Not that I deem these short essays precious, but hey: some drops of life have been brewed in, so:
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Alright. A politician says: "we are bound to the Holy See by many political things, and by a few others".
There is in such sentence an obvious epiphany and hype which insists exactly upon the threshold of what should have more needed to be revealed, because the stress rests pointedly on the omission. The sentence is provocatively concerned with betraying with as much transparence as possible that it is performing a concealment.
When a speech stops on a borderline and emphatically discards the baggage right on the boundary, there is an intentional purpose to let the surroundings resound with echoes in whose instantaneous recognizability we trust, and an ambition to release an obvious hint about our resolve, our availability, to tread beyond the line - better: to the confession we already secretively did.
Therefore every allusion presumes a complicity, and reminds us that we're bound to it and by it: we are trespassers. For every complicity presumes a felony. It is not cooperation, for cooperation declares its objectives: it is connivance.
Only criminals wantonly hint.

Couldn't these hints be disvested of their allegoric nature? But the discourse implicitly deems them unfit, the innuendo is dispatched to seal the oration and provide it with all the consistency it at the same time grants and withholds.
And what is withheld is that the "few other things" which are mentioned, are precisely what should have not been there: or we would have not chosen an omission to enact them.
By this, the speech implies an abdication to sovereignty, for it admits there are within it nuclei of power that led it beyond the patent (and arguably legitimate) ones: the specific flavour of this abdication is that the discourse, by sheltering some contents under the cloak of its insinuations, sanctifies this resignation of sovereignty because it discloses its wittingly cooperation with it.
Now, it may well be (as actually it was in the case in point) that no harm is implied. But the heart of the matter is this, that whenever a political discourse waives to an elsewhere, this is an elsewhere about which you can no longer argue about, and you cannot argue about it exactly when it would have been more necessary to do it: for you omit only and alone with the purport of sparing yourself that revision which would have been the more indispensable, and whose indispensability is certified by the omissive option itself that you endorsed. You don't omit if you don't want to preclude what you acknowledge as rightful.
At times our defeats are there exactly to remind us that we never omit for ourselves, but always against ourselves.

A feature power relishes is the one described by a remarkable italian political analyst, Norberto Bobbio (my translation):

«You can assume as the model of every autocratic government whatever government wherein it is led to perfection the principle according to which the Prince is as much able to make himself obeyed as he is all-seeing, and he is as fit to exert command as he is invisible.
Considering the pair order/obedience as the pair characteristic of the asymmetric power relations, he who reigns is all the more terrible the more he is hidden; he who has to obey is all the more docile the more he can be pried in any gesture of his.»

None the less, I see a stronger rule.

«I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress: my God; in him will I trust.
Surely he shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler, and from the noisome pestilence.
He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust: his truth shall be thy shield and buckler.
Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day;
Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday.»
[Psalm 91]

Listen.
If your plan is such that, by divulging whatever aspect of it, this would jeopardize it and your plan would fail its scope, then this means your plan is a bad plan.
Dump it.
The problem is not who is going to spy you: the problem is the frailty of your project.

Terezin Nazi Concentration Camp, the slogan above says: 'Work Makes You Free'

The USA free France. A german prisoner hurries through a street in Toulon. The following jeep will probably ensure he arrives bruised but alive. From The Hulton Getty Picture Collection

Hitler's conquests impressed both those who witnessed them and those who learned of them with the privilege of hindsight.
What those who lived at the time when France collapsed felt, is magnificently described by Peter Calvocoressi:

«But the french army was one of the great armies of the world and France itself stood -if any single country could be said to stand- as the embodiment of western civilization. The fall of France was much more than a military decision. It was a portentous distortion of history, all the more shattering because its completeness led nearly everybody to suppose that it was final and irreversible. (...)
The fall of France opened an abyss of uncertainty for the whole continent and shook the imagination as perhaps nothing had shaken it since the victory of the turks at Mohacs in 1526.»

But also in our time we still interrogate ourselves about Hitler, and we wonder. Isaiah Berlin wrote (my translation):

«although Hitler's project was considered the dream of a madman, a sadistic medieval fantasy (...) who could today say whether his was a complete failure? His dominion lasted only twelve years, during which he changed the horizons and the structure of the lives of his subjects to a degree that surpassed the most daring expectations (...) If eventually he lost, we are left with the idea that there was a margin for his victory too, and it needs no particular imaginative effort to envision his complete triumph.»

No. Hitler could not win.
We can postulate that without the overwhelming forces of the United States and their willingness to shed their own blood for European freedom, Hitler might have won. Or we can argue that whether he would have refrained from engaging himself on multiple fronts he could have concentrated his armies in a more focused, and therefore victorious way.
But this is not true: Hitler just couldn't win. He could only last. He couldn't win because his project was empty. As heinz Kohut once wrote:

«Nazism would have never lasted, because it brought nowhere.»

