Italy's Great Purge

...But Bush merely failed to understand, and his sins were sins of omission...

...They would not be pleased to see their names in print alongside those of the true believers, and one sympathizes with their anguish...

...A new electoral law has been passed, retaining some elements of the old proportional method while creating winner-takeall districts for the vast majority of officials...

...The object of impeachment was precisely that "political solution" for which the Italian magistrates called: to be able to remove malefactors from office without having to go through criminal court proceedings...

...He would do well to consider the data from the Italian laboratory...

...All manner of excuse has been invoked to keep the archives closed—and some useful information has trickled out—but not one of the ex-Communist countries has seen fit to open its files...

...So it was that Tangentopoli ("payoff city") prospered on the banks of the Tiber and the Po and the Arno, until its destruction by an unexpected moral earthquake in the early nineties...

...If the past is judged in context, we may find that some of the old elite should be retained, if for no other reason than to train a new generation...

...Finally, there is the obligation to honor those who resisted, and to stress their uniqueness...

...The Communists, for, example, were given the entire payoff from the Milan subway system, of which they transferred half to the Socialists and a quarter to the Christian Democrats...

...The Socialist Party is shattered...

...It was impossible to say where the one ended and the other began, and one does not have to be an economist to understand what happened: By the mid-1980s, huge commissions—sometimes reaching as much as 30 percent—were built into contracts (especially public works), divided among companies, and kicked back to the political parties...

...Yet in each case their behavior was traditional, and had been deemed acceptable for decades...

...The message to Rome and points South is, in Bossi's words, "We are the North and we say to the state, get off our feet and let us work...

...Then, suddenly, in February 1992, the roof fell in on them...

...It's as if we had never existed," he shot back...

...a lot of people were contaminated by the evils of this century, and many of them were reluctant participants...

...if we do not have the full picture, then individuals will be judged against abstract standards, and the judges will rule...

...After the defeat of the Axis, it was urgent to present the truth to the citizens of Germany and Japan, but to this day, Japanese texts gloss over the Axis period...

...It was an efficient and democratic corruption, for the payoffs were divvied up roughly in accordance with the relative strengths of the parties...

...Like most European countries in the Age of the Welfare State, Italy took to heart the old adage, "the business of government is business," and elevated it to the status of Holy Writ...

...The Italian magistrates throw their targets into prison, and let it be understood that the hapless souls will be released only if they point the way to juicier targets...

...No matter...

...On each occasion the elections constituted a national referendum on the legitimacy of the PCI as a governing party, and each time the Italian electorate voted "No...

...Between 1948 and 1991, the Communist share of the national vote was roughly one-third, making it the second-largest party in Italy...

...and of course the term-limit movement, which is an effort to limit the power of elected officials...

...If the Socialists were the biggest of the establishment losers in the Great Purge, the major beneficiary has been a new Milan-based political party...

...Yet, sad to say, what should be a simple telling of the tale invariably turns out to be extraordinarily difficult...

...The inquisitioners changed the rules of the political game, and then applied the new rules retroactively...

...aradoxically, opposition to full disclosure does not come only from the wicked...

...So while Yeltsin might have been a good leader for the break with the past, he doesn't have the right stuff for the transition to the future...

...Yet it, too, must be understood, if we are to make mature political choices in the future, and we can only understand if we have the full picture...

...It is unforgivable to permit a collaborator to pass for a freedom-fighter...

...Someone so thoroughly out of step with a global revolutionary movement cannot possibly succeed...

...According to the Lega, the "honest, productive, and hardworking" citizens of the North have been corrupted and stolen blind by the cunning parasites in the South...

...For the past year and a half the Italians have been conducting a particularly volatile experiment in revolutionary politics...

...Its leader Craxi knew about political earthquakes, having himself unleashed one in the late seventies when he captured control of the PSI from a group of lackluster holdovers from the days of the alliance with the Communists...

