Pogrom at Campo de' Fiori

[rhubroma]

After the repulsive little pogrom of Campo de' Fiori the other night at the pub "The Drunken Ship" (which was ironically opened by a woman from Philadelphia 15 years ago with her Roman boyfriend at the time, who has since sold it, after a stint in an American university study abroad program. I don't frequent the place as I don't care for the clientele - mostly American university students and British football fans - though, unfortunately, I'm friends with a few of the new owners) all the public authorities, including the football ones, can be anything except be flabbergasted. Roma has been in the hands of the ultràs (neo-fascist football tifosi) by now for several years, ever since, look at the case, it's had the first right-wing mayor in the city's post-war history: Giovanni Alemanno, a "reformed" neo-fascist himself, who in his younger years was associated with extreme right-wing groups. No political past is really every permanently damning in Italy, as Alemanno's case demonstrates. One can have been a most fervent fascist in one’s youth, then become a most centrist conservative in one’s mature years and even, perhaps, get elected mayor of Rome. Then again there's a parliamentary figure with the name Mussolini (in fact il duce's granddaughter). But I digress.

As I have said: Roma has been in the hands of the ultràs for several years now. They have devastated the city on more than one occasion. They were able to have suspended a football derby (which means a match between the Roma and Lazio squadre), an incredible episode that has all but been forgotten, by giving orders to the pavid footballers of the two pavid team associations, while shutting-up the urban prefect (the prefect!). The ultràs of the Stadio Olimpico's two curves (north, Lazio and south, Roma) have been the not even too secret protagonists of diverse aggressions let's say "not football related;" from punitive fascist beatings, to homophobic violence, and now an anti-Semitic raid against the fans of Tottenham at Campo de' Fiori, about which the entire world is talking at this moment while branding the Italian capital with a label of incivility, of violence and racism that's unfortunately super merited.

I ask myself, not being a jurist, how much distant is the vile curriculum of the ultràs (not only Roman, obviously) from the crimes of an armed gang? It's enough to have the misfortune of running into, at an autogrill (Italian freeway pit stop), those motor coaches of gentlemen travelling to the distant match, to have the distinct impression of having to do with paramilitary organizations totally committed to plunder and pillage, to intimidation, to private violence. Until which point? How many more dead and wounded must we await?

PS: And imagine, while I am writing this, there are three protest marches getting under way this morning in Rome: 1. student, 2. COBAS (communist union) and 3., shamefully and frightfully, Casa Pound (a neo-fascist bunch of cretins). When these groups collide, Rome must hope that it doesn’t spark off something akin to Alaric and the Visigoths, if you get my meaning. The social tension in these parts is mounting and palpable. A time bomb waiting to explode.

 

[L'arriviste]

Sounds like Britain in the 1980s, with some important differences: the violence in Britain was generally "good-natured", where collateral damage was likely to be accidental rather than intended and there were not often organised quasi-political undertones attached to these events.

Rather it was your image of coachfuls of reprobates at the motorway service stops that I found familiar, as was the sacking of the city, though I think Rome provides a much more dramatic backdrop than Sheffield.

I must confess that I find it difficult to take neo-fascism seriously today and perhaps that is foolish. But it seems to me that it has become nearly impossible to generate a proper consensus on any political issue beyond the usual generalities of crap government and institutional corruption. Meanwhile this sort of moral panic has plenty of historical precedents and rarely do they cross into the mainstream.

That's not to say that I would be comfortable having my shop window smashed in some kind of Kristallnacht re-run, nor would I want to be caught between two marauding rival factions at either end of the Via Cavour.

When I was a poorish student, I babysat for a "top boy", what they used to call the ringleader of a 'crew' of football hooligans. By then, the guy was well embarked on his 40s - a family man, evidently - and he worked as a criminal court reporter. He was a very mellow character, had not been anywhere near violence in years but he reported it every day. I once asked him what happened back then. He gave me a book to read, written by another top boy. The book was execrably written but it described a generation of angry young men that did not really know what it was angry about. When I asked the guy what he had been angry about, his eyes flashed brightly with the memories but he could not really say what had motivated him to spend several years' worth of Saturdays shedding blood and avoiding cops. Perhaps that's the scary part.

 

[rhubroma]

Sounds like Britain in the 1980s, with some important differences: the violence in Britain was generally "good-natured", where collateral damage was likely to be accidental rather than intended and there were not often organised quasi-political undertones attached to these events.

Rather it was your image of coachfuls of reprobates at the motorway service stops that I found familiar, as was the sacking of the city, though I think Rome provides a much more dramatic backdrop than Sheffield.