Too many plans bring nowhere, so deeply they are inhabited by ghosts of destruction: much of the terrorism we see today is a plan of this nature: it inherently leads nowhere, thus it is deprived of any chance of final success from inception. This does not mean a bad plan cannot do harm before coming to its last stop: nazism did.

A plan must be founded with so much pure transparency upon the strength of the things, it must be tuned so deeply with the flux of destiny, must insert itself with so much clairvoyance within the path of the global history, that it will be able to walk by itself, raising on its own feet like a golem.
Of course that destiny exists. I am not speaking here of destiny in the fashion James Hillman did. I am speaking of that destiny which is revealed by the feedback:

«And if you deem feedbacks irrelevant, try to shave yourself without watching in the mirror»
[W.H. Baugh, United States Foreign Policy Making]

Any time I do something, reality feeds me with a feedback, populated with hieroglyphs dense of unvaluable clues.
But if destiny is in the feedback, I can then choose whether to consider this feedback or whether to mould it: for it is only upon the feedback, backwash of fate, that I can modify destiny appropriately upon the basis of its own indications.
But it is typical after an electoral defeat declaring you've none the less somewhat gained a significant result: it is a paradigmatic way to ignore the feedback in order to save one's face, which should not puzzle you too much: a few politicians made a career out of this, so what does it matter to them if the group lost, provided their own seat and that of the leader maximo is once again salvaged? Exactly that which the destiny said should have gone compromised, is what they fret to rescue.

A political party that wants to be middle-way normally includes among its purposes that of enacting some forms of convergency.
But what can we mean by convergency? Could we misinterpret it?

A politician said: "The middle of the road as we mean it is a social center, namely the encounter between free market and social solidarity".
But what the hack does it mean?

I wonder, because positing the necessity of this reconciliation, we evidently conceive free market and solidarity as features inexorably conflicting. In fact, it would make no sense pledging oneself to the effort of making this encounter possible, if we wouldn't deem it otherwise unlikely.
But why should free market and solidarity be contradictory, and require a deliberate fix? Their opposition is smuggled as apodictically expected.
Evidently, by solidarity this type of politician could be meaning the synonymous, or the mystification, of something else. What?

Let's take another typical political sentence used to acquit charges of bribery: "you cannot judge in the same way the blackmailed and the blackmailer". Of course, this appears obvious: but what the politician is referring to here, is that peculiar situation whereas both the bribed and the briber have a common stake into the fulfillment of the bribery; and here a conflict which doesn't exist, is now predicated as something which does exists.
So a full blown political line can be constructed upon these basis: propitiating the composition of a clash that may not exist, and promoting the prescription of a split that may not exist. A portentous transmutation of all the values is subtly implemented, under the mask of a middle of the road attitude.
This is why a few alleged moderated parties can be the residence of so much violence.

That you cannot put the blackmailer and the blackmailed upon the same ground is in fact something you may be inclined to agree upon. And you'd be right: for the malice of that rhetoric figure exactly insists in this: into

«employing terms in so vague a manner that the listener may be coaxed to believe he must grant his assent, when he didn't mean it.»
[Ezra Pound]

There is at least one country where these practices gained a (bad) name: Italy, where they were called "consociativismo" [con-society].
Actually, the politician's quoted sentence isn't but an enormous insult and an horrendous allusion.

Of course, confiding in it, the blackmailed (the briber, indeed: he bribes but he -or she- claims he is passive in such role: it has been extorted out of him/her) can consent to the bribery because insofar as he/she is a victim of a necessity, he/she perceives himself/herself as already acquitted.
But there is more than just this in it.
Assured of this position, the briber can start speculating intentionally on it: and in sight of the final absolution he/she not only yields to the bribery (which would not be enough to consolidate our persuasion about his/her bad faith), but he/she can start making him/herself so lavishly induced into bribery, to encourage and cajole the interlocutor to promote the blackmailing process even when there was no intention whatsoever in this direction.
In this fashion, I preemptively equip myself with an alibi, effecting a dynamic which surreptitiously pre-constitutes the burden of proof: but why should I be doing this, if not because I had the intentions to pre-determine the conditions for the offence?
And here, positively, we consolidate our persuasion about the bad faith.

No longer victims, no longer persecutors: and none the less we still dwell in hell.
Now it's all clear: when the politician mysteriously considered free-market and solidarity as opposed, he was guileful: the solidarity he was mostly thinking about was this solidarity: the solidarity of the bribed and of the briber. It can be understood why, then, in the logics of his own mind, the urgency to reconcile them arose: because corruption is against the rules of free markets indeed.
And the worst thing is that you don't have to be corrupted yourself to partake in this mindset: you only have to breath this polluted air for a while.

