Deterring democracy in Italy

Pacitti: Billionaire media magnate Silvio Berlusconi was recently elected premier at Italian general elections despite a welter of serious criminal accusations and conflicts of business and political interests. It would appear that Italian electors are less interested in moral issues and more interested in what they think he can do for them.

Chomsky: Well, why do you think that’s different from Britain and the United States?

Pacitti: That’s what I was hoping you would explain.

Chomsky: Well the answer is that it isn’t different.

Pacitti: Can you elaborate?

Chomsky: We had an election here a few months ago. Now, I don’t know about Italy, but here the population is polled very extensively, so we have a pretty good grasp of public attitudes. There is, in fact, at Harvard a project called “The Vanishing Voter Project”, which I hope tells you something. It does extensive polling analysis to try to determine why the voters have been losing interest in elections over the past twenty years. One of the things they measure is the sense of helplessness, that is, that you feel you cannot do anything that will affect the political process. It hit a new high this year, far beyond anything before. Right before the election about 75 per cent of the population felt that there was no election at all, that it was just some kind of game being played by rich contributors, party bosses and the media. The whole public relations, or advertising, industry was crafting candidates, training them to use certain gestures and produce certain words that the research industry showed might increase the number of votes. But they didn’t mean what they said and you weren’t supposed to be able to understand what they said and it was all meaningless, just some kind of public relations game.

Pacitti: And do you feel then that what is happening in Italy is similar?

Chomsky: Well as far as I can tell it is very similar, but I don’t know Italy as well as I know here. This is a tendency which was led by the United States and Britain and goes back to the early part of the century. It was very natural that it should be in more democratic countries. There was a recognition back in the 1920s – I think hitting other countries later – that you can no longer control people by force. The countries were becoming more democratic. The franchise was extending. The British Conservative Party – we have their internal records – realised by the First World War that there was no longer any way to keep the general population out of the electoral system. They realised they were part of a union that was going to be a broadening of franchise and therefore they had to turn to what they call political warfare. It’s called public relations, meaning propaganda, to try to control people’s attitudes and thoughts and direct them to other concerns and keep them all out of the political arena since you could no longer simply control them by force. The same was done in the United States. In fact, there was a huge growth of the public relations industry right around that same time for the same reasons. In the most advanced, more democratic societies, there is good reason to believe that as a society gains more freedom, propaganda takes the place of violence as a means to control people.

Pacitti: Berlusconi is on record as having a list of criminal offences with actual convictions. But because of the Italian law of statutory time limitations he has not in fact served any of those sentences. A recent book lists fourteen criminal cases against him. It confirms that in the last decade he has received three prison sentences totalling six years and five months for corruption, illegal financing and false accounts.

Chomsky: By US standards that’s a triviality.

Pacitti: In 1990, Berlusconi was found guilty of perjury for denying his membership of the P2 Masonic lodge, an anti-Communist organisation which used Italy’s security services for political ends. His conviction was one of many later annulled by a general amnesty. Alleged US backing of P2 would appear to confirm what you’re saying.

Chomsky: Exactly. Italy, as far as we know, has been the main target of US efforts to undermine democracy since the Second World War. There was great fear in the 1940s that the Left in Italy would win a democratic election. In 1948 particularly, there was great concern that the Left, which had a lot of prestige – I mean, it supported the resistance against Fascism and those were important things in those days, and it had backed labour unions – were going to win the elections, and the US had plans. I don’t know if you know this, but the National Security Council’s first planning body, NSC1 [see the first, 1947 memorandum in “History of the National Security Council, 1947-1997”: www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/NSChistory.htm ] was concerned with how to undermine democracy in Italy. That was considered to be the problem at the time. And they concluded that they could undermine democracy by withholding food – and I don’t have to remind you that people were starving at that time – reinstating Fascist police, which they did, undermining unions and a whole variety of techniques of that sort were used. But then it was concluded that if this doesn’t work, if Italy nevertheless has a Left political victory, the US will call a national mobilisation, will begin to support paramilitary activities in Italy against the government. The National Security Council won, and that continued until the seventies and maybe beyond. I mean, we only know until the seventies because that’s where the documents stop. That includes supporting P2. So the effort to undermine Italian democracy goes back very far. Compared with this, Berlusconi isn’t making plans to carry out military activity to overthrow the government. What’s going on isn’t correct, but in terms of the efforts to undermine democracy it’s not a major thing. And it’s the same here. Clinton didn’t happen to have a lot of trials for corruption. But just look at his record. But look at Reagan’s record and just look at some of the people in the Reagan administration [1981-89].

Pacitti: There’s more than a suspicion here in Italy that Berlusconi obtained heavy backing from the Sicilian Mafia at national elections.

Chomsky: Yes, but where did the Sicilian Mafia come from? It didn’t arise from nothing. The Mafia was, as you know, destroyed by Mussolini. And how did the Mafia get reconstituted? It got reconstituted as the American and British armies moved first through Sicily and then southern Italy and the same in southern France and it was reconstituted as an agency to undermine the resistance and undermine the Left.

