Friday, October 24, 2008
Vedea ceffi di birro in ogni volto.
Yesterday the American Freedom Alliance, a right-wing US think tank, announced they were going to give an award to Geert Wilders, the Dutch anti-immigration politician sadly famous for his short film Fitna.
In the note it is said that the Freedom Award is given to individuals or organisations which defend world freedoms.
All this sounded to me pretty odd: you actually call Freedom to be against human rights?
I would say no, but it turns out that this word (freedom) is often used for right oriented political groups generally against basic freedoms.
There are six political parties in Europe recalling Freedom in their name; in most (but not all) of the case they mean individual freedom in economics, liberalism, but in all the case they are populist parties. This probably tells us that the word freedom is a bit abused in order to touch easy emotions of people by calling simple principles on which everybody has to believe.
The funny thing of this is in fact that all this so called freedom parties have in their declared intents the will of fighting freedom.
These are the parties:
1. Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ, Freedom Party of Austria): the populist and nationalist party held until 2005 by Jörg Haider, against asylum system, against EU policy in Austria, pro restriction in Austrian citizenship law, against Turkey in EU;
2. Frihedspartiet (FP, Danish Freedom Party): founded by the former pastor of Faderhuset evangelical church, Eivind Fønssagainst, against freedom of abortion;
3. Il Popolo della Libertà (PdL, Italian People of Freedom): the party by and with Silvio Berlusconi, against the freedom of being clever and Italian at the same time;
4. Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV, Dutch Party for Freedom): led by the already mentioned Geert Wilders, it's against Europe, Turkey (or anyway them both together), double citizenship, immigrants in The Netherlands;
5. Freiheits-Partei der Schweiz (FPS, Freedom Party of Switzerland): against immigrants (especially black people), for a "law and order" approach to crime and drugs;
6. Freedom Party (FP, English): very smll populist anti immigration party.
We could notice that all of these parties are actually pretty small and they refer to a very small, radical and extremistic, part of the population.
All but the Italian one which just took 37.4% of the votes (and it was not the only populist party).
What does this mean? That our populism is better than the others? Or that we are more populist than others? (If so, who's fault is this?)
But for one thing we, as Italian, can be proud: despite the fact that Freedom House consider Italy as the 34th of the Countries ranked by Democracy Index, and consider ours a Flawed Democracy, we can claim to be the freest in the world, since most of the people in Italy apparently believes in Freedom and in its champion, Silvio Berlusconi, that for all his life tried to fight for (his) freedom.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
ShareThis
Posts
3 comments:
nel frattempo, nel Paese della Libertà, l'amico Silvio arringa gli industriali italiani raccolti a cena a Villa Madama: "Mi chiedo come fate ad accettare che la Rai inserisca i vostri spot dentro programmi che diffondono solo panico e sfiducia."
There is one other party with Freedom in the name. It is the VVD, Volkspartij voor vrijheid (freedom) en democratie (Dutch, just right from the middle)
bedank!
Post a Comment