“I regard class differences as contrary to Justice.” (Albert Einstein in a personal statement of his credo.)    

     “The Russians have proved that their only aim is really the improvement of the lot of the Russian people.” (Albert Einstein in his 1934 refusal to sign a petition condemning Stalin’s murder of political prisoners.)

     “Any government is evil if it carries within it the tendency to deteriorate into tyranny. The danger … is more acute in a country in which the government has authority not only over the armed forces but also over every channel of education and information as well as over the existence of every single citizen.”   (Albert Einstein in a speech to Russian scientists in support of democratic socialist ideals and criticism of untrammeled capitalism.) (1)

BY GAITHER STEWART 

(Dateline: Rome, 20 August 2008)

 I have chosen to set out on this trip back in time to Joseph Stalin from the six-meter tall statue of the revolutionary writer, Vladimir Mayakovsky.

Standing on a square about a mile from Moscow’s Kremlin, the towers of which are nearly visible from famous Trimphalnaya Square, commonly known as Mayakovskaya Square, the poet’s statue seems lonely in the hubbub of modern Moscow. Passing right over the body of the “poet of the Revolution”, so to speak, this voyage passes through the intricacies and pitfalls of available choices in life, the artistic choices of the poet and the political-ideological choices of Stalin, a man caught at the center of an extremely complex world historical process. The ultimate goal on this journey is to suggest a reassessment of the historical role of Joseph Stalin, Soviet Russia’s leader of 30 years following the death of Lenin, the Vozhd of a revolution that changed irreversibly the nature of backward Russia and carried the revolution far beyond its frontiers. (LEFT: Mayakovsky’s monument.)

But first, the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky.

The Cubo-Futurist poet of the Russian Revolution, admired, pampered and promoted by Stalin and some Russian revolutionary leaders, mistrusted and criticized by others, apparently shot himself in his office one day in April in 1930 in Moscow. His death ultimately became the subject of speculation for historians and mystery thriller writers alike: suicide or murder? Both versions are tempting and facile: either he committed suicide because of putative disillusionment with the revolution or he was murdered by Stalin. Or perhaps it was a more mundane question of his love life. Read more…

From Our Archives: American Imperialism Series—
Reading Lenin in Modern Rome

A bit of Lenin before breakfast gives you the strength of a hundred camels in the courtyard. (My adaptation of a Paul Bowles’ Arab adage)
BY GAITHER STEWART

Lenin, master revolutionary strategist.

(ROME) Real leftists like to cite Lenin. To quote Marx is to delve into the theory of Socialism/Communism. But Lenin is another cup of tea. You get into Lenin and you’re in revolution. When you read Lenin’s The State and Revolution, which contains the core of Leninist thought, you are no longer in the world of socio-economic theory. This powerful text offers insights into Leninist policies and elaborated Lenin’s interpretation of Marxism, above all the class conflict, the crushing of the bourgeois state and the establishment and role of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Reading Lenin today is to enter the realm of the overthrow of Capitalism and the transition from Capitalism to Communism. Fantasy? Not many years ago such words seemed like maniacal ravings. But that was before the shit hit the fan in the bourgeois capitalist world, right smack in its heart on Wall Street. The images of capitalism digging its own grave seemed to many the theoretical wishful thinking of a handful of radical eccentrics. But today? Lenin’s writings now read like contemporary political thought. The younger Trotsky noted in his autobiography, My Life, that “Lenin, although he was firmly entrenched in the present, was always trying to pierce the veil of the future.” That quality underlines the difference between Lenin and many of his contemporaries and marks him as the true revolutionary. Read more…

FROM OUR ARCHIVES: Articles you missed the first time around.

For most Americans, the defense of “Americanism” is indistinguishable from the defense of capitalism, aka “the free enterprise system”—its favorite euphemism. Only in America can a citizen opposed to capitalism be denounced as “un-American.”

