#Guido Crosetto

[spunkeater]

[toscanoirriverente]

Il giornale attribuisce al ministro della Difesa frasi choc su Ucraina, Cina, Medio Oriente e "neutralità" dell'Italia. Ma nella registrazione dello speech, ascoltata dal Foglio, non c'è traccia di nessuna di quelle affermazioni. Dice l'opposto. Per il ministro è "un atto di guerra ibrida"

[u-more]

Insultato dal capo di Wagner, il ministro della Difesa ordina ai Servizi di aumentare il monitoraggio della Cirenaica.

[trendynewsnow]

Italian Charity Delivers 15 Tonnes of Humanitarian Aid to Gaza

Italian Charity Sends Humanitarian Aid to Gaza An Italian charity organization has dispatched a significant shipment of 15 tonnes of humanitarian aid to Gaza, aimed at assisting the civilian population in dire need. The aid was meticulously gathered from generous donors by the Confederazione Nazionale delle Misericordie d’Italia and was transported aboard a C-130J military aircraft from an…

[pier-carlo-universe]

Giorgia Meloni: Il Percorso di Vita Prima della Ribalta Politica. Dall'impegno giovanile alla leadership nazionale, una storia di determinazione e passione

Giorgia Meloni, nata a Roma il 15 gennaio 1977, è una delle figure più influenti della politica italiana contemporanea.

Giorgia Meloni, nata a Roma il 15 gennaio 1977, è una delle figure più influenti della politica italiana contemporanea. Prima di emergere come leader di Fratelli d’Italia e diventare la prima donna a ricoprire la carica di Presidente del Consiglio dei Ministri, il suo percorso è stato segnato da un profondo impegno politico e da una crescita costante all’interno delle istituzioni. NICCOLO’…

[consistantly-changing]

[Image descriptions in order: a tweet by @PucciPedia "II Pucci" which says "Guido Crosetto best skills and highlights:" attached is a screenshot of an article titled "Guido Crosetto fuma 150 sigarette al giorno e finisce in ospedale". Translation: Guido Crosetto smokes 150 cigarettes a day and ends up in hospital. The article says "Ha trascorso la notte in un ospedale romano. Ha "esagerato" con il fumo, con ben 150 sigarette al giorno. Crosetto fa autocritica: "Sono stato un cretino"". Translation: He spent the night in a Roman hospital. You have "exaggerated" with smoking, with as many as 150 cigarettes a day. Crosetto criticizes himself: "I was an idiot". Below is an image of Crosetto's face. He is a middle aged man with pale hazel eyes and a roundish face. His hair is greying and possibly thinning. @broderly "David Broder" replies "The new Italian defence minister was hospitalised during the 2013 election campaign after smoking 150 cigarettes in one day. Which would equal one every six minutes from 8am till 11pm".]

[a screenshot of the translation of his quote "sono stato un cretino" in google translate. It's translation is "I've been a fool".]

[matt-at-pencils]

Guido Crosetto

Italian Minister of Defence

[giuseppearagno]

Giorgia Meloni o Harry Houdini?

Giorgia Meloni o Harry Houdini?

Attaccare il governo Meloni sul tema del fascismo significa rafforzare una leader che viene da dove viene, ma nega, rinnega e soprattutto sa che per i disperati vale un principio: “spes ultima dea“. Fratelli d’Italia e soprattutto Giorgia Meloni hanno avuto e hanno riferimenti indecenti, ma in due mesi sono stati capaci di competere persino con Harry Houdini. Oggi purtroppo si fa politica…

[quotidianoalessandriaastionline]

ROMA. LA GUERRA DI GUIDO..."CROSETTO MANDA L'ESERCITO, IL MINCULPOP A RETI UNIFICATE E LA PROPAGANDA DEL POTERE".

La fantasia del ministro Guido Crosetto non ha limiti, inventa un dirottamento mai avvenuto e come in una sorta di guerra preventiva attiva i reparti scelti dell’esercito, che a favore di televisioni a reti unificate diffondono l’azione eroica dei nostri marò contro il nemico arrivato dal mare. Ma le indagini e i primi accertamenti hanno smentito la ricostruzione fantasiosa e propagnadistica…

[kesarijournal]

The Grain Games: A Tale of Threats, Famine, and Diplomatic Ping-Pong

In the grand theatre of international politics, the stage is often set with the most unexpected props. Today, it’s grain. Yes, you heard it right, grain. The humble cereal, the staff of life, has become the latest pawn in the geopolitical chessboard. And boy, what a game it’s turning out to be!Act 1: The ThreatOur story begins with a threat, as all good thrillers do. The Ukrainian military, in a…

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[mariacallous]

Italy is, notoriously, not a nation of readers, with Italians spending on average far less time reading books than many other Europeans. Yet, lately, a book has monopolized the nation’s political conversation. The author, Roberto Vannacci, is an army general whose political thoughts lean reactionary, to say the least. In the past year, he has become one of Italy’s most prominent right-wing figures. Indeed, he has come close to eclipsing Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in domestic media coverage.

