I watched Paolo Sorrentino’s quite extraordinary film Il Divo last night. It is remarkable in so many ways, but especially, as a portrait of evil in the form for Giulo Andreotti (as depicted by Toni Servillo) and also, in terms of the most marvelous cinematography. In a recent post I attracted hostility from some by doubting the West’s commitment to individual rights. No doubt I overgeneralized a little, but post-war Italy would be a part of any case for the prosecution. Andreotti as portrayed in the film, is prepared to go to almost any lengths, to inflict evil in pursuit of what he takes to be the good, to deal with the Mafia, to sacrifice his colleagues (I’d say his friends, but it isn’t clear that he had any). I wonder if it isn’t possible that Italy between some date in the 1970s and the fall of the Berlin Wall, wasn’t the European state where a person was most likely to be the victim of political murder? (Actually, I’m guessing that Romania might take that prize.) Not to be missed.
{ 29 comments }
JoB 11.09.09 at 10:43 am
There is a difference between politicians getting murdered (which is bad) – and citizens getting murdered because of their, suspected, political opinions (which is still worse).
You are mixing quite different competitions.
Chris Bertram 11.09.09 at 10:51 am
JoB, no I’m not. If you think that the victims of political violence in Italy in the period were all (or even mainly) politicians, then you are just mistaken.
Henri Vieuxtemps 11.09.09 at 11:04 am
I don’t know if any citizens were murdered because of their suspected political opinions in post-war Europe. That sounds more like the grand and glorious South American way.
JoB 11.09.09 at 11:59 am
Chris, I make it a point to be able to be wrong but it’s hard to take your word for it. I’m not saying that there was no violence against citizens in that period. I’m not saying that it isn’t difficult in that period to split political and maffia-related violence. But I do say, as far as I know, that the risk of bodily harm to non-public figures in Italy because of a mere suspected political opinion was lower than in all current still communist lands (& Reagan’s South-America of course alongside most ideology-based non-democracies).
PS: but i AM anxious to see the Andreotti pic because clearly Italy has been, and still is, of the worst that democracy can bring forward.
Chris Bertram 11.09.09 at 12:08 pm
Well you are obviously right to say that the rate of political murders in a total population doesn’t necessarily capture the risk to the normal person, because the murders may be concentrated in a sub-population. I’m not sure that everyone is going to agree with you that that’s less bad though. You could run a similar argument for normal murder, in, say, large US cities ….
Chris Bertram 11.09.09 at 12:20 pm
I’d, add, by the way, that the principal means for keeping people in line in Eastern Europe (after 1968) was _not_ the threat of violence, but rather the systematic denial of opportunities (jobs, university places for your children) to those who spoke out. See, for example Milan Simecka’s, _The Restoration of Order: The Normalization of Czechoslovakia_ .
florinrinja 11.09.09 at 12:20 pm
hei! i’m from romania, and you’re right. every citizen that was considered to be against the official politics, was killed. and it didn’t mattered if you were just an ordinary citizen or if you were a big politician. if you were against it, you were out. and everybody knew it. and i think that this was a such bad thing, because many romanians used to lie about it just to enable themselves to grow on the hierarchical scale.
James Conran 11.09.09 at 12:23 pm
I found the film a bit of a mess (a fairly enjoyable mess), I have to say. Though admittedly depending on taste this could be covered by “marvelous cinematography” – and there was definitely some real flair to some of the more playful scenes (eg Andreotti dancing, Andreotti strolling pensively through the streets of Rome late at night with his massive security detail).
I also thought that while it hardly painted him in a positive light, it was ambiguous as to how “evil” or criminal he was. Maybe this wouldn’t have been so for someone whose knowledge of Italian politics was less entirely cursory than mine. But my takeaway view leaving the cinema was: “Boy, that guy was dodgy (whoch was already my impression going in)” and “boy Italian political history sure is murky, dodgy and confusing”. I’m sure this confusion was entirely deliberate on the part of the director, but it didn’t make for a morality play I thought.
JoB 11.09.09 at 12:51 pm
5, well – I am fairly sure not everyone is going to disagree with me either ;-) But let me try to convince you: attacking the activists (bad as it is) does not necessarily erode the support for their opinions whilst the reverse clearly will isolate the activists (and, also, isolate them leading to more extreme activism leading to further erosion of support, it is an all too common structure of good intentions turning into terror) – the latter is the worse. To make a contentious claim: that’s aeguably why China is better than Cuba – at the moment – even if China clearly has the worse record once somebody is in the claws of the system.
6, I agree that denying opportunities is the devious route but here I would agree with you if you would say that the West is not so much better than the East was (and that a case in point like Italy really is worse than many totalitarian regimes)
alex 11.09.09 at 1:13 pm
Italian politics has never been even slightly honest – general disgust at 40 years of deeply self-serving liberal corruption was a significant reason for the strength of both left and right extremes in the period around WW1, and after 1943 they just picked up where they’d left off. I blame the Renaissance; if they’d stuck with cuckoo-clocks and chocolate they could have had 400 years of peace and brotherly love…
Zamfir 11.09.09 at 1:18 pm
I don;t know JoB, it’s also about power and possibilities. From the looks of it, there was at least one period of time where the prime minister of Italy could order the murder of a citizen for his own political gains. It would have to be done subtle and through non-stae means, but the power was there, it was used, and it frightened people off.
