The revealed mapping of the enemy (playing with the words: "the enemy
appears" to me), a preparatory act of intimidation/public communication,aimed at indicating/suggesting a target, is an ancient device, widely
experimented by the apparatuses of power in the century of the masses,
refined in the current era of the artificial society. It is important to
point out that these apparatuses of power pertain not only to the
twentieth-century totalitarian regimes, but now concern the entire
global system, the world of values generated by Fordism and
post-Fordism, the so-called mature Western democracies. The watchwords,
with marked identity-related purposes, are the same as always: depict
the objective enemy, the perpetrator of possible crimes; construct/name
the margins, even with language, criminalizing unpopular categories of
people regardless; create the right mental atmosphere for widespread and
shared stigma, for total mobilization against a "scapegoat". These
mappings thus emerge from the dusty police files to become a propaganda
tool.
This intervention is inspired by an article occasionally read in the
Milanese pages of the right-wing newspaper "Libero" (November 12, 2024,
p. 34 with a front-page reference), by Massimo Sanvito, titled:
"Assaults on the police, Gaza and business. The red dens that the left
tolerates". The subheading summarizes the entire summary of the phobias
and obsessions of the post-MSI right: «From the old Leonka to the
violent people of Cantiere and T28, there are 11 antagonistic acronyms
under scrutiny. Evenings, street clashes and events with former members
of the Red Brigades, between black market takings and proselytes in
universities». There is already material for the psychologist here, from
the comical accusation of tax evasion to the hidden frustration for
one's own, scarce and unproductive, university attendances. All
accompanied by a "Map of illegal social centers", really well done and
enriched by an accurate address book.
The operation of the mapping device is simple and intuitive, within
reach of a thug. I'll give you names and surnames, I'll also write down
the home addresses, then, in case you don't understand, I'll even draw a
nice little drawing. The encouragement to "cut the red thread that
unites old and young comrades" is explicit. Now, since the article's
incipit cites as a source a dossier from the Ministry of the Interior
still in draft, it is clear that the exhortation to act is aimed
elsewhere. We are at the media legitimization of post-missino
neo-fascism, of struggle and government, we are at the cultural
clearance of the fighting camaraderie forged in the Seventies.
This is a story we have seen before, which smells of fasces from afar.
In 1923, "Il Popolo d'Italia", a Mussolini organ that proudly bore the
name of its founder under the masthead, as was the practice in these
cases, published (n. 37 of 13 February), on the last page, a short
article entitled "Red Railwaymen Exonerated", dated: Rome 12 night. It
was, in essence, timely and precise information, coming directly from
the general management of the Railways, where a High Commissioner had
recently been installed, charged with carrying out an "energetic purge
of the dependent personnel". Thus a ruthless action was announced
against "the most unbridled extremists, communists, maximalists and
anarchists, responsible for the state to which the railway workers'
class had been reduced by the strike mania of the managers of the Red
Union". And the names and surnames of the first 56 exonerated were
dangerously made public, without hesitation. They were the recipients of
a real, inflexible, political revenge. From the first post-war period to
the fascist laws, including the Matteotti murder, the path was marked by
squad violence in collusion with the State and the media. And the squads
found their work program ready and waiting, anticipated in the pages of
"Il Popolo d'Italia".
At the origin of everything, however, there is a subjective,
pseudoscientific, summary and arbitrary classification. Summary and
arbitrary a bit like all the classifications that would like to
pigeonhole different humans into a single container, united only by
being made the object - indeed "object" - of superior preventive
measures, of the obsessive, paranoid view, which descends from the idea
of classifying people. Thus, the highly confidential police filings of
nineteenth-century memory were accompanied, over time, by an
increasingly casual and targeted use of media communication. The
repertoire of these classifications, lemmas that quickly passed from the
bureaucratic koinè to common usage and political jargon, is broad.
Sometimes the results have been truly surprising, as in the case of
"subversives" and especially "anti-fascists", labels that the recipients
have proudly adopted, reversing their original meanings of stigma. In
other cases, as in the one cited, we remain within the ordinary
management framework of finalized media squadrism, of active, integrated
and synergic collaboration between the fourth estate and the police.
A few years ago, while poring over one of the many confidential police
reports relating to the left-wing extra-parliamentary movements of the
Seventies, documents for which I had gone through a long process of
authorizations at the Central State Archives and the Ministry of the
Interior, I had, to my great surprise, the astonishing sensation of
having already read it. Really strange, because I was consulting it for
the first time... Thinking and thinking again, I discovered the mystery.
In reality, those pages had been a press release for the time and I, in
essence, had worked hard for nothing. In the journalistic sources,
already found, I had already been able to read much of that content.
It is a story declined in the present that looms over our daily life,
inspired by the synergic principles of control, communication and
consensus, characterized by connivance and complicity between the
various actors present on the stage, characterized by the pragmatic use
of squad methods, if deemed necessary. Traditionally it was a direct
collaboration between the administrative state and the mass media, more
recently between the military world and hackers. Nothing new under the
sun, the relationship between communication and the evolution of social
control refers to a long-term issue.
Giorgio Sacchetti
https://umanitanova.org/mappare-il-nemico-il-ritorno-dello-squadrismo-suggerito/
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