Vannacci, 55, also happens to be the star candidate of the anti-immigration party the League in the upcoming European Parliament elections. He was picked as a candidate by party leader Matteo Salvini—despite the opposition of some League officials, who viewed the general as inexperienced—in an attempt to regain the visibility that the League has lost since its main ally and rival, Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, usurped Salvini’s support base and rose to power.

Only a year ago, Vannacci was completely unknown to the wider public. Throughout the first half of 2024, one could hardly turn on the TV or open a newspaper without bumping into his name. It seems almost as if every week the general is at the epicenter of a new media storm: the most recent one about an interview he did with La Stampa in April, where Vannacci declared that “Italians are white, statistics say so,” and accused gay people of “showing off as exhibitionists.”

As soon as his candidacy was announced in late April, the progressive Democratic Party rushed to issue an (inadvertently counterproductive) statement urging Italians to ignore him.

Born into a military family (both his father and grandfather were professional soldiers), Vannacci served in Italy’s special forces in Iraq and Afghanistan in the 2000s, then led the army’s prestigious Folgore battalion, took part in the nation’s anti-Islamic State task force in 2017 and 2018, and served as a military attaché to the Italian Embassy in Moscow in 2020-2022. Yet fame came, unexpectedly, last August, when Vannacci was holding the not-so-glamourous position of head of the Military Geographic Institute in Florence.

In his free time during his service at the institute, Vannacci had written and self-published a book titled Il mondo al contrario (“The World Upside Down”). “I wrote the book for personal satisfaction. I thought it would be spread among my friends and would sell 300-400 copies,” Vannacci said in a phone conversation with Foreign Policy. But, to its author’s own surprise, the book became a huge success—the fifth-bestselling title in Italy in 2023—making Vannacci a better-selling author than Ken Follett and an instant celebrity. Despite being self-published, The World Upside Down had sold 200,000 copies by early 2024. (Italy’s publishing industry is small. By comparison, Prince Harry’s memoir, Spare, which was the country’s top seller, sold just over 300,000.)

The views of the book were so extreme that even Italy’s defense minister, Guido Crosetto—who co-founded the Brothers of Italy with Meloni—had to reprimand him: Vannacci was first replaced as head of the Military Geographic Institute and then suspended from the military for 11 months.

Organized into chapters, each dedicated to a specific theme, from environmentalism to multicultural society up to LGBT-related issues and animal rights, the book is a compendium of ultra-conservative personal philosophy, in which Vannacci sees the West threatened by feminism, environmentalism, the LGBT community, and animal rights.

His tirade rests on what he frames as buonsenso (“common sense”), the belief that all these modern ideas are insane, with little need for explanation: “Normality is heterosexuality. If everything seems normal to you, however, it is the fault of the plots of the international gay lobby.” Same-sex marriage or adoption? Come on, it’s just nuts—it’s common sense that a family is husband plus wife. Women want to work outside the house? Nonsense, “even if they work, they don’t feel fulfilled.”

Vannacci presented himself as the voice of the silent majority, which is hostage to some noisy minorities—and he was in some ways proved right. The message resonated with many Italians, who found in his book a manifesto for their own thoughts.

In an interview, Vannacci described himself as a “patriot.” He added that he views his literary endeavor as a defense of “our culture, our traditions, our roots, if only for the respect of our ancestors, our fathers, of our grandparents.”

In his book, the general exalts Italy’s greatest historical figures—going back to Aeneas, Julius Caesar, Dante, Galileo, and Garibaldi—and takes pride in having, supposedly, their glorious ancient blood in his veins, a staple of Italian nationalistic nostalgia.

Political scientist Mattia Diletti, who teaches at Rome’s Sapienza University, notes that his nostalgic discourse echoes Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” rhetoric.

The success of The World Upside Down lies in the portrayal of a world that, being “upside down,” one must “overthrow this morally, socially, politically corrupt elite. We must return to the ancient values that are within Italian society,” Vannacci writes.

