bifo on Fri, 22 Oct 2004 05:26:57 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> The Axis of English by Stephen Bennetts |
I post this paper by Stephen Bennetts because I find it is describing very well the current Italian situation, in its political and anthropoligical implications. But also I like the humorous critique of the cultural and psychological British condescension towards Mediterranean people. Bennetts reports that Churchill wittily said that it was 'better to have the Italians as enemies than as allies.'. I think that there is something true and deeply meaningful in this racist sentence of that depressed fat wormonger. The fascist penchant of the Italian character has to be understood as a pathetic effort of counteracting the special mediterranean dolce vita culture. There is a double bind in the mediterranean relationship to history, and especially to the military side of history. Italian cowardice is my only personal national identification, the only Italian identity I like to share. franco berardi bifo Stephen Bennetts is currently working in the department of anthropology at the University of Western Australia The Axis of English: the Iraq war seen from Italy. The gentleness of the English civilisation is perhaps its most marked characteristic... It is a land where the bus conductors are good-tempered and the policemen carry no revolvers... and with this goes something which is always written off by European observers as 'decadence' or hypocrisy, the English hatred of war and militarism. It is rooted deep in history, and it is strong in the lower-middle class as well as the working class. Successive wars have shaken it but not destroyed it. 'England your England'. George Orwell Making these observations during a Nazi bombing raid on London in 1941, George Orwell noted that 'as I write, highly civilised human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.' In 1937, he had narrowly escaped death fighting as a Republican soldier against Franco's Fascists, and then subsequently at the hands of Soviet agents bent on purging non-communist elements on the Republican side. Marooned in one of the last bastions of democratic Europe, and surrounded by a sea of competing totalitarianisms whose brutality he had experienced personally, it is perhaps not surprising that Orwell celebrated the virtues of British civilisation in this manner. In 2002 and 2003, as Britain, Australia and the United States prepared troops for the invasion of Iraq, I observed in Italy an overwhelming tide of opposition to war which led me to conclusions about the nature of Anglo-Saxon culture which were diametrically opposed to Orwell's. Returning to Australia after 12 months in Italy, I was also hit by a sense that something in the national atmosphere had changed dramatically for the worse. Certain features of one's home country stand out sharply when you return home after a long period away. Living in Italy between 1988 and 1990, I found a depressing air of conformity and moral and cultural stagnation in which the cultural vitality I had glimpsed in Italian cinema of the sixties and seventies seemed only a distant memory. As I prepared to return to Australia in early 1990, the gross consumerism and political corruption of the eighties was about to explode in the great Tangentopoli corruption scandal. What struck me most forcefully about Australia on my return was that it seemed well governed, enjoyed the British virtues of a functioning civil service and the rule of law, and seemed relatively untarnished apart from Queensland by systemic political corruption. Italy had seemed like an almost feudal society in which there were 'no rights, only privileges', whilst in Australia, there seemed to be a genuine commitment to constructing a society based on principles of egalitarian social justice. Returning to live in Italy in 2002 and 2003, the country seemed to have regained a cultural and spiritual vigour which I had found so lacking in the late eighties. The old corrupt Christian Democrat political order had been consigned by Tangentopoli to the dustbin of history, opening up space between 1995 and 2001 for the first centre left government in post war Italian history. New countercultures had emerged and there was an openness to the outside world I had not noticed in the eighties. The country's new right wing prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, elected in 2001, did seem however to provide an element of continuity with the past. During the eighties, it had been the Machiavellian Giulio Andreotti (seven times prime minister and recently acquitted of his third and final charge of Mafia collaboration) who had epitomised the ancient Italian art of political and diplomatic opportunism. Andreotti even managed to shock such a cold eyed observer as Margaret Thatcher. Comprehensively outmanoeuvred by Andreotti's negotiating team during discussions over EU monetary union in the early