Pacitti: You’ve looked at the Italian question in some detail, then?

Chomsky: I haven’t done original research on it but I’ve reviewed it with different sources. So, for example, in my book Deterring Democracy, one of the chapters [chapter 11: Democracy in the Industrial Societies], has something about the main, first project of the United States and Britain after the Second World War, which was to undermine the resistance against Fascism and to restore the traditional system. Italy is discussed, and it’s also discussed in a later book with new revelations. And there’s actually a very good book which I review somewhere [World Orders, Old and New, London, 1997]. It’s by an Italian historian [Federico Romero, The United States and the European Trade Union Movement 1944-1951, North Carolina, 1989, 1992], who incidentally thinks it’s fine that the Allied Forces should have “disarmed the resistance and brought its Committee of National Liberation to order” on the grounds that “free political and social movements always inspired mistrust among the Allies” since they were “hard to control”. Romero describes the efforts of the British and the Americans to undermine the labour groups and the resistance against Fascism in northern Italy. And he describes it very positively, but he also describes it pretty accurately.

Pacitti: And the basis for this was established right after the Second World War, right?

Chomsky: Yes – and not just for Italy. It was a worldwide phenomenon, the same in Japan. It affected Japan, and a major study has just appeared – it won the Pulitzer prize [Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan by Herbert P. Bix] – on how the United States reinstated Emperor Hirohito after the Second World War as part of the effort to support Fascism and undermine the Left. It’s all over the world.

Pacitti: So traditional Italian forms of corruption are far less serious than the US variety?

Chomsky: I’ll just mention one other example to convince you. In France, right next door, we also had a powerful anti-Fascist resistance and strong labour movements. The south was immediately hit with one of the first activities, second only to Italy, to try to undermine the unions and undermine the Left. And to do that they restored the Corsican Mafia, in southern France, and that is the source of the heroin traffic in the world. In order to pay them off, they gave them the monopoly of heroin production. That’s the same thing as French Connection, right? That’s where the post-war drug problem originated. These are things that are important. Simply take a look at NSC1 that I quoted. NSC1, the First National Security Council memorandum, so very important, calls for, as I say, if necessary, coercion – let’s say, withholding food – and if that doesn’t work, to undermine the election. The United States should call a national mobilisation, but prepare for war, and should support the paramilitary activities within Italy.

Pacitti: It follows from what you are saying that Berlusconi could have been backed by the Mafia all the way along – and all the way back to the US.

Chomsky: Yes, it was the US that had the Mafia reconstituted. And you know that Mussolini destroyed the Mafia.

Pacitti: Indeed. So in Italy we’re just seeing half the story. Can I just ask you one more thing relating to the Berlusconi issue? I know you don’t like giving advice and no doubt you probably won’t give me any advice on this, but there are plenty of radically minded folk here in Italy who are wondering what can be done. Some have taken to writing books in order to expose the full range of Italian corruption and injustices, from Mafia and allegedly Berlusconian forms to the more socially acceptable academic varieties. I know you’ve placed the problem within a wider, global context, but is there something else we could and should be doing over here that we’re not doing and that goes beyond an Italian context?

Chomsky: The answer to these questions is always the same no matter what the issue is: there are no secrets that have been discovered in the last couple of thousand years. In the case of Italy, it’s certainly worth while bringing out the criminality, the Mafia connections and so on – people should understand the fact. But the question is: do they care about it? And now the big problem in Italy as far as I can see is that people more or less know – they may not know the details – but they don’t care about it.

Pacitti: And why do you think they don’t care?

Chomsky: They don’t care because they are under tremendous pressure – this is not Italy but the world – to try to remove the population from the political arena. That gets called neoliberal, which has its core in Britain and the United States – again the most advanced countries – but it’s spread all over, which is a major effort to reverse what happened in the 1960s. What happened in the 1960s was extremely frightening to international elites. You see this very strikingly, and perhaps most strikingly, in The Crisis of Democracy.

Pacitti: It was published in 1975 and was the first major study of the Trilateral Commission founded by David Rockefeller. Is that correct?