This type of rhetoric resonated with Italian conservative voters, especially since Meloni, the head of a party that has its roots in postfascism, ended up being more moderate than her fanbase expected. For instance, she sided with the United States and European powers in supporting Ukraine, despite pro-Russian and anti-European Union sentiment enjoying some popularity on the right. On LGBT rights and abortion, Meloni’s reactionary rhetoric was never followed by major action: LGBT rights (or the lack of thereof) have remained unchanged since the pre-Meloni era, and the country’s abortion law has remained unchanged.

“Vannacci is a sort of rebellion against the thinking of the current times,” said Francesco Borgonovo, the deputy director of the conservative newspaper La Verità. The cultural battles waged by the suspended general, Borgonovo noted, are precisely the same cultural battles that right-wing parties had waged during the electoral campaigns but then did not deliver after they came to power.

“He puts together ideas in a somewhat bar-room way,” appealing to “right-wing people, who now feel betrayed by the parties that are now governing Italy, which they helped to elect,” Borgonovo said.

Diletti of Sapienza points out that part of Vannacci’s success is precisely that of presenting himself as an outsider who tells things as they are. In a country where the political class is widely discredited, Vannacci succeeds by presenting himself as “the non-politician who speaks the truth to politicians.”

Today, Vannacci is at the epicenter of Italy’s political debate, not only due to his EU candidacy. After his first book’s success, he recently published an autobiography.

Paradoxically, being elected to the European Parliament could dim his star: As an MEP, Vannacci’s image could be downgraded from “firebrand general” to mere “politician,” a term many Italians have come to loathe.

Although Vannacci’s fame might be transitory, his message will likely last: According to Diletti, “He put his name and face on them, but the ideas he expressed are part of Italian society.”

[beardedmrbean]

Italy's defense ministry admits Hezbollah staged an attack on itself when a UN Interim Force in Lebanon base was hit by rocket fire that it initially blamed on Israel, Barron's reported on Tuesday. 

Last week, Italy said an unexploded artillery shell hit the base of UNIFIL base, putting the blame on the IDF.

According to Barron's, Italian Defense Minister Guido Crosetto had initially said in Brussels that the IDF had staged the attack on the UN base in Lebanon.

Israel's newly appointed Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar had promised Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani an 'immediate investigation' into the shell incident.

However, an IDF review determined that Hezbollah was responsible for firing the rocket hit the UNIFIL post, the military said.

According to UNFIL, the strikes hit areas where no peacekeepers were present, and no serious injuries were reported.

Hezbollah attacks

On Tuesday morning, multiple UN Interim Force in Lebanon bases were hit by rocket fire and then again in the afternoon, one in the region of Ramyeh, another near Chamaa, and additional locations were hit later, UNIFIL said.

According to the IDF assessment, the rocket was fired from the area of Deir Aames, one of many fired by Hezbollah in a barrage launched at Israel at 9:50 a.m.

UNIFIL agreed with the IDF report that these strikes were from Hezbollah, saying the rocket was “fired most likely by non-state actors within Lebanon.”

[superfuji]