nineties, Thatcher commented in a thumbnail sketch of Andreotti in her memoirs that he 'seemed to have a positive aversion to principle, even a conviction that a man of principle was doomed to be a figure of fun.' Whereas the Spaniards had made a remarkably swift transition to parliamentary democracy after nearly forty years living under a Fascist dictatorship, in Italy, democracy still seemed in 2002 to be on very shaky foundations indeed. When he came to power in 2001, Berlusconi already owned most of the commercial TV stations in Italy and the advertising companies which fed them, in addition to sizeable publishing and print media holdings. In office, he wasted no time in stacking the board of the RAI (an Italian version of the ABC or BBC), ensuring effective control of almost all state and commercial TV outlets in the country. Several of Italy's most talented political journalists and satirists were soon purged from RAI programmes on the grounds that they had criticised the Prime Minister. None of them has so far been reinstated. It was as if Australian media magnate Kerry Packer had been elected Prime Minister of Australia without divesting himself of his media interests, and had then proceeded to gain control of the ABC and SBS[1] boards while the Australian Parliament, Head of State and High Court remained powerless to do anything about it. For anyone who has spent time in Berlusconi's Italy, recent Government attacks on the ABC and the BBC for alleged 'anti-American bias' and not toeing the war line have a chillingly familiar quality, and seem part of a generalised global political campaign against public broadcasting. On a more positive note, Australians may be proud of the fact that the SBS network is superior to any television service currently operating in Italy. On coming to office, Berlusconi faced several serious criminal charges, including one case in which he was accused of bribing several Roman judges in order to fix a multi-million dollar judicial decision in favour of his Mediaset empire in the early nineties. The Berlusconi government now began to simply change any laws which might expose their leader to prosecution. Berlusconi's defence lawyers were installed on the same parliamentary commissions which were responsible for vetting the legal amendments necessary to keep him out of jail. A government law passed in July 2003 to grant him full immunity from criminal prosecution while in office was subsequently overturned as unconstitutional in January 2003 by the Italian High Court. It all seemed a world away even from the mendacity and deceit of Howard's Australia. Italy: Millions Flood Rome When Bush began his drive towards war on Iraq, one got the feeling that for Berlusconi, it was the perfect distraction from these embarrassing legal concerns. His response combined the great ad man's instinct for trying to sell everyone what they wanted, with the Italian tradition of diplomatic opportunism and of trying to secretly negotiate the best possible deal with all interested parties without any clear commitment to any principle whatsoever. However, Berlusconi's attempt to ingratiate himself with the Bush Administration was completely out of step with Italian popular sentiment. In mid-February 2003, I filed the following rather melodramatically-worded report in the Australian Green Left Weekly: At least 2 million people (organisers estimate 3 million) from all over Italy converged on Rome on February 15 for probably the largest peace rally held anywhere in the world on that day. An entire section of the historic centre of Rome, between the Colosseum and piazza San Giovanni, was packed for hours in a slow moving carnival of dancing and music, surrounded by a sea of coloured banners. The piazza San Giovanni, with its extraordinary backdrop of the Basilica of San Giovanni and the Lateran Palace, seat of the popes for centuries, has been the traditional venue for major Communist Party rallies in the post-war period. The slogan Stop the War, No Ifs or Butsbrought together participants representing the breadth of Italian society and from more than 400 different organisations. Catholic youth, nuns and priests marched in the early spring sunshine alongside young people with dreadlocks, nose rings and Palestinian scarves. Many marchers had left home late the night before on nearly 3000 special buses and 30 extra trains to travel to the Italian capital. The stage was hung with one of the twentieth century's most vivid images of war, Pablo Picasso's Guernica. Among speakers from all over the world who addressed the rally were Kurds, Iraqi dissidents, Palestinians, a representative of the American Council of Churches and an Israeli conscientious objector who had spent three 7months in an Israeli military prison for refusing to serve on the West Bank. Italy's right-wing government, led by Silvio Berlusconi, has openly sided with Washington and Britain in their plans to attack Iraq. Without