I must confess that I find it difficult to take neo-fascism seriously today and perhaps that is foolish. But it seems to me that it has become nearly impossible to generate a proper consensus on any political issue beyond the usual generalities of crap government and institutional corruption. Meanwhile this sort of moral panic has plenty of historical precedents and rarely do they cross into the mainstream.

That's not to say that I would be comfortable having my shop window smashed in some kind of Kristallnacht re-run, nor would I want to be caught between two marauding rival factions at either end of the Via Cavour.

When I was a poorish student, I babysat for a "top boy", what they used to call the ringleader of a 'crew' of football hooligans. By then, the guy was well embarked on his 40s - a family man, evidently - and he worked as a criminal court reporter. He was a very mellow character, had not been anywhere near violence in years but he reported it every day. I once asked him what happened back then. He gave me a book to read, written by another top boy. The book was execrably written but it described a generation of angry young men that did not really know what it was angry about. When I asked the guy what he had been angry about, his eyes flashed brightly with the memories but he could not really say what had motivated him to spend several years' worth of Saturdays shedding blood and avoiding cops. Perhaps that's the scary part.

Firstly I apologize for the length of this response and the apparent disconnected flights of the mind of which it is composed. However, your many fine points led to considerations about a series of concomitant, if seemingly unrelated, issues. Apart from complimenting your good knowledge of the Roman city and the routes of its not too uncommon protest manifestations, I think the recidivate fascism we’re all witnessing today should be considered as potentially more dangerous than that of the 70’s and 80’s, when it was mostly a byproduct of the Cold War and labor disputes, and thus monitored carefully. By contrast the revival of fascism in Europe today, as is evident by France’s Le Pen, Greece’s Golden Dawn (Χρυσή Αυγή) party and Italy’s Forza Nuova, Movimento Socialista Italiano, and Casa Pound movements, among others, should be contemplated in light of a matrix of converging phenomena: a) the global crisis of financial capitalism; b) a chaotic form of immigration that is placing the national identities in crisis; c) the delocalization of manufacturing and labor, under the purely exploitative impetus of liberalism, that has depressed local labor markets; d) the militancy of an ideological driven financial apparatus bent on social state subterfuge by aggressive targeted speculative attacks against the euro currency and Euro states (i.e. the dictatorship of the spread as pure demagoguery); e) the political and, above all, social disunity of the EU itself. I have always said that any European Union resting exclusively upon economic and financial pillars, is destined (though doomed is perhaps the better word) to witness bitter rivalries and differences between the “strong” vs. “weak” states – again only in terms of economic “performance” – with the consequent rise of the iniquitous nationalisms that such a situation breeds. A recrudescence of fascism is naturally to be expected within the spectrum of this picture of a chosen (by whom and for whose benefit?) state of affairs. This doesn’t mean that Hitler will come back of course, however, Europe, like the United States, does need to be on guard by the surge of right-wing extremism. Even such apparently unrelated events like why America, France and Britain really bombed Libya, are connected to the inscrutable problems of globalization, and thus the implacable rise of neo-fascisms (for we should discuss the matter in terms of a plurality) that have resulted among the European nations.

As to the latter situation in the Maghreb: on a recent visit to the Archivio di Stato Capitolino in Rome, at the old seat of la Sapienza (Rome’s first university, for those that don’t know) in the portico of Borromini’s beautiful courtyard of Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza; I read an article written a few years ago that was posted beside the archive’s entrance, about the real reasons why these states wanted Gaddafi’s head. Gaddafi, who despite having been a notorious dictator, would have been able to refinance the African states’ banks on Libya’s abundant oil and natural gas revenues; thus affording the black continent an opportunity of financial independence. Naturally such a scenario would have been totally unacceptable to the arrant and unmitigated, exploitative banking and industrial enterprises of the multinationals of these Western states. It’s much better for them to have a subservient, dependent and ultimately divided Africa in the hands of bloody tyrants, than one that’s able to get up and begin to walk on its own. It is enough to also remember the Rwandan genocide of 94, when the prepotency of one tribe’s leaders, with exclusive access to the lucrative contracts offered by the Western companies to despoil Africa of her riches exclusively for other’s benefits, resulted in another tribe’s near extinguishment.

