Stuck in our little cocoon here, we simply have no idea what tragedies and traumas other populations are experiencing.
We may think that we face challenges day after day but they pale compared to the challenges other peoples have to face.
I am not saying we do not have our problems and our difficulties but we constantly need a sense of proportion because what we consider to be our problems simply disappear off the register when you consider the lot of others.
We think that since we live in a world of instant communication with Internet, Facebook and the rest, we know what other peoples are going through.
We think that just because we go to London or Italy on holiday we know what these peoples are putting up with.
What do we know of the poverty-stricken Italian Mezzogiorno where youth unemployment is at a record high? Where the Mafia and its local variations rule everything, where central government is inexistent, where it takes real heroic courage to stand up to the suffocating system that stifles individualism, creativity and people’s lives.
What do we know of the lives that the thousands, if not millions, of immigrants endure in shanty towns in the suburbs of Rome, Naples etc? How they eke out a living that is daily at risk, of being sent back to poverty or war, where they have to accept wages that are lower just because they have no papers. Many times, they find an unused factory to sleep in, or a wrecked farmhouse.
Their children, being Italian citizens, should get free schooling and free medicine but many times they end up by getting none.
That’s as regards the immigrants, but today’s Italy is a very tough place also for its citizens, mostly due to the mistakes of past governments. Up till the beginning of the Monti government, they had to pay a tax on their second, or holiday, homes. The Monti government, pushing austerity for all it was worth, introduced a tax on the first home. Many people who did not have a second home and who thought they were safe, have now ended up owing the government money in taxes for something, their own homes, which they never considered as taxable and for which they never saved any money.
If you run a company and do work for the government, the government delays paying you. But when you go to the bank, and try to tell them you cannot pay interest on the loan because the government delayed its payment, they reply it’s no concern of theirs. And many businesses have been foreclosed on this account alone.
Carlo Levi wrote some 60 years ago Cristo si e fermato a Eboli to decry the state of things, even at the beginning of ‘the Italian miracle’ just south of Rome where Italy ended and poverty began.
Today, the dividing line has moved much more to the north. Cities like Naples and even Genoa, which used to be radiant, joyful and pleasant cities, have become no-go areas and cities where the law is simply non-existent. One remembers how just a few years ago rubbish accumulated at street corners in Naples and it took the army to clear the mounds of garbage.
The worst despair is if you’re out of a job and you’re young or have commitments: you look to the future and there’s nothing in it for you.
This is the same situation that recurs in the other countries with high unemployment rates such as Spain or Greece. I don’t know about you, but I have started to notice far too many cars with Italian number plates, or Bulgarian, on our roads and wonder what t has attracted such people here or what they have left behind.
There were also the riots in Sweden, the Sweden of the welfare state. Even here one discovers that it was not race that sparked the conflagration but deprivation – these were mostly immigrants taken in by Sweden with its wide pluralistic approach, but they are without a job, they cannot get a job. Their schools are falling apart under the sheer weight of them. So the vicious circle keeps going round and round until it finally blows up.
But if there is a people with huge, seemingly intractable problems – that is the British people, I think.
Last week’s brutal hacking of Drummer Lee Rigby outside his Woolwich barracks has shocked the whole nation in a way that is simply not possible to tell here.
From what I can see, the Maltese media were prurient in their accounts of what happened and the most gory images never made it to the Maltese public. Having been in Britain in those terrible days, I can vouch for the relentless coverage of the aftermath of the event on British television and media while there is no trace of it here.
There is tension in the air and people many times think of nothing else and speak of nothing else especially behind closed doors.
Let me try and dissect the event and its wider implications.
On a calm and balmy Wednesday afternoon, in broad daylight, a British soldier emerged from his barracks. Drummer Lee Rigby has been described by his family and friends as a good man, always ready to help and who willingly took on the burden of working for his wife and his sisters. Clean-shaven and smart. A hero in Afghanistan.
He did nothing to provoke the attack. Instead, the attackers were prowling around and he was the absolutely random victim, chosen because he was a soldier, not for anything he did.
They first hit him with their vehicle. Then they got out and hacked his head off. Then they cut his body to pieces.
The attackers did not run off. Instead they calmly faced a woman who remonstrated and gave a long interview on a mobile phone in which they declared the same fate would befall to any soldier as long as Britain remains in Afghanistan. Henceforth, no soldier is safe, said the attacker, with the bloody machete still in his bloodied hands as he calmly walked away.
Some 10 minutes later the police turned up and shot and maimed, not seriously, two of the attackers.
That’s the dynamics of the attack. What it all signifies, however, is far more dramatic.
Britain has become a completely pluralistic country. It started to lose its one race characteristic long ago in the times of the British Empire and Commonwealth when anybody from a Commonwealth country was allowed free entry to a welfare state with free education and health, as well as a very generous social security regime.
Things have become worse with EU accession and the accession of so many East European countries in 2004, despite the many restrictions that Britain tries at its ports and airports. Britain is also not part of the pan-European Schengen pact of free frontiers. Yet they keep coming in.
The real problem, however, is the increased radicalisation of many Islamic groups who, like what happened in the US, have created a parallel country and who have been attracted to radical fundamentalism by the fundamentalist imams in some mosques and on the Internet.
The attackers of Drummer Lee Rigby are home-grown terrorists, some of who did not go to training camps such as exist in Somalia but who are as extremist as those who have. They are so impossible to keep tabs on, unless entire populations have to be shut in jails. They are impossible to predict.
Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, has come up with some suggestions with which one can agree or disagree:
We must not give the killers the thing they crave above all – the prize of dividing us. They say they want a “war”, or, as others have put it, a “clash of civilisations”. That idea is bunk, and we can show it.
To prevent any such temptation, we must be clear in our heads that there is no sense in blaming Islam, a religion that gives consolation and enrichment to the lives of hundreds of millions of peaceful people.
So we need to make a hard and sharp distinction between that religion – and the virus of “Islamism”. This is a sinister political agenda that promotes a sense of grievance and victimhood among a minority of Muslims. The Islamists want universal sharia law, and other mumbo jumbo. Above all, they want power over others: and so they prey on young men who feel in some way rejected by society, and they fill those young men with a horrible and deluded sense of self-importance. They tell these people that they are not alone in suffering injustice; that they belong to a much wider group of victims – the Muslims – and that the only way to avenge these injustices is jihad. These Islamist evangelists have no allegiance to the Western society they live in and whose benefits systems they abuse: far from it – their avowed intent is to create a sexist and homophobic Muslim caliphate.
At the same time, there is a very real risk of a counter-clash. The BBC UK service reported a ‘huge’ increase in attacks targeting Islamic centres and persons in the days following the massacre.
The Daily Mail reported yesterday: “Racial and religious tensions are running high on the UK's streets since the brutal broad-daylight killing of Drummer Lee Rigby on a Woolwich Street last week.
“There are fears that far-Right supporters and their opponents could clash at a series of demonstrations planned at war memorials across the country.” Within hours of the killing, Far Right supporters had marched to the spot of the murder and in support of the British soldiers.
Now tell me, do we in any of our angst-laden rants on either side of the political spectrum, live in any way like this?
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