consulting the Italian parliament, the government on February 13 agreed to US requests for the use of Italian rail, road and airport facilities for its war on Iraq. The massive demonstration confirmed opinion polls showing that Italians overwhelmingly reject Berlusconi's pro-US, pro-war line. City councils that have raised the rainbow peace flag have been threatened with prosecution. This has prompted a wave of civil disobedienceby mayors all over Italy and a defiant rush to get hold of peace banners. At the February 15 rally, hundreds of local councillors from as far away as Friuli on the Austrian border arrived in Rome to march in uniform behind their cities' banner. Catholic opposition to war is very strong, and the Catholic Church is an important component in the Italian peace movement. The pope has condemned the drive to war more openly than almost any other world head of state and the Vatican has played a significant role in European diplomatic efforts to prevent war. Apart from its large Catholic population, there is also a counterbalancing anti-clerical tendency in Italy for whom the current Pope is something of a conservative bogeyman. Yet the Pope's outspoken opposition to war galvanised Catholic and non-Catholic opinion alike. In 1915, Pope Benedict XV had denounced the First World War as 'this useless slaughter'. In his almost daily denunciations of the case for war, Pope John Paul II now seemed to fall only a little short of issuing an excommunication against Bush. Although Italians had become accustomed to images of an increasingly enfeebled Pope debilitated by Parkinson's disease, he now seemed to go into training like a champion boxer preparing for a big match. He was reported to have begun a special course of treatment which involved drinking a vitamin-rich concoction of papaya every morning, and seemed to emerge extraordinarily reenergised, ready to go head to head with George Bush. 'History will judge him', commented the Pope bitterly as the US President finally let slip the dogs of war. Few other world leaders had had the courage to condemn US militarism so openly. In Easter 2003, I attended the celebrated Good Friday procession on the island of Ischia, during which a shrouded seventeenth century wooden image of Christ is carried in silence through the streets by hooded members of the local religious confraternity, attended by a heart-rending Baroque image of Christ's grieving mother, the Madonna of Sorrows. We later adjourned to a nearby pizzeria to watch the RAI telecast of the Pope leading the Good Friday service in the Colosseum in Rome, which was ablaze with candles. From this killing field in which perhaps half a million Christians and pagans had once been torn apart by wild beasts, crucified, killed in gladiatorial combat or burnt alive for the amusement of the Roman populace, the Pope gave forth a great cry of anguish at this planet transformed into a cemetery, this earth full of tombs. In a kind of access of poetic Christian existentialism, he later claimed that God had 'turned his face away from human beings in disgust'. Through his outspoken statements, the Pope created a remarkable consensus which united Italians of all political and religious denominations in opposition to the war. Many Italians seemed prepared to go a lot further in their opposition to the war than I could imagine was happening back home in Australia: Growing campaign of civil disobedience against US military convoys in Northern Italy February 2003 Italian peace activists have been blockading US military convoys along Northern Italian rail routes since last Friday, as the centre right Berlusconi government faces a rising tide of opposition to Italian support for a US attack on Iraq. Under the NATO treaty, Italy hosts a network of 12 US military bases, including Camp Derby near Pisa, the largest American weapons dump outside the US. On 14 February, the Government acceded without parliamentary debate to US requests for military access to Italian rail, road, port and airport facilities for the redeployment of war materiel to Turkey via Camp Derby and the port of Livorno. Over the last few days, the Stop That Train; Disobey Global Warcampaign has attempted to block 27 special trains laden with US troops, tanks, rocket launchers, jeeps and bulldozers which are en route to Livorno. Members of the railwayworker's union have been providing activists with detailed information on rail movements, and in a rerun of a 1969 scenario during the Vietnam war, dock workers are refusing to load military cargo in Livorno. Following union bans, civilian train drivers have been replaced by Italian military engineers. Many of the trains have been delayed for hours and forced to re-route along minor branch lines, although some have finally reached Camp Derby following intervention from Italian riot police to clear the rails. The Government appears however to be playing its cards carefully, aware that