Salvini's Christ
This essay was originally published on 28 October 2021 for subscribers to our newsletter.
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I was intending to translate a newspaper article on the Roma and the Sinti communities in Hungary. The article, which I have mislaid, went into details that now escape me, but the principal theme was of course the oppression they have to suffer in Orban’s Hungary. These are urban communities that probably were the result of post-war communist regimes, who were keen to give them housing and citizens’ rights but too rigid to allow them to continue their lifestyle. In recent years their living conditions have become unbearable, and many have moved abroad, but the communities were so large that substantial numbers continue to live in conditions that shame both Hungary and the European Union. The same page also had an article on the new anti-Orban coalition in Hungary, which has emulated Bennet’s in Israel by bringing together parties across the spectrum from right to “left”. There is very little to hope from such coalitions, as they are likely to be mirror images of the governments they want to unseat, but they demonstrate that at least on economic matters, there is very little difference in the policies of “centre-left” and “centre-right” parties, and all of them from the viewpoint of the 1970s would be considered extremely right-wing. The first story would probably be news in the anglosphere, the second (I would hope) is something you already know.
However, the loss of the article may have been fortuitous, because a much bigger story has now taken Italy by storm and is dividing it into two camps that could never come together. I’m sure that there will have been a small amount of coverage in Britain (or maybe not), but the details will, I’m sure, be of interest to readers. It is the story of Mimmo Lucano and his community of asylum-seekers in the dying village of Riace (famous for its two Greek bronze statues found about forty years ago in a wreck that sunk close to the coast the village overlooks). But first we need go back to the First Gulf War and the exodus of Kurds over the mountains to escape Saddam Hussein’s wrath (one of the many times the Kurds have been betrayed by the West) and also to the fifties and sixties when Calabrians were abandoning their villages in the hills either to go to Germany for work or down onto the plain to build a new house, since the Americans had sprayed the area with DDT which got rid of the endemic malaria. Sometimes they did both, but the important thing is that these villages (so much more attractive than the dispersed and chaotic towns built to replace them on the fertile plain) were abandoned, and the communist mayor of Badolato announced that the Kurds who got to Italy could come to Badolato and be given an abandoned house. And they came. It was a complex story and in the early 2000s I interviewed a German UNHCR official, and it seems that after a good start, the young Kurdish men followed in the footsteps of previous Calabrian generations to seek work and a Kurdish bride in Germany. Some wrote the experiment off, but after two or three years of factory work they once more copied previous Calabrians and returned in the summer to do up their homes. Of course, they weren’t intentionally copying the host community’s past behaviour, but were driven by the same economic forces. After a few more years, some of them started to live permanently in the village in the hills and set up their own businesses, so that their children could go to school there and a community was born. It became a model.
One person who was attracted to it was a youthful Mimmo Lucano in the late nineties. His village had not so much shifted downhill as started to die. There is a Europe-wide abandonment of small settlements in “remote” areas, and this is definitely not restricted to Southern Italy, though it is particularly pronounced in some parts of it. Mimmo (I’ll call him that as all his supporters do, but of course I have never met him or communicated with him) saw an opportunity to welcome immigrants to Italy and also revitalise the local economy. It was a slightly different model, because the only thing the immigrants had in common was that they were immigrants, as they were coming from all parts of the world. And the model worked extremely well. People came and created demand, which in turn created jobs. The EU congratulated him and gave him funding (these were people who no longer wanted to continue their journey north, as is the case with most immigrants who arrive by sea). In fact everyone seemed pretty happy with the situation, with the exception of one man in particular, Matteo Salvini. This mattered when Salvini’s Lega (having removed the “Northern” from the “Northern League” and switched from the hatred of the south to a generalised xenophobia) and Beppe Grillo’s Five-Star Movement romped home with collectively more than 50% of the vote. From the very start, the treatment of Mimmo Lucano went beyond normal legal procedure. Without any process, his mayorship was removed and he wasn’t allowed to enter Riace. His prosecution commenced and the decision of the judges was only announced on the 30th of September of this year, shortly before the elections in which he was standing. He was found guilty of aiding and abetting a marriage of convenience. This is all they had, and it is quite likely that this is what actually happened, but while entering into a marriage of convenience is a (fairly minor) offence, mentioning the possibility of it to others in order to avoid deportation is surely not. Mimmo is not a wealthy man and has no interest in becoming one. His lawyer, who died recently, worked for him gratis. Mimmo’s wife, Lemlem Tesfahun, cleans other people’s houses to make a living. I have no idea what his political or religious ideas are, but he is committed to living with the humiliated and being one of them. He was relaxed and fully expected to be acquitted, as did his supporters.