Therefore, having the intention to conjugate two incompatible perspectives, the politician is evidently declaring the false: his purpose has never been that of bolstering a free-market, but of exorcising it.
The mystification is therefore intentional: the politician is not wielding the term 'solidarity' as something too vague which he is impotent to focus with major precision.
On the contrary, having to predetermine the conditions for the felony, he has focused in the clearest possible way the pre-determinations of the meanings: 'solidarity' isn't but a deliberate euphemism meant to convey as a mule the pre-conditions for the crime.
The toxin has already been propagated; the contamination has already occurred: everything is lent to pre-establish the outcome of the clash well before entering the official playground. The politician is handing over to you a dish which is already poisoned even before you taste it.
This is the immemorial italian art of the "consociativismo".

Why does a political system may cheat and do such things as those outlined above?
A few political systems are blocked, as if they were permanently clogged. Others are entirely wasted by corruption, this everlasting foe of development and liberty.
An opposition that never comes to power (at times also for appropriated reasons: you cannot come to power exploiting a democratic system in order to deny or hamper, as soon as you have gained power, those very same mechanisms that allowed you to gain it) is an opposition that never threatens the elites. This may mean that all the opposition's payload as a dissuasive force that compels the ruling parties to rule well and that grants the hygiene of the state, went either entirely lost or significantly eroded and dissipated.

«It is no longer possible, then, to produce a coherent political drive, so that it is overcome by a string of debauched negotiations, all reflecting the occasional, labile pre-eminences now of the former then of the latter of the contenders. These negotiations are all achieved by sacrificing the resolutive decisions, swapped by others whose nature is dilatory (...) No normative fiction can then prevent whatever of the warring parties from employing either this or that part of the laws that best seem to suit their interests. In this situation a democratic state, inclined to pay heed to all voices, becomes encompassing not for its strength but for its weakness.»
[Constantino Mortati - my translation]

«If there is a perfect adherence to the whishes of power, is this a consequence of a power so omniscient and totalitarian that it tolerates no deviation whatsoever, or is it perhaps the consequence of a power so weak [and careful] to resort every time only to those commands susceptible to be obeyed?»
[Stefano Passigli, an italian professor of Political Science (and MP)]

Or, as Benjamin Constant wrote in a definitive way (trying to translate and being up to such majesty):

«Be fair, whatever occurs. Because if you really cannot govern by justice, by injustice you won't govern for longer (...) All mediocre souls, ephemeral conquerors of a particle of power, are drenched in some maxims, that are all the more welcome by the foppish mediocrity because it uses them to cut short those knots it cannot untie.
They envision nothing but public health measures, grand measures, coups of state. They believe themselves great geniuses exactly because at every step they take they go one step farther from the ordinary means, and violence is so viable in their hands, that it ends up appearing always indispensable.
Great heads, they proclaim themselves, for justice appears to their eyes a narrow thing. At every mischief they perpetrate, you can hear them crying: "Once again, we salved the country!"
Undoubtedly, a country that lets herself being salved every day in this fashion, is a country that is going to be lost pretty soon.»

A Robert Doisneau photo, The pack. place de la Concorde in Paris, 1969

Thiers, a French president in I can't remember any more which french Republic (maybe the first?), said that feudalism was an attempt to make the contents of rights hinge on the land (which cannot perish) instead than on the person (who will all perish).
The tactics we have depicted above, the attempts to compromise all the citizens in one global offence isn't but a stratagem meant to include the citizens of a weak state within a solid social contract, and thus grant the cohesion of the state entity in an allegedly imperishable way.

In this garb, corruption doesn't mean just corruption: for as such we could well argue that corruption always existed: namely we could argue, using words of Giuliano Amato (one of the members of the European Commission that works on the new European Constitution) "that this may be daily bread of whatever pluralistic democracy, where the weight of particular consensus invariably exerts a role. None the less, there is a physiologic limit, that from Schumpeter to Downs has not only been cleared, but analytically focused."

Forms of corruption like the quoted italian "consociativismo" differ from mere corruption and trespass its limits in this: whereas corruption's aim is to neutralize an adversary by delivering him into the limbus of his own satisfied greed, and there it abandons him for it didn't want to include him but just to silence him, "consociative" corruption wants, on the contrary, to incorporate him into a system whose scope lies well beyond the mere contingency: consociative corruption proposes itself as a social inclusive medium!

From the sublimation of corruption in this empyrean rains all the fascination that consociative corruption casted on many minds.
Infiltrating the mindset of the dissenter, this type of corruption aims at shaping an elliptical and complete forma mentis, whose bearing nucleus doesn't consist any longer into limiting oneself to the concussive action, but conversely aims to generate and then nurture a perennial and stealth availability to be corrupted, in the ones, and an analogously sly and permanent expectation to corrupt, in the others.