...It was comfortable and easy, and the mentality engendered by this system was exemplified by a remark to me by the CEO of a major construction company: "It makes no sense to do public works projects if there aren't any payoffs," because normal profit margins are quite narrow...

...Many wrongdoers have been identified, but many innocents have been sent to jail or destroyed by leaks to the insatiable media...

...the original Senate version contained a provision limiting representatives to fifteen years in Parliament...

...he first question arising in the short term, though, is T how to replace the corrupt ruling class...

...Craxi transformed the PSI into an outspokenly anti-Communist, pro-NATO party...

...Those who collaborated with the Stasi, the KGB, and the other instruments of the Terror often did so to protect a child, or a meager income...

...The head of the "pool," Judge Antonio Di Pietro, has repeatedly asked the government to find a political solution, but the clamor for summary justice—inflamed by the media—has so far blocked any such move...

...It has long been fashionable to believe that the right government, staffed with the right people, could solve most of society's ills...

...the landslide votes across the country against new taxes, which show that voters don't want the government to do anything more than it already does...

...A third general question has to do with the proper relationship between government and business...

...For as the Italians carry out an American-style revolution, the Clintons are trying to build Tangentopoli on the banks of the Potomac...

...There is more to the Lega than mere resentment of the high cost of Tangentopoli and the vast subsidies paid to the South over the years: there is the demand to "let us work...

...about the enforced prostitution of thousands of Korean women...

...By the early eighties, he had become the John F. Kennedy of Italian politics, and in Milan, as in Rome, the most glamorous women, the elite of Italian cinema, the new pinup stars of Italian business, and the heroes of Italian soccer joined the party...

...It was The Great Purge, Italian-style...

...And the free rein given to the magistrates automatically implies their own corruption...

...It was a great success for the party, the country, and the Atlantic Alliance: the PSI delivered the crucial votes to approve the installation of U.S...

...S econd, there is the question of "accepted practice...

...all of the smaller parties...

...T here have been lots of scandals in postwar Italy—why such a long wait for a serious investigation...

...Di Pietro is certainly right...

...Second, the Communist alternative seemed far worse politically, and was no less corrupt...

...Italy must be near the top of the list of high taxers, with more than 200 taxes, including levies on dogs and balconies, and something called a "minimum tax," which means the state simply assumes that you must be earning a certain minimum amount, and so you must pay taxes on it, whether you actually earned it or not...

...Because this was the first investigation following the collapse of the Soviet Empire, and of the European Communist parties, including the PCI (Partito Comunista Italiano...

...But postwar Germany may be the exception that proves the rule, for even in the United States, fools and scoundrels are attempting to whitewash the Final Solution...

...Like one of Kafka's wandering antiheroes, Cagliari sought unsuccessfully to understand what his crime had been, and finally concluded that he was not being punished, but simply humiliated...

...If we understand what happened, we can make proper political decisions...

...Clinton, by contrast, is leading a counterrevolution, as if, after winning the Cold War, we decided to embrace the worldview of our enemies...

...Following the collapse of Communism, we were viewed both as the lone superpower and as the most successful political model for the rest of the world...

...And they have found willing, even generous, accomplices in the West: the Library, of Congress and the Hoover Institution, among others, have given millions of dollars to the Russian Archives, even though most documents for the past thirty years have been "classified...

...The Russian president hasn't a clue about economics (and every now and then his government reverts to its predecessor's form, as when all the "old" ruble notes were confiscated in late July) and he has shown excessive sympathy for the former "organs of state security," the KGB and the GRU...

...By mid-summer there were signs that the Lega's engine was running low on fuel...

...The majority of the targets of the investigative magistrates are technically "guilty," just as, according to the most recent interpretation of the statute, many of the men and women of Iran-contra were guilty of misleading Congress...

...much of Italian business was owned, wholly or in part, by the state, and much of private Italian business came from dealing with the state...

...And the cry goes hand in hand with the impulse toward regional autonomy and even separatism, for this is another manifestation of the desire to have greater freedom, and to have smaller government, closer at hand...

