Newsgroup: it.politica
Titolo: uk guardian : berlusconi like goebbels ?

Censorship worthy of Goebbels
by Simon Jenkin
The plan to draw up a list of historical events that people can be  
prosecuted for celebrating is a sign of a leader losing his grip
At last history hits pay dirt. For years it was pap for television. The  
nation's rulers needed scientists for guns, linguists for trade and  
economists for mistakes. History was for nuts and numismatists. Now up  
pops Charles Clarke jingling bags of gold. The home secretary has promised  
the prime minister that he will lock away for five years anyone who  
"glorifies, exalts or celebrates" a terrorist act committed in the past 20  
years. He does not care if glorification was not meant. If someone,  
somewhere takes anything that I say or write as encouraging to terror,  
even if they do not act on it, I have committed a criminal act.
Nor is this all. Lest any crackpot thinks he can dance up and down any old  
high street praising Hitler, Mao or Uncle Joe as outside the 20-year  
limit, Clarke is preparing a list of earlier terrorist acts that also  
render their celebrants criminals. After "listed" historic buildings we  
have "listed"
historic terrorisms. To the glorious chronicles of our island race, Clarke  
is to append an open-ended catalogue of listed events. They may include  
any acts of violence against people, property or, bizarrely, electronic  
systems anywhere in the world if intended to advance a political,  
religious or ideological cause or to influence a government.
I am told that this astonishing bill was cobbled together not by Clarke or  
the lord chancellor, Charles Falconer, who were both away at the time. The  
author was a No 10 wonk who was trying to think up "12 points" to put in  
Blair's holiday press conference pack on August 5. The wording recalls the  
remit of the old House Un-American Activities Committee in Washington. It  
is born of Joe McCarthy out of 1066 and All That, with a dash of the  
Soviet Academy of Sciences.
A sure sign of a leader losing his grip on reality is when he starts  
meddling with history. New Labour was born denying its past. As George  
Eliot said of women, happy is the one who has no history. Blair's party  
was not-Labour, not-Liberal, not-Tory, just "we". Hence the significance  
of Clarke's partial cut-off date in the mid-80s. That was the time when  
Blairism first oozed like ectoplasm from the guts of Orgreave and Wapping.
Terrorism as defined in law more or less covers the story of the human  
race.
Half of Churchill's History of the English-Speaking Peoples must qualify  
as a listed event. The Crown Prosecution Service must be staffed with  
experts in William the Conqueror, the Black Prince, the New Model Army,  
the Gordon rioters, the Tolpuddle Martyrs. Spin doctors must cut their  
teeth on Alexander the Great, Vlad the Impaler, Innocent III and the  
Counter-Reformation in Latin America. They must burn midnight oil over the  
Albigensian crusade. Blair will be heard screaming in his attic: "Beware  
the Da Vinci Code."
This is government by trivia and whim. Already we are told that Clarke's  
listed events will not include anything Irish. Why? King William's  
campaign is life and breath to loyalist militants, as is the 1916 Easter  
Rising to Blair's pet insurrectionists, the IRA. Why should these groups  
be excused the law? Soon anyone who visits terror on the British people  
will negotiate a "listed events exclusion clause" as part of their final  
settlement.
Even without the cliche that one man's listed event is another's act of  
heroism, this is a can of worms. Bomber Harris's flattening of German  
cities in the second world war was specifically described by Churchill as  
"simply for the sake of increasing terror". The bombing of Hiroshima was,  
to put it mildly, a politically motivated assault on people and property.  
Last month it was not glorified, but it was certainly celebrated.
Are Hiroshima or Dresden to be listed events? If not, how can the no less  
terrorist blitz be listed? Conrad was in this sense right: "The terrorist  
and the policeman both come from the same basket." I have no faith in  
Clarke's Stalinist historians. If Whitehall bureaucrats are so  
otherworldly as to find village ponds, conker trees and rare steaks awash  
in human hazard, there is no telling what they will find in the  
bloodstained pages of history. They need only to find a dodgy event and  
someone to praise it and they will pounce. The issue is not mens rea or  
intention to glorify. To convict, there need only be someone who confesses  
to being "encouraged" by the glorification. It is a stooge's charter.
This extension of censorship renders any apologist for any liberation  
struggle vulnerable to prosecution. I find it astounding that people such  
as Falconer, Clarke and the rest of the cabinet can sit round a cabinet  
table and pass a measure worthy of Joseph Goebbels.
Ministers may yet be hoist with their own petard. I might draw a moral  
distinction between Blair's crusade against certain Muslim states and,  
say, publicity for al-Qaida violence against me. I might feel that my war  
is in a good cause and theirs an evil one.
The courts are not free to make that distinction. Any act with terrorist  
connotations puts not just its perpetrator but any contributory publicity  
at risk. Operation Shock and Awe against Baghdad in March 2003, in which  
Britain participated, was intended to terrify the civilian population to  
the political end of toppling Saddam. The name boasted it.
Government lawyers may argue that states cannot be terrorists, yet those  
same lawyers apply the phrase "state terrorism" to others. Besides, the  
bill offers no defence of "good cause". The Crown Prosecution Service must  
surely apply the law impartially.
The government's defenders will argue of terror-bombing from the air that  
there are distinctions in targeting and collateral damage. But any  
self-respecting terrorist can find similar excuses for horror. At very  
least Downing Street is vulnerable to hypocrisy. Its crude attempt to  
stoke war fever in the winter of 2002/3 with briefings of "new  
smallpox/ricin/anthrax threat to London" was no less political. It was  
meant to frighten the public into supporting the rush to war. The effect  
was to disseminate the same fear as did the supposed terrorists. Bluntly,  
the government was doing the terrorists' job for them. I cannot see how  
this puts ministers above their own law.
Downing Street is not alone in playing this tune. This week Brussels  
joined in the New Orwellianism. In a document called Terrorist Recruitment:
Addressing the Factors Contributing to Violent Radicalisation, the  
European Commission warns the media not to take a "reductionist and  
conspiratorial world view where inequity and oppression are dominant". It  
singles out journalism as offering a "specific risk" in the fight against  
terrorism - the risk of "oversimplification". Journalists should  
apparently watch themselves. The edict is the work of the commission's  
vice-president and ally of Silvio Berlusconi, Franco Frattini. Berlusconi  
is no friend of the press.
What is going on here? Blair, Clarke and Falconer are consorting with  
strange company. They should remember Montaigne's warning to history: "To  
make judgments about great and high things, a soul of the same stature is  
needed." Otherwise, said the great man, we drag history down to the level  
of our own vices. Just so.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1576613,00.html

On Tue, 27 Sep 2005 17:11:10 +0000, Ralph Barker wrote:
Non si parla del berlusca o sbaglio?
-- 
"Che abbia voce o no, il popolo puo' essere sempre portato al volere dei
capi. È facile. Tutto quello che dovete fare e' dir loro che sono attaccati,
e denunciare i pacifisti per mancanza di patriottismo e in quanto espongono
il paese al pericolo. Funziona allo stesso modo in tutti i paesi."
(Hermann Goering) <<< Sig. heil!