STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
Italy's Top Pol Beppe Grillo Being Groomed for Disruption by Soros?
By Staff News & Analysis - March 12, 2013

Rather than opening up to debate and scrutiny like the rest of the digital establishment, the Five Star Movement has locked itself in its leader's weltanschauung. Grillo's project is reminiscent of Google and Facebook's one-way system of navigation. Grillo has more than one million Twitter followers, but he exclusively follows representatives of the movement who, in turn, use the medium to communicate their message unidirectionally, employing a divisive "us versus them" tone. – Guardian

Dominant Social Theme: Beppe Grillo's political triumph is a social media miracle and a triumph of the Internet. But watch out, the radicalism of Grillo shows that the demons of European fascism are not yet exorcised. Much better to support the EU before more Grillos emerge.

Free-Market Analysis: Grillo's stunning ascent in Italy's political firmament is both insular and astonishing. There is something about it that is manipulated as well as genuine. Thanks to various DB feedbackers for pointing this out. We've written about it already: Will Grillo's Dubious Affiliations Send the EU Back Into a Sterile Debate?

When we follow up, we find that it may well be that Beppe Grillo's victories in the recent Italian elections are a kind of directed history supported by such globalists as Joseph Stiglizt and George Soros. The idea in this instance could be to shove people back toward support of the European Union by frightening them with the idea of incipient fascism.

The European Union is in trouble right now but if one scares people in Europe with the idea that the alternative to the EU is a return to fascism, then anti-EU sentiment may dim or even collapse. The idea is always to support internationalism and the grand, globalist experiment of the EU itself.

Beppe Grillo's politics and political theatre are insular and show little signs of evolving. There something of a pre-packaged approach in both his positions and success. In fact, Grillo's party is only about three years old and the kind of progress it has made during that time is typical of institutions that are massaged and supported by Money Power.

Grillo runs one of Italy's largest websites (if not the largest) and specializes in blunt denunciations of the "ruling class." … "Go f—k yourself," is one such slogan. And as we can see from the excerpt above, he is not so much interested in a dialogue as in imposing a particular viewpoint. Here's more from the article:

Far from promoting healthy debates across the board, and representing a centrifugal and transparent force, the Five Star Movement's online strategy is surprisingly partisan. Its core broadcasts its message without responding to criticisms and feedback. In an interview with the Italian blog network Blogosfere Roberto Casaleggio – co-founder and image curator of the Five Star Movement – spoke of his ambition to launch a Reddit-style social news website which would allow readers to select the best articles and thus play a role in the hierarchy of coverage. One could see this as an attempt to morph the web in the movement's image.

Meetup – a site launched in 2001 that allows users to arrange meetings and send online invites – is often used by the members of the Five Star Movement, along with other experimental platforms which should allow activists to collect votes and gather proposals. The first official app of the movement was only introduced at the beginning of February, and even then its political usefulness has yet to be proven. The app's content is highly gamified, and therefore risks becoming a tool for viral marketing (as opposed to an instrument with which the campaign may self-organise): it has a list of the top 10 Five Star activists, which fight for the top honour by collecting points. Does your Facebook profile picture have the Five star logo? You get 200 points. Did you print some promotional material? 50 points. Before eulogising about Grillo's revolutionary online strategy, it's worth remembering that just 20,000 users took part in the online primaries for candidate selection; that's less than the population of Pompeii.

We can see from this reporting that far from being a convulsive national movement, Grillo's political effort seems at least in part to be a manufactured entity with a small initial base and a political narrative that has been manufactured by his recent victories.

We've written already about Grillo's associations with the socialist economist Stiglitz – and a visitor to George Soros's Open Society will find analyses of Grillo's victory as being a triumph for social media. The Open Society seems quite supportive of Grillo despite his political opposition to the kind of globalism that Soros espouses. Stiglitz and Soros are reportedly longtime friends that share a fascination with turning IMF SDRs into a full-scale global currency.

We've reported on the dominant social meme of "social media" in the past. Those that want to control the Internet celebrate social media as an alternative to blogging and individual offerings. The idea is to bring everyone under the envelope of Facebook or some other social media site where the opinions and relationships of those presenting independent information can be better analyzed and controlled. See Wishful Thinking: Why The Economist Wants Social Media to Replace Blogs.

There are other reasons to be skeptical of Grillo. He will, for instance, have nothing to do with Silvio Berlusconi who shares a good many of Grillo's supposed dislikes and is also anti-EU and certainly anti-euro, or at least anti-austerity.

But Grillo refuses to deal with him in a constructive way. As we have speculated in the past, Berlusconi is not considered trustworthy by those who want to build globalism and is considered an obstacle to EU unification. There have been reports, as well, that Berlusconi's support of Russia and Vladimir Putin has alienated Western political support and put him in the sights of Intel agencies like the CIA that have worked to undermine him.

Like so much else in the modern world, Grillo's ascent is probably not exactly what it seems and his great success is explainable by larger geopolitical forces that want to use his magnetism and his voice for their own purposes.

After Thoughts

Look for more (controlled) chaos in the Eurozone, not less.

Posted in STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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