On Wed, 24 Jun 2009, Chris Doss wrote:
> Man, what has Berlusconi done that has made his name into such a
> swearword? Are Italians cowering in fear from the Gestapo or something?
> He's a run-of-the-mill center-right European politician as far as I can
> tell. (?)
It has nothing to do with repression. It comes from several things, among them:
1) His association with, and main role as a causal agent in, what many consider a cultural downfall of civilization. Italy was a country that as late as the 1980s didn't have much of a TV culture at all. It was still a written culture. Even soccer you could only see half of one game a week. Now they what is by all accounts the most vulgar TV culture in the Western world, and the closest integration of that with politics found anywhere. So imagine the complaints against such things in any other country and multiply them by 100. Maybe a thousand, since the intelligentsia that did so well in that print world is the one complaining.
2) The belief that after being frozen out the entire cold war by an armory of unfair means, the left, which was the majority, was finally due to take power after the cold war ended. The feeling of inevitable historical triumph was increased 10 fold by tangentopoli, which removed almost the entire right and center political elite (whereas the left was notably clean by comparison). And then suddenly this nonpolitician billionaire comes from nowhere and steals it. And keeps it.
3) Berlusconi inherits all the frustrated fury against Andreotti, complete with its (quite justified) mafia and CIA accusations, not least because he has shown himself to be even more immune to even clearer testaments of his crimes in court. The guy's been convicted several times and cleared by statute of limitations that were run out because he strung out the cases in time using his money, or by acts of parliament granting immunity that his party passed -- both kind of amazingly outrageous.
And then of course there is all the various clownish things he says and does that embarrass people on the world stage and outrage them by themselves.
It is hard to grasp Berlusconi from the outside. I had this same question for years. One book I found very helpful was Alexander Stille's _The Sack of Rome_. Also the recent movie _Il Divo_ is helpful indirectly (which is about Andreotti but even more about trying to capture the national feeling about him by incorporating art film techniques into an historical docudrama, an Italian speciality.
Michael