Hunger Robbers for Robbery Wars, 8
Behind the fierceness, the personal gain, too.
Note that the looting even reached the level of grotesque, when the products of the robbed South provided the basis for the robber barons of the north to reach new monopolistic heights in personal gains. In the absence of credit for the South, it was Francesco Cirio, financed by the North, who built the first canning industry upon the products of the South; and these were so good and successful that they enabled him to enter the railway sector, at first to deliver his products, but later on to achieve a monopolistic position in it. And this was done with the help of the Turin bank syndicate headed by Carlo Bombrini. As you might expect, Bombrini was also a personal friend of Cavour, and Cavour had business interests in the agricultural sector; a meaningful precedent of such interests took place during a grain crisis a few years before the Italian unification: while in Naples the “autarchic” King Ferdinand prevented the export of grain to ensure food for all citizens, in Turin the “liberalist” Cavour openly favoured its more profitable – for him – export. And on this basis we know that foodstuffs to be exported and railways to export them with go hand in glove.
As an aside worth pointing out, then there is the coarse grain of rhetoric.
For instance, in the words written in 1851 by the young British diplomat Gladstone to London’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Naples was referred to as “the denial of God erected as a system of government”. It is interesting to note how history – or, rather, suppression – repeats itself also in terms of the coarseness of propaganda: we have heard heads of state in our times refer to some other nation with terms as crude as “rogue state”, and we might took that as insulting to our intelligence. If we didn’t, we should. The basis of this kind of insults is obviously the generalisation, and indeed later on we’ll contextualise generalisation explicitly as a specific indicator of suppression. Justice consists also in being enabled to confront both the accuse and the accuser in order to stand up for oneself on an equal footing, and this presupposes the accusation is specific and detailed. Propaganda denies it all, point by point: the control of media is a loudspeaker powerful enough to silence the target, the accusation is sufficiently vague to be impossible for the target to rebut, and its coarseness comes full circle by successfully appealing to our humanoid faults to issue the guilty verdict.
