Erepublik for dummies: The italian takeover of South Africa

Day 403, 07:41 • Published in Italy Italy • by Swann

This article is for all of the citizens who don't know much about italian politics in the last months and want to understand who, why and how some italians took the power in South Africa.

Italian political scene has been dominated for the whole 2008 by the Aquila et Gladius (AetG) party, a far-right movement which is the biggest in members among the italian parties.

The key reasons for its success lie in its big numbers theirselves, which often drive the newbies to join the biggest party, but most of all in its definite ties with the Italian army apparatus.
The vast majority of the Army commanders are or have been part of AetG, and the vast majority of the most skilled soldiers are AetG supporters.

This factor led mainly to two important consequences for the Erepublik italian history.
First, our nation developed a good hierarchical organization in military, which allowed a relatively weak nation (at least in terms of population) to boast one of the most efficient armies in the New World.
On the other hand, the development process of the Italian nation paid the penalty of being often subjugated by the military component, which frequently annihilated the political power itself and replaced it as often as not.

In the last months many debates arose on italian newspapers and inside the Congress itself about the need of separation of powers. Nevertheless, every attempt to put the Army under the aegis of the political power failed. The main component in this game is war, at least for the majority of players. Even if, potentially, there are many components to expand for a growing virtual nation, wargames are highly fascinating for many of us. Hence, in many cases supporting AetG for a citizen didn't mean supporting a political party. Instead, being member of this party and voting for it meant supporting the "Glorious Italian Army". Many players who were members of other parties, even of the far-left side, ended up to join AetG to support the "warmongers".

Other players (a small minority) tried to counter this situation, but most of the times whoever tried to was accused of being an enemy of the nation, threatened by Atlantis forces and "in need of cohesion instead of internal cleavages". I put myself among these ones. In September, I left AetG and founded the "Lads Of Liberty" party, a center-right libertarian movement, whose main goal was to seek for a real transparency in politics, and to try and combine the efforts of all those who believed in the need of a clear political process where the military apparatus has to be detached and submitted to the political power.

The elections for Congress in Italy, in December 2008, reserved a great surprise: many of the political leaders involved in the recent italian political history decided not to run for parliament. The Peace vs. Atlantis war in France could be a reason, because most of them are skilled soldiers who could need to travel to fight.
Thus, many new faces were elected to italian Congress, and AetG itself lost many seats compared to the previous elections.

What most Italians had to discover was that many "warmongers" were trying a takeover on South Africa. With such a situation on the italian side, the existing war and the political accusations they could risk by playing some "trick" in our nation itself, probably trying a "funny game" in South Africa was a better option for them.

Many players consider following ethical rules in a game as boring, and like the part where they can try something "different". So they did, on the other side of the world, to avoid troubles.
No matter if these people are the same who cried at other nations' behaviour and criticized other countries' expansionist policies in their own sweet times.

The main question now is: what's the real Italy? Who are the real Italians? The ones who took over South Africa to entertain themselves and maybe to get some gold to use against "expansionistic countries"? The ones who distance theirselves from them and say "It's not Italy, it's just a separate party who made it all", but are still colluded with them? Or maybe the ones who call this a scandal and try to show to the world what else Italy can be?

Time will give the answer.