This happened a few years ago, back in 1998. Transnational Radical Party

This happened a few years ago, back in 1998. Demonstrators in support of the Anglo-American Desert Fox Operation aggressed by right-wing activists in front of the American Embassy in Rome. Course (and recourses) of History.

1998, December 12 -- Two demonstrations have been held on past saturday in front of the American Embassy in Rome. One by supporters of the Transnational Radical Party, with the slogan "I Support Clinton and Blair", the other by activists of the italian "Social Movement" (extreme right wing), protesting the "genocide of Iraqi people" brought on by Clinton and Blair. Police patrolled between the two, but a platoon of right-wing activists out-flanked the cops and aggressed the radicals with fists and kicks, trying to seize and destroy the American flag they were waving. Since the Radical Party supporters adhere to Gandhian nonviolence doctrine and practice of civil disobedience, no wonder that they succumbed in the match. At the end the Police intervened, just before the outrage to the flag was completed. Italian TV news reported "moments of tension between supporters of radical and social movement parties". It is strange enough that a party that declares itself to be a nonviolent party support the Desert Fox Operation, while an extreme right-wing party (formerly the "fascist" party by excellence in the Italian partycracy rule) is side by side with left-wing minority groups and Moslem integralists in the fight against the American Devil. According to some interpretations, the strike against Iraq was but a diversion from the main point, that is the Clinton - Lewinsky case. Even more surprisingly, the first US President of the "Make Love Not War" generation seems to be at ease with both love and war. To those that have interest in further investigating this aspect, I propose the reading of the following article, published April 12, 1991 by the Italian magazine "L'Europeo". The article is by Luigi de Marchi, co-founder, back in the '60, of the first Italian association for birth control, AIED, Professor of Psychology and a Radical Party member too.

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They Hate the Western Countries Because They Are Scared by Sexual Freedom

… Under their ideological mask, fascists, and former communists, Catholic or Islamic integralists, share the same psychologic matrix: they are sexuophobic, dogmatic, intolerant.

In a recent editorial, Vittorio Feltri (1) pointed out that the Gulf crisis revealed that in Italy there are two transversal parties, that collect consensus among different ideologies and different traditional parties. He recalled the fact that the anti-occidental front is made by a majority of former communists, former fascists and of catholic integralists. Those groups are respectively considered as being left wing, right wing and moderate, but they get together to protest against "western countries arrogance" that is not able to find an agreement with the good man Saddam Hussein. It is difficult to explain how people that consider each other enemies end up together in the same pile.

I believe that the Gulf war, this traumatic event, worked as reagent to reveal the psychologic relationship between certain groups and certain kind of personalities, beyond their apparent incompatibility. I believe that these transversal front on the Gulf crisis give us further evidence that political and social behaviors must be analyzed in psychological terms, an analysis that I call psycho - political.

"Ideologies are but masks", says the psycho - political analyzer "what really counts are the psychological types under those masks".

If we take a closer look at these ideologies from this point of view, we can easy find that they have a lot in common. First, they have a common denominator in dogmatism. To be honest, this is less strong than it used to be in the past, because history and science together disavowed enough catholic, communist or fascist dogmas, and their hierarchies had to revise or attenuate their doctrine. Nevertheless, all these groups have nostalgia of the past certainty, and they all had or still have "infallible leaders".

Second, all these movements have - sometimes in contradiction with their open statements - a strong sexuophobic and misogynist approach. It is not by chance that they fight to "moralize" the society, and that for a long time they excluded women from leadership.

Third, these movements, catholic movements in particular, oppose contraception and birth control.

All these movements have a long history of bloody persecution of the opposers, both inside and outside.

All these common aspects are strange and alarming, and still it seems difficult to find a common psychological denominator. Among the firsts who tried to explain those fact there was Wilhelm Reich, a heretic disciple of Sigmund Freud. According to Reich, the repression of natural sexuality, that is a typical among authoritarian regimes (from Nazism to Stalinism, from Maoist doctrine to Catholicism to Islamism) is the psychological trigger for gregariousness of the followers and authoritarianism of the leaderships. It creates a sadistic -masochistic distortion of the personality. At a social level, it produces a constant desire of domination and control in the leaders; and among the followers, an incoercible need of submission, a spirit of sacrifice to the authority, will it be the Church, the State or the party.

Reich's hypothesis is interesting, as he is the first who searched for a psychological explanation to phenomena that seem to be very different. However, this hypothesis also appears to be unilateral and simplistic. Can we believe, as Freud did in his Victorian times, that all the human neurosis and tragedies derive from sexual repression? An Italian writer of the Thirties, Achille Campanile, answered corrosively to Freud that "a man's life - and death - is not just about his pains (penis)" (2). If it is true, as Reich believed, that before the totalitarian regimes with their sexual repression came to life, men were all good and healthy (as in the myth of the Bon Sauvage proposed by J.J. Rousseau) from where and by who all the authoritarian and sexuophobic regimes have been generated?

In my researches about human conflictuality, I came across another primary factor of destructiveness that psychology seems to have neglected, that does not derive from any "evil society" but from the simple and natural evolution of the human mind, that is death angst (that follows the discovery of the common destiny of death, the very own, and the participation to agony and death of the beloved ones) and his paranoid acceptance.

Human psyche tries to defend itself from this angst with a need for certainty, and with religious promises about the Paradise, where there is eternal happiness and peace of mind, a Paradise that is reserved to the followers of the True Faith (and here it is the beginning of all the Holy Wars, last is the Islamic Jihad that promise to destroy all the disbelieving). Modern totalitarian movements, left wing or right wing, appear all to be the extreme tentative to reproduce the Paradise on Earth of the ancient religious beliefs, shacked by the lay and scientific approach that flourished in the Western countries.

But at this point, the basic psychological affinity of the followers of the True Faiths and of the True Revolutions seems to be clear, and explains why people with different ideologies find themselves side by side: as it was the case in 1939 with the nazi- Ribbentrop - Molotov alliance, and the Vatican sustain to the fascist regime in Italy, or the irresponsible support of former Soviet Union to Islamic fundamentalism; as it was the case for the continuous revival of the catholic-communist culture, up to the generous "comprehension" the Pope showed for the instigators of the killing of the writer Salman Rushdie (happily not realized) and the cordiality that the Holy See has always had face to PLO (that has renounced to terrorism just recently); or the refusal of acceptance for birth control practices in the name of the possibility of multiplication of the loaves and the fishes (that has never been put in practice); up to the article that the magazine "Catholic Civilization" published in defense of legitimacy of the Iraqi invasion of the Kuwait; and of course, up to the anti-Occidental piling during the Gulf crisis.

At the end, what are the faults of the democratic Occident that those militants and veterans of various dogmatic beliefs consider unforgivable, up to the point of always backing his enemies?

I indicate three points. The first fault, is that Western countries are the homeland of these "revolutionary" people, and by that, the symbol of the Authority that they contest. The second fault is sexual freedom, that undermines the process of building the fanaticism, as Reich pointed out. Third unforgivable fault is that Western countries are the homeland of the humanistic thought, based on independent research, that since two hundred years put in crisis their certainty e their promises about the Paradise, will it be celestial or on Earth".

Notes 1. Italian journalist 2. In Italian, the word "pene" means both "sufferings" and "penis". (From "L'Europeo", April 12, 1991)

--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- With many apologies to Prof. De Marchi for the translation, and to all native-english-speaking-people for the inevitable injuries to the language of Shakespear and Hemingway, faithfully yours Mr. Bittertooth