Italy in LockDown

 

Prof. Eugenio Capozzi, professor of Contemporary History at the University of Naples Federico II comments on the current situation: "The general lockdown has already been decided some time ago.

 All the fluctuations of these weeks are just the game of the good and bad cop, a tactic to impose the decision gradually, testing the reactions time by time.

 The project is clear and has nothing to do with the health situation, which is under control (except for the usual inefficiencies in certain regions) and which sees a pressure on hospitals lower than that which usually occurs every year for seasonal epidemics of  influence.

 Deaths and intensive care are evidently largely the elderly who are ill with other things, often already hospitalized - the data emerge on a local scale even if the government is careful not to clarify it at the national level.

 If we wanted to seriously address the protection of the groups of citizens at risk (clearly identifiable by statistical means) it would be enough to monitor the elderly with specific diseases through basic medicine and Usca, administer them therapies now known to the first suspects of viruses, provide services to avoid them  as much as possible to leave the house, and to recommend that their family members adopt the strictest distancing with them.

 But clearly the rulers don't care about this.  The project already planned since the spring is another, and entirely political: an experiment in the authoritarian re-regulation of societies functional to a very specific economic model.

 It is a project not only Italian but European, which starts from the Franco-German axis and from Brussels, and of which the Italian government is only one of the executors.  It is not necessary to be conspirators to identify it: it is already evident in the paternalistic, ethical twist of the EU institutions of which Ursula von der Leyen is the guarantor.

 The goal of these political classes is to over-emphasize the virus to destroy what remains of the small and medium-sized business, the autonomous service sector, the spaces for "physical" training, sociality and culture, and replace them with consumption, entertainment, teaching, sociality  fully digitalized, completely incorporated by the great global hi-tech corporations.

 The terrorist narrative of Covid and the lockdowns are the tool to completely replace socialization with social networks, school and university communities with platform teaching, love and sex with virtual dating, restaurants and bars with food  delivery, cinemas and theaters with Netflix, shopping with Amazon, concerts with remote live broadcasts, sport with the home "workout" managed by an app, work with state subsidies of semi-indigence, community religious worship with a  solitary spirituality without any social significance.

 And, above all, to eliminate all forms of free, uncontrollable cultural associations, circles, civic and political movements, transforming civil society into a plurality of isolated individuals who limit themselves to being followers of political leaders, in a daily reality show, "  profiled "and subjected to the continuous hammering of the unanimous news of the regime selected for them by social media, purging them of what they call fake news, that is, of any source that is not approved by the mainstream political-media complex.

 The acceleration of this transformation would allow, for the European elites, the connection between the overseas mega-techno-capitalism, the EU bureaucratic statism with a subsidized economy and the Chinese authoritarian market model.

 The only obstacle that can still stand between the project and its implementation is the reaction, the resistance, the mobilization of European civil societies, classes and social strata that it has been decided to sacrifice.  Whether the techno-authoritarian experiment will succeed or be declared failed or at least delayed depends on their ability to rebellion, on their ability to coordinate, giving life to a coherent social and political block to replace a now non-existent political representation.

 Eugenio Capozzi

 Professor of Contemporary History

University of Naples.

(Thanks Ros for the article in Italian)