The absolute power was historically the one of the kings before the English, American and French revolutions. The King could do anything and didn't have to answer to anyone, so no one could control what he did, nor oppose him. Today the world is returning back to that time. The only difference is that instead of the Kings now there are groups of political and economic power. Power has a bad and a worse aspect.
The bad aspect is that Power tends to do whatever it wants to impose its will, trampling the rights of other men. The worst thing is the fact that Power tends to draw to its side the worst criminals. We have some illuminating examples of that right now. In Iran the bad aspect of Power is the restriction of individual rights of persons and their freedom of choice in the name of the law and Islamic morals: limited rights for women, limited political rights, ban of western dress, ban to listening Western music and drinking even small amounts of alcohol, and many other prohibitions. But the worst thing about the Iranian regime are the abuses of power, unjustifiable in the face of any law or moral, Islamic or not: electoral fraud to make Ahmadinejad win, beatings of opponents in the streets, tortures and murders in prison. Such acts cannot be justified even by the Islamic regime, but they occurred.
Another striking example is China. Even there the bad aspect of power is the absence of real political rights for the population, but the worst thing are the power abuses committed beyond any law of the state. Zhiyong Xu, 36 years, is an activist that attempts to enforce the laws in China: he defend workers, death row inmates, relatives of children killed by the poisoned milk. He was jailed for tax evasion. The same has happened to at least to two other lawyers who simply wanted the regime to respect its own laws. The problem of power out of control is exactly that it ends up not respecting even its own laws and commits the most atrocious abuses. Power does that simply because it can.
"Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely," wrote Lord Acton, though at times the phrase is attributed to the theorist of the separation of powers, Montesquieu. Since the great revolutions it was thought that the separation of executive, legislative and judiciary would be enough to defend the people against abuse of power. In Iran and China of course there is no such separation, but overall in the modern world is now quite clear that to guarantee the people the opportunity to defend themselves against abuse of power would be enough that only one power was truly independent. The so-called fourth power, the information. If the information is not independent then the power becomes absolute and can committ all its abuses unpunished, simply because most people will never know. The Iranian regime would last if the torture and murder of prisoners were broadcast on television in every home? The Chinese government would last if every chinese really knew what the three lawyers arrested on fabricated accusations were trying to do?
Italy is unfortunately a typical example of how the separation of powers is not enough to guarantee the people against abuse of power: the fact that the information is almost completely a slave to political and economic interests means that the worst abuses are hidden. People killed in jail without reason. The involvement of parts of the state in the massacres of innocent citizens. The devastating impact that have incinerators on health. The spending of public money to buy obsolete warplanes. The construction of a bridge convenient for many companies but not for the people. These and many other things that the power could never justify in the eyes of the people if they were actually told in every house on TV.
But for now only part of the world's population has understood this concept, the part that reads the web and tries to see beyond the official truth. Of course the interest of Power is that people remain unaware and disinterested, because far from the media spotlight Power can remain unpunished, even when it commit absolute crimes.
Francesco Defferrari
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