By Gaither Stewart  &  Patrice Greanville
Originally published on 2 August, 2008

The dismal demise of the American Dream (if it ever really existed), the dream not of what we believe it was but of what we wanted to believe it was.  “It seems to me that the nature of the ultimate revolution with which we are now faced is precisely this: That we are in process of developing a whole series of techniques which will enable the controlling oligarchy who have always existed and presumably will always exist to get people to love their servitude.” (Aldous Huxley in a 1962 speech at Berkeley)

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Dateline: (Rome) July 31, 2008  [print_link]

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PHOTO: (Left) JFK, long enshrined as one of America’s best presidents, was a plutocrat in his own right, and a de facto propagandist for the superiority of the “American Way of Life.” No US president could govern (or get elected) on a platform that disparaged individualism, or the core values of capitalism.

IT’S UNDENIABLE THAT THE AMERICAN SOCIAL MODEL (the vaunted “American Way of Life”) is a paradox in the world. All you have to do is look around at other nations and the difference is clear as the Rome sky in July. Even today at the nadir of its profound social crisis because of its flagrant, outright failure, America continues unabashedly to hammer away at its people how fortunate they are, while simultaneously proposing itself to the world as the paradigm, the quintessence, the very epitome of western civilization. Read more…

The sting of satire can often underscore certain truths that straight prose rarely manages to touch.

By Gaither Stewart

Silvio Berlusconi. Until yesterday a loyal pal of Gaddafi's. Today, one of his executioners.

(Roma) A cold wind was blowing down Mussolini’s showpiece avenue. The Via dei Fori Imperiali is the site of victory parades. The victory over the duplicitous Ethiopians. The victory over the ambitious Libyans of East and West. The victory over the ferocious Albanians. It was about 3 p.m. Rain was in the air. The Roman Forum alongside the great avenue was relatively empty this last day of March. As each time I pass I stopped to observe the tourists looking at the ancient Roman ruins of numerous basilicas and arches and statues extending from the Campidoglio to the Colosseum. Read more…

Of all the uprisings in the Maghreb, the case of Libya is perhaps the most opaque.  Is the country a locus of true spontaneous insurrection or simply the target of an opportunistic maneuver by the West?

By Gaither Stewart | 24 February 2011

[print_link]

(Rome) Does colonialism pay off for anyone? In the long run, definitely not. There is always a payback. The events today in the North Africa reflect this story. The situation today is the living and the dying proof of the payback. An atrocious, insufferable payback. The English in Egypt, the French in Algeria, the Italians in Libya. But especially the occupied Arab peoples of Egypt, Algeria and Libya, have all paid and continue to pay the price of colonialism. Read more…

Not too improbably, what may have kept Berlusconi afloat is that he’s “all too human” in the eyes of many Italians. His penchant for nubile girls is certainly proof of that. 

By Gaither Stewart

[print_link]

February 19, 2011

(Rome). Rubygate it’s called. The final act of the Berlusconi saga. Over fifteen years of comedy for the outside world. A comedy played out against a background of non-government and misery for many Italians. For years now, each new scandal, each new act of corruption, is identified with the suffix “gate”. Deriving from the original Watergate, even though the latter was not actually a “gate” as used today to pinpoint scandalous behavior and the resultant cover-up. During these last stages of the Berlusconi era there has been Noemi Gate, named for another of Sultan Silvio’s teenage favorites. Then, the Bunga Bunga Gate, in reference to the sex games and “orgies” in the Sultan’s luxurious private residences in Milan and Rome. In Italy, in Commedia dell’Arte fashion, the gate suffix means scandal, speculation and gossip. 

“Bunga bunga” is a new word in the Italian vocabulary, familiar to probably 99 per cent of the nation’s sixty million inhabitants. Allegedly, Berlusconi borrowed the word from his friend, Muammar Gheddafi, the dictator of Libya known for his extravagant excesses, to describe his own private parties. Bunga bunga means sex games. Girls who have been there describe Berlusconi’s bunga bunga room, equipped for pole dancing and such. A room for explicit sex games. Group sex, in the popular belief. Like twenty half nude young women caressing each other for the amusement and stimulation of the Grand Old Sultan. Berlusconi claims that his hard, dedicated work for the people excuses his nocturnal passions: nights, he needs relaxation and entertainment. He needs bunga bunga. 

