Ce-ți doresc eu ție, dulce Italie?

Vedeți vreo diferențǎ? Eu, sǎ moarǎ pisicile din Forumul Roman, zǎu dacǎ vǎz vreuna. Ai dracu’ veri de ginte latinǎ, cum sîntem noi la fel, dar doar în cele rele...

“This is the formula. It was good in the past and it will probably be good enough for many years to come.

Take a vast, hard-working, pliable, ingenious population, worried about its daily bread, capable at times of accepting untold sacrifices, but restless and anxious for novelties.

Keep the people ignorant by providing the minimum amount of schools. Keep them in want by regimenting with an iron hand or persecuting industry and trade. Keep them bewildered and insecure by the arbitrary manipulation of vaguely worded laws.

See that there never are clearly defined rights and duties, but always favours from above or abuses of power. Keep the people happy with a steady rain of miserable alms, distracted with many holidays, more holidays than any other nation in Europe, feasts, the inauguration of splendidly decorated and sometimes useful public works.

Spend most of the money on superfluous things, the armed forces and insensate wars in the past, and now on entertainments, public spectacles, games; spend as little as possible on improving the people’s moral and physical conditions. Keep them always drunk with stirring appeals to their more primitive emotions.

Then take a small oligarchy of leaders, eternally squabbling among themselves, frightened for their position and, often enough, for their life, whose power depends precariously on the favour of a few or of one man, sometimes even a foreign chief, residing abroad.

Put these leaders above the law. This tends to make the best of them wary, pitiless, overbearing, unscrupulous and avaricious.

In the old days such men were courtiers, land-owning aristocrats, high dignitaries and generals; later they were also bankers, shipowners, industrialists; yesterday they were Fascist chieftains. Today they are the heads of mass parties, exponents of organizations turning out million of votes, controllers of industrial empires privately- or State-owned and trade-union chiefs.

The grand seigneurs of old had better taste, were braver, more polite, and carried themselves with greater dignity; the liberal patriots of the nineteenth century often loved their country, encouraged industry and trade, and tried at times to do something to better the people’s living conditions; today’s leaders are more intelligent, efficient and have studied more. But such differences are as unimportant as the fashions of the clothes they wore.

When one forgets superficial variations, one can see that the Italian leaders of today behave more or less as their predecessors have always behaved. They manage Italy as if it were cosa nostra; carry out vast, ambitious, impressive political designs, which are described as essential to the welfare of the country but are brutally and transparently conceived mainly to reinforce their own power.

They use the people as if they were extras on a Graeco-Roman film set, to be moved by remote control, to whom nobody explains the plot. Anything else would be unthinkable. To persuade their countrymen to cultivate the arts of reading and writing, to allow them to gain and enjoy a moderate prosperity, to encourage as many as possible to become soberly responsible would endanger the hold of the élite, or, as the élite prefers to say, weaken the social structure.

There is, however, this to be said in the leaders’ defence. They are the product of their society. The grand seigneurs of old as well as the contemporary cabinet ministers or controllers of State monopolies share the qualities and defects of the people, nourish the same ideals. They are, in fact, what the Italians make them.

[...] This, it must be pointed out with solemnity, was in the past and still is today the crux of the Italian problem, of all Italian problems, the heart of the matter, the only significance in many apparently meaningless and disorderly intricacies of Italian history. It is the only explanation of many otherwise puzzling aspects of the national behaviour, the question people debated passionately down the centuries and are still debating today in cafés and Parliament, the thorn in the heart of all good Italians of all ages.

Why did Italy, a land notoriously teeming with vigorous, wide-awake and intelligent people, always behave so feebly? Why was she invaded, ravaged, sacked, humiliated in every century, and yet failed to do the simple things necessary to defend itself?”

Luigi Barzini, The Italians (Penguin Books, London, 1964; pp. 358-359; 360-361)



.