Instead he was found guilty (of what it is still not that clear, as the written judgement has not yet been published), but the real shock was the prison sentence of thirteen years and two months. Even the prosecutor was “only” asking for seven years and two months, and probably didn’t expect to get it. His wife has been condemned to four years and ten months, which is particularly cruel as they have a daughter. Immediately afterwards, the whole thing descended even further into farce: in an interview with the press, the leading judge – clearly taken aback by the widespread indignation – said that he hoped the sentence would be halved in appeal (neither Mimmo nor his wife have been arrested, as the court allowed for appeal – and one newspaper article ended with these words: “The election campaign has been overshadowed, and everything has changed into an expression of solidarity, because Riace can be put on trial, it can be found guilty, but it cannot be arrested”).
No one can make any sense of this, but we can try to understand what it means, and to do this, we need to step back a bit. Norberto Bobbio, a political thinker and philosopher of law, stated that there is natural law on which the concept of human rights is based and positive law which claims that the only rights are those enshrined in law and backed up by some body capable of enforcing it (the UN’s rights lack the second element). For the proponents of positive law, claiming a human right is merely expressing a wish, and that was the side of the argument that Bobbio intellectually came down on, although he campaigned and argued for human rights he considered desirable. Many years after his death, I was in Palermo and met a professor in philosophy of law, and we became friends and met up again on other occasions. When I told him that I had translated five of Bobbio’s books, he immediately took issue with the philosopher, and suggested another school of thinking whose name I sadly can no longer remember. He believed that Bobbio’s error was to think that law was defined by a text, when actually the text is reinterpreted incessantly in accordance with the dominant culture in any particular period. I asked for an example. He came up with debt in Roman Law, which many countries believe to be their law; although the text is the same, the understanding is completely different. In the case of debt in Roman law, the problem is that the Romans perceived non-payment of a debt as a crime against the state and not a person. The person, my friend argued, was relatively unimportant, and the debtor was imprisoned and had to pay a fine (whether the creditor got any of it, I cannot say). This was a society in which the state was very strong, but when the Western Empire fell and fragmented into tiny kingdoms, and particularly after the Longobards took over Italy and annihilated the senatorial class, the state took on another form and the debt became a civil matter or at least a crime against a person and not the state (we should remember that Caesar invaded Gaul primarily because his personal debt was just about to bring him down).
The decision of the Calabrian court is a reminder that decisions that appear utterly insane can become common practice fairly quickly, and the Palermitan professor was right (or perhaps all three theories are right and we have to take them all into account). This decision could not have been made a decade ago and certainly not thirty years ago. Here we are looking at a disturbing trend in the whole of Europe, and the court is both a product of it and means to validate it. In the eighties, there were quite a few Polish and Romanian immigrants in Italy, and no one worried about that. Later arrivals from Albania in the late nineties and early 2000s were not so welcome, but recent events point to increasing racism in Italy, where racism still appears to be less widespread than in other European countries.
The laws that are being used to deter people from assisting asylum-seekers and immigrants were originally written in order to prosecute people-traffickers (and no mention was made of the profit motive, except as an aggravating circumstance). This may have been an oversight or intentional as the original law passed in 1998 was amended in 2002 by Bossi and Fini, the first was the leader of the Northern League and the second the leader of the “ex-fascists”, minor partners in a centre-right government. There is no substantive mention of the kind of activity Mimmo was involved in, but the route to reinterpretation was there, and to be fair, these activities were probably not in anyone’s mind and Mimmo was only then starting off on his life’s work. Here in Italy many think that this is a nonsense that will eventually be sorted out, and common sense will reign once more – as if it ever had anywhere. I am less optimistic: the inability of the EU to develop anything resembling a humane immigration policy which shares the “burden”, the sheer barminess of Brexit Britain and the continuing demographic growth in countries whose economies have been devastated by war or the ravages of unfair trading agreements will only exacerbate the problem that is really a problem for them and not us, as they are partly the solution to our problems. And those wonderful people in every country, including Hungary which is obviously not a monolith and I hope that I didn’t suggest that above, who go out of their way to assist asylum-seekers and immigrants will find themselves increasingly spat on metaphorically and eventually literally. There is a mindset that is angered by expressions of goodwill and humanity, as though they were distasteful or had to be counterfeit – a contempt for “do-gooders”. I believe that a majority of Europeans don’t share this mindset and want to halt the tide of rising xenophobia, but are not finding a unified voice to do this. Yet again I draw your attention to the stench of the thirties: vicious racism and a fragmented left.
Allan Cameron, Pitigliano, October 2021