...it undoubtedly came as a shock to most Japanese to learn recently...

...Had we seized the opportunity, we could have actively supported the democratization of the planet, but our leaders were not up to the challenge...

...More than two hours later he was driven out in an official car, and announced his willingness to wait until next spring for new legislative elections...

...The Great Purge combines the worst of J. Edgar Hoover and Watergate with the best of the Untouchables...

...The ideals that inspire democratic revolutions from Central America to the Soviet Empire are our original ideals, the ideals of Tom Payne and Sam Adams...

...The files must be released, and the story told, so that decisions can be made in historical context...

...It is not the only one...

...Predictably, Italian productivity was well under Western standards, while labor costs were well above...

...Tangentopoli was as Italian as pasta e fagioli, just as secret diplomacy by the White House was as American as apple pie, at least before 1986...

...he epicenter of the quake was Milan, which had T become a stronghold of the Socialist Party (PSI, the Partito Socialista Italiano...

...The other traditional parties, including the Communists (now split into a Stalinist rump and something called the "Party of the Democratic Left") are similarly afflicted...

...T he corruption of the DC and its various coalition partners was not merely political...

...in the June municipal elections, it virtually disappeared north of Rome, drawing slightly more than 1.5 percent of the vote in Milan, its previous stronghold...

...The leaders of the old order must be excluded from power, and the big-time criminals should be prosecuted...

...The only sector of the economy showing major growth was, ominously, the state's tax revenues, up 9.3 percent in the first six months...

...Above all, Craxi and his party effectively blocked the Communists' drive to national power...

...Various economists have calculated that the marginal tax rate for well-to-do citizens is actually over 100 percent, and thus tax evasion is quite widespread...

...If the Italians simply throw the old guard to the wolves, it will only be a matter of time before a new Tangentopoli rises on the old foundations of statecontrolled business...

...For the remainder, it is best to trust to the judgment of an informed body politic...

...This was killed in the final act...

...With such tools at their disposal, it is not surprising that the magistrates have obtained thousands of confessions...

...If Italian business is to become competitive again, the government has to get out of the way...

...Known as the Northern League (Lega Nord), it calls for a purge of the current political class, and then a twofold restructuring of the Italian state...

...And it had better move quickly...

...After all, Boris Yeltsin was once the Communist chief of Moscow, and he was elected the first Post-Communist leader of Russia, thereby confirming Ignazio Silone's prophecy that the last war of the century would be fought between the Communists and the ex-Communists...

...Such use of preventive detention is a clear abuse of power...

...The suicide of Raffaele Cagliari, until recently one of the most powerful business leaders in the country, was a primal scream against the arrogance and inhumanity of the judges...

...This cry is quite new in Italian politics, as it is in the innumerable countries around the world where citizens are demanding greater freedom for themselves and therefore less power for their governments...

...At a moment when privatization has achieved the dimensions of a mass movement, and when people are taking government into their own hands all over the world, he calls Canute-like for a "new partnership" between government and business, and asks for higher taxes in order to impose still more government...

...On July 29, two days after bombs went off in Rome and Milan, Umberto Bossi walked into Palazzo Chigi in Rome to meet with Prime Minister Ciampi...

...Giulio Andreotti, the most urbane Italian leader, once suggested that "power corrupts above all he who does not have it," but Italians have read their Machiavelli, and know better...

...Even the Communists were cut in, adding to the funding provided them by the Soviet Union, and to the commissions they earned on projects carried out by Italian companies in Communist countries and the Third World...

...But if the Lega liberates Italian entrepreneurs from the state, then there is real hope for a fundamental and durable transformation of the country for the better...

...Surely it makes sense to retain some of the alchemists Who transmogrified the dross of postwar Italy into the gold of one of the richest societies in the world...

...Some of the auguries in Rome are positive: in early July, the government announced its intention to privatize seven of the largest state-owned corporations...

...As La Stampa put it in early June, the Lega is the first "liberal mass movement ever to emerge in our country," with "liberal" being used in its European, free-market sense...

