Nation Topics - Italy | The Nation

Looks at the outcome of efforts to rescue Giuliana Sgrena, an Italian journalist held hostage in Iraq. Report that an Italian intelligence officer was killed by a American soldier following Sgrena's rescue; Reaction from Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and the Italian public to the incident; Report that anti-Americanism in Italy has grown following the incident; Impact of the incident on Italian politics and government; Impact of anti-American sentiment in Italy on relations between the nations.

Reviews the books "The Day of the Owl," "Equal Danger" and "The Moro Affair" by Leonardo Sciascia.

Provides the author's opinions concerning the war with Iraq and the United States as an imperial power. In the past 200 years, all of the earth's great territorial empires, whether dynastic or colonial, or both, have been destroyed. The list includes the Russian empire of the czars; the Austro-Hungarian Empire of the Habsburgs; The German empire of the Hohenzollerns, the Ottoman Empire, the Napoleonic Empire, the overseas empires of Holland, England, France, Belgium, Italy and Japan, Hitler's 'thousand-year Reich' and the Soviet empire. With its takeover of Iraq, the United States is attempting to reverse this universal historical verdict. True, American officials state at every opportunity that they do not intend to occupy Iraq. But then the British in the nineteenth century said the same thing. Two years before the liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone ordered the conquest of Egypt he declared that his heart's desire was an 'Egypt for the Egyptians.' The United States, it turns out, forgot to bring a new government with it when it set out from Kuwait to Baghdad. Before the war began, it was often said that winning the war would be easy and winning the peace hard. With every day that passes, 'the peace' looks more like another war.

In more than fifteen years of rock-and-roll touring, my worst night of sleep followed a June 10, 1989, show at Centro Sociale Leoncavallo, an anticapitalist squat in Milan. On that impossibly long tour, ending just months before the Berlin wall fell, my band Soul Side played at social centers lodged in squatted buildings in Italy, Holland, Spain, Denmark, Norway, Switzerland and Germany. None, however, rivaled the squat in Milan where we were taken after our concert at Leoncavallo to "sleep" in a bat-infested room, on mattresses that had seemingly been marinated in bodily fluids. Since the mid-1970s, groups of anarchists, communists, punks and artists across Europe have availed themselves of liberal housing policies to seize and inhabit abandoned buildings, former factories, churches, schools, etc, and turn them into nonprofit, anticapitalist social centers. They are essentially illegal, and plenty are mercilessly crushed by the police. After several evictions, one of which spurred national solidarity demonstrations in 1994, Leoncavallo resides in an assortment of buildings behind huge walls that can be quickly barricaded in the event of another police raid. Social centers like Leoncavallo host a wide range of cultural and political activities: theaters, bookstores, art galleries, guaranteed shelter/or homeless immigrants, meeting spaces for antiglobalization organizing, Internet cafes, soup kitchens, yoga classes and live music of varied genres.Many social centers have disappeared, while a few have been given official recognition and support from local governments. Under the reign of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who is hostile to anything and anyone falling under the "no global" umbrella, Italy has nearly 150 active social, centers, most of them stationed in squatted buildings. My band, Girls Against Boys, discovered that Leoncavallo is considered a menace to Italian society.

The demonstrators in Padua--a university town forty minutes west of Venice--eren't just striking, they were celebrating. Gathering together 70,000 adversaries of Berlusconi in the heart of the miracolo del nord-est--the economic miracle of Italy's conservative northeast where small- and mid-scale manufacturers have produced one of Europe's greatest concentrations of wealth--was a miracle in itself. While much of Europe has been shifting rightward, Italy tilted somewhat faster and farther and is now precariously poised, its citizenry both evenly and deeply divided. About half voted free-marketer into office in May 2001.

The old tale about the walled city of Verona, Italy, has something to tell us about the present political situation in the United States. Over time, the story goes, the population inside the wall grew and the city became overcrowded. The problems from this circumstance mounted, until one day the bishop decided something had to be done and called a meeting with the chief rabbi. The appointed day arrived. Everyone turned out and watched expectantly as the bishop began. He raised his right hand up to the sky. The rabbi brought his right hand down and pointed to his left palm. The focus in this article, here is the way the bishop and the rabbi embody contemporary American concepts of representation as defined by the U.S. Supreme Court. The rabbi substituted for the Jews, the bishop substituted for the Christians, and their silent interaction substituted for the conversation of democracy. American democracy is today constituted by elites who are charged with policy deliberation and are presumably held accountable through elections.

This article focuses on several political developments in the U.S. and at international level, as of August 6, 2001. The G-8 summit at Genoa, Italy was characterized by bloody confrontations and demonstrations. The courage, coalition and commitment that have unfolded from Seattle 1999 to Genoa 2001 define a movement that, despite outer repression and inner divisions, cannot be stopped until the global decision-making system is radically reformed. In another development, anonymous leakers of Washington are whispering that Brent Scowcroft, National Security advisor to former U.S. President George Bush, is in line to become head of U.S. President George W. Bush's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.

This article reports that in United Nations (UN) and in Western capitals, government and corporate officials are arguing over the size and governance of a kind that is going to be the primary international response to the greatest public health pandemic since the Black Death. The fund will be high on the agenda at both the UN General Assembly special session on AIDS and a meeting of the G-8 the rich countries' club in Genoa, Italy, in July. Kofi Annan, UN General Secretary's grand vision may well be giving way to a modest resource mobilization and potentially flawed institutional arrangement. Perhaps what takes shape will be just the beginning, but it is also possible that the present political momentum to do something about AIDS will be lost once the fund is created.

The article presents some political updates related with Italy. It highlights that indications are that in national elections on May 13, Italians will opt for the center-right, led by politician Silvio Berlusconi, whose "House of Liberty" coalition includes the National Alliance of politician Gianfranco Fini. The alliance is heir to the Fascist legacy despite Fini's largely successful effort to transform it into a modern, open, right wing party. Berlusconi's government would also include the xenophobic Northern League, whose pugnacious leader, Umberto Bossi, not long ago was urging northern Italy to secede. Many Italian observers consider the league, and its often-unruly backers, the most dangerous element in Berlusconi's electoral cocktail.

The triumph of World Pride, a weeklong program of conferences and cultural and social events culminating in the march, offered the edifying spectacle of Italy's small, and heretofore politically quiescent, gay movement out-organizing the most powerful antihomosexual forces in Italian society. The tiny but vociferous far-right Forza Nuova group promised to add a bit of fascist muscle to respectable conservative antigay opposition with its threats of violence against World Pride participants.