Italy? Not a country for (old) bloggers
When I confessed to him the will to open my own blog, Paolo De Andreis - accountable director for Punto Informatico - kindly offered to me the availability of the zine’s servers to let me have my own domain and with extremely favorable conditions too. I decided straightway to refuse and open an on-line space on a foreign server because, putting it into simple and straight terms, as I see it Italy isn’t a civil country neither outside nor inside the Net and the facts of the last days confirm this.
At the present time, Italy is a country incubating the inadequacy of the laws to the reality of the new technological media of democratic participation, if not pure and simple ignorance of the officers appointed to the application of the above said laws. A reality, however, made also and mostly of abuses of power and macroscopic injustices, where illegality becomes a pride and legitimacy for make out of governing even an entire nation while it’s thinking to do other.
Bloggers seized
Italy isn’t a country for bloggers because here the blogs end up in being seized, the authors denounced and recalled to the respect of the ridiculous laws of fifty years ago. It’s happened for example to Carlo Ruta, an historian involved for decades by now into collecting witnesses and documentation on the murder of journalist Giovanni Spampinato, killed in Sicily in 1972 for his investigations against the connivance between politics, affairs and Sicilian mob (aka “Mafia”).
The Court of Modica (province of Ragusa) has declared Ruta guilty of “clandestine press” as stated by the Law n. 47 of 1948, which with article 16 sets up that “Anyone that begin the publication of a newspaper or other periodical without having performed the registration prescribed by the art. 5, is punished with the reclusion up to two years or with a fine up to 500,000 liras“. The article 5 cited above forces any “newspaper or periodical” to the registration “nearby the court chancellery, in which precinct the publication must be performed“.
A subsequent law on publishing dating back 2001 established that a generic “editorial product“, constituted by “an header, establishing an identification element of the product” and released to the public with “regular periodicity“, must be ruled by that law approved after the end of the Second World War. The generic definition of “editorial product” was finally done suitable, without the fitting specifications on the matter, to all websites also with another law in 2003.
As a practical result of all this useless legislate the Sicilian judge has convicted Ruta, which in his investigation activity had suffered, say the organizations Metro Olografix and PeaceLink, “several outrages” too including the fire of his own car. Due to lack of the law and to the ineptitude of the officers of the “justice” he has decided that the Ruta’s blog was an “editorial product”, and so it had to be sanctioned because it didn’t respect the corresponding regulations.
The Ruta case is only the last one of a series of preemptive seizures and blackouts including that regarding the bloggers Antonino Monteleone and Piero Ricca, guilty of having trod on high rankers and their lackeys foot who have had an easy play into using the law to close their mouths . Now I’ll say it clearly: personally I’m more interested to computer science and technology that the other, and surely I have no intention to turn Sir Arthur’s Den in a megaphone of political questions.
But I’m used to have always my say and above all to not to lick anybody’s ass, and if I have the desire to report a public document that shows how much disgusting is the morality of the so-called Italian “ruling class” I want to be able to do that without some little judge too zealous could have an easy play into putting my site knockout.
To have a server abroad clearly doesn’t mean to be under a shield effective against any possible censorial intervention towards me, but as said I prefer not to make things easy for a judicial power gone rotten that, in the worst case is simply ignorant of the reality and in the best case, unfortunately, is the daily target of a political power enslaved to megalomaniac and persecutory obsessions of one that has became rich by corrupting judges and making use of his political friendships, then ending up to be the Italian Prime Minister for 4 times.
Silvio IV, italic emperor
Silvio Berlusconi acts like it was a sport practice, to target the magistrature and the judicial power by turning into state issues his own personal situations, the inquiries involving him, the investigations on his economic and corporate lapses, by arguing that there is a “democratic emergency” if a judge in Milan would put him on trial for corruption in judicial acts - he would have bought a deposition to his benefit in the infamous Mills case.
A sport-obsession for which Berlusconi has recently arrived to submit two propositions in Parliament (having on his side an overwhelming majority in the two Chambers after the victory in the last political elections) that humiliate the principle of equality of all the citizens in front of the law and give to him and his buddies, but particulary to him as President of the Concilium of Ministers the total impunity for an undefinable number of years.
The Raging Silvio argues that any Italian, politician, journalist, public prosecutor that accuse him of being a scoundrel that pollutes the political, social, economic, moral life or if only the air of Italy by years now is a “communist”, one that has it in for him , one “politicized” against his legitimate interests and the power given to him by the electors that have chosen him once again, a fact that in his profound ignorance of the democratic principles is equal to a safe-conduct for any trash made in the past, in the present and maybe in the future too.
If however those same accusations come from the Financial Times, Berlusconi can’t possibly say “comunist” to the Briton financial newspaper of international relevance. And the Financial Times, recently, has once again emphasized the return of Berlusconi to power as the nth ugly adventure of an Italy in constant decline (source: Beppe Grillo’s Blog).
Between two fires
Summarizing this is the situation: if an Italian blogger talks too much he runs the risk of falling under the gunpoint of the magistrature and the judges, who act in respect of obsolete laws no more suitable to the interconnected society and to the pervasivity of the modern Internet. That same magistrature and judicial power must then suffer any day accusations, insults, threats or proper warnings in mob style from Silvio IV the italic emperor, and from the gophers who surrounds him without showing to have their own cerebral will.
In these conditions one must have a real sauce, or a puffy wallet, to say that Italy continues to be a great occidental democracy. Italy is a sewer, and more time is passing by and more it seems to me a drain which collects the shit of years. I prefer to keep my server far from this drain, hoping that the stink do not reach Chicago and let me work in peace. The risk is always here, but surely I’m not accustomed to bend myself to a miserable reality that could’n be more miserable.
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