"Tutti colpevoli, nessuno responsabile."
Enter a world in which corruption was norm, not exception, the structural fibre of power itself, a world in which raw numbers of depravity paralyzed the state, demonstrating how it is not men and women but systems that can be morally corrupted. Tangentopoli; Italy's First Republic crashed in the 'tangent scandal' and uncovered decades of political conspiracy, mass government corruption, and clandestine alliances from town halls to ministerial salons.
Italy, 1992. What was a minor investigation into a local politician became the trigger for institutional revelation. The Mani Pulite (Clean Hands) operation revealed the intricate machinery of patronage, nepotism, and entwining of bureaucracy, not of persons but of the political class in general.The investigation confirmed Hannah Arendt's insight: where everybody is involved in normalized evil, responsibility is diffusionary, and moral responsibility is infinitely postponed.
When public indignation burst into the streets, fixed parties (Christian Democrats and Italian Socialists )unraveled; political movements were created, rendering the icons of the media the shield and the sword. It was an era when political legitimacy could no longer be assigned by tradition only, it needed to be performed, challenged, and told in the public court of opinion. Italy was faced with the choice of reform: dismantling a prevailing structure short of descending into anarchy, harmonizing the stiffness of vested interests with the ethical need for justice.
Will you save the system to maintain your power, or will you take the chance for change and open the door to chaos to establish a new paradigm of politics? All that you choose will reverberate through social hierarchies, codes of morals, and the very definition of political responsibility. Honor, power, and duty come together in your grasp, and the reverberations of what you choose will frame the political and moral landscape of Italy for generations to come…