The Pitchforks are once again moving northwards through Italy - Pino Aprile
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Author and journalist Pino Aprile’s Passaparola.

Producing without any guarantees
Hello there to all the friends of Beppe Grillo’s Blog. My name is Pino Aprile and I am a journalist and author. I deal mainly with what is happening to Southern Italy and why the South currently seems to be harbouring a lot of resentment and indeed, let’s go as far as using certain words that may sound somewhat exaggerated, inexplicable anger. One example of this is the Pitchfork Movement. There is this instant revolt, involving tens of thousands of people down in Sicily, that has effectively blocked Sicily, is busy spreading to the other southern regions of the continent and we don’t know that it will stop there. Our immediate reaction has been to ask “But who are the politicians or the movements that are behind these people? Surely the Mafia is busy making its move, infiltrating, etc.”, which is a somewhat consolatory and reassuring way of explaining what is going on. I met a number of the Pitchfork Movement’s leaders about a year and a half ago and I was so taken aback at what they told me about their situation that I decided there and then to include it as a chapter in my last book, entitled “Giù al Sud” (Literally Down in the South) . But what exactly did they tell me? What is happening down in the South involves many different groups, types and classes of people, indeed all sorts of people, although the ones I was talking to at the time were produce and livestock farmers. What happened was that these farmers had modernised their businesses by investing more money and thereby keeping people employed and ensuring that produce and livestock would be produced, quite rightly so, in accordance with the Central Government and Regional Administrations’ health and tax regulations, but what happened then? They were producing with all those wonderful guarantees, but when their products got to market, with all those additional costs, they still had to compete and obviously they could not compete against similar products produced in areas where there are no such Regional and Government regulations.
For example, the “ciliegino” (Cherry tomatoes) that are produced down in Sicily subject to three-thousand different guarantees are marketed at the same price as the Cherry tomatoes grown in Egypt where a farmer’s daily labour cost is around two Euro. Quite clearly, under such circumstances our producers are dead in the water because their revenues don’t even cover their production costs. As a result, they have accumulated a huge amount of debt, particularly with the Receiver of Revenue, the Department of Welfare and Pensions and with the State. Instead of addressing the problem and resolving it in conjunction with the producers, the Government simply presented the producers with a bill to be paid. However, the producers did not have the wherewithal to pay these bills, so the Department of Welfare and Pensions simply sold the debt on to debt collection agencies for around 10% of the actual value of the outstanding debt and so the producers, in other words the debtors, said “If you had told us that you would accept a mere 10% of what we owed you, then perhaps we would also have found some way to pay you”. At that point the new debt holders simply declared the companies in default and so they were put up for auction and sold off to the highest bidder. They were telling me that over the past three years, some 50-thousand of the 200-thousand companies in Sicily landed up like this, and then we are surprised when their anger explodes in this way?

The education system reform that conveniently forgot about Quasimodo
Having gathered various views from all sorts of people around me, although I cannot draft an entire encyclopaedia I can at least try to tell you about some very different ones amongst them. There is an awful lot of dissatisfaction regarding our schools at the moment, but particularly regarding the schools down in the South. What never made the news headlines at the time was that the then inauspicious Minister of Public Education, Minister Gelmini cut around half a billion Euro from the budget destined for the upliftment of the poorer schools of the South and then proceeded to share the money out throughout the Country and then, as if that weren’t enough, Gelmini also proceeded to make a number of extremely disparaging statements about the students and the teachers in the South. According to her, all the teachers in the South were in dire need of supplementary training courses, each and every last one of them. That’s rich, coming from a woman who took an extra three years to complete her degree! But then, for example, the Ministry that she managed issued an edict, the subject guidelines for Italian literature courses for secondary schools, in other words, how the literature of the 1900’s is to be taught, which listed the names of the approved Italian authors, poets and writers. All good and well, however, not a single one of these approved authors, poets and writers were southerners, in other words, according to the Ministry of Public Education, throughout the 20th Century, a very prolific Century at that, there was not a single poet or writer from the South who was worthy of being read by Italian students, not even a Nobel Prize winner such as Quasimodo, now that’s total madness! Now I don’t mean to sound racist in any way but what I am about to say is purely meant as an example. Just imagine what would happen if the situation were reversed and a Minister of Public Education from Palermo, a Sicilian in other words, in providing guidelines for how the literature of the 1900’s should be taught, were to eliminate all the names of writers from the North from the list of approved writers, so no more Saba, no more Ungaretti and no more Pasolini, now that would equally be total madness! The best thing to do would be to call in the men with the white coats and ask them to “Please go and pick up the minister and take him/her somewhere where he/she can rest in peace!”.
Now, changing the topic completely, In Messina they told me that there are still two ongoing legal disputes regarding property confiscated from survivors of the 1908 earthquake, Italy really is a truly strange Country indeed! At that point I decided that I really wanted to find out what the hell happened after the Messina earthquake. The people of Messina know what happened and although they don’t speak about it very much, inside it’s eating away at them as they would say in Bolzano, but why? Well, in 1908 there was an earthquake. The town was destroyed, 2/3 of the town’s population was killed and what do you think was the first thing that the Italian Government did at the time? They tabled a proposal, which was subsequently voted on in Parliament, that the town of Messina be bombed, this is no joke! Never mind the fact that there were still survivors buried under the rubble at the time, they were seriously proposing to bomb the town of Messina right off the face of the earth, forever, and thus split the Palermo and Catania Provinces. Giolitti, who was hoping to stand for election in Messina, foiled their plans. Fortunately the proposal was subsequently defeated and 10-thousand “Bersaglieri” troops arrived in Messina with orders to shoot any looters and suspected looters, so they began to shoot the survivors.
Meanwhile, the very ones who were supposed to ensure law and order, in other words the soldiers, managed to get a post office put up right on the pier, reserved exclusively for them and prohibited to the survivors. So, while there was no way for any of the survivors to contact say an uncle in Florence to ask that blankets be sent down to them, only the soldiers could use that post office to send between 80 and 100 parcels a day to family members back home, containing jewellery and money stolen from the dead and the survivors. There are documents relating to this racism that are enough to make one’s hair stand on end! Added to this growing resentment the Lega’s insults depicting Neapolitans as “rats to be exterminated”, Romans as “pigs” and southerners in general as “Mediterranean scum” that are being resuscitated, so now all the ill-feeling is once again resurfacing and adding up. So, on the one hand there are the protests of the produce farmers and livestock farmers and on the other hand the fuse-lighting flame, all that tinder that has lit the fires, which are now spreading. That’s what’s happening down in the South. No one is listening to the people of the South. They have tried in every way they know how to make themselves heard and understood, but to no avail!

