#WORLD #WORLDWIDE #ITALY #ANARCHISM #News #Journal #Update - (en) #Italy, Anarchico Galatea FAI: How to kill a human being - Part One (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 The murder of Alika Ogorchukwu by Filippo Ferlazzo, which took place in

Civitanova Marche on July 29, reopens a scenario that has been seen in Italy
several times over the last 40 years. ---- In the case of Ogorchukwu we have not
only a racist problem, but also a patriarchal and social problem in general.
Therefore, we must take into consideration not only the racially motivated
murder, but also a harassment (later denied) towards the woman who was in
Ferlazzo's company and the people present who filmed the assault until the man's
death. ---- Murders and physical violence against migrants are the last pieces of
well internalized racist situations - and supported at an institutional and
social level, we add - within Italian society.

The racism that never dies

Since the Italian State has existed (first as a Kingdom and later as a Republic),
racism has always been the political cornerstone on which to divide and control
the masses, representing a part of the population as "different" in the eyes of
an average public cultured, or even academic.

We need to start from afar to understand how racism has always been present in
the control policies adopted by the Italian ruling classes.

In the fight against banditry in Southern Italy, the officer of the Royal Army
Alessandro Bianco, Count of Saint-Jorioz, described the society of Southern Italy
in this way in his book "Banditry at the papal frontier from 1860 to 1863.
Historical-political-statistical-moral study -military":

" Here we are among a population that, although born in Italy in Italy, seems to
belong to the primitive tribes of Africa[...]and therefore it is not necessary to
speak here of things that are not even accessible to their intelligence "

If the Count of Saint-Joroz was imbued with a racism deriving from his noble
status - and which in turn was based on racial theories according to which
non-civilized populations (headed by those of African origin) were brutal and
barbaric - others still began to theorize and apply various scientific studies
(ethnological, anthropological, psychological, etc.) in line with the European
intellectual environment of the time - which had begun to theorize "scientific
racism" to justify various forms of racial hierarchy (with always in the lead the
white populations).

These were theories that had their roots many centuries ago, and which had been
dusted off during the Enlightenment and then found their practical application in
the following centuries.

Post-unification Southern Italy was an excellent political and cultural
laboratory to start putting racial policies into practice.

The beginning of the colonization in East Africa (1890) was, for Italy, a not
indifferent economic and cultural turning point.

Although countries such as England, Spain and France had established their
dominions in various parts of the world a few centuries earlier (Central Asia,
India, the Americas, China and Africa precisely), post-unification Italy had
arrived late in the race. to colonization.

This delay, however, certainly did not coincide with an intellectual, scientific
and political unpreparedness. On the contrary. With the well-established
"laboratory" in Southern Italy of the various psychologists, phrenologists,
anthropologists and so on of the time, a whole series of scientific and political
modalities could be easily transferred to East Africa first and, subsequently, to
Libya (1930s) , in Ethiopia (after the conquest of 1936) and in the territories
inhabited by the Slavic populations (1920s).

The support of Italian politics (liberal and, later, fascist) did nothing but
accentuate a delusional racial theorization and practice.

Non-Italian and non-white populations were labeled as laborers and objects for
the use and consumption of the ruling classes, whose life was worth more or less
like that of non-human animals.

The establishment of the Italian Republic after the world war had certainly not
changed this mentality. In the first decades of the Republic's existence,
non-white people came for the most part from the former Italian colonies and from
North Africa in general.

The use of them as labor - like people coming from Southern Italy to Milan and
Turin - was part of the capitalist logic of the open door policy.

At the time, however, the issue of non-white migrants was not a political problem
as it was in the middle of the Cold War and, above all, the objectives of the
parties of the First Republic and the bourgeoisie were to keep a potentially
explosive situation under control. inside post-'68 factories and universities.

The situation changed radically with the 1980s, between the USSR crisis and the
various civil wars and dictatorships that flourished throughout the African
continent. The migrations of millions of individuals from one place to another
are starting to be more and more pressing, leading to a considerable increase in
non-white people in Italy.

The regularizations and controls given by ad hoc laws (Martelli, Turco-Napolitano
and Bossi-Fini), at the end of the fair, were nothing more than attempts to
marginalize, confine and expel these people within a company which, in general,
he has never dealt with a profoundly racist and divisive past and present.

