Italy: The road to dictatorship
The government and all the institutions are stalled these days, Parliament does not exist in practice, and everything follows one another by means of urgent and vacuous decrees made during the night.
The measures taken because of the coronavirus to contain it are, on the whole, reasonable. The aim is to strongly slow down the contagiousness of the virus by preventing people from assembling; an elementary tool used on other occasions in human history. Too bad, however, that in Italy the virus continues its inexorable march. Often the most common question we are asked from abroad is: why?
The answer is simple if you look at a map of industrial Italy and that of the virus propagation. The state of emergency does not concern large companies in the territory. Many people, from employees to factory workers, still have to go to work every day. There is increasing evidence that most of the contagion is occurring in workplaces or public transport.
Not to mention the situation of all workers in health care facilities without the slightest protection, who, in addition to being infected, are vehicles.
The state of exception is such only for the people and does not affect those in power, who continue to make unnecessary journeys and vital benefits during this period, such as the possibility of taking a swab. A few days ago, the Ministry of Health issued a circular that prioritized the analysis of swabs to the military and their families, justified by the fact that they must ensure operational readiness.
The delegation to Defence apparatus that can, by function, exercise the use of force is more dangerous than the virus itself.
The Army is already deployed in Italian cities, and in these days the prefectures have the faculty to ask the Ministry to increase the task force already employed in the " safe roads" operation. The contingent made available by the Army for the containment of the emergency in the territories therefore reaches 20,000 units.
Currently, in most cases, the prefectures have ordered the use of the Army in the streets to intensify the controls on people and goods. In addition, they can intervene in the event of "unnecessary walking" or "walking beyond the permitted perimeter".
The state of exception is something that suspends the rule, that is, normal functioning: in the case of a pandemic, for example, such as the current one, certain individual and collective freedoms of citizens are reduced in order to protect the community.
It is clear that the state of exception is justifiable under two conditions: that it is limited in time for which it was adopted and that it is an unusual way of dealing with problems.
In Italy, on the other hand, we have now experienced how the state of exception is normal. So it was done with the earthquake in L'Aquila, so it was done with immigration, so it was done with the economic crisis. In reality, none of these emergencies has ever ended and the state of exception has become the rule in Italy.
The state of exception, understood precisely as the suspension or abolition of confrontation and debate, is obviously the normal state in which dictatorships move, regimes in which confrontation and public discussion of political choices do not exist in principle. The impossibility of interacting with those who issue orders is guaranteed only by physical and military force.
If the suspension or limitation of freedom does not have a fixed time for the resolution of the problem, a mechanism of further reduction of freedom is activated in order to contain everything that can appear as a non-observance of order. This leads to a spiral in which the military presence in the streets is presented as the only possible solution.
The state of exception produces as a direct effect the fear of punishment for not having respected the disposition given, a fear that clearly prevails over the desire to contribute, by observing the dispositions, to dealing with the problem. The fear that enforces the rules is exactly the opposite of the belief that the rule helps to pursue the objective and must therefore be respected. Identification in the rule imposed requires identification of the people in the law, introducing it as right for themselves and for the community. In order to operate this inner elaboration in every individual of the people there is a need for a symbolic father (the government) who speaks and argues the rations of an order, and one cannot rely on the impossibility of rebelling against it with the use of force. To date, the penalties for those who do not respect the state of emergency in Italy range from 500 to 4,000 euros and from 1 to 5 years in prison, but they are increasing every day with the time passing.
In this situation, we see an increase in the number of informers, which in psychoanalysis is called "alliance with the persecutor". In order to avoid the clash with the authority, they adhere in full to the order received and the tendency to denounce is re-emerging in the collective behaviour (as during Fascism after the Racial Laws of 1938).
In this state of events, it is good to remember that in 2018, 25 billion euros were invested in military expenditure, of which 1/5 billion went into armaments such as tanks, helicopters, aircraft, warships and aircraft carriers. So much expenditure to "defend ourselves" from a "changing enemy" of the interests of the imperialist states and to subjugate the people by accustoming them to the military presence in our streets with the excuse of making life "safer".
It is a duty to remember that the army in the squares is not and has never been a good sign.
V.D. Dogan Presse Agence
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