The tragic death of Giacomo Gobbato has hit the headlines nationwide,
but it is still useful to summarize the facts. ---- On the night between
September 20 and 21, in Mestre, two friends see a woman being attacked
by a man for the purpose of robbery and intervene to help her: they are
Giacomo and Sebastiano; Giacomo is stabbed to death, while Sebastiano
only suffers minor injuries. The woman comes out unharmed.
From the very beginning, institutional and party figures, in addition
to superficial mourning, use what happened to emphasize that "we need
more police", "we need more controls" etc. etc., while racists are
unleashed on social media shouting "enough immigrants".
But who are the protagonists of this story? A homeless Moldovan, a drug
addict; a woman of Colombian origins who was punched and robbed, who
asked for help and now blames herself because "if I hadn't screamed,
that 26-year-old boy would still be alive today"; a Japanese tourist who
was the victim of a second robbery, threatened with the knife still
stained with Giacomo's blood; an Albanian man who managed to scare off
the murderer. And finally them, Giacomo and Sebastiano, two activists
from the Centro Sociale Rivolta in Marghera, two comrades or - as they
would say on the other side of the fence - two ticks.
This picture already leads us to a first consideration: who are "the
foreigners" and "the Italians" in this story? What we see are people,
who live or pass through the same city and who share, each with their
own path and personal history, the difficulties of every day, in this
increasingly desperate, anguished, frightened, impoverished society.
Even the murderer.
Many people these days have spoken of "heroism" and "exemplary gesture",
but I disagree. Using terms like that implies thinking that what Giacomo
and Sebastiano did is something out of the ordinary, within the reach of
only "supermen" or something like that. The two friends instead did the
most normal thing in the world: they saw a person in difficulty and
didn't think "it's none of my business". They acted directly, in a way
that perhaps not all people can do: maybe if they had been two elderly
women they wouldn't have felt like it (or maybe they did). But perhaps
the point is not so much what you do, but the fact itself of asking
yourself the question, of trying to act in some way, of not considering
only immediate personal interest. A spontaneous movement of solidarity
that should be the norm and that instead becomes "exemplary" in an
increasingly atomized world, in which social relations between people
often and willingly reflect the values of capitalism and authority,
namely oppression, violence and indifference.
I didn't know Giacomo, but I could have. The very evening of his death I
discovered that we were "friends" on Facebook. I looked and looked at
his photos to see if I remembered him, but nothing. However, I saw the
images of him in the front row at hardcore concerts in Veneto, the same
concerts I was at: most likely we supported each other during the stage
diving and screamed side by side under those stages. Twenty years of
difference between the two of us, and yet just looking at those images
is enough to understand that we shared the same passion, the same fire
inside, the same determination to fight for a better world, even in very
different political contexts. It is precisely this commonality that
struck me. Because in Giacomo and Sebastiano's place there could have
been any of us. And this is exactly the way in which, in my opinion, we
should remember Giacomo: a boy who made the choice, that night as in his
entire life, not to look the other way, to fight for a world in which
violence, discrimination, poverty and exploitation are only a distant
memory.
Ciao Giacomo
https://umanitanova.org/giacomo-gobbato-non-voltarsi-dallaltra-parte/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
but it is still useful to summarize the facts. ---- On the night between
September 20 and 21, in Mestre, two friends see a woman being attacked
by a man for the purpose of robbery and intervene to help her: they are
Giacomo and Sebastiano; Giacomo is stabbed to death, while Sebastiano
only suffers minor injuries. The woman comes out unharmed.
From the very beginning, institutional and party figures, in addition
to superficial mourning, use what happened to emphasize that "we need
more police", "we need more controls" etc. etc., while racists are
unleashed on social media shouting "enough immigrants".
But who are the protagonists of this story? A homeless Moldovan, a drug
addict; a woman of Colombian origins who was punched and robbed, who
asked for help and now blames herself because "if I hadn't screamed,
that 26-year-old boy would still be alive today"; a Japanese tourist who
was the victim of a second robbery, threatened with the knife still
stained with Giacomo's blood; an Albanian man who managed to scare off
the murderer. And finally them, Giacomo and Sebastiano, two activists
from the Centro Sociale Rivolta in Marghera, two comrades or - as they
would say on the other side of the fence - two ticks.
This picture already leads us to a first consideration: who are "the
foreigners" and "the Italians" in this story? What we see are people,
who live or pass through the same city and who share, each with their
own path and personal history, the difficulties of every day, in this
increasingly desperate, anguished, frightened, impoverished society.
Even the murderer.
Many people these days have spoken of "heroism" and "exemplary gesture",
but I disagree. Using terms like that implies thinking that what Giacomo
and Sebastiano did is something out of the ordinary, within the reach of
only "supermen" or something like that. The two friends instead did the
most normal thing in the world: they saw a person in difficulty and
didn't think "it's none of my business". They acted directly, in a way
that perhaps not all people can do: maybe if they had been two elderly
women they wouldn't have felt like it (or maybe they did). But perhaps
the point is not so much what you do, but the fact itself of asking
yourself the question, of trying to act in some way, of not considering
only immediate personal interest. A spontaneous movement of solidarity
that should be the norm and that instead becomes "exemplary" in an
increasingly atomized world, in which social relations between people
often and willingly reflect the values of capitalism and authority,
namely oppression, violence and indifference.
I didn't know Giacomo, but I could have. The very evening of his death I
discovered that we were "friends" on Facebook. I looked and looked at
his photos to see if I remembered him, but nothing. However, I saw the
images of him in the front row at hardcore concerts in Veneto, the same
concerts I was at: most likely we supported each other during the stage
diving and screamed side by side under those stages. Twenty years of
difference between the two of us, and yet just looking at those images
is enough to understand that we shared the same passion, the same fire
inside, the same determination to fight for a better world, even in very
different political contexts. It is precisely this commonality that
struck me. Because in Giacomo and Sebastiano's place there could have
been any of us. And this is exactly the way in which, in my opinion, we
should remember Giacomo: a boy who made the choice, that night as in his
entire life, not to look the other way, to fight for a world in which
violence, discrimination, poverty and exploitation are only a distant
memory.
Ciao Giacomo
https://umanitanova.org/giacomo-gobbato-non-voltarsi-dallaltra-parte/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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