...This might seem similar to an American grand jury, but the two institutions are polar opposites, for the grand jury simply decides if an indictment is justified, whereas the investigative magistrate can arrest people (and have them held—on extremely vague charges—for up to two years), and order police to search domiciles, seize documents, and tap telephones...

...In Germany, thanks in large part to the courage of the great historian Hans Dietrich Bracher, an exceptionally honest television series on the Nazi years was broadcast, and then turned into a textbook...

...We need a new revolution of our own, not a Restoration...

...There were two very good reasons why there was no serious effort to challenge the system...

...the DC was the linchpin of every postwar government until the spring of 1993, and since power corrupts even its briefest holders, the Christian Democrats—whose tenure is unequalled in the history of European political parties became profoundly corrupt...

...Delay inevitably favors the old guard, not least of all because it enables them to preserve their parliamentary immunity, which shields them from the judges...

...The bell that tolled for Craxi and the Socialists tolled also for the Christian Democrats, the Communists, and most...

...Henceforth, if the Lega view prevails, the South will have to generate its own wealth...

...Yeltsin himself ordered the classification of millions of Soviet documents that would have detailed the crimes of the Soviet Empire, thereby making it much harder for the Russian people to make proper political decisions...

...At a minimum, Bossi wants far greater autonomy for the North, and on occasion Lega rhetoric has bordered on secession...

...Had they been more attentive to the risks of power, the Socialists might have become a durable force for generations, but they were in a great hurry to cash in on their success...

...First, despite its cost(those commissions came out of the pockets of Italian taxpayers, after all), it was extraordinarily successful: this corrupt system brought Italy from the ruins of the war to become the world's fifth industrial power...

...In short order, politicians and businessmen were slammed unceremoniously into prison, the investigation was expanded to cover the whole country, and the scandal spread to include leaders of all the parties and their business allies...

...George Bush often seemed embarrassed by the role history had assigned him, and instead of leading the Revolution, he betrayed it, and turned to the world country-club of presidents, sheiks, and kings for consensus...

...By mid-August, there were more pensioners than employed people, and jobs were vanishing by 100,000 per month...

...I have been arguing for several years now that we are living through The Second Democratic Revolution, which is the political harvest of the revolutionary seeds we planted more than 200 years ago...

...At the core of the Italian revolution, the Lega's cry, "Get off our feet and let us work," echoes the Jeffersonian tradition: the best government is the least government...

...cruise and Pershing missiles in Europe in the late seventies, the party gained votes, and Craxi became prime minister...

...And the crisis of the traditional parties follows an April 18 referendum to abolish proportional representation in the Senate, which captured a fantastic 82 percent of the vote...

...In Italy, the "history" of Fascism was manipulated by the dominant pro-Communist intelligentsia, and presented as a caricature of capitalist reaction...

...The investigating magistrates followed the money trail, and it led them into a vast network of commissions, bribes, and payoffs, largely in the hands of Socialist Party officials and their business associates...

...When charges are brought to the court, a magistrate is appointed to determine whether the allegations warrant a trial...

...The grand jury is supposed to protect citizens against arbitrary state power, whereas the investigative magistrate is arbitrary state power, with all the menacing means that implies...

...In February 1992, a Milanese businessman, who had been shaken down for payoffs by a local Socialist, 'filed charges...

...As Madison commented in a discussion of the separation of powers, when the power of the judge is combined with that of the legislator, the judge becomes a tyrant, and that is one reason why the Founding Fathers provided a purely political remedy—impeachment—for malfeasance in high places...

...In the first five months of 1993, unemployment grew by 35 percent nationally, a staggering 57 percent in the South...

...On the other hand, Yeltsin also demonstrates the enormous intellectual damage inflicted by Communism on most all of those who lived under its sway...

...By civilized standards, the entire Communist apparatus was criminal, but only a miserable handful of top leaders—and occasional scapegoats, like the East German border guards—have been charged, and precious little has been done to tell the true story of the Communist era, despite the 'abundant evidence conserved in the archives of the Communist parties and the institutions of the Terror...

