kinds of fascist regimes is that they may want to change the status quo in a nationalist direction. But as long as they don't do that too much and bow their heads to the Emperor of Washington (and the dark powers behind the throne), they have no problem. In fact it's what they have fed to most of the imperial satellites all the time: Mediterranean Europe until the 1970s/80s, Latin America until the very 90s, Arab World even today, etc.
And fascism is as old as Napoleon if not as civilization anyhow. Just that it did not have that name yet, and then there was not a democratic and human rights paradigm to contrast it with, at least in most places.
The worrying tendency in so many countries nowadays to illegalize whole opposition blocs is just a form of fascism, getting a de-facto single-party system where all allowed parties think and do virtually the same. Monolithic media also cause that effect, supressing most dissident opinions and getting Futurama-like electoral debates, where two cloned candidates make for a farce of democracy, being no real options.
We have never stopped suffering fascist regimes and fascist-like elements all the time but the situation today, with no apparent alternative to Imperial "democracy" (an euphemism for mere Capitalism in most circumstances) at global level. In the USA itself, with the Patriot Act and all those totalitarian laws of the Bush era still in effect (Obama and the Dems are doing nothing in fact to reverse the Bush totalitarian trend), the prognostic is similar to that of the late Roman Republic: a dictatorship awaits behind the corner, as soon as possible/convenient for those who promote it.
And in Europe is not better: the trend to scrap democracy, human rights, workers rights, etc. is clear in many countries. The big problem is that such ideas of less democracy and rights, more police and surveillance cameras and internet surveillance, more extreme laws to protect corporative property are becoming accepted (I'd not say popular but people is swallowing all that without much more than a grunt).
Human rights are being scrapped and we are slowly transitioning towards a de facto fascism that keeps only the forms of democracy. This is new in regards to classic fascism but the case is that single parties and too monolithic hierarchical systems work badly nowadays: the tyrant needs some feedback, even the Chinese PC has noticed that and is allowing people to speak in the net and even at times in the media as long as the system's nature is not challenged. That way they hope to keep corruption (and therefore popular unrest) at bay.
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So yeah, probably the hyper-monolithic fascism of the Fordist era is not really workable in the Toyotist period (in fact in the crisis of the Toyotist model) but something way too similar (and in some aspects more terrorific maybe) is becoming widespread (not even Iran is as totalitarian as Franco's Spain but can be as criminal or even more). And it's happening because there is fear in the estabilishment that the crisis will lead people to challenge and subvert the system, a has happened so many times before.
It is very curious how the estabilishment is going ahead of the potential revolutionary movements, nowadays pretty much disorganized and weak. But they are doing it: democracy was ok when people could maybe lean to an alternative system (an obsolete one) like was that of the USSR, but now that there is just no alternative... they can just let the dogs free (more or less).
The Basque case may be different but in Europe today anti-fascism generally takes the form of being pro immigration. I really don't see how mass immigration is in the interests of the workers.
The left joins a capitalist conspiracy when it defends immigration. Continuing the displacement of the native population is going to require construction of police state controls on dissent.
T
I don't think anyone is pro-immigration, because that means being pro-emigration. The only exception are probably the Capitalist elites and their "middle class" minions who get huge benefits from exploiting illegal immigrants, just as drug dealers do with illegal drugs.
There are huge global problems fueling migration from the peripheral areas ("Third World") to the center ("First World") but that can only be solved with global measures and probably a good deal of radical socialism worldwide. Meanwhile, while effective solutions to exploitation (and hence also the need to migrate) are not implemented, people is people and have human rights and those rights must be defended at any cost.
That's the real attitude of the Left: that the problem must be adressed radically (at the root, for that's the true meaning of "radical") not with xenophobic patches and paranoias that do no good to anyone.
The Left is also concerned that the unequal legal status of workers is harmful in particular to native and otherwise legal workers. Hence it must be assured that all workers are legal, have the same rights, preventing unscrupulous capitalists (and most are) from using this inequality to their advantage, and to the damage of both legal and illegal workers.
But the problem has no solution within Capitalism. As long as some areas of the planet have maybe 10 or even 100 times more wealth per capita than others, people will flow massively from the poor to the rich areas and no laws, walls or police state will impede that in any significative manner. These measures are just patches and mostly just for show, with very limited or no effect at all.
We live in a highly globalized World and we have to take global measures. This applies to climate change, human rights or poverty. And there is only one political project that can effectively deal with these global issues: ecosocialism.
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