Security package:cruelty to power, in the name of power

It works like this.A proposal is made that is inadmissible from many points of view, requiring the proposer to be kicked out, closing the door rudely behind him.Or throwing it in his face, if he is at the door.

The advantage of making it so big?Simple.The subsequent proposal, purged of the most inadmissible aspects, will at that point seem much more reasonable or acceptable.It will seem the result of a happy and constructive common sense mediation.Let's be clear:it cannot be ruled out that the other party is not so smart as to accept the first proposal.But this would only demonstrate how useful it is to shoot big on the first try.

This dynamic is now repeated for the security package just announced by the government.Which aggravates crimes that did not need to be aggravated, or creates them for dangers that are non-existent.However, trampling on rights, as for those who are moved by a clear contempt for the categories affected.A contempt that is reserved for enemies;not to citizens, not to their fellow men.A contempt in which one can invest electorally, as long as one has the certainty, or at worst the illusion, of being able to ride the wave.

Sorry if the tone may seem provocative, but scrolling through the key points of the security package all this becomes evident, it's a constant rolling of eyes.In fact, it doesn't seem to me that in recent months the public debate has been dominated by the emergency of criminals with children or who become pregnant on purpose to be able to cheat the law;or from prisons in the hands of prisoners, with an Italian remake in sight A dog day afternoon where the protagonist instead of “Attica” shouts “Rebibbia!”.

Where there were riots, it seems to me they happened due to the conditions inhumane institutions (including i Permanence Centers for Repatriation), which are also degrading for those forced to work there.Repression also wears out the repressor, not just the repressed.But the relevant rulings of bodies such as the European Court of Human Rights remain in the background of politics and the media, and while they offer themselves enemies and scapegoats to the electorate, they ignore the sentences and the costs they impose.And he pays, frustrated but he pays.

I don't think there has been an escalation of attacks on off-duty officers.Or that there was an escalation due to pickpocketing by minors.When pickpocketing in Italy went viral around the world, it was because the media highlighted the wrong person with the right catchphrase (“Attention pickpocket!”).It does not seem to me that the main obstacle to the ecological transition and the mitigation of a climate catastrophe that is already affecting millions of Italians is represented by road blocks, or that there is such a legal vacuum that they could become a kind of summer game for short-lived activists. of ideas.Indeed, if there is an increasingly widespread problem at a European level, as we already wrote in January, it is in the repression of dissent.

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But the government's game is a game as tried and tested as it is cruel, which we saw at work right from the start.Starting from the decree "anti-rave", which wasn't so "anti-rave", and continued over the months with the decree on "selective landings”.Since in Italy there is no longer any need for prophetic intellectuals, but at most intellectuals with a good memory, let's illustrate the probable cycle that will be inflicted on the country with this security package.

First, we have the rubbish, in package form:a jumble of repressive tools as useless as they are cruel or dangerous.This, obviously, triggers a range of understandable reactions from experts, observers and associations.Those who chew the bread of law every day perceive its toxicity just by smelling such a package, and therefore raise the alarm.Arming himself with infinite patience, he goes to dissect what is wrong, what is useless, what is dangerous, what absolutely must be stopped.Some opposition politicians will naturally join the chorus, also because it is in cases like this that it is useful to have an opposition.

Predicting the crime of prison riot and also including cases of peaceful protest and passive resistance means annihilating every form of dissent.Beating at the bars, which draws attention to what isn't working, could fall into this category

— AssociazioneAntigone (@AntigoneOnlus) November 17, 2023

Second, comes the official defense.Unlike Greek tragedy, the Italian grotesque involves a chorus and a counter-chorus.Then the titles of the sovereignist trimurti arrive, Free, The newspaper And The truth:the opposition (or a Schlein) will be branded as a friend of pickpockets, a friend of riots, a friend of those who want to kill law enforcement officers.As much a friend of these as an enemy of the homeland.They will then arrive on X/Twitter and on TV influencers to Giubilei or Chirico, ready to take things up a notch, to defend the colors of their favorite team (their own and that of their accountant):pregnant women?Too little, we would need to incarcerate the spermatozoa directly.

Third, in the role of the hero that no tragedy really needs, comes the voice of common sense.The one for which a modest amount of repression is ultimately useful.The one for which these activists exaggerate a little - “Did you see what Greta Thunberg did?these are the results when you don't send your children to school but make them go on strike."The one for which it is better to problematize on the left, because the right "knows that it is like this".A bit like the classmate who went to explain to you what you need to do to avoid the bully's attentions, after having watched while you were bullied.To a certain one you send a friend like that to hell (or it's you, now an adult).