the issue could easily become a flashpoint in a country where the majority, including the Pope, are opposed to the war on Iraq and where even some members of the ruling coalition have openly questioned Berlusconis support for the war on Iraq. The drama is being played out mainly in Tuscany, an historic stronghold of the Italian Communist Party and also of the Italian Resistance movement during the Second World War. In the current spate of railway sabotagethere is perhaps an echo of the tactics used along these same railway lines by Italian Partisans during the German occupation. The blockade is being co-ordinated via SMS messages, alternative websites and radio stations such as Radio Sherwoodwhich are providing up to the minute information on the latest military train movements. On the Indymedia website, a technician explains how to stop a train by activating red train signals. A wide range of groups are involved in the blockade, including the Italian Green and Communist Refoundation parties, trade union groups, the uncompromising anarchist 'Disobedient ones, and Catholic peace groups which include several Catholic priests. According to a survey published on Tuesday by the Rome daily 'La Repubblica', 34 % of Italians support the current campaign against the military convoys. The blockades seem to be becoming more radical in nature, as the leader of one peace group called on activists to stop the war machineby putting sand in the petrol tanks of US military vehicles. A small group of activists have begun a more generalised campaign of disruption to train traffic by activating emergency brakes in civilian trains, and train stations all over Italy will be occupied on Wednesday in a national day of protest against what the activists call the trains of death. Even though every one of the 'trains of death' eventually reached its destination, in Italy, direct action was not, it seemed, a dirty word. Back home it seemed to be considered 'un-Australian'. Green Senator Bob Brown's interjection during George Bush's speech to Australian Parliament was greeted with a paroxysm of popular outrage, for Brown had let the national side down at one of those very rare moments when the rest of the world was actually aware of our existence. At a time when we should have been basking in the reflected glory of our illustrious guest, CNN had beamed the whole embarrassing incident around the world. Australian talkback radio hosts and the sagacious crocodile trainer Steve Irwin[2] fantasised openly on air about kneeing the obnoxious Greens senator in the balls, while even political moderates seemed to see the incident as an appalling lapse from the otherwise impeccable standards of Australian parliamentary tradition. In Spain, another "non-belligerent" Bush ally, opposition to the war was running at 91 per cent at the outbreak of war. Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, a slightly more polished but equally colourless Spanish version of John Howard, tried unsuccessfully to push the same line on the war as Berlusconi. In Spain, Good King Juan Carlos enjoyed the kind of popular prestige which the feckless Windsor family could only dream of, due largely to his courageous role in the transition from the Francoist dictatorship to democracy. Like Berlusconi and Howard, Aznar was keen to gain a moment of glory at the minimum of national expense by sending a frigate to join coalition troops in the Persian Gulf. Since Juan Carlos was formally head of the Armed Forces, Aznar would need his assent. When he declined to give this, a furious row ensued, after which the King disappeared discreetly from view for nearly two weeks. This lead to wild popular speculation that Aznar had ordered the Spanish Secret Service to kidnap the head of state. Meanwhile, Barcelona peaceniks were elated to rate a mention in a speech by Bush in which he stated that 'not even the demonstrators in the streets of Barcelona' could do anything to sway him from his course. Meanwhile, my four year old daughter was banging pots and pans for peace every night in Barcelona with her mother and militant socialist grandmother from the backblocks of Andalucia. This was the classic popular Hispanic tradition of the 'caceroleada' popularised by the mothers and grandmothers of 'the disappeared' under the Argentinian military dictatorship. Every night from the beginning of the war right up to its conclusion, the caceroleada rang out in Barcelona between 10 and 10.15 pm. Coverage of Australia's participation in the war on Iraq was mercifully scant in Italy, a far cry from the Tampa crisis the year before, when Australia was front page news in Germany, Italy and Spain for a week, and when I was tempted to pretend I was a New Zealander. Amidst the throng of cash-strapped, easily suborned Third World countries and former Eastern European dictatorships with whom we joined the 'coalition of the willing', Howard's stagey military antics were barely