Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Inane comments like this are one of the many reasons why political discussions on HN are so bad.

The thinking that most politicians are just like people who would take a 12 year old boy and dump him in a vat of acid after strangling him is shallow and devoid of any depth of thinking on how different organizations operate.

States do dirty things, and so do individuals, and so do organizations on various levels. But there's a lot of differences in incentives, capabilities, tradeoffs, calculations and so on between them all. If you are really interested in understanding the world, rather than making the point that THE GUBERMENT IS EEEVIL, thinking about some of these differences would behoove you.

So: are you genuinely so poorly informed that you see no difference, or are you completely blinded by your libertarian propaganda as to not see any difference?

I live in Italy, and like many people, I intensely dislike Berlusconi. But, you know what? I'd prefer him 10 times - 100 times - to the sort of people who run actual Mafias.

Berlusconi is pretty deep in bed with the Mafia and would not be where he is without them.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/03/25/uk-italy-mafia-tria...

"It's complicated". He's a fairly rotten guy in many ways; in all likelihood he's made deals with them, but isn't at all involved in their actual operations.

For those actually interested in learning about Berlusconi and Italy, this book is pretty good:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004ZZMBAS/?tag=dedasys-20

By a former corespondent for The Economist in Italy.

I don't really think the Mafia was an integral component of his success though - in some ways that's an easy out for people looking for someone to blame for the whole Berlusconi phenomenon.

Interestingly, the US apparently reconstituted the Mafia (which had been destroyed by Mussolini) to undermine WWII resistance, labor unions and leftist movements. The stuff they don't teach in school...

(http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/200205--.htm, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborations_between_the_Unit...)

Yes, not many fascist leaders from Italy were ever prosecuted for their crimes post war. Caused quite a stir in places like Yugoslavia. Britain was initially trying to be helpful but they were losing support from the locals (Italians) and then USA told them to back off.

The same thing happened in Germany. The top level guys were tried at Nuremberg, but Nazi 'middle management' ruled West Germany for decades after the war. This, in turn, was an important motivation for the formation of the Rote Armee Fraktion.

Western liberal democracy often forgets (or pretends to forget) that history is a thing, and that people have memoeries. There are many more instances where Western foreign policy (often initiated by the US, supported by Europe) was beneficial to us in the short term, while having negative long term consequences. The CIA calls it 'blowback'. The last century in the Middle East and South and Central America is riddled with it. And then people turn around and ask 'why do they hate us?'.

I despair.

Agreed.

For example seeing the people in Egypt now (VICE documentary), both camps, whether the secular camp/army or Muslim Brotherhood were blaming Obama for the current situation.

On a similar note, hats off to Russia, that, even though is supporting the Assad regime in Syria and beyond, never gets such a strong backlash or blowback as you say. Or maybe the fights in Caucasus are underreported.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com