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Rating: The Broadcast.
Essentially, it's interviews and comments by Licio Gelli on recent and contemporary historical events.
The importance and, in its own way, the authority of the character make the broadcast, with some footage available on YouTube, very interesting, albeit not innovative in terms of television language.
It's not so much the medium that matters, but rather the content of the message, and therefore the perspective of the speaker.
The Comment: A Plan with Many Levels of Reading?
Aired on the "Odeon Tv" circuit towards the end of the year 2008, "Venerable Italy" is a rather peculiar and very interesting broadcast even for the younger audience, as it tells us about past and contemporary history - and, in a certain way, also about the counter-history of our Republic - from the point of view of one of the most influential figures of the post-war period, that Licio Gelli who, along with Gianni Agnelli, Enrico Cuccia, Enrico Mattei, and Eugenio Cefis, can certainly be classified among the men of greatest power of the 20th century without ever having been elected to Parliament or having held, directly or indirectly, governmental or executive power positions.
The title of the broadcast is clearly double, if not triple, entendre: the term "venerable" is, in fact, a polysemous qualifying adjective that first brings to mind Italy itself, considered the center of Gelli's interests and, therefore, as a Nation and Community worthy of veneration and respect.
On the other hand, it refers to Gelli's own age, born in 1919 - like Giulio Andreotti and Alberto Sordi - and thus now a nonagenarian, rightfully the historical memory of many events stretching from Fascism to the Resistance, reaching the years of the economic boom, the strategy of tension, the revival of the craxian center-left, up to the collapse of Operation Clean Hands and the achieved democracy of contemporary alternation.
Certainly, in that mischievous qualifier, one might rightly discern a reference to Gelli's own role as Venerable Master of the Propaganda 2 Masonic Lodge, an organization that included, in the late '60s and '70s and '80s, some of the most important representatives of the economy and institutions of the era, united by a visceral anti-communism, pro-capitalistic tendencies, and an ideological framework that was later summarized in the known "Plan for Democratic Rebirth", a political project to which - according to Gelli himself - both center-right parties (especially Forza Italia) and, surprisingly for some, the center-left (considering the advent of bipolarism, meritocracy, the breaking of the public monopoly of Rai, objectives certainly shared by the left, or at any rate achieved without genuine opposition from the left on the contents of the governing majority's program) were inspired in the '90s.
Gelli has long been spoken of in derogatory terms, also based on some judicial investigations that saw him involved, through the P2 Lodge, in various chronicle events - from the attempted Borghese coup of '70 (Gelli was supposed to "block" President Saragat at the Quirinale), to the massacres of the '70s, up to the Bologna Station bombing of '80, passing through the Calvi and Sindona financial scandals - without however reaching a completely clear and univocal picture regarding his direct and indirect responsibilities in these matters, although there are significant clues, if not evidence, of involvement by P2 members in these events.
Involvement that was, in any case, inevitable considering that nearly all the top ranks of the Country's Military Corps were members, as were nearly all the heads of the Secret Services, alongside influential representatives of the Italian economic fabric (bankers, financiers, publishers) and also various conservatives and nostalgic Fascists, who - given the well-known theory of "six degrees of separation" - could not have been completely unaware, in more or less direct ways, of such events, which required the necessary involvement of many people in preparing the relevant acts.
Some therefore argue that Gelli himself is the "Grand Old Man" to which certain literature on terrorism and institutional chronicles alludes, although this is not proven, with a thesis recently proposed by some credible observers that the "Grand Old Man" is not a person but a relationship of powers, more or less hidden, basically aiming to control the developments of young Italian democracy in a pro-Atlantic and anti-Communist key, in which Gelli too was a part (cf. G. Barbacetto, "Il Grande Vecchio", Rizzoli, 2009).
Any negative judgment on Gelli and his suspected involvement in the "strategy of tension" essentially reflects, on a historical level, a deeper significance on which historians and political scientists should ponder, and on which I, too, would like to humbly focus along with the users of this site, asking them to abandon the usual prejudices and superficial, instinctive assessments - I'd like to say visceral - to follow me with due attention in the subsequent expository path.