Strangely, few Berlusconi supporters censor the Leader. They are titillated by the bunga bunga image and would do the same if they had the means. Their advice to Berlusco is: Resist! Resist! Resist! Resist the old-fashioned opposition that wants to carry modern Italy back to the dark ages. And resist he does. A new poster depicts a Berlusconi-Balboa wearing boxing gloves, his guard up, his face a mask of blood, while the fighter repeats out of the corner of his contorted mouth, “I’m not worried at all!”

Every Italian knows that Ruby gate refers to the minor, “Ruby”, that is, Karima El Mahrough, a Moroccan teenager, whom Sultan Silvio the First instructed to refer to herself around the Milan clubs and bars she frequents as an Egyptian and a niece of Mubarak. Then, she claims, he paid her a total of 187,000 euros, about $250,000, for her sexual services and his personal entertainment. That was before his perhaps fatal intercession with the Milan police to release her after she was arrested for theft.

Now four judicial processes against Berlusco are scheduled during the next forty days: a series of cases of false accounting, tax fraud, corruption, bribery of police officials and judges, charges known to most everyone in Italy. The man who claims to be “the most persecuted man in the world” is on the verge of transformation into “the most prosecuted man in the world”, as he should have been a decade and a half ago.

Ah Ruby, Ruby! Karima, Karima! If the Sultan had only imagined where his irrepressible lust for teenagers would lead! There it goes again, as with Noemi, so with Ruby-Ruby. What his mafia association didn’t accomplish, teenage beauties did. Jail sentences await the man who dreamed of becoming Italy’s next President with the power of his friend, Vladimir Putin. Instead he faces both jail and banishment forever from government service. Lifetime exile from public life awaits him. The countless girl stories have amalgamated into his one great perversion: lasciviousness and lechery.

RIGHT: Noemi Letizia, one of Berlusconi’s scandals with a teenager, and protagonist of “Noemi Gate”.

“Old man,” the girls say behind the back of the short, neckless old man with his ridiculous wig or whatever it is he wears on his round head and his built-up shoes. Old man pretending to be a young buck. So hyped up on Viagra that his own doctors worry about his heart. “Culo flaccido,” flaccid ass, the girls of the harem call him, the girls he put up in a luxurious apartment house in his very own Milano 2, the residential city of 10,500 apartments allegedly financed by mafia money. Maybe the harem-apartment building too was another Gheddafi idea.

Well, well! Rubygate. The Sultan’s undoing. Or is it? Things have a tendency to go haywire in this land of lemon tree gardens. Bet on a losing horse and win a million. Bet on a winner and lose a fortune. Mussolini, like many Roman emperors, learned too late about the fickleness of Italian electors. Now it’s showdown time for Berlusconi the First. His sundown. The decline has set in.

Now, let’s weigh the yeas and nays. Since his wife—a former soubrette herself who charges that he fucks minors—denounced him as a “sick man” in need of psychological care and divorced him, now one million Italian women have followed suit and come out in a massive demonstration against Sultan Berlusco in a demand for respect for their dignity. The Church has turned its back on this great sinner. Trade union workers, the lowest paid among leading nations of the European Union, oppose him. Part of his coalition, chiefly many ex-Fascists who were made salonfähig by Berlusconi and amalgamated in the Sultan’s party, has defected, though as I write these lines, some defectors are re-defecting, bought back by Berlusconi in his acquisition campaign (which he runs as if it were his Milan Soccer Club) in order to maintain a parliamentary majority. He remains in office and thus far out of jail thanks to his media and financial power, “money suasion.” The force of his immense wealth has created a class of “parliamentarians in transit”, rewarded with cash or paid-off mortgages in exchange for their passage from the opposition to the side of the victors.

Internationally, Berlusconi is infamous for his reckless remarks about the internal affairs of other nations. In that milieu, he has shorn any credibility he once had. He lacks the proper prestige and overall comportment expected of a statesman. And statesman he is not. Statesman he has never been. And will never be. He offends the dignity of the dignified leaders of the European Union’s 27 member states. A class that cares very much about its dignity and prestige. Berlusco, the outsider, cracks his corny jokes at the wrong moments, hams up group photographs, or sings a song. Members of Italian delegations to international conferences must shudder that he will have them sing together his personal hymn, Meno male che Silvio c’é , Thank Goodness There’s Silvio. 