All of this has directly determined the chaotic immigration we get from Africa today on Europe’s (mostly Italy’s) shores, which is ironically potentized by its former colonialization, to say nothing of what the turbulent Mideast crisis since 9-11 has triggered in this regard. The influxes of largely Muslim and ethnic immigrants have led to an acute “identity crisis” in contemporary Europe, for which the various fascist responses put for forth so far have tried to provide emphatic responses. They are though, of course, merely symptomatic of the larger unresolved and perhaps unresolvable issues: namely, the global distribution of wealth concentrated among the few and political destabilization within those states of the many who are excluded from that wealth. In addition if we merge these external social forces to the internal economic and political ones of c, d and e mentioned above; it becomes quite evident that Europe has become the testing grounds for a new kind of world order, in which state identity is radically attenuated, as capital establishes its final sovereignty over human beings. This has rendered Europe a sort of social time bomb waiting to go off. Globalization thus may not result in a fortuitous multiculturalism. While it is precisely here, that is among the tension and controversy of a chaotic globalization, that the present recrudescence of fascism is to be analyzed and understood. Created by the predatory nature of a malign economic model, globalization has weakened the democratic state by making its elected political class subservient to the mechanisms of finance, which thus adversely conditions the relationships between states and societies. Although it is a recrudescence of fascism that is not limited to Europe, of course, but a planetary phenomenon that rears many ugly heads in the form of both political and religious extremism.

 

[rhubroma]

(Part 2)
I conclude with a somewhat protracted (again, sorry about this) tale of a conversation I had this morning while at a cafe with a friend from Tuscany. It should give some idea of the social malaise people are experiencing right now and the problems, inextricably social, this creates:

This morning while sipping a cappuccino with my Tuscan friend at our cafe, who works in the emergency room of one of Rome’s public hospitals, we were discussing the problems with “the system” in light of the militancy of international finance and the recidivist extremism of late. He isn’t a medic, but a nurse of sorts, very working class. I have always though been impressed with his grasp and comprehension of current events, on the occasions when such matters have come up between us. Now I can’t say exactly what triggered it, but at a certain point my Tuscan friend launched into an invective against finance, America, Germany, the mafia, Russia, China, Santa Clause, the Easter Bunny and Fabio Briatore. Given the sweeping and rather eclectic content of his expose, I naturally could only have fomented him further with target questions meant to raise his ire and instigate other heated remarks, between sips of cappuccino. I proposed my questions always in a low, understated tone, one could even say exaggeratedly discreet, as if too engrossed by the morning bar ritual and to not give off the impression that I was really egging him on.

As to finance in response to my inquiry about the virtual economy, he said quite naturally that it was a sordid affair and that, in light of the terrible shape of the real economy, such hedge funds guys with large capital deposits in Cayman Island and other such fiscal paradises, should really watch out for themselves. These quattro stronzi, he said, produce nothing. They sit on their fat arses all day long in front of a computer and move incomprehensible numbers around making millions of dollars while doing nothing, nothing useful that is; to then keep the profits in tax-free lands, which don’t ever get invested back into the real economy. We have to get back to individual people, he insisted, who produce actual things we buy and sell to live on and away from this devious finance and virtual economy. Then the sh!t hits the fan when they caused Wall Street to blow up and the whole economy, virtual and real alike, sinks to the bottom of the ocean like a rock, which means there’s trouble. Basta! Questi quattro stronzi hanno rotto I coglioni! Well these quattro stronzi just better watch out, because the people can only take so much before the lynching season begins. These guys can make all the money they want, that’s fine, so long as I can still buy my cornetto and cappuccino each morning. But the moment their business affairs result in me not being able to buy my cornetto and cappuccino, then chyyyyyyp; he sounded with wide-eyed, teeth grit, almost deranged expression, his finger sweeping just below the adam's apple in a simulated throat slitting gesture. When I can’t have my cornetto, he said, that’s it, I come to you and I slit your throat, then put a straw in the fissure and sip out your brains! This was the most graphic part of his discourse, performed, as always, with the consummate bravura of a Dantesque showman.

As regards America he said that generally as a society it is frightful and that there was really not much to admire about this state. I simply let him continue. I mean, he rhetorically asked, what kind of a world does America represent? Capitalismo puro e selvaggio (“Pure and savage capitalism”). Citizens are merely units of production and have value only in terms of the capital they generate privately, beyond that, nothing. Work, work, work, so that in the end you have to drug yourself just to stay in the race, or else one is doomed. While this crisis, he continued, where did it begin? America, though of course it spread to Europe and the four corners of the globe, but its nascence was at Wall Street. The banks were giving too much money to too many citizens in an effort to perpetuate the false illusion that people can eternally live beyond their means, in houses they could never afford, but were sold anyway under a most spurious finance until Kaboom! I reminded him that the central European bank was also run by the most diehard financialists, for which liberalism has quite infected Continental society too. Of course, he retorted, but do you know why Europe’s debt crisis has been made into a scapegoat for the sluggish global economy, even when far inferior to the US’s? Well for one thing I said, the dollar has allowed America to distribute some of its debt, as it were, onto other countries, that there were the massive Chinese investments too and so forth. Right he said, but you forget something else, he said leaning over as if to relate an important secret: America just prints more of its own money, which is something the central European bank doesn’t have the authority to do. Nor would the IMF, run by the Americans, ever allow it: to do so would be to place in jeopardy the global hegemony of the dollar. With that the conversation moved back to Europe.

