Here is a photo of something really disgusting at Silvio Berlusconi’s luxury villa.
Italy is agog with the publication by El Pais in Spain of pictures of naked people during romps at Berlusconi’s villa. Personally, I find war criminals (and that is a photo of Blair on holiday in the villa) much more disgusting than naked girls. I think you would have to be pretty nuts not to realise that Berlusconi is living a dream playboy fantasy, but I don’t regard that aspect of Berlusconi as hugely harmful, except for the fact that he has been abusing state resources to subsidise it.
What is appalling is the man’s racism. He says things as Italian Prime Minister that even the BNP do not say in public. I watched him this morning on EuroNews making a European Election campaign speech. He said:
“How do I feel when I see all these non-Italians walking around Milan? When I look around Milan, I think I am in Africa!”
this kind of inflammatory racism is unacceptable from a European Union head of government, and if the EU cannot find some means of sanctioning such behaviour, then it is not an institution which brings the civilising benefits which its proponents claim.
Turnout at the EU elections has been abysmal throughout Europe, with 12% voting in Slovenia. Given that the European Parliament has – and this is a good thing – steadily increased its powers vis a vis the Commission and Council, particularly through co-decision and co-initiation, the lack of interest is alarming.
So too is the xenophobic turn of European politics. Sarkozy today effectively said “No” to Obama’s lobbying for Turkey to join the EU. Berlusconi’s racist rhetoric would not be unusual in many EU states, among parties who are going to win their national EU elections.
Still more alarming, even Berlusconi is not right wing enough for David Cameron’s Tories and they have allied themselves with some truly horrible nationalist parties from Eastern Europe.
I was First Secretary at the British Embassy in Warsaw heading the Embassy’s political and economic sections. I speak Polish. I can tell you definitively that the Kaczynski’s Law and Justice Party – the British Conservative’s now main ally in the EU parliament – consists of a large number of anti-semitic and ultra-conservative Catholic crazies of the worst kind. I actually know these people, and they are miles to the right of the BNP.
Kaczynski continually condemns anti-semitism in public. You might ask yourself why he has to do that. One prominent member of his party (and of ther Sejm) once walked out of a lunch with me in Warsaw where a girl from the Adenauer Foundation was also present, because she was Jewish. I have heard casual anti-semitism from components of Law and Justice which you would not believe.
I cannot believe the Tories are not aware of this. Chris Patten, Ken Clarke and others have been ridiculed by Tory toadies like Iain Dale for warning strongly against the Conservatives’ new European Alliance. What does it tell you about Cameron’s Tories that they do not care?
Charles Crawford
It is self evident that you are an insufferable boor but your comments on the PiS are really taking the P**S. The Kaczynskis are ultra Catholic ideologues of the Old School; homophobic and antisemitic. No-one is fooled by their pro-Jewish posturing as they try to buddy up to the US. Except you, of course: so the fact that you rose through the ranks to become HM Ambassador to Warsaw just goes to prove the Peter Principle: ‘In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence’
Craig
I have been left deeply traumatised by your link to the image of the Bliar. I have spent the last two years deep-cleansing my mind of any traces of that grinning avaricious charlatan and now I shall have to start all over again. You cruel man. 😉
Berlusconi rides high on Camorra/ N’Drangheta/ Mafia money. He is a Mafia front-man, just like Andreotti was but with less guile. Swaggering emptiness. How dare he insult Arabs and Africans? How dare he insult Obama? Berlusconi is a nothing, he is a turd with a mouth. It’s all for domestic consumption, of course. He feeds his supporters shit and they eat it, gleefully, they fill up their heads with it, they become it.
And as for that terse comment made earlier today on this blog by Mister Keep, which was deliberately provocative and which does not deserve a discourse, yet which I do not think should go unchallenged, well, all one can say is that the iteration tells one everything one needs to know about people like him. Lopers, dopers, no-hopers.
Just back from the cinema. Looks like my improvisation of an election slogan for Signor Berlusconi may have benefitted from more explanation.
Oh well. Ho hum. Such is blog life.
Still – Lopers, dopers, no-hopers works just as well (with a suitable graphic).
Good point, my sincere apologies for going off the (wrong) deep end.
Suhayl
I look for poetic simplicity because the wool is often pulled over our eyes by distractions in politics. I do not know if Berlusconi is mafia, but I do know that orgies and torture are from Shaytan, or as Craig describes them, porn.
With regard to David Kilcullen, Lawrencian spy, his words in The Interview on the BBC World Service describe the horrible truth of the Iraq war. Up to 500,000 innocent men and women were imprisoned after their doors were kicked in. They were taken as innocent hostages to be bargained with by US spies in exchange for co-operation of Family leaders. This goes beyond the concept of George Bush that the enemies of the US in the war on terror lost their human rights, because these hostages were innocent civilians.
I know that some people would say that these family leaders were corrupt but what are they supposed to do, either now, or under previous regimes, when their family members male and female are being tortured in prison, other than try negotiate a flawed path out of the terrible fitna or nightmare created by US and UK overwhelming violence?
All the evidence from Iraq is that the US again and again ignited sectarian violence by false flag operations, i.e. blowing up civilians in public places to light the fire of civil war. Everybody with a grain of intelligence knew what the outcome of starting that war would be, but the British public do not know a fraction of the calculating, mercenary, chilling wickedness of the machinations of Blair and the aptly named Kilcullen.
Fortunately they have exposed themselves to the light of day by their triumphal and indeed pornographic glorification of their evil actions in Iraq, now to be repeated in Pakistan. If anyone thought that Gordon Brown was different from Blair, remember that Brown has taken exactly the same condemnatory stance towards Pakistan that Blair took towards Iraq, They went to the same school. It is Zionism. If I’m wrong, forgive me, that’s how I will continue to see it until the target of these abominations is seen to be other than Islam and Muslims.
Anon,
I agree with nearly all of what you’ve written in the above post.
Right now, Muslim countries are potential targets because they are weak and disunited and their leaders are conflicted in their allegiances and often reliant on their colonial overlords in the West for the retention of their power. The only semi-independent states, like Iran, are attacked because they are semi-independent; independence is not permitted. Global hegemony is the goal, control of resources, one of the means. And yes, Uber-Zionists have positioned themselves in key positions within the colonial structure and have positioned Israel as an indispensible beach-head for the US/UK/ Western military-industrial machine. It is these people who were responsible for the attack in Iraq and it is they who continually clamour for an attack on Iran.
In the recent past, the Enemies were the Soviet Union and China and Islamic movements were created and supported by the West as fighting forces against communism. Now oppositional forces outside the capitalist empire have coalesced around these movements and so they are seen as the Enemy.
The USA and her allies destroyed Indo-China, large parts of Africa and Central and South America in its fight against those peoples gaining independence while communism was seen as The Enemy. Now it’s Muslim lands which are being destroyed. The fact is that if the West got their fingers out of those countries and allowed them find their own way to progress, eventually they might become independent and that is what cannot be allowed, any more than it could be allowed in Nicaragua in the 1980s, Iran in the 1950s or Chile in the 1970s.
What I write below is complementary, rather than in riposte, to what you’ve written.
I think it is important to bear in mind that politics and history are neither simple, elegant nor poetic. Nonetheless, there’s no harm applying the ocassional poetic maxim or two, such as this one – albeit out of context:
Study the river well, know its courses. But do not mistake the river for the ocean.