...All the stupid things we did in twenty years he's repeated in twelve months...

...Lega leader Umberto Bossi is a blunt-talking maverick with none of the intellectual pretensions of traditional Italian politicians, but considerable charisma and sound electoral instincts, and the numbers are eloquent testimony to his effectiveness: the Lega is now by far the largest party in the North...

...Only in the past decade have Italians begun to understand that Fascism was a popular, broad-based regime that contained revolutionary elements as well as conservative themes...

...It is hard to fathom what motivated him, for the very logic of the Lega's surge seemed to demand that he insist on new elections as soon as possible...

...In this century alone, the Italians have, given us Fascism, Eurocommunism, and Euroterrorism...

...Aside from Catholicism, there was little in the way of political ideology to unite the DC, and even the ostensible raison d'être of the party—anti-Communism—was often observed in the breach, as DC prime ministers like Aldo Moro and Francesco Cossiga sought working alliances with the PCI...

...The extreme contemporary case of this problem is the post-Communist nations of Eastern and Central Europe...

...The Lega combines its call for greater independence for the North with a revolutionary demand that the state's role, particularly in the economy, be drastically reduced...

...Without a close working relationship between government and business, Tangentopoli could never have reached such awesome dimensions, and while it generated a lot of money (and, to use the currently fashionable language, it created a lot of jobs), it did considerable damage to Italian business, because the companies didn't have to compete in an open market...

...Even Lawrence Walsh would envy the enormous powers concentrated in the hands of Italian investigative magistrates...

...Cagliari suffocated himself in his cell in Milan's San Vittore prison after he was denied release on bail after more than three months of detention, during which he was never interrogated by the magistrates...

...This demand sets the Lega apart from all the other "new" political forces, for the others simply wish to replace the old politicians with new ones...

...There were two moments when the PCI might have taken power: in 1948, when the Communist-Socialist alliance seemed capable of winning the national elections outright, and in the mid-seventies, when the "Eurocommunist" PCI seemed about to enter the government...

...From the end of the Second World War until the end of the Cold War, Italian politics were dominated by the presence of the largest Communist Party in the Western world, the PCI...

...But the old guard salvaged some hope for tenure...

...After the Second World War, the captured Nazi documents were made available to scholars, and it is no accident that our understanding of Nazism was achieved decades before we began to grasp Italian Fascism—the Italians had released their documents quite slowly, and it wasn't until the sixties that most of the material became accessible...

...some of the more reflective magistrates see that they have overstepped the traditional boundaries between judiciary and legislature...

...The rejection of the PCI left the country by default in the hands of the largest political party, the DC (Democrazia Cristiana, the Christian Democrats), actually less a party than an amalgam of fiefdoms, factions, and special interests...

...The political changes are revolutionary...

...if the public is fully informed about the past, those responsible for it will not be rewarded...

...For this, clearer minds and freer spirits will be required...

...The evils of the past must be fully understood, and new standards must be established...

...Within days, Bossi had returned to his battle cry of "elections now," but the apparent ease with which he was coopted by Ciampi raises significant doubts about his future resolve...

...Thus, particularly in .the big, state-owned megaholdings like IRI and ENI, both market share and inflated prices were guaranteed by the government...

...Mitterrand was neither the first nor the last Western leader who could have avoided 'a lot of trouble by paying attention to Italy, the political laboratory of the Western world...

...The most effervescent symbol of the Craxi years was his friend and ally, Foreign Minister Gianni De Michelis, who, with his long hair and vast midsection, his witty repartee and constantly changing cast of gorgeous female companions, charmed and scandalized Western capitals...

...That conviction is increasingly rejected, as we can see in our own society: the school "choice" movement, which is essentially a revolt against the education bureaucracy...

...It was therefore the first time that Italian investigators could go right to the bottom of the matter without fearing that Italy might fall into enemy hands...