Yet, gate after gate, lie after lie, betrayal after betrayal, the man resists. One asks all over Europe, as does the “liberal” and “Left” Italian media, how and why Italians continue to vote for him. It is an enigma. Italians did the same for Mussolini, who carried them to destruction. Despite many politico-sociological explanations, a large core stubbornly continues to vote for the Sultan. He still sits well with much of the middle class, the haute bourgeoisie, and wide strata of the Lumpenproletariat. Like many places in the capitalist world, the ignorant cast their votes for the person who hangs out the most placards and images of himself. Just as during Mussolini’s twenty years. 

Polls show that despite all the many gates and arches under which Silvio Berlusconi the First has passed, many of his voters remain faithful to their glorious leader. The leader of many promises. It is his promises and his anti-professional politician’s stance. But I insist, he gets their vote also because he reflects the base and ugly qualities—qualities that Berlusconism itself also created—of many contemporary Italians who want it all, now. The attractive young girl who believes she can become an actress or a politician overnight. He is the Leader of a vulgar culture in which “to seem” crushes the very idea of “to be”. Where any attractive young woman, once pinpointed by a political pimp, is willing to share the Sultan’s bed and can expect those great rewards, the actress role or a high-paying political post. Such attitudes of seeming, shred of even a modicum of self-esteem and personal worth filter down and down to the regional level, to the provincial level, to the communal level. It is Berlusconism, the modern modus vivendi. Berlusconi is the paradigm for all those TV-molded persons who strive to arrive quickly. His People of Freedom Party leadership belongs to the arrivistes. A party he bought: created, named and molded. He represents the culture that has transformed the land once loved by people of the world into a hell to live in. 

An interesting observation of recent days is that the end of Berlusconi means also the end of Italy’s pitiful political attempt at a two-party system in imitation of America: Berlusconi’s People of Liberty Party on one side and the moderate left, the Democratic Party, on the other. Now however center parties have revived, as has the far left. Italy is returning to its true, splintered political self which in reality has never disappeared.

Now, new revelations by Wikileaks show that Berlusconi made a secret deal with Washington: Obama’s support for his government at last year’s G8 in Italy in exchange for greater Italian participation in the spread of the US empire: more Italian soldiers in Afghanistan, elite soldiers freed of restraining caveats and rules of engagement, troops free to combat alongside Marines. And more US military bases in Italy itself. Bases with extra-territorial rights operating free of Italian interference.

Lechery. Moral corruption. The old, old idea of the self-made man. Such considerations inevitably invite the question: is this moral degeneration only an Italian phenomenon? Or is it universal in our times? 

In the case of Italy however, the question I raised above remains unanswered: has Berlusconi changed the Italian and Italy, or is he and his life style the paradigm of the real Italy? I prefer the former, but cannot help but fear the latter. Today, on the peninsula reaching out toward Africa, the general atmosphere is that of the end of an epoch. Of a Götterdämmerung for Berlusconi the First. 

One wonders what Silvio is thinking as he follows the effusions of the nude teenagers swarming around him, engaged in their bunga bunga antics to earn their compensation.  Does he feel anything in his pants? Or is he asking himself if he can risk another Viagra despite doctors’ orders? Is observation enough? No! Observation is too little. He is the man. He must display his manhood to one (or more?) of these beautiful girls younger than his own daughters. Take that Viagra. Take it now! To hell with tomorrow’s Council of Ministers during which he can anyway nap in peace. If he is needed one of his aides will wake him. Adjusting his hair piece, he sails up, up, to the sky, to the horizons. There are no limits. He has the wealth. What is his wealth worth anyway if he cannot even buy a few more moments of bliss? 

Nonetheless, I believe Silvio Berlusconi has lived his life inside a web of self-deceit. Most likely he himself still doesn’t realize or accept that deceit. But the day he comes to see himself as many others see him could be fatal for him. I would not be too surprised to read some morning in the spring, when life sprouts everywhere, that Silvio, deserted by all, finally alone on his long ego trip, alone in his world of fantasy about himself, his boundless, invincible, enviable self, immune to the laws of man and decency, I would not be surprised that he decided not to take the Viagra and instead ended it all in one desperate gesture, perhaps the first true one of his life. 