At that same time, in a number of European communist countries that were definitely oppressive states, like Czechoslowakia and Hungary, no politician had that power. There was no system, even the security forces, that would follow up on such an order, and a politician would not accepted by the system, or the people, if he would try to pull strings like that.
Of ourse, there were other channels of oppression there, but the border between ‘free’ and ‘not free’ is not 100% to draw.
alex 11.09.09 at 1:42 pm
Really? In communist Czechoslovakia the security forces wouldn’t whack someone? I find that hard to believe, on the general principle that security forces the world over have whacked people on political orders since the dawn of time.
Gabriel 11.09.09 at 1:53 pm
@Henri, you should take a closer look at the Ursu Case, more details http://gh-ursu.ong.ro/ursu_case.htm
there is a long history of Securitatea planning Markov style attacks on Romanian dissidents established in the West. See also the case of Monica Lovinescu, bombing of Free Europe. Ion Vianu spoke about the Communist regime policy of putting dissidents into mental houses.
It is a shameful prize indeed.
Zamfir 11.09.09 at 3:11 pm
Really? In communist Czechoslovakia the security forces wouldn’t whack someone? I find that hard to believe, on the general principle that security forces the world over have whacked people on political orders since the dawn of time.
Well, secret police is a bureaucracy too. Killing foreigners, or people the police sees as enemies of the state is one thing, killing citizens for personal reasons of politicians is something else. Some police forces clearly do and did such things, but that is not a universal given.
The unconfirmed rumour that the police had killed an student in a demonstration was fuel for the eventual revolt in 1989. Clearly, killing citizens was not what people expected the police to do.
JoB 11.09.09 at 3:45 pm
Zamfir, don’t know where you’re trying to take this (& don’t know, in fact, where I was taking this myself other than pointing to Chris making it a bit easy for himself, which I think he granted by now) but clearly – killing citizens is not what I or anyone expect of anybody, really. And to risk something of a backlash again: it’s in my opinion worse to have state oppression based on opinion than to have murder for personal reasons also when the personal reasons are coming from the head of state. I maintain that in period identified by Chris, the terror on citizens with respect to voicing their opinions even in private was of a completely different order – even between the worst of the West & the best of the East (I think some of Latin America was much worse than most of the East, in this as in other respects).
Henri Vieuxtemps 11.09.09 at 3:54 pm
Gabriel, dissident are activists, a dissident is a sort of politician.
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?
Chris Hanretty 11.09.09 at 4:56 pm
@ Zamfir: if you’re referring to the Pecorelli killing when you say “there was at least one period of time where the prime minister of Italy could order the murder of a citizen for his own political gains”, then you should know that two out of the three courts which have tried the case against Andreotti have cleared him. Now, that doesn’t mean he didn’t do it, but it is worth bearing in mind.
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.
JoB 11.09.09 at 6:24 pm
Henri, having introduced the term ‘suspected’ here I can only say I meant it to use it in your first way; I too count activists as politicians.
Rob 11.09.09 at 10:56 pm
The Consequences of Love is also really good, recognisably by the same person – all the odd camera angles, for example – but much slower, more meditative. I suppose recording Andreotti’s life in long, dreamish shots would be rather odd.
Doctor Slack 11.10.09 at 1:12 am
“I blame the Renaissance; if they’d stuck with cuckoo-clocks and chocolate they could have had 400 years of peace and brotherly love…”
Props for working in the Third Man reference.
Alex 11.10.09 at 1:10 pm
We reviewed.
Doug M. 11.10.09 at 6:18 pm
“the European state where a person was most likely to be the victim of political murder?”
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.
Chris Bertram 11.10.09 at 7:58 pm
Yes Doug, that’s why I wrote “between some date in the 1970s and the fall of the Berlin Wall”.
Doug M. 11.11.09 at 11:07 am
Whoops, you’re right — missed that. Sorry, my bad.
Doug M.
Tommaso 11.11.09 at 4:45 pm
I have no sympathy for Andreotti and the ideology he represents but this post is overly simplistic.
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.
Phil 11.11.09 at 11:18 pm
You can argue that there were different means available to pursue the same end or that the end in itself was not worth pursuing
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?
Phil 11.11.09 at 11:20 pm
Chris – thanks for the pointer to Ron Francisco’s data, which looks very valuable. That 1980 start date, though – if only it started five years earlier! I’ll just carry on referring to [Vinciguerra and] Cipriani.
Tommaso 11.12.09 at 1:51 am
Hi Phil,
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 rightâ€) 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.
ajay 11.16.09 at 12:46 pm
the European state where a person was most likely to be the victim of political murder?
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”.
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