The Bastard-Government in Italy Evokes Historical Parallels

The right-wing Italian Prime Minister has suggested sending the army onto the streets to fight crime, because more violence-prone thugs is definitely the solution, nothing wishy-washy like opportunities or racial equality.

What caught my attention was this:

“Mr Berlusconi suggested the extra deployment of troops in response to the highly publicised cases of two women reportedly gang raped near Rome.”

This reminded me very strongly of Susan Brownmiller’s chapter on race in her book ‘Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape’. She describes how in the American south, black men raping white women served as a central theme in racial conflict, especially in justifying white men’s violence against black men.

She describes both how the over-inflated idea of such rape was taken out of all context and used to justify racism, and also how that racism was then used by many leftists and black agitators to downplay or dismiss the significance of actual rapes. She also describes how a good few black male writers, articulating their racial disenfranchisement, admitted that the sexual conquest of white women, forcible or otherwise, occupied a particular place in the racial landscape for them too, as the most telling blow they could strike against white men.

All these attitudes must be resisted in regards to the Italian situation. Rape is a crime overwhelmingly committed by men against women, and the frequent lack of class consciousness of the part of these groups does not mean that it loses this sex-class character, or that its sex-class character can be ignored in favour of its race-class character. Which is also not to say that the racial issue here should be put aside – there is no question of which side we should be on here.

Civil Wars and Bafflement

Civil wars are, I think I can safely say, generally not very nice. This post will not be directed at the central question of how to stop them happening. Rather, it will be directed at a related question: how to make them less confusing.

One of the reasons why civil wars can be confusing is that so often it is either hard or impossible to identify one side as ‘legitimate’ and the other as ‘illegitimate’. The government claims that the rebels are unelected usurpers, trying to bring down the people’s representatives! The rebels claim that the government are corrupt and have forfeited the people’s trust! The rebels moreover claim that the government is oppressing Ethnic Minority X! The government claims that if the rebels take control over X-land, then the majority citizens there will become a minority and will be hideously oppressed! It’s all rather baffling sometimes.

Obviously not all bafflement can be removed from life, but I believe there is a structural factor which makes extreme bafflement almost inevitable. That factor is the separation of the institutions of legitimacy from the institutions of efficacy.

Defining Political Systems

People sometimes say, in relation to direct democracy, that it ‘would never work’ and is ‘obviously impractical’, meaning by this that it would be vastly impractical to decide every single political question by a vote of a vast, billion-strong popular assembly.

Which is of course true, but also beside the point. We live in a representative-democratic political system. But we do not live in a system where every position of power is elected, nor where elected representatives decide every political question, setting aside any question of whether that would be good or bad. Our civil service, our judiciary, our armed forces and police, are all run on principles other than representative democracy – setting aside questions about the economic ‘dictatorship of the bourgeoisie’.

Yet our political system is representative-democratic, not because the representative structure (elections) is applied universally, regardless of any other considerations, but rather because the representative structure is applied selectively, in such a way as to be dominant. Not every single position of power is elected, but the most important ones are, and the ones that are typically can direct or exert strong influence over the ones that are not.