" 'Il Giornale' - dice il segretario Ds Piero Fassino - usa la tecnica di
Goebbels, il capo della propaganda di Hitler, che ogni giorno lanciava calunnie
per distruggere gli avversari in modo che qualcosa alla fine rimanesse"
IL GIORNALISTA INGLESE PETER POPHAM, CRITICANDO GLI ARTICOLI DI PAOLO GUZZANTI
CONTRO ROMANO PRODI, CONCLUDEVA COSI' UN SUO PEZZO SULL'INDEPENDENT DEL 2
DICEMBRE SCORSO:
"So it's going to be a dirty election campaign. No surprises there: Berlusconi,
it is reported, has been taking strategy lessons from George Bush's 'little
genius', Karl Rove. But they will have to do better than trying to embarrass
Prodi by reminding him of a silly old lie. Five years of Italian failure
is no fairy tale". [1]
TRAD.:
"DUNQUE, HA TUTTA L'ARIA DI VOLER ESSERE UNA CAMPAGNA ELETTORALE CONDOTTA
IN MODO SPORCO. NESSUNA SORPRESA: SI RACCONTA CHE BERLUSCONI ABBIA PRESO
LEZIONI DI STRATEGIA DAL 'PICCOLO GENIO' DI GEORGE BUSH, KARL ROVE. MA DOVRANNO
TROVARE QUALCOSA DI MEGLIO CHE CERCARE DI METTERE IN IMBARAZZO PRODI, RICORDANDOGLI
UNA BUGIA VECCHIA E SCIOCCA. CINQUE ANNI DI FALLIMENTI ITALIANI NON SONO
UNA FAVOLA"
E CHE COSA SI DICE IN GIRO DI KARL ROVE?
ALESSANDRO GILIOLI, PER "L'ESPRESSO", L'AVEVA CHIESTO A SUSAN SONTAG:
blog.espressonline.it/weblog/stories.php?topic=05/12/13...
Qualche giorno fa a New York ho intervistato Susan Sontag: a un certo punto,
chiacchierando di Karl Rove, l?uomo che da anni costruisce l?immagine di
George W. Bush, la Sontag mi ha detto che Rove le ricorda Albert Speer, l?architetto
che organizzò le scenografie del Raduno di Norimberga, nel 1934.
Susan Sontag sostiene che, così come nel 1934 Speer costruì gli scenari per
il Raduno di Norimberga, così oggi Rove organizza lo sbarco di George W.
vestito da aviatore sulla portaerei Lincoln e tutte le tv più importanti
trasmettono l?evento in diretta. Questa straordinaria capacità di usare la
comunicazione da parte dello staff di Bush - sostiene la Sontag - sta facendo
crescere un nazionalismo vendicativo che assume toni sempre più estremi.
Ma la Sontag non e' l?unica a formulare giudizi così pesanti. Sul numero
di giugno di Harper?s magazine, l'articolo di apertura (The Demonstration
Effect, firmato da Lewis H. Lapham, sulle bugie dell?amministrazione Bush
nella campagna irachena) è preceduto da una frase di Hermann Goring, il leader
del partito nazista che così spiegava le regole base della propaganda ai
suoi collaboratori: "Tutto quello che dovete fare è dire ai cittadini tedeschi
che stanno per essere attaccati, denunciare i pacifisti per mancanza di patriottismo
e accusarli di esporre il paese al pericolo. Funziona sempre, in ogni paese
del mondo".
Come si vede, volano parole grosse nel dibattito politico americano. Le tecniche
di comunicazione di Bush preoccupano i democratici americani: concetti elementari
ripetuti all'infinito, uso disinvolto dei mass media, scenografie patriottiche...
Su questo terreno, qui come in Italia, la sinistra sa di essere perdente.
[1]
www.independent.co.uk/
THE INDEPENDENT
Dec 2, 2005
Politics in Italy: THE SEANCE THAT CAME BACK TO HAUNT ROMANO PRODI
by Peter Popham
Four months before Italy's general election, a ghost has returned from Romano
Prodi's past to haunt him.
Mr Prodi, who became fairly well known a few years ago as the tubby, mumbling,
avuncular president of the European Commission, is the second most formidable
politician in Italy. This is on the face of it strange. Prodi has no identifiable
charisma. But many Italians trust him, and voters of the centre left gave
him an overwhelming mandate in their primary elections six weeks back.
