The health of the rule of law between Italy and the USA
What Mattarella really said about the Bologna massacre and the rule of law in Italy. The italics of Teo Dalaveracuras
Many years ago a dear friend, a young aristocrat from north-eastern Italy not without a touch of extravagance (as can sometimes happen to aristocrats who have not reconverted into great entrepreneurs or super-consultants) confided in me that a very narrow had died, along with 80 other people, including passengers and crew, in the tragedy of the Bologna-Palermo flight of June 27, 1982, operated by a DC9 of the private company Itavia. After exploding in flight, the remains of the aircraft sank in the stretch of sea between Ponza and Ustica . The doubt about the origin of the explosion (a bomb hidden in the airplane or a missile) has never been dissolved, at least until now.
My friend (who also died some time ago), when I asked what was his opinion on the origin of the accident, told me, with resigned serenity: "I don't expect any revelation: it is clear that there are questions destined to remain covered by secrecy, any State would behave in the same way". In the same vein, in the 1970s I was told that people very close to her told Inge Feltrinelli that they had "sniffed" clues that could have led to the truth about the death – objectively singular as well as tragic – of Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. According to the official version, Giangiacomo died from the accidental explosion of an explosive device that the Milanese publisher – for years transformed into a sort of revolutionary militant: we are in the famous years of lead – was preparing to plant, alone, on a pylon of the high voltage in the Milanese suburbs, in March 1973 if I remember correctly. Inge asked her willing friends to immediately desist from any research into her husband's death.
Of course, what I have just referred to are not the common reactions of ordinary people, a category to which I belong, so I sense both the necessities of life that force you to seek at least a pecuniary reparation and the very human desire for revenge that leads you to question yourself uninterruptedly about why and especially about who a person you were existentially linked to lost their life in obscure circumstances.
These memories of many years ago came back to me, in recent days when (with the first aim of representing a contrast between the Prime Minister and the head of state, and with the second of passing over events apparently not considered suitable for the Italian public, Donald Trump's indictment for the events of January 6, 2021 in Washington and then the downgrading of the American public debt rating) in the mainstream press yet another political crisis was staged between Meloni and Mattarella: the first was held up to public ridicule for not having explicitly denounced the "fascist" brand of another massacre, that of the Bologna Central railway station on June 2, 1980: 85 dead and 200 injured. The President of the Republic, on the other hand, was brought to bear for having pointed openly verbis the "neo-fascist matrix" of the massacre, confirmed by the trials that have closed – at least for the moment – the investigations and judicial debates on this other tragedy.
Since I am convinced that Mattarella too is subject to criticism (God forbid!) but that he is neither stupid nor tarnished by age, unlike some of his colleagues (but let's not name names), I went to read the President's statement. Given the emphasis of some newspapers, I expected the President of the Republic to have also intoned, this June 2nd, Bella Ciao …
Here are the exact words of the President on the subject of the dispute: "Italy has been able to reject the murderous subversives, their accomplices, the cynical hidden directors who cultivated the design of increasing tension and fear".
The mobilization of public opinion has served. The commitment of the institutions has served. The neo-fascist matrix of the massacre was ascertained in the trials and cover-ups and ignoble misdirections came to light, in which secret associations and infidel agents of state apparatuses participated. The search for complete truth is a duty that does not extinguish, regardless of the time that has passed. The credibility of democratic institutions is at stake".
More than saying that the search for the complete truth is a duty that does not extinguish, regardless of the time that has elapsed, what else can the Head of State do to remove the suspicion of having wanted to send a transversal message to the Premier? Should he have kept silent about the official version contained in definitive sentences?
The only thing I cannot share about the President's message is that reference to the credibility of democratic institutions. I see an excess of zeal in the claim to attribute to the "Institutions" the task of promoting the search for the "complete" truth. This adjective echoes a distinction in judicial jargon, that between "historical" truth and "procedural" truth. Which may also sound cynical, but it reflects the reality of things: judicial truth is nothing more than the result of a game in which different interests confront each other, including those of the judicial body and of the State behind it: exactly like the "truth" of a football match is the result in terms of goals and the "truth" of a sale is the agreed price. In short, the trial is a game whose stake is not the truth but victory or defeat. In the search for the "complete" truth, institutions have no role, this belongs to the historian who can usefully do his job only after the interests involved have left the scene.
As for the judges, these are always judges of reason of state, whatever the terminological and institutional trappings with which one purports to give them the superhuman appearance of totally independent and disinterested arbitrators. And whether they are democratic or authoritarian institutions, little changes from this point of view. It is enough to look at the use that in the mother house of the democratic West, the United States of America, is made of judicial institutions to cripple opponents and to cover up the flaws of friends.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/stato-di-diritto-italia-stati-uniti/ on Wed, 09 Aug 2023 05:39:41 +0000.