The fourth stage takes place more quietly, in the technical offices, or in the rituals foreseen by the institutional passages:This is where the bulk of the mediation work takes place.Since a government and a parliamentary majority simply cannot be left outside the door, as in the example we started with, here we intervene to smooth out the clearly unconstitutional parts, which would be torn to pieces in the courts, or in supranational bodies:let's just think of the rainbow families and the Padua case, the ordeal before which even the prosecutor's office finally gave up, sending the decision back to the Constitutional Court, with the legislator who willfully failed to do so.It saves the government's face a little, but above all it limits the damage that cruel and inhumane measures would cause if left untouched:they would devastate lives, ruin existences.To these damages, more pragmatically, must be added the bureaucratic ones, due to the mountain of appeals, lawsuits and compensations, and which in any case can never be cancelled.This is because inhuman and cruel measures usually clash with human rights, and therefore with articles of the Constitution, conventions and treaties.

What passes, at the end of this path, is an inhumanity that is no longer pure and lethal, but cut with a certain percentage of legal technique, of civilization.In short:a digestible inhumanity.We are therefore at the second offer of the starting example, and for one reason or another, even if only due to exhaustion, the bar of civilization has moved more and more towards the extreme right.Not a hundred steps, maybe just fifty, or ten.But always and in any case of a distance greater than zero;there is certainly no turning back, towards the negative numbers of "multiculturalism", the "woke left", etc. and so on.

Of course, it may still happen that a harsh reality check arrives.A failure that frustrates in toto the provision, as for example will happen to the newly approved law to block cultured meat.But in that case, as in the past, one can thunder against the enemies of the homeland:whether it is a "communist" judge or the Europe of "technocrats" makes little difference.The important thing is that this cruelty fulfills its two main purposes, which are cultural hegemony and the increase in power.Where cultural hegemony also means the possibility of diverting the debate away from those flaws that are difficult to defend in front of public opinion:there is an example of this double achieved by the majority in recent days, with updates on the two infringement procedures opened against Italy by the European Union (did you perhaps miss them?Precisely).

In any case, from a general perspective, if cruelty in power is rejected after months, or even years, in the meantime it has taken center stage in the public debate and has gained plausibility.It has even been normalized, or even consecrated.He has circumscribed those enemies whose opinion we will never listen to, and who immediately push us to accept whatever proposal they oppose.And perhaps the opposition will have started to say that certain issues cannot be left to the government, so to speak, without even trying to work on alternatives.Therefore, by growling and crying against the enemies of the homeland, while the cultural and political life of the country has moved away from the limits of law, we will be able to begin to attack those limits with even more cruel and inadmissible proposals, if not even those who by law or custom is required to enforce them.

Take for example the recent case of the United Kingdom, with Rishi Sunak's government being seen rejected by the Supreme Court the plan which envisaged no more and no less the deportation of asylum seekers to Rwanda.As with us, the conservatives tried to justify the provision by speaking of a rule necessary to combat "smugglers" and "boats".Naturally, migratory flows in the United Kingdom are very small compared to those in Italy, just as irregular immigration is very marginal.

But this measure also served to focus the debate on the "migrant problem", in a country economically devastated by the failure of Brexit and the mismanagement of the pandemic.Now, the plan has been rejected as illegitimate both under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and under the national laws of the United Kingdom.It is simply something cruel and inhumane that does not stand up to the most basic human rights, a rubbish that a person with an average conscience should be a little ashamed of.It is the translation into law, even exhibited, of useless violence.Obviously the government's reaction was (lying!) to blame the "foreign courts" that "block flights" to Rwanda.That is, relaunching an old catchphrase, that of leaving the ECHR.

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This probably won't allow the British government to do what it wants with migrants.However, it will allow him to have greater power over British citizens, since the ECHR protects, for example, freedom of expression, or other fundamental rights.And, rest assured, already the day after the rejection in newspapers like the Times editorials have sprung up to tell us that human rights “they have had their day”.

In short, if it seems to you that too often there is an unbearable level of cruelty at work, keep two points firm, not just one.The first fixed point is in a certain sense reassuring, although terrible, like every great truth:yes, it is at work, you are not the ones who are too sensitive.If it were otherwise, in public debate there would not be this obsessive need to frame every political battle around an enemy to be struck, dissimulating the actual results, which remain in the background of the debate itself, perhaps illustrated by martyrs of rationalism who can only do all this oppose the same tools as always.The second point is that the purpose of this cruelty is the vertical trail it traces, towards power and towards its preservation.Or, if possible, towards its expansion to the detriment of those lower down, or outside the same wake.

Preview image via The print