Del resto, Fratelli d’Italia nasce esattamente per sfruttare questa finestra di opportunità. Prendiamo i suoi tre fondatori ufficiali: Ignazio La Russa, Guido Crosetto e Giorgia Meloni. Il primo rappresenta (in modo perfino caricaturale) la fedeltà al fascismo storico, e la militanza nel torbido e sanguinario neofascismo del dopoguerra. Il secondo rappresenta la garanzia di totale organicità ai dogmi del liberismo economico e alle esigenze del sistema militare-industriale e dunque della guerra. La terza rappresenta l’apertura all���ideologia dell’estrema destra internazionale (da Orban a Bolsonaro a Trump). Quest’ultimo punto merita qualche parola in più. Nonostante l’affettuosa deferenza per Giorgio Almirante e alcune giovanili dichiarazioni di entusiasmo per Mussolini, Meloni è attenta a smarcarsi dal fascismo nostalgico alla La Russa. La ragione è la volontà di essere, e apparire, in sintonia con un nuovo fascismo che – pur nella sostanziale continuità ideologica con le idee di Hitler o di Evola – non ha bisogno di un apparato simbolico storico, e costruisce nuovi simboli e nuovi miti. In questo 25 aprile, prendetevi un momento per guardare un terribile video del 2013 (in francese, con sottotitoli in inglese: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XA5S5Qrg6CU). È la ‘dichiarazione di guerra’ alle democrazie lanciata da Génération Identitaire, un movimento politico nato in Francia (e lì sciolto dal governo nel 2017) che fa della ‘questione etnica’ il fulcro di una politica fondata sulla paura e sull’odio. La linea è quella del suprematismo bianco: e in concreto quel movimento ha organizzato una serie di attacchi anche fisici contro le Ong che soccorrono i migranti nel Mediterraneo. I simboli non sono le svastiche: ma, come si spiega nell video, i ‘lambda’, cioè le lettere greche che figuravano tra gli emblemi degli Spartani (‘lambda’ è la lettera iniziale di Lacedemoni, altro nome degli Spartani). La scelta cade sulla grande antagonista della democratica Atene: una città governata da una minoranza (gli Spartiati) che dominava attraverso la violenza e il terrore su una maggioranza (gli Iloti) etnicamente diversa. Un modello atroce, fatto proprio dall’organizzazione studentesca di Fratelli d’Italia. Un esempio eloquente: il percorso formativo di Azione studentesca si chiama ‘agoghé’, come quello dei giovani spartiati, che in esso si formavano alla resistenza fisica, e alla violenza (anche attraverso uccisioni rituali e impunite degli Iloti). Una ricca documentazione iconografica mostra come i ragazzi italiani che crescono all’ombra della Presidente del Consiglio non ricorrano ai fasci o alle svastiche (anche se la croce celtica rimane il simbolo ufficiale di Azione studentesca), ma ai simboli dell’antica Sparta: un mimetismo formale che mette i giovani di estrema destra italiana al riparo dalle accuse di fascismo nostalgico, e in connessione con i loro camerati di tutta Europa, consentendo una perfetta, e indisturbata, continuità con gli ‘ideali’ fascisti e nazisti. Vale la pena di ricordare che è stata proprio Azione studentesca la responsabile, nel febbraio scorso, del pestaggio dei ragazzi del Liceo Michelangiolo, a Firenze: e che nello stesso palazzo fiorentino hanno sede Fratelli d’Italia, Casaggì (nome locale di Azione studentesca) e la casa editrice “Passaggio al bosco” (etichetta esplicitamente jüngeriana che allude alla ribellione contro la democrazia), il cui catalogo è ricco di testi su Sparta, e sulla sua mistica del razzismo violento. È in questo quadro che si deve leggere l’uscita sulla ‘sostituzione etnica’ del ministro Lollobrigida, cognato di Meloni. Lungi dall’essere frutto di “ignoranza”, come penosamente asserito dall’interessato, si tratta della maldestra esibizione della parola d’ordine chiave per questa nuova-vecchia destra europea che fa della questione razziale e migratoria il centro di un intero sistema di pensiero e azione. Negli ultimi decenni si possono documentare decine e decine di uscite di Salvini, Meloni e molti altri leader della destra italiana sulla sostituzione etnica: e ora la tragedia di Cutro mostra come proprio quell’ideologia ispiri le azioni e le omissioni dell’attuale governo della Repubblica. Un nuovo fascismo, dunque: che non ha necessariamente bisogno dei labari del Ventennio. Ma che quel progetto comunque resuscita e persegue: soprattutto in una mistica della violenza e della morte che ha nei neri, nei musulmani, nei diversi i propri eterni obiettivi. Lo dimostra il fatto che la politica di questo governo fascista attacca frontalmente alcuni principi fondamentali della Costituzione antifascista

Il 25 aprile con un partito fascista al governo

[ginogirolimoni]

Eccone un altro che non si dimetterà: lui meno dice e meglio è, la Meloni ci ha abituati ai suoi silenzi a caldo e talvolta anche a freddo su queste vicende, mentre è incontenibile e istrionica in altri casi. Ci saranno le difese d'ufficio dei "giornalisti" amici, tali Nibbio, Biondino, Carlotto, Montanarolo, Sfregiato, Squinternotto, Tanabuso, Tiradritto e Sparafucile, poi il silenzio e dopo più nulla. Gennaro Sangiuliano continuerà ad essere il ministro della cultura così come Daniela Santanché, Francesco Lollobrigida, Matteo Salvini, Matteo Piantedosi, Carlo Nordio, Guido Crosetto, Giuseppe Valditara, Calderoli, Musumeci et alii lo rimangono ancora.

Certo però che la ragazza Boccia bene!

[conte-olaf]

Le richieste degli Stati Maggiori delle Forze Armate: nuove armi per almeno 25 miliardi

E la scuola a bagasce

E la sanità a bagasce

E le pensioni mai

E la giustizia a bagasce

E gli stipendi a bagasce

......