detected at all in Europe outside Britain. My account of this period hardly does justice to the thousands of Australians who rallied against the war while I was away. During a spectacular mass break out from Woomeras refugee detention centre in the central desert in 2002, Australian activists and refugees had attracted wide international publicity by pulling down security fences with their bare hands, thus. It was gratifying to see Italian TV news footage of the red letters No Waron the Sydney Opera House, and to get a brief glimpse of a papier mache Howard in the form of a dog licking George Bushs arse in the Sydney peace rally. Then there was my friend Sue in the nude womens peace rally in Byron Bay, indiscernible in the page three photo in La Repubblica. As I told her later, anything with naked women in it was sure to get a run in Italy. As war broke, the biggest trade union in Italy called a one hour national strike. By now, it was almost impossible to find a vantage point in any major Italian city from which the ubiquitous rainbow peace banners were not visible. Email circular to Australian friends, April 2003 Berlusconis attempt to ingratiate himself with the Americans by taking a more active role in the Iraq war has been stopped dead in its tracks by a massive wave of opposition by ordinary Italians. At the outbreak of war, 89 per cent of Italians were opposed to the war, and on Saturday there were peace demonstrations in 36 provinces throughout the country. The opposition partiesoutspoken and articulate opposition to the war have made the idea of any closer collaboration in the war a non-starter. Like the great ad man he is, Berlusconi has realised that his brief for selling war to the Italians is a dud, and so has been reduced to mouthing pious and highly ambiguous platitudes about what a great thing peace is. Meanwhile, several thousand American paratroops have been deployed to Northern Iraq from bases In Northern Italy, in apparent contravention of Italys official status as a non-belligerent ally, the Italian Constitution and the declared position of Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, the President of the Republic. It is not immediately clear whether this was the result of a secret deal between Berlusconi and Bush, or whether the Americans just decided to do whatever they felt like. Greenpeace has scored a propaganda coup in Rome by managing to unfurl a huge banner in front of the Altar of the Homeland, a grotesquely florid military monument to the Unification of Italy known locally as The Wedding Cake. In a spoof of a Berlusconi slogan during the last Italian election campaign, the banner depicted him in a military helmet announcing: a concrete commitment: war. Slogans at a peace rally in Naples: 'Rambo, stay at home'. 'If Bush wanted oranges, he'd bomb Palermo. Coming home Thus Capricornia, freest and happiest land on earth, was dragged into a war between kings and queens and plutocrats and slaves and homicidal half-wits, which was being waged in a land in another Hemisphere, thirteen thousand miles away. Australian novelist Xaxier Herbert Capricornia, 1937 A depressing spectacle awaited me on my return to Perth in mid-2003. Much had changed. What struck me most was the degree to which the political agenda in Australia had been seized by Bush, Howard, and their cronies, and the inaudibility of dissenting voices. A comprehensive process of dumbing down seemed to have occurred, and the Howard consensus seemed to have the nation in a vice-like grip, small wonder given the lack of pluralism evident in the Australian media. In Spain, dissenters were able to read the centre-left daily El Pais, in Italy there had been the centrist Corriere della Sera or the centre left Roman daily La Repubblica. In Britain there was a choice between the left wing Manchester Guardian or the centre-left Independent, while in France, there was Le Monde. In Australia, if you lived outside Sydney, Melbourne or Canberra, there was The Australian. Living in Perth and Alice Springs (in Central Australia), I had found the paper a conservative but informative alternative to the pitiful local rags The West Australian or the Centralian Advocate. Returning in mid-2003, I was shocked by the paper's new aggressive advocacy of the Bush and Howard line on Iraq and a host of other issues, presented in an increasingly crass and tabloid style. Janet Albrechtsen seemed to jostle with Keith Windshuttle, Dick Cheney or Condoleeza Rice for attention in the opinion pages every other day, while the Harvard-educated US apologist Greg Sheridan indicated the sensible line on global politics. In fact, a common-sense position seemed to have been established on just about everything; a 'politically correct' leftist intelligentsia was sending the country to the dogs, falsifying its history, upsetting the blacks, being easy on 'illegal immigrants' and not pulling its weight in the 'war on terror', or the 'so-called