I saw "Di vita non si muore", a film about Carlo Giuliani, which made me
think back to the days of the G8 in Genoa, and I realized that there isa clear link between the repressive ferocity of that time and that
exercised today on the Palestinians and the Lebanese. In Genoa, the
knots originated by the fall of the Berlin Wall came to a head. The
world was finally free from the nightmare of Mutually Assured
Destruction and an ocean of possibilities had opened up for planetary,
widespread and collective progress. However, everything had been
diverted from above towards the project of intensive exploitation of the
planet and its inhabitants destined to build the world of today,
dominated by an oligarchy of overpowering billionaires interested only
in accumulating power and devoid of any interest in the survival of the
human species.
That project was so obvious and so impactful on the lives of ordinary
people (as we can now see firsthand) that many people moved to try to
stop it.
The spark in Seattle in 1999 started a series of protests that put that
policy in a very serious crisis of legitimacy. The problem with the
globalist exploiters was that they had no plausible political response
to offer to those who protested. For example, they responded to
criticisms of delocalization, or the transfer of industrial production
from the First to the Third World with consequent mass layoffs, by
stating that it was right to make some sacrifices to bring wealth and
prosperity to less developed countries... and you can imagine how such
ridiculous responses not only did not quell the protests, but rather
confirmed the exploiters' brazenness and their dangerousness.
In the short span of two years, the protests were so strong, widespread
and globalized that it was no longer possible for Western elites to
gather anywhere without being hunted down and besieged by tens and tens
of thousands of protesters, and participation was constantly increasing.
It was at that point that the elites made the decision to address the
protests with pure and simple terrorist repression to intimidate the
protesters, Italy, with the neo-fascist Gianfranco Fini at the head of
the Ministry of the Interior and its police forces never seriously
cleansed of fascist legacies, was the ideal choice. The resulting
unheard-of violence and police torture are in the history books. The
film ends by stating that it was the fear instilled in the protesters by
that ferocity that extinguished the movement that originated in Seattle,
but anyone who participated in those days will be able to confirm that
this is not true. Of course, no one was happy that the police had raised
the level of the conflict to such an extent that they beat, tortured and
even killed the protesters... but even after the events in Genoa, the
demonstrations against the leaders of the powerful continued for a long
time and were very well attended, despite the very heavy climate
generated less than two months later by the events of September 11th.
What really undermined the movement against globalization from above was
the (non) reaction of the so-called "civil society" and the
institutional left. Faced with events of such extreme gravity as those
in Genoa, perpetrated by a right-wing government, it would have been
logical to expect a large civil mobilization, perhaps promoted by the
Democrats of the Left (forerunners of the current PD) and/or by the
CGIL. Instead, not only did the two subjects of the institutional left
carefully avoid putting their weight behind them at that absolutely
crucial moment, but also the so-called "civil society" (that
right-thinking lower-middle bourgeoisie that loudly proclaimed its
superficial anti-fascism) was almost completely incapable of
demonstrating opposition to and disapproval of the extremely fascist
repression in Genoa. In hindsight, it is easy to see how one of the
reasons for this position was the illusion/hope that they, unlike the
working class, would remain immune to the negative consequences of
globalization, coupled with the very bourgeois sense of "decorum," of
the existential need to clearly distinguish themselves from the picture
of idle, ugly, dirty and bad protesters painted by the media.
Thus, those who protested for a better world for all understood that
they were essentially alone in the face of an actively aggressive right
and a new lower-middle bourgeois "left" interested only in delimiting
its own little garden to attribute to itself a non-existent moral
superiority. It was awareness of social isolation that undermined the
anti-globalization movement, not fear of truncheons. Today it is easy to
see that obviously the lower and middle bourgeoisie also paid the price,
as the twenty-year generalized impoverishment of that class (totally
incapable of defending itself from cuts to wages and the welfare state)
clearly demonstrates. In any case, the message to the elites came loud
and clear. The lack of reaction to the very serious events in Genoa by
the public opinion of the so-called Italian (and European) "new left"
born after the fall of the Wall showed them that this "left", despite
its resounding proclamations of anti-fascism and morality, was strongly
classist and therefore would not have acted as a barrier to the crimes
committed against those perceived to be lower on the social ladder: even
if such crimes reached the level of authentic and systematic torture.
This lack of reaction, in a country that until ten years earlier had had
one of the largest communist parties in Western Europe, meant that there
was no need to worry, that the multitudes of protesters were in fact
substantially isolated and that to deal with their protests it was
enough to unleash against them the combined might of the police and the
judiciary.
And they were right. The shameful lack of reaction of the right-thinking
left in the face of the horrors of Gaza confirms that, despite the very
high principles constantly declaimed with great self-satisfaction, there
is no consistent "civil society" willing to stand up for the
dispossessed, exploited and tortured.
The indolence over the events in Genoa has freed the elites from the
fear of a catastrophic loss of consensus and has cleared the way for the
ferocity of repression, not only police repression, but also genocidal
repression... and once again, the idiotic illusion of the self-styled
right-thinking leftists that Gaza does not concern them, and that
inaction will not have negative consequences, clearly emerges. Once
again, they are very wrong, and soon we will experience the full dire
consequences of the frightening collective stupidity of this privileged
social class.
http://alternativalibertaria.fdca.it/wpAL
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