The question I would like to humbly pose is the following: to what extent could the Reason of State, and the ideological political struggle in an anti-Communist key, go in the West and in Italy in compressing individual freedoms and, of course, in sacrificing many innocent lives, or in committing crimes of various kinds, including financial ones?
Could the presence of P2, of other organizations like Gladio or the Rosa dei Venti, the strategy of "tension" as a permanent coup attempt aimed at maintaining a high bar of anti-communism, keeping the pro-Soviet PCI away from the Government of a pro-Atlantic Country and rebuilt thanks to the generous contributions of the Marshall Plan allocated by the U.S.A.? Could this "strange alliance" between Fascist nostalgics, or in any case ultraconservatives with nostalgic and dictatorial projects, and democratic United States, which somehow favored the fall of Fascism, be justified?
We cannot give a definitive answer, the fact is that this could happen and historically did happen.
The instinctive response would naturally be to consider such conduct abhorrent, but perhaps a more careful analysis of the individuals' psychology and the deep reasons driving them to act in such directions, on the concrete historical circumstances (not that the KGB just watched), besides a serious comparative analysis on the cost of human lives connected to the exercise of any state power: not that military campaigns, the management of internal security, the implementation of public works, the very survival of the State as an Institution do not entail these daily sacrifices, when we think about it.
If the Communist threat could be deemed real, and with it a totalitarian drift of Italy and the emergence of a Third World War, where the Communist breakthrough in Italy meant the entrance of Communism in the West with unutterable costs in geopolitical balance terms, the so-called "strategy of tension" assumes a different interpretative key, almost like a dear price that the Country has paid to guarantee World Peace, and thus to save a higher Good, paradoxically to preserve its own democratic "form".
An unworthy price, a desperate price, yet a fundamental price to assure us a greater advantage in a context of permanent State of Necessity. An advantage from which we still benefit today living in a fundamentally free country.
The discourse would be different if this danger had been entirely virtual, and completely induced through a clever technique of "polemogenesis" - or creation of an enemy that doesn't really exist: like a bogeyman from fairy tales - intended to consolidate the ranks of the Country in a conservative key, and limiting individual rights, emptying our democracy of content, alternatives, dialogue, debate, and transparency.
In this case, the antidemocratic nature of the activity would stand out clearly, without any excuses.
Certainly, if this thesis were true, we could see a historical-political co-responsibility of those who, perhaps in good faith, played the apparent "villain", or the cooperative sparring partner in this whole struggle: that Communist Party which, in the '60s and '70s, was perhaps too timidly anti-Soviet, continuing to represent itself as the long arm of the Bolsheviks in Italy and not making, after the Hungarian events of '56, a definitive break from a politically losing practice on all fronts and frankly contrary to the same democratic values enshrined in our Constitution.
It is no coincidence, we believe, that the strategy of tension ended when, on the left, there was the disconnection of Berlinguer's PCI from a Communism in definitive crisis and now heading towards Gorbachev's reforms, and when the political strength of Bettino Craxi's PSI simultaneously increased, that is, when left-wing politics, after the obscuring of the '50s, '60s, and '70s, returned to being essentially a moderate policy open to productive classes and not just antagonistic to the DC, and when the socialists themselves, after the diaspora of the '90s, managed to requalify themselves both in center-left and center-right political forces.
Therefore, I prefer to suspend judgment on these events and on Gelli himself, allowing my readers to reflect upon them; this, even with the awareness that he has been adequately judged by magistrates concerning his criminal responsibilities, and by historians regarding other related responsibilities, aware that his Italy project has, for better or worse, materialized in our Country as we live it and as we accept it in the vast majority, regardless of political fences and divisions in the short, medium, and long term.
I know the topic is treacherous: I ask the most irascible users to calmly read this essay and to balance their reactions with due equity, not falling into the trap of "polemogenesis" themselves and not seeing in me a preconceived enemy.
[*] review ready for weeks, whose publication was delayed due to pressures from some users of the site, representative of the so-called "strong powers" obstructing the recognition of a right to critique and a balanced history of our national affairs. I thank the editors and the management for the freedom granted to me.
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