The "game" of exclusion towards these people leads to a binary categorization:
you have either criminals or victims.

In this way, these individuals become passive subjects to whom any type of
violence (whether physical, cultural, religious and economic) can be applied.

Physical violence, due to its application and its "materiality", is what we
immediately perceive compared to others of a cultural, religious or economic
nature. It is precisely the most immediate, but this does not mean that the other
forms of violence are not as dangerous.

Living in a certain territory and having certain characteristics involves the
acquisition of privileges of race, gender and class, endorsed by the social,
cultural and economic powers that govern the territory.

Thus emerges a figure of an individual-type that dominates over others.

The privileged figure par excellence is the white individual, cisgender,
preferably heterosexual (although homosexuals have also acquired, not always, a
certain power), with a stable job - the "breadwinner" par excellence.

In "All About Love. New visions ", bell hooks wrote how white, so" convinced that
he is protecting his life and what is his ", shoots the" non-white "as" white
supremacy has taught him that all black people are threatening. regardless of
their behavior. Capitalism taught him that, at all costs, his property can and
must be protected. Patriarchy taught him that his masculinity must be
demonstrated by the will to overcome fear through aggression. "

Such a manifestly violent mode is typical of those center-right parties and
neo-fascist groups - as amply demonstrated in recent years by the continuous and
undaunted proclamations of subjects linked to parties such as Lega and Fratelli
d'Italia or the CasaPound, Forza Nuova groups. .

In addition to this way of acting, there is another: that of a Christian and
pietistic matrix. The "pietas of Christian matrix" does not refer to the Catholic
Church and all its economic ramifications (such as the "Company of Works") but,
in general, to those white people who, from the height of their culture, feel
fully the right to tell non-white people what and how they should do things,
seasoning it all with cryptoracist and victimizing rhetoric.

It is necessary to distinguish two levels: the first is the concrete aid
consisting of tents, blankets and meals carried out by associations - mostly
Christian Catholic such as Caritas -, while the second is that of a media and
awareness-raising nature.

If the "criticism" to be made towards concrete aid is due to their welfare
character - that is, that assistance does not change the state of things, given
the maintenance of the existing economic difference -, that on the media and
awareness-raising character is precisely a true spectacle of the problem, a void
filled with beautiful words and nothing more.

The social-mass-media machine (newspapers, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram) has a
dual use in the representation of non-white people.

They range from sugary and dull posts that tend to absolutize the goodness of
Africans, not contaminated by Western perversions - in a current re-edition of
the myth of the good savage -, to the negative representation of these people -
preferably black - as ignorant , buzzurre to be cultured, inhumane and so on.

In the first case, we can refer to those characters of the left milieu from "we
remain human" who endorse, aware or not, the exploitation of migrants on the
basis of work and / or pietistic logic (an evergreen: "Migrants are needed
because so they will help us pay our pensions, let's welcome them! ")

Such a thing was described in detail by Dando Dandi (pseudonym of Candido Mollar)
in the serialized article of "Bianchi e ne * ri", published on March 28, 1942 on
the Gathering of Refractories:

" What hurts the black the most, in his most delicate sensibilities, is the
duplicity, the immeasurable hypocrisy of the white man in his false claims of
protection and emancipation of the African-American; governmental and private
social agencies, churches and missionaries of various religious sects, public
charity organizations, hospitals, shelters, reformers, vocational schools,
scholarships, colleges, technical institutes, universities exclusive to the Negro
race are founded, financed, maintained for a single, evident, palpable,
indisputable purpose: to make "good niggers" ", or excellent slaves where white
condescension is a"greasy, oily, slimy attitude, enveloping with mendacious
compassion, with the false piety of the dominating Christianity that says to the
dying victim[...]: these lashes do more harm to me than to you! Condescension is
the firstborn daughter of vainglory and power; the repulsive moral quintessence
of the ruling classes ".

In the second case, on the other hand, institutional politicians and various
crypto-fascist or openly far-right online newspapers can be cited, which, if all
goes well, report events concerning people considered migrants in a falsified way
or, directly, blatant scandal-like fake news.

Let's take an example for this second case. Several times on social networks
there have been images of non-white people who had crucified a cat and were
walking around in procession. At the time, first the Northern League and then a
parliamentary member of the PDL had taken up this image describing it as an
anti-Christian procession staged on Italian soil by "illegal immigrants". Unless
we later discover they were young Ghanaian Christians who were, precisely, in Ghana.