Thence apparently corruption gets ennobled, becoming the main vehicle of social inclusion, besides from being the unique legitimate and legitimating method of social communication, political relationships, and self-identity.
But this ennoblement is the usurpation of a title. Consociative corruption may give the illusion that hamletic non-solutions may defuse an underlying social strife that would be simmering and which must be stifled by the agency of the enactment of this fictitious communality. It may also, in the long run, engender an illusion, and a faith indeed, in the perspectives of immortality of the system: if all are wrapped by a collusion within a perimeter where everybody can be instantaneously presumed guilty, no one should be co-interested any longer in a modification of the system that protected his participation to the social crime.
Thus you can have a good constitution and a weak state.

These type of approaches, in fact, create a plethora of laws whose purpose is not to support the fruition of the right, but to maim it by laying a siege to it.
Surrounded by a legion of vicarious codes all rigorously pretending to bolster it, the right in force on the paper cannot be accessed in the praxis but desperately dodging the innumerable codes that encircle it.
This immediately imports that the right cannot be exerted any longer without the mediation of the politician. This practice, therefore, has replaced the enjoyment of a right with the concession of a privilege (what Arno Mayer would call "The Persistence Of The Ancien Regime"), and imposes the violation of the codes.

In such violation you become the accomplice of the politician, because you solicit his/her intervention.
The politician then breaks the laws, but we denounce him/her not, because he broke them on our behalf.
Done deal. You're a connivance now. Consociative corruption achieved its goal: you partake in the system, but not insofar you preserve it, but inasmuch as you brutalize it.

This annihilates from the onset whatever chance to define a National Interest.
We could define National Interest as that set of shared political objectives, whose pursuit and whose preservation are acknowledged as pre-eminent by whoever is in power, regardless of the ideology prevailing in the elites that relentlessly overtake each other in power, and without any need of coercion.
With so strong a profile, what is fit to be elevated to the rank of National Interest may as well profile a new entity, an International Interest: for any objective whose diagonal nature is such that it detects all the hues within a polycentric state, is also a good candidate as the National Interest of whatever other Nation. Thenceforth the possibility of an International Interest (something, by the way, that international terrorism seems likely to give a contribution to shape: barbarism on civilians is for nobody and leads nowhere).

But corruption, and especially consociative corruption, means giving up whatever National Interest, let alone International Interest, to resign oneself to personal interests because they appear as the only one who can really be pursued.

These political systems do not produce participation, but complicity.
And since this complicity cannot be established if first you don't consummate the crime, a whole praxis of malversation throughout a country may easily ensue, which doesn't constitute either a "funny" folklorist feature or a fateful phylogenetic condemnation, but which constitutes the desperate attempt of an extremely weak state, or of a disunited country that can rely only upon the weakest of the means, to provide itself with an inclusive might and grant by it a faltering but undefinitely lasting and loitering social assent. You vote those who you commited felony with: necessarily.
A thing, this, that dictatorships know very well: all the mediocrities that a dictatorship brings to power (for it kills all the brains) know very well that the tyrant is far too whimsical and that he could be going to kill any of them any monent any reason: thence every courtier consipres to entice the tyrant into the most hideous among the crimes he is already even to willing to enter: and this just in order to be sure that by the extreme nature of the committed outrages the tyrant is now forced to rely upon your complicity, for not all assassins are so zealous and not all evidences can be obliterated.

The idea that the systems which elect misdemeanours as a path to partnership and social involvement/cohesiveness support, is that you could possibily temporize with your own defects forever, and thus end up soothing the impotency of the local middle class (if any) to implement its bourgeois revolution, for only burgeois revolutions have been successful in universal history: if a modern revolution is not possible, a few states may argue you can make up for it with reforms.
As if pacing upon the squared chessboard-like floor of the grand priestess, sort of a metaphysical chess game should follow; a game whose each position, whose each garrison, would have portrayed the inexorable succession of enchanted conformations and of extremely delicate balances subtended by an omniscience filled to the brim with refined strategic proficiencies. Within these dispatchments, hostility and violence should have travelled as much plushy, latent, and procrastinated as they could be intense, treacherous, and devious.
And step after step, pawn by pawn, configuration after configuration, small achievement after small achievement, violence would have been forestalled forever and we would have eventually attained a final checkmate without bloodshed.
Until you discover that at times this violence erupts notwithstanding. The history of many countries of the so called third world, but not only of that one, have been visited by this problem: countries who cannot provide themselves with affluence and social liberty have a penchant for bombing and being bombed, when the whole set of the phony solutions has been exhausted to the dregs.

But you just cannot have democracy without democracy.