Features

ROME — My host in Rome, a retired professor of nearly 80, surprised me by proudly telling me about the peace marches she had recently attended. “I lived through the bombing of Hull during World War II,” she said of her home town in England. “That experience left me very intolerant of the whole notion of bombing people.” 

Her perspective wasn’t hard to find during my recent trip to Italy (nor during a short detour through Switzerland). Indeed, mainstream Italian newspapers like La Repubblica and Il Giorno ran stories that disapprovingly compared America’s bombing of Baghdad to the Allied bombing of Milan and Dresden during the 1940s. 

Italians may have elected the right-wing government of Silvio Berlusconi, which rhetorically supported the Bush administration’s war and recently agreed to send 3,000 Italian soldiers to help police post-Saddam Iraq. But anti-war sentiment ran high in famously polarized Italy, and opponents decorated much of the country with their symbol, a rainbow flag featuring the slogan “Pace” (Peace). I saw whole apartment buildings draped with these flags, flying from windows and balconies. 

Italians adapted the same symbol to jewelry (which several front-line employees of my U.S.-owned airline unapologetically wore to work) and clothing. Leading me to her car, my host grabbed a rainbow umbrella that matched those I’d seen in many other hands. A minor chance of rain had been forecast, but I sensed she carried it under clear skies, too. 

I found a corresponding rainbow of opinion about the war and about U.S. intentions in the European press. If the U.S. media tends toward Mars, European newspapers occupy a broader spectrum of the solar system. Unlike the model of objectivity to which North America’s regionally dominant newspapers have aspired since an early 20th-century backlash against yellow journalism excesses, most populous European countries still have a thriving tradition of multiple national papers, many of them proudly partisan in their affiliations with political parties from right to left. 

In Italy, that spectrum starts with the rightward-leaning Libertà, which trumpeted the discovery of Saddam’s airport bunker with the banner headline, “Saddam Robbed Infants’ Cribs to Build Himself Golden Sinks!” On the left, it runs to the socialist daily l'Unità, whose title plate now bears a Pace rainbow flag opposite the attribution “founded by Antonio Gramsci” (the 1920’s Italian revolutionary leader who opposed Mussolini’s rise, and for whom a major street is named in almost every city). There’s also a Communist daily, Il Manifesto, which has a more sober layout and is — ironically — Italy’s most expensive paper. 

The partisan papers run some items that you might expect. L'Unità had large headlines that proclaimed “Baghdad in Chaos,” declaimed the looting of Iraq’s national museum and library and trumpeted U.S. troops’ killing of three journalists in a Baghdad hotel. It also had a front-page reprint of a “Dear America” letter from Canadian author Margaret Atwood, recounting her early enchantment and recent disillusionment with U.S. behavior. 

What’s more surprising is that mainstream dailies carry items you wouldn’t find in their U.S. counterparts. France’s centrist Le Monde, for example, ran (on April 3) a similar front-page critique of U.S. conduct by Mexican author Carlos Fuentes. During the week of April 7, both Le Monde and Italy’s correspondingly earnest mainstream daily, La Repubblica, ran full-page articles that traced the Iraq war’s origins back to neoconservative intellectuals in and around the Bush administration. La Repubblica’s version even embedded little “baseball card” graphics to help readers sort out the likes of Richard Perle, the Heritage Foundation think tank and the American Spectator magazine. 

The following week, each paper had a similar full-page dissection of Rupert Murdoch’s Anglo-American media empire and its role in distributing “pro-war propaganda.” On April 15, La Repubblica followed up with a front-page essay playfully scrutinizing the worldwide interventionism of “The Trotskyists in the White House.” 

British papers range across a similar ideological spectrum, from right-wing national tabloids (the screamingly pro-war Sun) to left-wing tabloids (the staunchly anti-war Mirror). In between, perhaps the most interesting daily is the left-leaning broadsheet The Independent. Its April 2 front-page article trumpeted staff reporter-commentator Robert Fisk’s discovery of missile fragments that incriminated U.S. forces in the notorious killing of 58 civilians at a Baghdad market. On April 5, a front-page editorial defended Fisk against U.K. Foreign Minister Geoffrey Hoon’s criticism of him in Parliament. 

Bay Area readers used to regularly receive Independent copy — including Fisk’s widely respected dispatches from war zones. That was before the Examiner and Chronicle each terminated the Independent reprint contracts they’d inherited from the Hearst Examiner. 

Today, all the British dailies are busy chronicling the fallout from explosive documents that the right-wing Telegraph discovered inside the Iraqi Foreign Ministry. The memos suggest that an anti-war legislator within Tony Blair’s governing Labour Party received secret oil-trading contracts from the Iraqi government that yielded him at least $600,000 a year. The legislator, George Galloway, says they’re forgeries.