Another example: the African cooking a cat on the street.
This news has been circulated several times over the years: it is true but it
must be contextualized.
A homeless man, of African descent, finds the carcass of a cat (therefore a
non-human animal already dead) on the street. He skinned the carcass and decides
to cook it.
The fact that he is living on the street should already make one think of a whole
series of difficulties that such a person may have (difficulty in finding food
and basic necessities, washing himself, etc.).
How is this news told? The uncivilized African takes a cat, kills it careless in
front of everyone and cooks it well and better and then tastes it in front of an
audience of indignant whites (presumably omnivores).

In both examples reported there are recurring elements, accompanied by logical
short circuits that are always the same.

In accordance with the theories on the racial hierarchy that see the white race
in the first place, the more the pigmentation of the person to be attacked is
detached from the "milky white", the more conservative and reactionary propaganda
will be unleashed in dehumanizing the person (or persons) in question.

This is particularly true of people of African descent, who are often attributed
the worst atrocities without this affecting anyone.

But people of African origin, migrants or Afro-descendants, are not the only ones
to be attacked in this way; we have seen it with the creeping synophobia that
exploded in episodes of street violence at the beginning of this pandemic.[1]

One element that right-wing propaganda often and willingly uses to attack and
dehumanize non-white people is the use of pietistic and emotional arguments
concerning cruelty to animals, strictly those of "affection" (dogs and cats).
Cruelty to pets becomes, according to this propaganda, a hallmark of non-white
cultures.

Consider, for example, the synophobic attacks accompanying the protests against
the Yulin dog meat festival in China, as well as the aforementioned examples
involving cats.

Yet we forget that, in times of war or even up to ten years ago, the so-called
"pets" were slaughtered and eaten in "very white" Europe.

Frederick J. Simoons in "You shall not eat of this meat", wrote to this effect:

"[...]Nowadays[presumably the 70s-80s, ed]in Extremadura, Spain, dog meat is
still considered a delicacy. It is also eaten in the Swiss countryside or in
other Alpine regions and Calvin Schwabe in informing us about how the Swiss dry
dog meat (Gedòrrtes Hundefleisch) points out that the only case of human
trichinosis that has occurred in Switzerland over the years " 70 was not caused
by pork, but by undercooked dog meat. At the beginning of the 20th century, an
observer reported dog consumption in Germany where, according to him, 8,000 dogs
had been killed for food the previous year, of which 1,400 in the cities of
Kassel and Chemnitz alone."

Therefore, those who flaunt feelings of pity and compassion towards domestic
animals victims of human cruelty, often and willingly are completely
disinterested in the fate of "production" animals (sheep, cattle, horses),
showing the evident hypocrisy of a speech that plays only on the emotional
strings but that has nothing rational.

These last animals are considered necessary for human nutrition, but in reality
they are indispensable only for the profits of small and large agri-food
producers who raise and slaughter them on an industrial and systematic scale
throughout the homeland.

To conclude the discourse, these two types of propaganda (anti and pro migrants),
in general, are nothing more than tools of chatters (journalists, opinion
leaders, professional politicians) to control and keep alive a system clearly and
openly excluding where nothing is changed: over-exploitation of work and
deprivation of food remain; diversity is accentuated and is a source of violence
of various kinds; having a roof over your head often results in short monthly
periods in official dormitories or, at best and in many cases, in shacks whose
roofs could collapse overnight.

The spectator effect

The filming of Ogorchukwu's death by some witnesses draws attention to another
serious point of the question: the spectator effect.

In the social psychological sciences, the "spectator effect" - also called
"spectator apathy", "complex of the bad Samaritan", "Genoese syndrome" and
"witness effect" - is a typically group phenomenon where, generally, a person who
finds herself in an emergency situation (such as risking her life, for example)
is not helped by the individuals around her.
It is generally thought that when one person is in an emergency situation, the
others go out of their way to help. The point, however, is that this is often not
the case.

John M. Darley and Bibb Latané, two psychologists from Columbia University, began
to analyze this phenomenon in the late 1960s, starting with the case of the
murder of Kitty Genovese in 1964, from which one of the names given to the
phenomenon derives. Genovese was stabbed to death while the people around her did
not intervene to help and / or assist her.