I have dedicated a British song of the 1930’s—in this case a dirge—to Sultan Silvio Berlusconi the First, who lived a life of dream, a dream as if it were life:

Underneath the arches

We dream our dreams away …

Every night you’ll find us

Tired out and worn

Underneath the arches

We dream our dreams away.

Senior Editor GAITHER STEWART serves as TGP European correspondent.  His latest novel is The Trojan Spy (Callio). He’s currently at work on a sequel, Lily Pad Roll.

 A Personal Testimony

Politically and philosophically, France is every civilized person’s second nationality. But when it comes to raw affection and sentiment, old Italy’s sheer humanity and big heart have no equivalent anywhere. 

By Gaither Stewart | 4 February 2011 

[print_link] 

BELOW: Marcello Mastroianni as Barone Cefalú, in Pietro Germi’s devastating satire Divorzio Alla Italiana. Like all great actors, along with Vittorio Gassman, Toto, Nino Manfredi, Massimo Girotti, Anna Magnani, Claudia Cardinale, Renato Salvatori, the Carotenuto brothers, and so many others, he came to personify the supple, inventive and indestructible spirit of Italy. 

(Rome) WHEN I WAS A YOUNG MAN I moved to Italy. It was an act of love for this Mediterranean land where lemon trees bloom. The original attraction for me however was not only the Bel Paese, as Italians like to call this truly beautiful peninsula jutting out southwards into the Mediterranean Sea and nearly reaching Tunisia. I also wanted the whole Mar Nostrum, the sea around which our Western civilization developed; I set for myself the secret goal of knowing all the lands surrounding the great sea. The attraction I felt was perhaps the same allure for the succession of peoples and civilizations, which have sought to both control and unite this beautiful and unique world. Though my original love for Italy has faded and waned in the vulgarity of contemporary Italy, not so the magical lure of the Mediterranean World as such.

Historically, the Mediterranean World tends to absorb and assimilate peoples more quickly than in north Europe. I was an adult when I moved here. Yet I have been assimilated here in a way that did not happen in my many years in Germany. However, as compared to my children not completely so, who though born as children of the north, grew up in the city of Rome. Today, even though they have now lived years in the USA, they still consider Rome their “home”. Like other Mediterranean cities, like also New York City, Rome opens its arms and invites racially similar newcomers to join. Racism and religious fundamentalism are new phenomena in the “ideal” Mediterranean World, where common cultural heritage weighs heavier than prejudice and exclusion.

Control of this world has been disputed and fought over by Italy’s own peoples, as well as by invaders from faraway lands. Ancient Greeks conquered Sicily and south Italy where Corinthian Greeks founded the 2700-year old city of Siracusa in the south-east corner of Sicily, a city which became a major power in that world. At the same time, the island of Sicily and the south of today’s Italy became the “America” of Greek colonizers. To Sicily! To Sicily! rang out across the Greek world. Greek (il greco) is still widely spoken in several towns of south Italy.  

A look at the atlas shows the big island of Sicily in the dead center of the Mediterranean Sea. The key to control of maritime routes linking East and West, North and South. Every power of the Old World wanted to possess that magical land. Sicily! Truly a land of magic and enchantment. Still today you find there remnants of those variegated old cultures: Greek amphitheaters and temples, Arab mosques, Norman cathedrals, Spanish urban architecture. During the sixty-four years of the golden age of that Norman kingdom in the sun, the land of Sicily, for the first time in history, hosted the three major racial and religious traditions of the Mediterranean littoral and became a kind of bank and clearing-house of the culture and knowledge of three continents: Europe, Africa and Asia.

RIGHT: Surviving at all costs. Mario Monicelli’s masterpiece Big Deal on Madonna Street (I soliti ignoti) portrayed a band of inept, highly likable would be robbers. Monicelli, Rossellini, De Sica and Visconti imprinted on celluloid the reality of a ruined postwar Italy where merely staying alive was already an accomplishment. 

Time passed. New empires formed. Romans defeated the Carthaginians and ultimately controlled the entire Mediterranean. After the Romans, arrived in the Mediterranean World a succession of foreign invaders—Arabs, Normans, German, Spaniards, French, the Papacy—who occupied parts of what we now call Italy, a geographical spear pointed south, which became a launch pad to the rest of the Mediterranean World.