war on terror;' as SBS news presenter Mary Kostakidis obstinately continued to call it. I learned soon that my Government was attempting to negotiate a free trade zone with the United States, had reserved the right to intervene militarily anywhere overseas to protect Australian interests, and that we were now enthusiastic about becoming part of the American anti-missile shield. After the greater public scepticism in Italy towards the US, it was a shock to see how little questioning there was of such proposals in Australia. The Australian view of the world seemed to be increasingly indiscernible from that of the American one, and John Howard seemed to do everything in his power for the distinction to be erased permanently. The militarisation of the collective Australian psyche which had taken place over the past twelve months was evident in the degree to which the macho language of US military operations had seeped subliminally into Australian public discourse. 'Weapons grade movement' boasted an advertisement for a performance by the Sydney Dance Company, citing a Sydney theatre critic. Interviewed for the anniversary of his term as Prime Minister, Howard jokingly likened the danger of a surprise leadership challenge to 'an Exocet missile coming unexpectedly over the horizon'. In the newspapers, there was a disproportionate attention to military matters which had been absent before I left. During the Timor emergency, there had been a heroic quality about Peter Cosgrove going off with his boys to save the Timorese from the machetes of the Indonesian militia. Now the deeply unreflective bunkum of the Gallipoli mythology was dusted off anew as cover for yet another dubious foreign-led expedition. As Arthur Callwell had observed on the eve of Australia's involvement in the Vietnam War, 'when the trumpet sounds and the drums begin to roll, the voice of reason is scarce heard in all the land'. Europe, war and the Axis of English I had discovered early on that in Europe, attitudes to war were often different from those in Britain and Australia, where we were emotionally distanced from war by our lack of direct experience of it. Visiting the Dutch town of Arnhem in 1980, I was embarrassed to discover that like many Europeans, my Dutch hosts did not share my adolescent Anglo-Saxon enthusiasm for military history. They were appalled by my request to visit the nearby World War Two battlefield in which the Allies had gone 'A Bridge Too Far' in the disastrous Operation Market Garden. My penchant for things military betrayed me yet again as a teacher at a summer English language school in Bournemouth in 1989, when I horrified a Swedish colleague by organising a student outing to see an English Civil War battle re-enacted between Roundheads and Cavaliers. Nearby, a British Army sergeant orchestrated a spectacular recruiting stunt in which tightly-disciplined Army athletes leaped acrobatically over the top of an olive green armoured car. The scene brought home to me a sense that British military tradition seemed to play a central role in the national imagination. Italians had themselves been far from peace loving in the genocidal Fascist attack on Ethiopia in 1935, in which poison gas was deployed against Abyssinian tribesmen. In the event of war, the Italian war party had generally taken a while to build up enough of a head of steam to counteract domestic pacifist sentiment. This is one reason why Italy entered the First World War belatedly in 1915, while Mussolini waited until Hitler had gobbled up Poland and most of France before opportunistically entering the Second World War in 1940. At this point, Churchill remarked wittily that it was 'better to have the Italians as enemies than as allies.' I grew up with my father's story of how British troops overrunning an Italian position in North Africa had been astonished to discover that each Italian soldier was equipped with his own individual coffee pot. In Australia, we had inherited the British notion that national identity and prestige is indivisibly linked to military prowess. Just as Fawlty Towers seemed to suggest the bigoted and self-satisfied English notion that anyone from the Mediterranean was a complete idiot, so Italy's legendary military incompetence was seen as a demonstration of its second rate status as a nation. In the bellicose populist press which seems increasingly to dominate post-September 11 Australia, opposition to war by 'cheese eating surrender monkeys' such as the French seemed to be treated with a similar degree of disdain. Yet during the build up to war, many in Europe, Australia and elsewhere turned to France and Germany rather than the leaders of the English speaking world for inspiration and leadership. Ultimately, the unholy alliance of Blair, Aznar and Berlusconi was successful in splitting the European anti-war front. In English-speaking countries, such events were corrected and normalised for the perspective of