In 1996 he beat Silvio Berlusconi in the general election, the only man so
far to have bested the media mogul at the polls. Something like half of Italy
is desperately hoping that in April he will do it again.
But first he has to face down this ghost. The name of the ghost is Giorgio
La Pira, who while he lived was one of the most dynamic Christian Democrat
politicians of modern Italy, and a pioneer of creative diplomacy between
West and East, meeting and trying to forge agreements with Stalin, Ho Chi
Minh and others, at the height of the Cold War.
La Pira died in November 1977. But in April of the following year, Prodi
has claimed, he came back from the dead in spirit.
The occasion was a wet spring Sunday, in the countryside outside Bologna,
at the country home of one of his professor friends, Professor Alberto Clo.
Being so wet, Prodi says, he and the seven other academics present settled
down around a ouija board for what Italians call a seduta spiritica, a sance.
It was the first time, Prodi makes clear, that he had ever attempted such
a thing " and for such a pious and conventional Catholic it was perhaps out
of character. But as it happens the sance was a success.
It took place at a moment of grave national crisis in Italy: these were what
were called the anni di piombo, the 'years of lead', when terrorist outrages
by extreme left and extreme right shook the nation month after month.
On 16 March 1978, in one of the boldest attacks, Aldo Moro, leader of the
Christian Democratic party and two times prime minister, was ambushed and
kidnapped by a unit of the Red Brigades, who killed his five-man escort.
Photographs of Moro and his heart- rending pleas for help were dispatched
from the place where he was hidden by his captors. But no one had any idea
where he was.
Where have they hidden Aldo Moro? It was the question on everyone's lips.
So once Prodi and his professorial chums had succeeded in calling forth the
shade of Giorgio La Pira, it was the question they put to him, too.
The saucer in the midst of the circle they had formed trembled and started
to spin, settling on one letter after another. Letter by letter, place names
emerged: Bolsena, Viterbo ... Gradoli. All of them knew Bolsena and Viterbo.
But Gradoli?
'No one had heard of it,' Prodi testified three years later to the Moro Commission
inquiring into the statesman's death. 'Then we saw in an atlas that there
was a village called Gradoli ...'
One can imagine the looks of consternation exchanged by the professors, the
dawning of a desperate hope that the ouija board was telling the truth. They
broke up the session; La Pira returned whence he had come. The word 'Gradoli'
was on everyone's lips.
'We asked around in case anyone knew about the place,' Prodi told the commission,
'and seeing as nobody knew anything I regarded it as my duty, even at the
cost of appearing ridiculous, as I indeed felt at that moment, to pass the
word on. If the name of the place had not been on the map, or conversely
if it had been [somewhere famous like] Mantova or New York, nobody would
have said anything about it. But the fact is that the name was unknown, so
I passed it on immediately.'
He told colleagues at Christian Democrat party headquarters in Rome, and
he also informed a criminologist at Bologna University. The word was passed
to the police. Four days later, the inhabitants of the tiny and unoffending
village of Gradoli, on the shores of Lake Bolsena near Viterbo, north of
Rome, were startled by the sight of vanloads of police, who proceeded to
turn it over. But they found nothing to link the village to Aldo Moro or
his captors.
The end of the story, one might think " but even while the police were prowling
through that irrelevant village, Aldo Moro was being held prisoner in a luxury
block of flats on a street called Via Gradoli, in a suburb of the capital.
He was never found; once Gradoli proved a dead-end, Prodi's ghost was written
off as an unreliable source and no further inquiries were made. Moro's wife,
it is said, asked the police whether there was not in fact somewhere in the
capital with the word Gradoli in it where they might also search. She was
bluntly and quite wrongly told that there was not.
Weeks later, after 55 days in captivity, Moro was taken from the cubbyhole
in Via Gradoli, put in the back of a car, wrapped in a blanket and shot 10
times at close range. He was found stuffed in the boot of the car abandoned
in the centre of Rome, midway between the headquarters of the Christian Democrats
and the Communists " the two parties between which he had been trying to
forge what he called a 'historic compromise' when he was kidnapped.
The old, strange and rather sad yarn of Romano Prodi's fruitless encounter
with the spirit world has been dusted off again this week. The man doing
the dusting is a senator in Silvio Berlusconi's party called Paolo Guzzanti,
who has several claims to fame: his striking red hair and beard, first of
all, framing his piercing, rather alarming eyes, and then his three children,
all of whom are now famous comedians.