As Albert Camus emphasized, the recognition of limits has marked the ideal Mediterranean mentality. Excess is negative. The advent on the age-old stage of an America singing “from the shores of Tripoli” has changed such attitudes. The America of excess is not a paradigm for the traditional ideal Mediterranean mentality and culture. In this world, satraps have of course always existed and thrived, though as a rule their fate has been that of today’s Ben Ali, erstwhile dictator of Tunisia, and likewise today, the fate facing Egyptian dictator, Hosni Mubarak, who long ago forgot the traditional Mediterranean quality of moderation and recognition of limits.

The excesses of “Colonel” Muammar Gheddaffi, dictator of Libia, admired by Italy’s Premier, Silvio Berlusconi, are legendary. Gheddaffi’s excesses—he frequently arrives in Rome with tents, harem and camels—make him a likely candidate for the same list of failed dictators. In this world, kings and dictators fall. They fall because Mediterranean civilization, though at low tide today, in the long run demands payback.  

A brief look at an atlas confirms the specific geographical unity of that world, into which one enters from the West through the narrow Straits of Gibraltar. From one moment to the next, you seem to step back in time and find yourself in another world. The Mediterranean is lined by diverse peoples, nations and cultures, from Spain and Morocco to Tunisia and Italy, to Greece, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine, interlinked by a common heritage and histories.

The Great Sea, one of the most important maritime routes in the world, encompasses three continents and in the doing also the three monotheistic religions. Not only disputed by its own peoples, its mild climate, its magic, its sorcery have drawn for over two millennia countless non-Mediterranean peoples—conquerors, colonizers, migrants (and today international tourists), often in search of the sun, but as a rule in search of the freedom of a new way of life.

The Sicilian writer, Leonardo Sciascia [left] ( January 8, 1921 – November 20, 1989   ) whom I often met in his home in Palermo, was amused at my complaints that each time I arrived in Palermo it was raining and cold. 

The history of the Mediterranean includes the separate though linked histories of the world’s major civilizations: ancient Greeks, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans and Arabs, as well as the three major monotheistic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Sometimes at war, sometimes in peace, their common history is both one of prosperity, such as that of the Arabs in Sicily, or one of destruction as during the Crusades and, today, Israeli occupation of Arab lands.

Curiously, ancient Rome ruled and exploited the Middle East in true imperialistic style, while Islam ruled over Spain and Sicily and made major cultural contributions to the world at large. RIGHT: Ancient Greek temple in Agrigento, Sicily.  The city was founded by Greeks in the 5th Century BC.

It is no accident that some of the greatest world cities mark the Mediterranean World, originating in times when the locations of cities were studied and planned. For many centuries, Athens, Rome, Alexandria and Marseille have been centers of world trade and culture. Doubtless the history of our entire world would have been vastly different if not for the shifting around of continents and bodies of water in pre-historic times which resulted in this incredible geographical unity.

Middle East in flames. Revolution in the Arab world. Away with the dictators. Such words ring positive and long overdue. But, Democracy! Democracy! Freedom! Freedom are something different! The ring of the last two words is false, deceitful, if not hateful. These words, echoing across Egypt today, are at the same time words of excess on the one hand, and on the other euphemisms masking real events. Who stands behind such slogans and events? Some slogans ring too familiar for comfort. For who in his right mind can imagine a revolt against Islam? The word is not in the cards of Eastern sorcerers or necromancers. Lawrence of Arabia is long since gone. Dervishes and magic remain. BELOW RIGHT: Spanish beauty Pilar Gomar. What many would call, “una raggione per vivere.”  Not all works of art are made of stone. In DNA terms, the Mediterranean is literally the real melting pot of humanity. 

So what else remains? That is the question one must pose. What alternatives remain? I did not intend this essay as a comment on the Egyptian enigma. Yet, today, one can hardly write about the Mediterranean World without turning to the ongoing revolt now reaching from Algeria to Tunisia to Egypt.

