Italy according to William Pfaff? Don’t buy it!
Every time I try to widen the horizons of my readership by proposing a column that would take advantage of a two decade long sojourn in the land of my forefathers, an insider’s view of the myriad muddle that is part and parcel of Italian politics, I hear the same answer. Foreign editors from Boston to L.A. tell me that they would love to publish such pieces, but the politics of their paper is to stick to human interest stories when it comes to Italy. They don’t think their readers care to read about Italian politics. And I can’t blame them. Even Italians don’t want to read about it anymore.
However, when American newspapers decide every once in a month of Sundays to break their own rules by publishing an article as prejudicial and disinformative as the one which recently appeared in the International Herald Tribune, sorry, but I beg to bicker.
According to the blurb written by the Los Angles Times Syndicate to market one of their columnists, William Pfaff is "an acerbic, erudite writer who eschews orthodoxy, trendiness and party lines." There was no eschewal of political party side-taking in the article that Mr. Pfaff wrote last week. Pfaff used no modest means in his demonization of opposition leader Silvio Berlusconi or his exaltation of former prime minister Romano Prodi. So apparent was his partiality that I even heard Italian readers of the IHT ponder over the possibility that Mr. Pfaff’s invoices might be paid by the Italian governing coalition rather than the IHT or the LA Times syndicate!
One editorialist found Pfaff’s favoritism so fanciful that he claimed that more than an article Pfaff’s piece was a Christmas fairy tale with the ruling leftist coalition cast as Little Red Riding Hood and Silvio Berlusconi as the Big Bad Wolf.
For the moment the political crisis in over, but what concerns me is that what concerned Mr. Pfaff was that the outcome of the crisis might have lead to new elections and that those elections would have surely been won by the coalition led by Berlusconi’s Forza Italia. Heaven forbid that the people of Italy should be allowed to vote out the coalition of leftist and center parties, a hodgepodge of political factions whose main reason for being is to keep Berlusconi out of the premier’s seat. In fact, every time they squabble over issues, the way they finally make peace among themselves is by looking straight into the face of reality: if they allow the Italians to go to elections, they’ll be out and Berlusconi will be in.
That communists of any kind, whether ex-, post-, or neo-, disdain the ability of the people to judge for themselves how to protect their own interests by choosing the men they wish to be governed by, hardly surprises me. That was their modus operandi when they brandished the communist name and symbols and their "we know what’s best for them" attitude hasn’t changed since they altered their party names and erased the hammers and sickles.
However, that the L.A. Times Syndicate’s Paris-based William Pfaff who is supposedly "impossible to pigeonhole politically" believes that he and the Italian post-communists know what’s good for Italy and its people better than the people themselves, smacks of the presumption that the Italians are quite used to from the powers that be, but not the neutral objectivity one would expect to read on the pages of IHT.
Pfaff speaks of "Italy’s democratic parties" when referring to the leftist coalition leading his readers to believe that there might be something undemocratic about the parties in the opposition. Pfaff is using the same technique employed by the former Communist East block countries: usurpation of the term democratic, euphemistically disguising a totalitarian spirit.
Pfaff reminded his readers of the multiple legal proceedings against Berlusconi, "allegations of political corruption, fraud, and association with the Sicilian Mafia," but he failed to mention that the cases never stick and that by some strange phenomenon that can only be interpreted as pure coincidence, new charges are brought against him every time the Italians are getting ready to vote!
For some reason Pfaff prefers to make comparisons between Berlusconi and the former Italian prime minister Romano Prodi, rather than the present one Massimo D’Alema. He calls Prodi Berlusconi’s "most successful opponent," the "man who produced the ‘miracle’ by which Italy’s Second Republic met EU terms for currency union last year." Miracle? That’s just another euphemism for subterfuge. Prodi maneuvered the Italian financial system with stratagems, contriving Italy’s successful entry with unsustainable measures. In fact, if the test for EU entry were to take place today, Italy would be out.
We’re all very happy that Italy is in, but perhaps if Silvio Berlusconi had been allowed to finish his term in office in the mid-nineties, he would have executed the reforms necessary for Italy’s solid entry, rather than the Band-Aid job performed by Romano Prodi.
And of course, Pfaff failed to mention the legal allegations against Romano Prodi: Before Prodi became the present European Commission president or the former Italian prime minister, he was president of IRI, the Italian state-holding company responsible for the privatization of state-held industries. Although Prodi has never been convicted, several of the many cases against him are still under investigation and Italians have yet to receive a plausible explanation for the fact that he sold numerous state assets at bargain basement prices when there were buyers with their checkbooks open and ready to pay full market value.
Using terms like "media mogul" and "Berlusconi’s television phalanx," Pfaff is hopeful that Prodi will use his new position in the EU to encourage European-wide norms in order to restore some "balance" to the Italian media situation. Obviously, Pfaff wasn’t in Italy when the news was monopolized by the state television networks. Nor does he have much experience with watching the news on Berlusconi’s networks, whose journalists are not always sympathetic to the man who pays their salaries.
If all American newspapers can come up with to keep their readers knowledgeable about what is going on in Italian politics is to offer similar superficial and synthetic regurgitations of the gospel according to the ruling post-communists, the American public would be better off indeed limiting their reading about this country to the restoration of the Basilica di Assisi and the fate of the earthquake victims of Umbria. When it comes to politics, let them be uninformed rather than misinformed. They say ignorance is bliss. I say lies are dangerous.
December 1999
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