Chomsky: Yes. The Commission was an elite, a mostly liberal internationalist elite, from Europe, the United States and Japan. And it was mostly people like the Carter administration, which was made up almost entirely from liberals, liberal in the American sense of social democrats and internationalists. They were deeply concerned about what happened in the 1960s around the world. What they were concerned about was an increase in democracy, that is, through the 1960s parts of the public which had usually been apathetic and passive began to get organised and began to enter the political arena and press their demands and so on. That included women, working people, minorities, the elderly, in general the large part of the population which was usually passive. They began to enter and to encroach on forbidden territory. The way the thing’s supposed to work is that the political system is supposed to be in the hands of private tyrannies, private power, and that was beginning to erode. That’s the crisis of democracy. And what they said is that there’s too much democracy and that’s no good, it’s a crisis, that we have to have more moderation in democracy and we have to restore people to passive apathy. They said that they had to prove that they were worried about what they called the institutions responsible for the indoctrination of the young – their words, not mine. That means the schools, the officials, media, the churches – they were not indoctrinating people, they were becoming too independent and thoughtful, too active, and something had to be done to reverse this, the crisis of democracy. Since then there have been major efforts to restore people to their marginal existence, and this takes many forms. One form is what’s called minimising the state within the neoliberal framework. So remove decisions from the public arena and back into private hands, one or another form of privatisation. Another form is the centralisation of financial authorities. So the European central bank has enormous authority and it’s not accountable to parliament. Still more important is the liberalisation of finance since the 1970s, dismantling the Bretton Woods system. That creates what economists call a virtual parliament and you have to pay attention to what investors say or else they can destroy the economy. And that restricts enormously what governments can do. But right now there are extremely important meetings on the general agreement for trade in services. And the idea is to privatise services, services meaning anything the government can do – education, health, etc. And the idea is to liberalise, meaning open them to private competition, and that’s got to mean private control.

Pacitti: This is exactly along the lines of what Berlusconi has in mind, incidentally.

Chomsky: That’s exactly it. But let’s remember that this is a small part of something going on internationally, trying to deal with a major problem that arose because of the democratising process. And it’s showing up all over the place and in an effort to undermine the Left. You can no longer control people by violence in the West. You can’t just throw them into a torture chamber. You have to find other means. One means is propaganda. Another means is rabid consumerism, to try to drive people into massive consumption. In the United States the economy has suffered under the neoliberal policies, as has been the case worldwide, and is maintained to a high extent by consumer spending. Household debt is now higher than disposable funds. And that’s good because it traps people, and trapped into debt you can’t do much. You’ve got to just work harder and try not to think about it. So from infancy children are deluged by propaganda telling them: buy, buy, buy, and so on. The same is done with countries. The Third World is trapped by debt which was imposed by immense propaganda from the IMF and the World Banking Organisation. These are devices to try to control the populations and ensure that the private tyrannies endure. So that’s what you have to do in times of increasing freedom.

Pacitti: Do you think the only thing we can do here in Italy is to try to make these things clear?

Chomsky: Try to help people see what’s going on. It’s not a matter of a little corruption here and there. I mean, that’s true. It’s a marginal part of it. And people are correct not to be very upset about it. This guy’s corrupt, that guy’s corrupt. So what? What’s much more important are the deeper systematic properties which are concerned as always to try to control the population. One of the founding fathers of the United States, Alexander Hamilton, described the population as a great beast that has to be controlled. As the major framer of the Constitution, James Madison, put it, the wealth of the nation must control what happens.

Pacitti: And do you think we should do this by continuing to write books and articles?

Chomsky: We have to organise; we have to organise people. There’s no point in books if they are just read by some academics. It’s a different matter if they reach the general public, and are part of organising efforts, for example, the kinds that have led finally to international actions.

That comes out of massive organisation. It’s not enough to write books. The purposes of privatisation are very obvious and it will not be stopped by writing books. It will be stopped by a united stand on an international basis. That’s the way to stop it.

Pacitti: Would you agree that it’s at least worth writing about the Italian component of the jigsaw?

Chomsky: It’s worth writing about it if it’s part of a more organised effort. If you’re writing something for academic readers who are reading in the library, that’s OK. It’s OK if somebody uses it. But the main thing is to have it used. I mean, it’s like doing science. Can we use it to advance understanding and inquiry, or in ways that will benefit people? If so, that’s fine.

Pacitti: Many thanks, Noam. I’m sure that our readers will find your comments, as always, both illuminating and stimulating.

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Noam Chomsky, the US linguist, philosopher and political activist, is considered by many to be the world’s leading intellectual and one of the foremost thinkers of modern times. Describing himself as "a sort of anarchist socialist", he has long been an indefatigable human rights campaigner and has written more than 30 books and countless articles attacking and exposing United States foreign policy. He is generally credited with being the father of modern linguistics for having transformed the study of language and mind over 40 years ago. He is Institute Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/www/chomsky.home.html

Domenico Pacitti is an international journalist and academic. As correspondent for The Times Higher Education Supplement and The Guardian in London and contributing editor of World Parliamentarian in Brussels, he has written over 300 articles against corruption in Italy, especially in universities. He has taught philosophy, linguistics and Chinese at universities in the UK and Italy. He currently teaches English and American language and literature at the University of Pisa.

http://www.humnet.unipi.it/~pacitti/

http://www.justresponse.net/

For Domenico Pacitti’s previous interviews with Noam Chomsky, see:

A new twist in an old turn of phrase (The Times Higher Education Supplement, London: Mar 24 2000)

Truth to tell (The Guardian, London: Apr 18 2000)

Evolution of revolution: Chomsky’s minimalism (EL Gazette, London: Jan 2000)

Chomsky offers advice to teachers on the use of science (EL Gazette, London: July 2001)