I view Egypt today from an Italian perspective. Italians know well that Egypt is a major repository of Mediterranean heritage. Rome with its big Egyptian population. Its pyramids from Egypt. Sharm el Sheik on the Red Sea is Italian territory. Nile cruises to Luxor. The pyramids. The great library in Alexandria. Places every Italian traveler knows.

But Mubarak? Egyptian politics?

According to a recent Italian TV reportage, informed Americans know more about the mystery of power in Egypt than do Europeans. And so they should, after thirty years of Washington’s economic-political support for that dictatorship. Yet I doubt the claim. In general, the most prevalent response to the Egyptian conundrum is indifference. As if eighty million Egyptians were of little import.  

Conspiracy remains alive at every latitude. One fundamental question echoes across the Mediterranean from Egypt to Rome: Why the sudden withdrawal of U.S. support for Mubarak after thirty years of support and the annual billions of American tax dollars? Why? A qui bono? Cui prodest? Is this another CIA mafia-like maneuver, to change things so that nothing changes? Has Washington suddenly awakened to the fact that its support of corrupt regimes is turning against its own interests?

BELOW: Roman statue unearthed by storms in Southern Israel. 

Conspiracy? But against whom? Moslem Brotherhood a threat? Moslem Brothers, a CIA asset? A mystery. Does the answer lie in Israel? The echo of the conundrum of power in Egypt arrives also in Rome, but it goes largely unheard.

Just as Sicily in the Old World, Egypt is a regional kingpin today. Though the “bread revolt” in Tunisia made a model for the Egyptian rebels, Egypt with its eighty million people is another dimension. For decades Egypt has been considered the guarantor of regional stability. The first Arab State to sign a peace accord with Israel, in 1979, for which Israel has defended Hosni Mubarak’s iron-fisted reign. Israel and the USA have relied on the Islamic Sunni Bloc led by Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to thwart religious domination by Shia’a Iran. Is that pact at an end?

Many aspects of U.S. international relations pass through the Middle East. Therefore, through Egypt, and that because of the decades-long priority for Washington of the State of Israel and Middle Eastern oil. That is one explanation of why billions of U.S. tax payers dollars have gone to Mubarak’s Egypt. And that also explains Washington and Europe’s caution about the Egyptian uprising: first the West defended the right to protest, followed then by timid demands for “peaceful transition to democracy.”

Europe like the USA prefers “friendly despots” to “inimical democrats.” Washington wants to have its cake and eat it too. The dilemma for the West is that a too cautious policy toward the Egyptian uprising can be interpreted as complicity with the corrupt regime (which complicity, as a matter of fact, has existed all along, as there are no such thing as “innocents” in this sordid game—Eds), while explicit criticism of it will weaken a precious ally. Support for dictatorships in exchange for stability and good business affairs is not only short-sighted, but today is at the end of the line. For years the European Union has followed the dictates of Washington; today it too speaks of “orderly transition” in even more cautious terms than the USA.

For thirty years Mubarak has deceived and deluded everyone—Europe, USA, Israel and Egyptians themselves—with the dilemma: Either I, Mubarak, or the Moslem Brotherhood. The dictator has performed in true dictator style, offering rewards to Western friends who in turn have granted him the title of “moderate” and his regime as a moderate one. The millions of Egyptians on the streets today do not agree.

Camus is right about excess and limits. The time of contemporary Mediterranean dictatorships is over. Metaphorically, one might say, the Mediterranean Sea has risen against excess. And today the Old Sea demands recognition of limits. A lesson, perhaps, also for western lands far beyond the Old World of the Mediterranean Sea.

SENIOR EDITOR and lifelong expat GAITHER STEWART’s latest book is The Trojan Spy (Callio Press). Gaither serves as TGP’s foreign correspondent for Europe, based in Rome. As part of a trilogy of political thrillers focusing on US military and diplomatic intrigue across the world, he’s currently putting finishing touches on Lily Pad Roll.

(Rome) NEITHER ITALIANS nor foreign observers should err as to where real Mafia power resides. It resides and thrives in the vulgarity of contemporary Italy in the era of Silvio Berlusconi. It was born in Italy and flourishes in Italy. Now it has swept across the nation from south to north on the waves of what is here called Berlusconism. And it has established its headquarters in the city of Berlusconi, Milan, Italy.