MARK KURLANSKY
The Italian Connection
As
though to prove he was going nowhere, Berlin-born Erich Priebke,
eighty-three, worked out every day for more than a year on a stationary
bicycle, while he was under house arrest in Buenos Aires pending a deci–
sion on an Italian request for extradition.
Italy and Argentina share more than an extradition treaty. So many
Italians have emigrated to Argentina over the years that Italian surnames
are more common than Spanish, and Argentine Spanish has acquired an
Italian lilt. In Argentina's obsessive, unsuccessful, and somewhat racist
quest to be European and not South American, Italy, along with
Germany and England, is one of its role models.
Unfortunately, among the concepts adopted from Italy is the idea of
unaccountable government. The past is to remain in the past, with the
hope that if it does, then peace and stability may come to a nation
threatened by destabilizing polarity. This is how Italy tried to get past
Mussolini and how Argentina is trying to get past the Dirty War. But
people need to believe that there is a moral order to the universe , a
power that can set right the sins which they felt too powerless to pre–
vent. How else can they live with their failure to have acted? As churches
have clearly failed to provide this leadership, great revolutions - the
American, the French, the Russian, the Chinese - claimed to offer a new
code of morality.
The failure of secular leadership such as Marxism, Maoism, French
Republicanism and Americanism to assert a moral order is driving people
back to religion. Without a sense of moral imperative, what legitimacy is
there to law? The notion of justice is not that transgressors are locked
up because they are dangerous. People want them locked up because
they have done wrong. Guilt is the sense that one has not paid for one's
crimes. The political argument often assumes that the society will more
easily rebuild if it forgets about the crimes of the past. But then people
feel they are living in a society without justice, where wrong goes
unpunished; where all are guilty at heart and the ruling system is
pointless.
Erich Priebke's unanswered guilt paralyzed two nations. Italy felt
too guilty not to ask for him but too guilty to really look at his crimes,
and Argentina was too guilty to judge him but too guilty to let him
go. In the end Germany, the most improbable
deus ex machina,
a nation