For the two psychologists, there were three triggers for the "spectator effect":
1) diffusion of responsibility, ie the feeling of having less responsibility when
more people are present; 2) fear of evaluation: fear of an unfavorable public
judgment when helping the victim; 3) pluralistic ignorance, that is the belief
that if no one is helping the victim then the situation is not dangerous.

Consequently it was thought that the spectator "effect" was present in all
individuals. From the subsequent studies that were conducted, a much more complex
picture emerged.

In Schroeder et al .'s book, "The psychology of helping and altruism: Problems
and puzzles" (1995), it is explained that there are five steps for the
decision-making process of one or more viewers in emergency situations to take
place in the affirmative:
1 ) realize that something strange is happening;
2) assess whether the specific situation requires help;
3) take personal responsibility for the intervention;
4) choose a specific form of help;
5) put help into practice.

The aforementioned study considers the assumption of responsibility (point 3) as
crucial, since in order to intervene in the presence of other
individuals-spectators, there must be an emotional and personal drive linked to
subjective perceptions - and not reasoned and weighted, that is, objective.

In this sense, likes and dislikes, attraction and repulsion etc play a
fundamental role in helping a person in an emergency or danger situation when he
is surrounded by a group of his peers.

The confirmation is also had at the level of neuronal activity where the
"spectator effect" and the emotional aspect greatly condition the
chemical-physical processes of the brain.
 From the experiments done through "functional neuroimaging"[2], attraction and
repulsion are inserted into two distinct motivational systems[3]that are
activated in sequence when people are faced with an emergency.

The number of those present, in such contexts, also has its weight in the timely
intervention. This is because the individuals present believe that the duty to
intervene belongs to certain people, specialized and trained to deal with
dangerous situations (paramedics, firefighters, teachers, police forces, etc.).

Analyzing the question from a political point of view and, therefore, looking at
the way in which today's society is structured, the condition of the
individual-spectator is exacerbated by a context of de-responsibility and
delegation of one's choices, of will and security (physical, social and economic).

Individuals are made passive, they are induced not to act and to "wait" for the
problem to resolve itself or through the intervention of specialized people.
If we add the racial question to this consideration, inaction towards a non-white
person in danger is amplified, as the fundamental principles of racism are
instilled in the minds of individuals by the current social model.

To make the issue of the "spectator effect" worse, there are new media; the level
of spectacularization achieved through the use of new media (videos, written
messages, etc.) places people to be virtual spectators and no longer physical.

Cases like that of Kitty Genovese, killed while the neighbors were holed up in
the house, or of Niccolò Ciatti, killed in a nightclub without anyone
intervening, or even of Pateh Sabally, who committed suicide in the Grand Canal
of Venice while the people around or ignored. what he was doing or were filming
it with his cell phone, are exemplary of what is the spectator effect and the
inhuman alienation given by this society.

Keep on...

Notes

[1]See Daniele Brigadoi Cologna, "The Italian synophobic temptations after a year
of global pandemic", Orizzone Cina, n. 3, pp. 76-80, Vol. 11, 2020.
Link: https://www.ojs.unito.it/index.php/orizzontecina/article/download/5606/5004/

[2]Neuroimaging refers to a set of tools for visualizing the brain in vivo at the
structural and anatomical level (morphological neuroimaging) and for performing
particular motor and cognitive tasks (functional neuroimaging). In the case of
"functional neuroimaging", tools such as PET (Positron emission tomography) and
fMRI (Functional magnetic resonance imaging) are used to localize and study motor
and cognitive functions.
Source: Treccani, "neuroimaging"

[3]By motivational systems we mean a series of innate rules, biologically
oriented to organize the behavior that leads to the survival of the individual
and of the species, predisposing the individual to action and behaviors capable
of modifying the relationship between oneself and the physical and relational
environment.
Their cognitive, emotional and behavioral components allow the species to adapt
to specific aspects and, at the same time, to evolve.
Source: Riello Maria, "Attachment and motivational systems. Motivation in
psychology ", PowerPoint presentation, University of Salento, 2018

https://gruppoanarchicogalatea.noblogs.org/post/2022/08/06/come-si-uccide-un-essere-umano-prima-parte/
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