WORLD WORLDWIDE EUROPE ITALY SICILIA News Journal Update - (en) Italy, Sicilia Libertaria, July: Berlusconi's waste in Sicily (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 With Silvio Berlusconi dead, there will be no other, and fortunately.

The Berlusconi era was incredible and, to paraphrase Leonardo Sciascia,
you have to go to Sicily to see how incredible it was. Because it is
from this region that the former Knight got everything: votes, consent,
judicial troubles. But what did he leave us to us? And for us I intend,
this time, to make it a generational question: the so-called
millennials, those who were born between 1980 and 1996. Too young to
remember exactly what existed before them, too old to be able to imagine
a future without inheritance of him. Indeed, it would be better to use
the term waste: because you can hide them, bury them somewhere, but they
remain and when you least expect it they reappear, and perhaps they have
already contaminated you without you realizing it. We of the millennial
generation have been in the middle: capable of hating Berlusconi, of
gathering joyfully around the cry "who doesn't jump is Berlusconi",
often unable to oppose his power. Now that he's gone we're no less
alone, because there are always enemies of hating. But we have to deal
with his waste: because if we have not defeated Berlusconi we must at
least defeat his legacy, the one sanctified on live TV from 12 June onwards.

So: what did he leave us to us? First, some prominent figures.
Gianfranco Micciché, for example, a former collaborator of Publitalia
and the strong man of Forza Italia in Sicily for 30 years: even now that
Micciché is involved in a new alleged drug ring, the "Berlusconi
favourite" remains in the saddle. For a time he even became the idol of
a certain pampering and humanitarian left, as he harshly criticized
Matteo Salvini and his management of migratory flows when he was
Minister of the Interior; now, however, he aspires to become a point of
reference for the guarantors and, if he emerges (as is possible) from
the investigation by the Palermo prosecutor's office that concerns him,
at 70 Micciché could carve out a new political youth.

Another personal friend of Berlusconi was the current president of the
Sicilian Region, that Renato Schifani who, when a journalist from Libero
asked him to point out three of Berlusconi's defects, was unable to
point out a single one. The same one that gave its name to the law known
precisely as the Schifani award, with which the trials for the five
highest offices of the state were suspended. The man without qualities
will probably end his electoral mandate at its "natural" expiry: without
jolts, in the most absolute greyness, the saddest scenario for a land
that instead needs continuous revolutions.

Far more influential, then, were the Sicilians with whom Berlusconi
surrounded himself in Milan. Starting with Marcello Dell'Utri, the only
one in his entourage who really went to prison and who, we can swear,
will never betray him even now that Berlusconi is dead and tell about
his real ties to the mafia. Speaking of judicial matters, the judicial
investigations that most hurt the former Cavaliere arrived from Sicily,
namely those of Caltanissetta and Palermo for the hidden instigators of
the massacres of '92 and '93 and for external competition in mafia
association. The investigations, however, ended up shelved and, above
all, they ended up absorbing too much attention from those who tried to
oppose Berlusconi's hegemony. Are they state massacres? Yes, we know,
let's go ahead, we are already at saturation level, there is nothing
more to say in this area.

Instead, it was on the cultural field that we should have fought him.
The Palermo director Franco Maresco had already understood this years
ago, who with his opera Belluscone, a profound and at the same time
amusing cross-section, investigated the reasons why the lower classes
voted for him en masse. It was not even conceivable that the workers of
Termini Imerese and Gela supported the former entrepreneur, and instead
it happened with an indecent frequency, which did not stop even when it
was by now understood what kind of villain he was. In this Berlusconi,
well before Trump in the US, succeeded where the other bosses had
failed, burying the class conflict between naked women, always full
restaurants and the controversy over the life span of a butterfly.

There is an episode, in my opinion, which is important to remember: the
"regulatory jewel" (just one article) of decree law n. 22 of 7 March
2002, with which pet-coke, one of the most toxic of oil, by law, it
became fuel from waste, giving reason to Eni who used it to power the
thermoelectric plant of Gela, and in this way opposing the court which
for this reason had seized the plants of the former refinery. It
shouldn't have seemed true to Berlusconi: with a single provision he had
collected the popular consensus, which had sided in favor of the
reopening to the cry of "better to die of cancer than to starve", and
had cornered the judiciary. For the record, pet-coke continued to burn
and pollute the air for other years, decisively delaying awareness of
the effects of Eni's activities in the city.

It comforts me to think that for the generation following the
millennials, people born between 1997 and 2012, Berlusconi was and will
always be just a stoned old man who, who knows why, a lot of people
listened to. A little bit, I know, but for the rest it will be necessary
to eliminate the residues of Berlusconi's poison. It's up to my
generation to do it.

Andrea Turco

https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca