News From Eurasia

Trisulti Monastery east of Rome, where Stephen Bannon maintains his gladiator school/"populist" academy in defense of the Judeo-Christian way of life in spite of being evicted five weeks ago, apparently. Photo by M. Williams/DW. 

This BuzzFeed story doesn't seem to be getting any play in the US—I heard it on BBC—but it involves hard evidence (Lordy, tapes!) of a meeting (reported in the news magazine L'Espresso in February) between Russian officials and representatives of Italian deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini's fascistoid Lega party at Moscow's Metropol Hotel in October. BuzzFeed has a recording of the meeting, in which participants develop a plot for the Kremlin to deliver $65,000,000 to the Lega in advance of last spring's European elections, violating Italy's campaign contribution law (which allowed foreign donors up until a new law this January, but only up to a maximum of €100,000) and evading European anti–money laundering and Know Your Client regulations:

Anti-Fascist Roundup

Austrian foreign minister Karin Kneissl, not a member of the Freedom Party, dances at her wedding last year with—ooh, that's Vladimir Vladimirovich! Photo by Alexei Druzhinin/AFP via the Financial Times coverage of this week's events.

Last year there was an inspiring democratic revolution in Armenia, an extraordinary democratic election in Malaysia, a distressing fascist backslide in Italy (a fascistoid party, the "Lega", was able to attach itself in coalition to the unfortunate actual winner, the Movimento Cinque Stelle, one of those new-fangled Howard Beale parties of irritable but poorly informed comedian populists, unable to wield power itself so that the minority League is basically able to run the government), and who knows what else, and we didn't cover any of it here because at this point we're basically all Trump all the time and I didn't feel like doing the work to come up with some hot take on the subject.

But it occurs to me that I should at least try to keep up some kind of running tab on the advances and retreats of democracy around the world...

Austria:

Proponents of liberal democracy may be forgiven a measure of glee in the fall of Austria’s far-right vice chancellor, which has thrown the government of Chancellor Sebastian Kurz into chaos and forced early elections. Heinz-Christian Strache, the vice chancellor and head of the far-right Freedom Party, had long projected himself as the scourge of dirty politics, and here he was on a secretly filmed video making all sorts of shady offers to a woman posing as the relative of a Russian oligarch.

Alzati, pezzo di merda!

Piero della Francesca, early 15th century, The Flagellation, via.

David F. Brooks is visiting sunny Italy! Lago di Como, apparently, and like so many artists from grayer climes, giddy with the freshness of the air and the musicality of the voices, and working with a lively Italian-primitive palette in his new narrative work, "The Loving Place for Children That Assumes Beauty", for which he finds the bright, naive tone of a nursery tale or late-medieval saint's life:

Thirty-five years ago, the two Figini brothers,
Erasmo and Innocente, were living in Como
with their wives, Serena and Marina.

Erasmo was a famous fabric designer. Innocente
was a prominent eye surgeon. They were successful,
but along with their wives, spiritually unfulfilled,
unable to understand the meaning of
the suffering they saw and felt. Erasmo went
to see a renowned priest, Father Luigi Giussani,
who saw faith not as an intellectual system,
but as an encounter with beauty, a love story.

Erasmo returned to his wife and reported: “God exists.
I have met someone who is a witness to his reality.”

Serena was intrigued: Erasmo was the last
person you’d call religious. But eventually
both couples met with Giussani and all found faith.

One day in 1986, Innocente
reported that there was an H.I.V.-infected
baby at the hospital whose mother was dying.
Erasmo and Serena had vowed to each other that they
would never have children, but they felt a swelling
of gratitude and said they would foster the baby.

General Priapic Lewdness

From a profile of Silvio Berlusconi from 2009, actually, by our new friend Michael Wolff for Vanity Fair. Illustration by Darrow.

David F. Brooks ("The Chaos After Trump") is suggesting we take a look at the Italian election results for clues as to what's going to happen to the US after the Trumpery goes away, presumably because Trump is the same person as Silvio Berlusconi:

What happens to American politics after Donald Trump? Do we snap back to normal or do things spin ever more widely out of control?

The best indicator we have so far is the example of Italy since the reign of Silvio Berlusconi. And the main lesson there is that once the norms of acceptable behavior are violated and once the institutions of government are weakened, it is very hard to re-establish them. Instead, you get this cycle of ever more extreme behavior, as politicians compete to be the most radical outsider. The political center collapses, the normal left/right political categories cease to apply and you see the rise of strange new political groups that are crazier than anything you could have imagined before.

Which is as good an opportunity as any to note that Trump is not, in fact, the same person as Silvio  Berlusconi. Berlusconi is, for one thing, extremely rich—his family ranks fifth on the Forbes list for Italy, with assets of $7 billion—though not as rich as he was when he was prime minister, when he often ranked first, because he was very good at using his political situation (originally as friend of the "Socialist" prime minister Bettino Craxi, later as "center-right" prime minister himself) to build up his fortune (it's incredible what small-ball Trump plays in this respect, with his tummler act at Mar-a-Lago and selling of presidential seal tchotchkes—no, I don't believe he's a billionaire). He fathered a media empire (Trump was begotten by one). He managed to avoid getting convicted for any of his crimes until he was too old to go to jail, by Italian law, which was clearly a major goal of his political career. He has surrounded himself at certain times of his life with a kind of harem of lovely young women ready to satisfy his every whim. He never felt a need to call up the newspapers to assure the public that his potency was undiminished, as Trump has done since he was in his forties. He's still beautifully dressed, slim, and cheerful at 81. His hair looks real, though I'm sure it isn't.

Berlusconi has been a shameless crook, deeply dishonest politician, bad prime minister, and monstrous narcissist, but never less than competent in his chosen way of life. Berlusconi is who Trump tries unsuccessfully to play on TV.  Berlusconi is who Trump is in his dreams.

Meanwhile in Italy

Orecchiette con cime di rape and ample pancia. Screenshot via YouTube.

So stop me if you've heard this: there's this popular comedian taking an anti-government pose, and saying we ought to stop relying too much on our brains:

We're not brainiacs on the nerd patrol. We're not members of the factinista. We go straight from the gut, right sir? That's where the truth lies, right down here in the gut. Do you know you have more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your head? You can look it up. I know some of you are going to say "I did look it up, and that's not true." That's 'cause you looked it up in a book. Next time, look it up in your gut. I did. My gut tells me that's how our nervous system works.

Only in the case I'm thinking about the comedian is speaking Italian, and he's not joking. It's Beppe Grillo, more a former comedian than a working one, the leader of the MoVimento Cinque Stelle or M5S, a party that says it's not a party but a Five-Star "movement" and something of a personality cult (for the first six years of its existence, 2009 to 2015, its Web address was beppegrillo.it, and the official party program is still there instead of the party's own website, which is pretty weird), discussing Prime Minister Matteo Renzi's referendum to reform the mechanisms of Italian government, in particular the ability of the Senate to stop government from going on altogether:

What a swell party this is!

Mélenchon remplit sa plage! Today's rally in Marseille for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, French presidential candidate of the Front de Gauche, drew a crowd of 120,000—looks like holding it on the beach was a smart idea. What a swell party this is.

A bit of a setback in Egypt in the news that the Supreme Presidential Election Commission, presumably military-run, has barred ten candidates from the election, including some we don't like—the hard-line Salafist Hazem Abu Ismail whose mother became a US citizen before she died, and the Mubarak intelligence chief Omar Suleiman. No reasons were given, according to the Guardian, but the New York Times speculates that in the cases of the likewise barred Muslim Brotherhood candidate Khairat el-Shater and the classy old liberal Ayman Nour it was their prison records.

And how did they get prison records? Jailed by Mubarak, of course, for political activity. They can't run for president because the disgraced criminal ex-dictator didn't like their politics! Looks like premature anti-fascism is still a crime, and that can't be good news.

From The Albinophant blog.

Here's another depressing little irony: Guess who doesn't like austerity, in Italy and Ireland? Small-business owners and entrepreneurs, and it's not very funny, either, because they're killing themselves: unable to pay their debts in County Cork (190 suicides from 2008 to 2011), creditors of a deadbeat government in the Veneto (more than 30 small-business suicides in the past three years). All those job creators just need to man up a little, I guess. Look at Mitt Romney! He doesn't whine.

Why is this man smiling? Photo by Sean Gardner/Reuters.

The presumptive Republican presidential candidate couldn't get his taxes done on time, though!  He's filed an extension, the same day Barack Obama and Joe Biden publicly released their 2011 returns. Luckily, he'll totally get it done before the election.

"Earlier this year, Gov. Romney released his 2010 tax return and an estimate of his 2011 income and taxes.  This is an extension for filing his 2011 actual return, similar to what he has done in prior years," Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul said in a statement. "Sometime in the next six months, and prior to the election, Gov. Romney will file and release the 2011 return when there is sufficient information to provide an accurate return."

The Romneys estimate a total tax liability of $3,226,623 for 2011, according to Saul. They made payments of $3,434,411 in 2011. They made an estimated payment of $887,000 for 2012.

Naturally Obama has it easier—he works for the government, doesn't he? Just goes to show how out of touch Obama really is.