This atrocity is known to have had its antecedents as far back as 1969, when the military wing of the long since outlawed Far Right political movement, ‘Ordine Nuovo’, had organized the Piazza Fontana bombing and the 1970 Rome-Messina train attack. Both of these atrocities, like the 1974 Piazza della Loggia bombing in Brescia and the Italicus Express bombing of the same year, were not only the work of Right Wing Terrorists, seeking to discredit the Left, at a time when Left Wing Terrorism was itself highly active right the way across Europe, but appear to have been carried out with the direct assistance of Gladio.

The organization itself can be traced back to the end of the Second World War and a time when the Italian Communist Party was undoubtedly the strongest in Western Europe. In 1948 the Communists could count on the support of 40% of the Italian electorate. With such a strong electoral mandate the Americans became so anxious, with regard to the potentially destabilizing effect upon the whole of Western Europe that a Communist victory at the polls would have, that they even contemplated using military means to prevent such an electoral coup from taking place. Enter James Jesus Angleton, who was later to become Chief of the CIA’s counterintelligence staff from 1954 to 1975.

During the late nineteen forties Angleton was to be directly involved in recruiting a number of Italians, who had been linked to the German Stay Behind organizations that had been set up to subvert the Allied advance, right the way across Italy in the wake of the German withdrawal. Amongst these was Prince Junio Valerio Borghese, the former commander of the elite Naval Commando Unit, Decima MAS, itself the Italian equivalent of the British S.B.S. According to Colonel Oswald Le Winter, the one time CIA-ITAC Liason Officer responsible for co-ordinating many joint American-Italian operations during the Cold War, the intelligence unit directly responsible for recruiting many former Fascists into the ranks of the newly formed Italian Security Service was branch X2 of the OSS: the forerunner of the CIA, at that time headed by Angleton.

What Le Winter failed to tell his interviewers, however, was that Angleton’s methods had previously been utilized by Joseph Russo, the former incumbent of the OSS Security Desk at Palermo in 1943. Amongst those who Russo had himself successfully recruited, in readiness for the Post-War fight against Communism, was Don Calogero Vizzini, who had headed the local Mafia Family at nearby Villalba, and whose principal involvement with the OSS is alleged to have had its roots in New York Mafioso Lucky Luciano’s own previous recruitment by US Naval Intelligence. Vizzini’s subsequent involvement with the OSS was to lead to the notorious Portella della Ginestra Massacre on May 1st 1947. The first of many Anti-Left atrocities that were to be carried out by the criminal element that would later become associated with the clandestine workings of the Far Right.

One of the key methods that the Political Elite have used to create an environment in which the traditional ways previously utilized by the Left to organize themselves, both socially and politically, has been the direct use of the Mafia; and the various other affiliated criminal networks with which it co-operates right the way across Italy; in areas such as waste management and disposal. In March 1998 the BBC announced a city wide strike in Naples, which had been principally organized by the city’s mayor, Antonio Bassolino, in an endeavour to curb the Comorra: the Neapolitan equivalent of the Mafia.

Thirteen years on and Naples was to see itself the centre of a major Comorra linked crisis in waste management which was to come to a head in November 2010 when the government had threatened the city with the imposition of fines. Six months later, with the crisis still unabated, the army could be seen clearing the city streets of rubbish. This systematic infiltration and subversion, of those areas within the power structure that provide essential services to communities, is just one of the ways in which organized criminal gangs have been used by corrupt elements within the Political Elite to undermine the Left’s abilities to organize itself within those self same communities for decades; and has been a major factor in the nationwide political apathy that has gripped the country for years. These are just some of the areas of discussion that Donatella Della Porta’s well written and no less informed article appears to have failed to address.

http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index.php?title=File:Real_GDP_growth,_2001-2010_%28%25_change_compared_with_the_previous_year;_average_2001-2010%29.png&filetimestamp=20120110102858

I am wondering what impact this had on the Italian workforce and the labour movement in the 2000s – my feeling is that it became weaker and weaker, and casualization of labour skyrocketed already before 2008.

Furthermore, the Left (but also the Italian intellighenzia) became increasingly obsessed with Berlusconi’s persona (hence the Italian ‘anomaly’), rather than his dreadful policies (which were certainly more ‘corrupt’, but not much different from an ideological point of view, than neoliberal policies elsewehere in Europe). They wasted huge energies in describing the Berlusconi phenomenon, and lost sight of the wider (European) picture (again, the fact that Italy was in crisis already before 2008, unlike other Southern Europen countries, probably contributed to this perception that Italy was an anomalous case, and the source of all evils was simply Berlusconi). As a result, when Berlusconi was replaced by the differently-but-equally hideous Monti, they completely lacked ideas as to what to do, and were not able to see that this is is actually a systemic crisis.

I can distinctly remember that in the 2000s, one of the inspiring figures for the Italian Left was the Spanish Premier Zapatero with his Spanish economic miracle… well, we can all see how that ended…