Greece, possibly, under the colonels in the late 60s and early 70s, might sneak in – unless that’s too early for you. And there was a fair amount of political murder going on in the UK, what with the IRA and so on. Though you may be implicitly drawing a distinction between “X was shot because he was an outspoken opponent of the government” and “Y happened to be standing next to a bomb when it went off”.

for tradeoffs I mean the fact that organized crime is very powerful in the south of Italy (in the north too but not in the same way). If you want to be elected and actually govern Italy, you have to face this fact and have to be clear about it.

You could choose to run on a platform that tries to change this, for example cutting the massive transfers to the south thanks to which corruption flourishes. Or you can decide to somehow come to pacts with it, as Dc did. The left does not do the former and so basically chooses the second course of action while pretending of not doing so, e.g. accusing the right of corruption.

The moral self-delusion of the left (“we are better than the right”) is based, among other things, on the inability of recognizing the situation for what it is. This is particularly hard to do for them given that they built their own legitimacy by claiming their moral superiority against the various rivals of the moment. Before it was Andreotti, then Craxi, now Berlusconi (let’s be clear, I am not absolving any of these three from what they have done).

I also disagree in the way you set up your counterfactual. It seems to me quite a stretch to claim that an Dc-Pci alliance in 1977 would have resulted in an early Ulivo. Not that the current italian leftist parties are a paradigm of a modern and rational approach to politics but the old Pci was way more detached from reality. Just to give you a flavor of what I mean, you can read the story here:

http://tinyurl.com/ybg94pz

Natta was the secretary of the Pci in 1984-1988. When the Berlin wall fell, Natta exclaimed that in the end Hitler had won.

I can and do argue that the end was not worth pursuing – we now know what an Italian government including (ex-)Communists looks like, and frankly it’s not that scary. (Not that exciting, either.) One of my favourite counter-factuals is a world where Moro is allowed to live and the pact with the PCI holds (it was already creaking by the end of 1977, but let’s just say that Moro pulls it off – perhaps he gives a particularly impressive speech at the opening of Parliament, or else bores everyone into submission). With a bit of luck Italy could have had an Ulivo government ten years early.

But you seem to have something more in mind when you refer to “the tradeoffs you face when governing Italy” – the Left in power presumably weren’t driven by the necessity of excluding the Left from power. Tradeoffs with whom and why?

Every government had, and still currently has, to deal with Mafia (and other criminal organizations) in the south of Italy. The American Army in WWII came to pacts with the Mafia to more easily gain control of Sicily. In Italy the communist party was always fairly strong after WWII. Andreotti’s party made pacts with Mafia, and also made other awful things, in order to maintain its power and to avoid communists to gain it.

You can argue that there were different means available to pursue the same end or that the end in itself was not worth pursuing but otherwise you cannot make your case against Andreotti so easily.

This is the same frustration I had with the movie. It is beautifully shot but it accumulates all the accusations that have been voiced against Andreotti without clarifying which were legends and which were real. It is the same attitude of the current left italian party. They were never willing to put Andreotti’s choices in their proper context. This has left them unable to understand the tradeoffs you face when governing Italy. No wonder that, once in power (at the regional or at the national level), they were unable or unwilling to do much against organized crime.

Doug M.

Yugoslavia, 1990-2003. (And I’m not talking about the wars.)

Milosevic and/or the people around him had anywhere between ten and a couple of hundred political murders on their chit before the tractor came in the door, with the exact number depending on how you define “political” and “murder”. At one end you have Ivan Stambolic, who was certainly whacked by the security forces with Milosevic’s knowledge and very probably though not certainly at his explicit command.

At the middle of the spectrum we have, ohh, Arkan; that was certainly “political” in some reasonable sense of the word, and Milosevic at a minimum had withdrawn his protection. A bit further along, you have the Zemun Gang members who were implicated in the Djindjic assassination, and who were then killed in a “shootout” that involved cuff marks on their wrists and guns being fired a few centimeters from the back of their heads. And then there’s Radovan “Badger” Stojisic, Milosevic’s Director of Public Safety; the truth of that one will never be known. (It’s plausible that Slobo had him killed to keep information about various brutalities quiet, but equally plausible that he double-crossed the wrong people in the arms/cigarettes/heroin trades.)

In between you have various journalists and minor political figures whose deaths caused barely a ripple in the West. Again, which were “political” gets tricky. At least some were probably of the ‘rid me of this priest’ variety. But the numbers do add up, especially given Yugoslavia’s small population—after 1992, just Serbia/Kosovo/Montenegro, or less than 8 million.

Doug M.

Props for working in the Third Man reference.

As for the comparative question of whether political murders were most likely in Italy, I guess someone could take a stab at that by looking at Ron Francisco’s absurdly detailed protest data. But still, that wouldn’t cover hits, only violent clashes.

But perhaps I misunderstood what the word “suspected” was supposed to convey in “murdered because of their suspected political opinions”. Does it mean that people suspected of having wrong political opinions are murdered, or that people openly and actively expressing their political opinions are murdered when their opinions are suspect?