Italians, get to know each other and stand united
Whenever Italy’s cheese producers are facing a crisis, the Government invariably uses the money destined for the South to bail out the parmesan producers and when there is no money left to bail out the Sardinian Pecorino producers because the available money was spent where it wasn’t needed, they then proceed to have the Sardinian Pecorino producers truncheoned and the Sardinians heads beaten in, and you see this difference everywhere.
When more Cipe funds become available, they proceed to introduce a totally unnecessary new high-speed railway link between Genoa and Milan while at the same time cancelling all the direct South-North train connections. Here in Italy these days, in 2012, it takes longer to travel up from the South than it did back in 1900 and there are 1000 kilometres of railway line less than what there were around 70 years ago. Shall we sit down and discuss this calmly and rationally? Otherwise what happens? What happens is that I carry on hearing that by writing about these things I am stirring things up, but since when? A book is like a finger pointing at the moon, so watch the moon and not the finger. I was born in February and my father was not a carpenter. I am merely a journalist who is trying to point out to the least attentive part of the Country that we are making a whole horde of mistakes. If these mistakes keep on building up, the people won’t be able to take it anymore and something very bad is going to happen, something very bad indeed, and it is going to be bad for everyone. No one should think that they are going to be able to save themselves somehow, or simply because they have somehow managed to clamber out onto the rocks and are now kicking those who are still in the sea.
In the words of Don Milani, politics is all about "Sortirne insieme", in other words getting out of trouble together, otherwise no one gets out of it. The time has come for Italy ….. after having promised the South 20 million rifles, after having promised the South that the rats would be exterminated and all that other garbage, thereby allowing the government ministers to say these things and still remain in their posts, after having allowed the then Minister of Finance to take the funds destined for underutilised areas and spend them elsewhere. The l’Aquila earthquake cost the Country 4.5 billion and that 4.5 billion was taken entirely from the South. To be precise, 85% of those funds should, by law, have been used in the South and the remaining 15% in the North. Well, those funds used for the l’Aquila earthquake were taken away from the poorest 1/3 of Italy while only 15% was taken from the wealthiest 2/3 of Italy. This notwithstanding, Borgezio had the gall to insult the people of l’Aquila as if they were the football at the tip of the boot of Italy, as if he had personally contributed even a single Euro.
The title of this editorial is “passate parola” or spread the word and I think that there is no better way than word of mouth to inform people every time we notice some sort of discrimination, irrespective of whom is being discriminated against because, in any event, someone who discriminates always starts out by discriminating against someone in particular and then, bit by bit, he/she invariably moves on to others and in this way they end up making the Country ungovernable and set one Italian against another. If the truth be told, the Italians are far more united than what it may seem, although they know little or nothing about other Italians. Just ask a Sicilian what he knows about the Venetians. Venice was the longest lived republic in the history of man, yet all we find in the school history books are about ten lines between Marco Polo and the white flag flapping on the bridge. Equally, how much do the Venetians know about the Sicilians?