The most celebrated is Sabina Guzzanti, who does an amazingly hurtful and
funny impression of Silvio Berlusconi " so hurtful and true, in fact, that
the satirical series in which she starred was ejected from the screen after
a single episode.
Mr Guzzanti probably does not find his daughter's impression of Berlusconi
either hurtful or true. He used to be a left-winger, and a journalist on
the Roman newspaper La Repubblica, but in a Pauline conversion a dozen years
ago he swung dramatically round to the right and now has a column in Il Giornale,
the daily owned by Berlusconi's brother.
He is also the head of something called the Mitrokhin Commission, and it
was in this capacity that he reminded Italy this week of Prodi's encounter
with the ouija board. A parliamentary committee called the Mitrokhin Commission
was set up when Berlusconi came to power in 2001 to rake over KGB documents
connected to Vasili Mitrokhin, the Russian double agent who died last year
and whose exhaustive spying on his own agency yielded an immense amount of
material about the KGB's activities in the West.
In a television interview on Wednesday, Guzzanti claimed that Prodi's tale
of ghosts and spirits was a load of rubbish, designed to hide the identity
of the person who had told him, Prodi, that Aldo Moro was hidden in a place
called Gradoli " a person, Guzzanti insinuated, who was closely connected
to the KGB. 'Professor Prodi knew that Moro was held prisoner in Via Gradoli,'
Guzzanti boomed. 'He said 'Gradoli' without mentioning 'Via'. This was deliberately
misinterpreted as Gradoli the village ... None of us believe in ghosts and
witchcraft. Prodi is hiding behind his revolving saucer, as a way of providing
information without revealing the source.'
In his column in Il Giornale, Guzzanti called on Prodi 'to come to court
and say finally what he has never said to the magistrates who questioned
him and to the parliamentary committees ... Prodi has over and over again
repeated this story of a sance that is not only incredible but profoundly
offensive ... I believe that a man who aspires to govern our country has
the duty to clarify an episode that until now has been completely obscure.'
For his part Romano Prodi, through a spokesman, said he had already given
exhaustive explanations of what happened, and that he was planning to sue
Guzzanti.
Despite Guzzanti's tone of righteous indignation, there was little excitement
in Rome about his initiative. For one thing, there is nothing new in his
claim, besides the offensive insinuation that Prodi knew where Moro was hidden
but failed to do everything in his power to save him. For another, Guzzanti
was pushing on a door that has long been wide open: everybody here has long
believed that Prodi's ouija board tale was no more than an ill-advised and
bizarre way to conceal the identity of his true source, probably a person
from Bologna's seething far-left underground whom he was pledged to protect.
That the police knew of Gradoli but were unable to take it a step further
and look in Via Gradoli looks like stupidity or worse " but it's difficult
to pin the blame for that on Prodi. He did, after all, provide the lead.
More than anything it reveals about Prodi or the Moro case, Guzzanti's outburst
is an eloquent testimony to the fraying of nerves within Berlusconi's coalition
as the election draws near. After five years of Berlusconi " the first post-war
Italian government to have completed a full term " the Prime Minister declared
this week that he has fulfilled all his promises made in the famous 'contract
with the Italian people' that he signed on television before the last election.
If that's the case " and it's open to serious doubt " people say, well he
must have promised the wrong things. How come Italy is growing poorer by
the day, its debt ballooning, its companies folding in huge numbers, written
off as the new sick man of Europe, and yet Berlusconi is satisfied with his
achievements?
So Guzzanti, Berlusconi's Barbarossa, is rolled out on to the battlements,
with his smoking tales of Communist conspiracy, his insinuations of treachery
and worse. And the case of the dodgy ouija board, we understand, is only
the beginning. 'This is just the taster', writes Corriere della Sera, 'for
the 'real lunacy', that, Guzzanti declares, will be contained in the final
report of the Mitrokhin Commission.'
So it's going to be a dirty election campaign. No surprises there: Berlusconi,
it is reported, has been taking strategy lessons from George Bush's 'little
genius', Karl Rove. But they will have to do better than trying to embarrass
Prodi by reminding him of a silly old lie. Five years of Italian failure
is no fairy tale.
Copyright 2005 Independent Newspapers UK Limited