the anglophone block in which we live comprising the US, Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand.. Getting outside the 'axis of English' for a while opened up a new position from which to view the world. Reading the excellent Spanish daily El Pais revealed a whole new Spanish-speaking area of the globe which contained the same number of language speakers as my own linguistic patch. El Pais provided for instance detailed coverage on Cuba, the installation of the new left wing government in Brazil, and many otherwise unreported Latin American events. From such a position, Tony Blair's bizarre choice to go along with the Bush madness also began to become intelligible, like economic rationalism before it, as an English speaking disease: Email circular to Australian friends April 2003 From the perspective of Italy, most of the English-speaking world (Australia, Britain and the US) seems to be marching in lockstep towards perdition. Only the more enlightened Canadians and New Zealanders seem to have had the sense to avoid this folly. What strikes me most here is the more pacific nature of the Italian people compared to the English-speaking world, where the logic of militarism seems to have greater purchase. Here in Italy, there is a deeper memory and more direct experience of war than in Britain, Australia or the US, and it is axiomatic for the average person in the street that the whole enterprise in Iraq is complete madness. In fact, two Roman barmen have volunteered this view to me in the last week. I have so far encountered only two people who support the war, one a Jewish friend in Rome who has become obsessively pro-Israeli since September 11, and another man in a crowd who seemed to have some kind of psychiatric problem. One Australian friend, a long-term resident of Britain, sent me the following peeved response which speaks volumes about British condescension toward the troublesome foreigners who live on the other side of the English Channel: Given the history of the past century, people in Britain tend to find it amusing when continental Europeans try to claim the high ground in matters of political morality. To whom should we look for guidance? To Germany? To France? To Italy?!! The world has been generously amnesiac with regard to the latter's role(s) in WWII, but we shouldn't forget that it was the English-speaking peoples who liberated France and Italy, bringing to an end (at enormous costs to themselves) a war that they did not begin. Apart from the anachronistic Churchillian rhetoric which was warmed over and served up in Britain as part of the case for war, there is perhaps here also a suggestion of Edmund Burke, the conservative English critic of the French Revolution who epitomises the traditional English disdain for the un-British enthusiasms of European politics. My friend also neglects the role of the Italian Resistance movement, one of the most powerful of its kind during the liberation of Nazi-occupied Europe. Although for political reasons the Allies largely denied direct aid to the Resistance, Italian Resistance fighters from 1943-5 freed themselves from Nazi occupation in Naples and large swathes of northern Italy before Allied forces arrived, even setting up short-lived partisan republics. In Italy, the liberation from Nazism and Fascism is marked by a national holiday commemorating these Resistance fighters and their Allied comrades in arms. It falls oddly enough on 25 April, the same day as our own deeply equivocal commemoration of the alleged birth of Australian nationhood on the beaches of Gallipoli. Australian columnist Phillip Adams has written that 'the only people on earth who believed, or pretended to believe that George W Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard were telling the truth were to be found among the gullible and culpable in the US, the UK and Australia.' Having witnessed this recent distressing period of world history from outside the English-speaking world, I find it difficult to share Orwell's upbeat view of the essentially pacific nature of Anglo-Saxon culture. As descendants of a nation which by 1914 had conquered a fifth of the world's land surface and a quarter of its population, it is not surprising that a vein of militarism lies close to the surface in countries like Australia, Britain and the US. Whether disguised or naked, the logic of military intervention as a tool for advancing foreign policy objectives is a part of the historical traditions of the Anglophone world. It was to this tradition which its unscrupulous leaders appealed in successfully persuading the US, UK and Australia to join the isolated and overwhelmingly English-speaking 'Coalition of the Willing'. [1] Australian multicultural broadcasting service. [2] A well known Australian media identity celebrated for his description of John Howard as 'the world's greatest Prime Minister.' # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net