← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · il ragno
Thread ID: 10678 | Posts: 4 | Started: 2003-10-23
2003-10-23 01:53 | User Profile
Maybe we should [B]all [/B] be looking to Italy for a model of courage in statesmanship. [B]Viva Bossi![/B]
[url]http://www.portal.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/10/23/wpig23.xml&sSheet=/news/2003/10/23/ixnewstop.html[/url]
EU elite are filthy pigs, says Bossi By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in Strasbourg (Filed: 23/10/2003)
Umberto Bossi, leader of the Northern League, said Brussels was "transforming vices into virtues" and "advancing the cause of atheism every day". He denounced the European arrest warrant as a step towards "dictatorship, deportation, and terror, instilling fear in the people, a crime in itself". It would lead to a Stalinist regime "multiplied by 25".
One day Italian citizens would be locked up on the orders of Turkish judges, he told Il Giornale newspaper, which is owned by the family of the Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi. He added that the euro was a "total flop", its inflationary effects costing ordinary people "a fortune" in lost purchasing power.
The outburst was a public relations disaster for Mr Berlusconi, who was at the European Parliament in Strasbourg yesterday for the first time since his calamitous debut as EU president in July.
Then he joked that a German Euro-MP would "be perfect" for the role of Nazi camp commandant in a forthcoming film, adding that Italians, unlike Germans, are not "hung up" about the Holocaust.
He returned to the subject in The Spectator last month, defending Mussolini as a "benign" dictator who 'did not murder anyone' but sent dissidents to "holiday camps". He later apologised to Italy's Jews.
Yesterday Mr Berlusconi managed to control his temper when the same MEP, Martin Schulz, led a fresh attack. Mr Schulz demanded that the prime minister rein in his coalition ally and accused him of sabotaging the EU warrant to save his own skin.
Mr Berlusconi is under investigation by a Spanish judge for alleged fraud. He has used delaying tactics to prevent the EU warrant coming into force in Italy in January. At the same time, the existing extradition treaties between EU states will lapse, giving him almost total immunity as long as he remains in office.
[QUOTE]http://www.uwgb.edu/galta/333/BIOS98/BOSSI.HTM
Umberto Bossi was born in 1943 to a working-class family. Before his life in politics, he was among other things a guitarist, math tutor and laborer. He was studying to be a doctor when in 1979 he met Bruno Salvadori of the Union Valdotaine, a group that advocated autonomy for the French-speaking region of Val D'aosta. Salvadori convinced Bossi of two things: that Italy was a nation divided by different cultures and languages, and that Italy would be bet- ter off as a federation of regions rather than a single nation state. During 1981 and 1982, Bossi studied politics and become more convinced that Salvadori's ideas were right. In March, 1982, Bossi founded the Lombard League, which was initially a club interested in the language and culture of the region of Lombardy, but changed to become a political party de- voted to its autonomy. From the start, Bossi kept his League under close scrutiny, making sure only members who were committed to his ideas could hold leadership positions. Mark Gilbert states that the League's political philosophy can loosely be described as liberal-conservative localism. It had a tint of xenophobia, but was at the same time anti-fascist. The goal was not to bring Italy together into one nation led by a single leader, but to break up Italy and confer government power to a local level. (48)
Diamanti (p.112-113) argues that Bossi and his League have been successful by exploiting two issues that he has to some extent himself created: first, pride in one's "territory" or region, and second, the lack of confidence in the Italian government. Diamanti identifies three conceptions of territory held by Italians: as a source of cultural and historical identity, as an interest in their own social and economic well-being, and as an anti-identity, which for northern Italians, included separating themselves from southerners and immigrants. (112-113)
During the early 1980's, the Lombard League struggled, but Bossi's anti-government, anti-southern, and anti-immigrant rhetoric soon caught the attention of many middle-class northerners. Many were willing to help the League by volunteering their time and money to the party.
The League found their first, small success by winning a seat on the town council of Varese with 13,000 votes. The next year, Bossi purged the inner circle of members and disposed of those who did not agree with his vision of what direction the League should take. These changes made the League more efficient and successful. In the 1987 national elections, the vote for the League rose to 200,000, or 3 percent of the electorate. Bossi was elected to the Senate and Giuseppe Leoni, a founding member, was elected to the Chamber of Deputies.
This success brought media attention, much of it negative. The league was viewed as a simple-minded protest movement that was succeeding only because it criticized the government at a time when the public was becoming wary of the corruption of the traditional parties. Despite this analysis, claims Gilbert (52), the League was tapping into legitimate complaints. The north was supporting the south with welfare, and much of the public money being spent on programs to improve the economic and social plight of the south was not working. Also, the political system of Italy was extremely corrupt, and the League offered an alternative.
In December, 1989, the League met with other like-minded organizations at a "national congress". Bossi merged his party with two other regional parties: La Liga Veneta and Piemont Autonomista, plus several other smaller groups. At the beginning, each organization was relatively autonomous, but in February, 1991, the party consolidated itself into the Lega Nord (LN), or the Northern League. The movement's message also changed at the 1989 congress. Bossi began emphasizing federalism, lessened his anti-southern language and replaced it with greater anti-immigrant language. He also de-emphasized local culture and language and instead tried to create an alternative to the traditional parties.
The formation of the Northern Leagues turned out to be a very smart political move. In the regional elections of May, 1990, the Northern League obtained 1,200,000 votes in Lombardy (18.9 percent of the electorate), surpassing the communist PCI and the socialist PSI to become the second most popular party behind the Christian Democrats.
Now that his League had run into some success, Bossi decided to expand his ideology to include the goal of dividing Italy into three republics: north, center, and south. Bossi was influenced and encouraged by Gianfranco Miglio, a political philosopher at Cattolica University in Milan. Miglio contended that the cultural gap between north and south was too wide for Italy to remain a unified nation. He believed that the era of the nation state was nearing an end and that the next step in the development of national entities was the "macro-region".
The onset of political crisis in Italy helped the League gain an unexpected 8.9 percent of the national vote in the Parliamentary elections of 1992. It won 23 percent of the vote in Lombardy and gained 81 seats in Parliament. In the local government elections of June 1983, the LN won control of many northern cities, including Milan.
The League's spectacular rise was halted by the fact that it essentially was primarily interested in supporting the wishes of the north. In an effort to gain more national support, the LN decided to join a coalition with a new political party headed by Silvio Berlusconi called Forza Italia or "Go Italy!" The League started to lose some of its more moderate members to Forza Italia, and Bossi decided to break the coalition.
The NL and Bossi have held to their successionist views, but the Italian voters are generally satisfied with being a united republic. Although the NL is still a player in the Italian political scene, it is limited due to the fact it is very much of a norhtern party and has touble finding votes outside its territory. [/QUOTE]
2003-10-23 05:18 | User Profile
Bossi is a good man and his populist party has lots of excellent, real nationalists within it. I admire the way his party has faced the bombs and mob violence of the left. Of course Italy has lots of excellent Fascist and NS groups as well and the level of activism is much higher then so many places. The real disapointment is that the Northern League is still aligned with the National Alliance which is the neo con successor to the Italian Social Movement which in turn was the successor to the official Republican Fascist movement of the RSI era. The NA has been a nothing short of traitorous for over 10 years now but at least Roberto Fiore's legions are doing better each year so realistic hope is reasonable.
2003-10-23 05:59 | User Profile
SLAVA BOSSI! :thumbsup:
2003-10-23 20:03 | User Profile
The Italians are way too chaotic to ever fully follow the EU's rules. With loose canons like Italy in the EU, the whole institution will never work the way it was supposed to do. Thank god for Italy.