From Tangentopoli to Farsopoli to Juventopoli: the Italian “loss of value” of the scapegoat
They want to re-destroy Juventus, but Juventus will re-live. The surreal accusations with which the sporting Justice is trying to re-make the skin of the black and white club allow us a "higher" reflection, or deeper if you prefer, compared to the miserable palace alchemies of our (rear) football shop.
However, here we don't care so much about examining the blame, in terms of capital gains or "salary maneuvers", which will lead to the penalization of the Turin company. The former are a method, a means, a remedy in some ways, used by all football clubs since the global financialization of football. The latter were a completely legitimate method identified by Juventus to deal with the Covid tsunami, the suspension of the championships, the consequent sterilization of any possible income. Maneuver never hidden nor used to alter the regularity of the championships.
And yet, Juve has to pay (for everyone); possibly, thus, en passant, he should also force himself to die. As has already happened once, in 2006: the unidirectional and selective investigation, through which an attempt was made – with excellent results for the fetishists of Juventus-phobic hatred – to make meatballs of the most loved (and hated) team in Italy . What is most interesting, in our opinion, is to identify the roots of a typically Italian phenomenon (the result of an equally Italian bad habit) and overflowing from the purely football, or more broadly sporting, level.
It concerns, if we broaden the view a little, the entire political, cultural and social "structure" of the so-called Belpaese. And it has to do with a tendency inherent in human beings in general, but clearly and acutely shared above all by our compatriots. It is the vocation to summary justice, which is then synonymous with sum injustice, subsumable in the biblical practice of the "scapegoat". It consists in identifying a predestined victim – already powerful, already successful, already acclaimed – and in putting him in chains to be nailed to the pillory of public ridicule. Then making it pass under the gallows of ignominy in order to bear the scandalized and canine yelps of the "righteous" and the "honest". But, above all, making them pay for the "collective sins" of an entire category or even of an entire nation.
Thus, under the frowning direction of improvised Torquemada, certain "sins" (up to a second earlier, known and tolerated by all and practiced by all, without distinction and voluptuously) suddenly fade into the dark crimes of capital punishment. But, based on the implacable "logic" of this perverse algorithm, it is never the many who pay, much less the very many, but the one. It is only an individual, or a party, or a group that has to suffer the shame (and experience the painful gleams) of the stake, never the whole.
This happened at the time of Tangentopoli when the illicit financing of the parties became, overnight, a crime sufficient to justify the beheading of an entire ruling class. Even in that case, it was a "portion" to pay (the five-party party) while the left got away with a few scratches, aware of having been (elsewhere) preserved and "elected" as the exclusive beneficiary of that white coup. Calciopoli, more appropriately defined Farsopoli, represented the application of the same algorithm to the Juventus club, without any serious evidence of actual corruptive practices and above all in the awareness, shared by the whole system that the whole system, and all the teams, were no less " guilty" of Juventus. All demonstrated by the interceptions from the beginning calliously "extracted" to be exhumed only when father died.
And even in that case, another well-loved team (in particular) was designated to collect the fruits, and trophies, mostly made of cardboard (but, as they say, in Italy we have a good mouth), of that coup d' football etat . Today, with the story of capital gains and wage maneuvers, here we go again. A collective and tolerated practice becomes a crime, and there is always and only one criminal. As it happens, the company that comes from nine years of undisputed sporting superiority, just like Juve in 2006 came from years of unquestionable merits acquired on the pitch.
But the impeccable mechanism of Tangentopoli, Calciopoli, Farsopoli, and today of "Juventopoli" does not change. The typically Italiot trait of envy and hatred towards those who "command" periodically demands its liberating tribute to hypocrisy and collective hysteria. It is a sort of vice or, to stay on topic, of national "loss of value": the morbid attraction to the expiatory "noose". And so invariably – in due course and with recurring and infallible cadence – the lugubrious tolls of that ancestral, cheesy, envy that calls the faithful to the "rite" resound.
It's all an amazing pantomime shaped along the lines of the same cliché: whoever wins too much, whoever has too much power, whoever exceeds too much must be immolated. Which could also be the case if this happened to cleanse a corrupt system of its epochal vices, in view of an authentic regeneration guided, and applauded, by the innocent. Instead, it's just the usual Italian "vice" cultivated by the fearful, the resentful, the defeated. The powerful, or the winner (object of the deaf jealous anger and the sordid malignant malice of the losers of the moment and of the masses of aficionados of the latter) programmatically pays for everyone's faults. And, above all, it pays the huge bill for an entire system by itself.
Which gives us back the most intimate, and intimately ignoble figure, of a certain exquisitely Italian "trait". A "truly" populist trait, in the most proper, appropriate and worst sense of the term. And, therefore, let Juventus die again with all the Juventus players. Which would be dramatic, if it weren't ridiculous. And if it weren't for the fact that, as always – as with every cathartic celebration of "crooked" and malicious bad faith – this buffoonery too, once its damages have been done, will pass.
Francis Carraro
www.francescocarraro.com
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The article From Tangentopoli to Farsopoli to Juventopoli: the Italian “loss of value” of the scapegoat comes from Scenari Economici .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/da-tangentopoli-a-farsopoli-a-juventopoli-litalica-minusvalenza-del-cappio-espiatorio/ on Sat, 20 May 2023 12:37:45 +0000.