On Germany my friend was no less critical. Merkel, he said, was getting on his nerves. West Germany alone would have gone nowhere, nowhere underlined, without us; which means France, Italy, Spain, Britain. We helped finance a reconsolidated Germany. We gave them so much money and we buy all those Volkswagens, more than the Americans, and now Merkel won’t bend on how German subsidizing of struggling European countries is to be allocated and managed. It’s pure exploitation. Germany has made a killing off us, that’s the truth, he said, but now its pockets are short and it wants to dictate and give lessons. Yes we have been irresponsible to a degree, certainly we have: too much assistance to the southerners, not enough productivity, and so forth; but this Germany sta rompendo um po troppo le coglioni with its miserliness and intransigent insistence on our austerity measures. We helped them unify and made them rich, but we can’t even breath! Va fancullo!

Who built East Germany? This brought him to a further topic. This time he leaned over and actually said he was about to let me in on something not many people knew about. I’ll tell you a secret, or rather a sensational revelation that most have never heard of before, he said, bent over right in front of my face staring straight into my eyes. Do you know who developed East Germany? The maaaaffffiiiiia. That’s right. It’s true. Although arresting a few peons by our carabinieri, as if the mafia were only Italy’s problem, won’t do. The mafia is everywhere! Whole countries today are being run by these criminals, are in the hands of organized crime. Arresting these cazzi piccoli our carabinieri round up every once in a while in Calabria and Sicily just for show is a joke. Ok, well those too, but Putin and his oil baron friends in Russia are much bigger. Arrest Putin if you dare! He’s the one that needs to be arrested. His kind are the ones to be tried and imprisoned. Instead what we get is the perverse spectacle of a conflict between keystone cops and two-bit clan patrons, when it’s the whole world that’s run by criminals!

On China he analyzed the latest phase of liberalism. To achieve what liberalism wants would mean that we’d have to work 30, not 24 hours (which aren’t enough, so they’d have to add six more), like the Chinese, for two cents a day to make the desired profits of our corporate executives. Capito? Speaking of the Chinese, though: what are these things they produce anyway and which have flooded our markets? I mean flashlights and umbrellas that last two days? Baoooow (typical Roman intervocalic - untranslatable ). Just crapola. Yet where do the big businesses of the West take their production plants, thus depressing our work market? China of course. Va fanculo!

In conclusion, I said it sounded as if his reasoned discussion would suggest that under the present regime the world seems to be sliding back to a sort of capitalist feudalism (or feudal capitalism, whichever you prefer), under the leadership of para-state financial groups and mafia run states. He said that’s precisely the case.

So as I said with comments like these that reflect a general state of discontent, is it any wonder that some hooligans go smash a bar at Campo de' Fiore, under the conviction that society's problems are caused by an international financial and banking conspiracy headed by Jews?

 

[rhubroma]

In connection with the Saturday’s Rome protests I had previously mentioned, which fortunately did not degenerate into something like a sack of the Vandals; this excerpt of an article by Ulrich Beck jives with my analysis and interpretations:

“Recently all across Europe there have been the first union wide protests. In just the last three weeks we have witnessed young people of Madrid, Tottenham, and Athens protest against the effects of the neo-liberal policies of savings and austerity, to draw attention on their destiny as a lost generation. Nonetheless, these manifestations were in a way still connected to the nationalist dogma of the past. The people rebelled in the single states to the German-Euro policy of rigor that has been adopted by other states. Yet what took place only a week ago speaks a different language: 40 unions among 23 countries had called into order a “day of action and solidarity.” Thus the Portuguese workers aligned themselves with those of Spain, to close the schools, while they paralyzed traffic and interrupted flight schedules, in what has been the first coordinated general strike at the EU level. Since the Spanish Minister of Internal Affairs spoke of it only in terms of “isolated protests,” it should be recalled that during the course of just the Madrid strikes 82 people were arrested, 34 were wounded, among which were 18 police officers. These diffuse protests throughout Europe have taken place precisely during the moment when many have believed that Europe had finally found a solution to the euro crisis: the Central European Bank reassured the markets by its commitment to purchase, in case of necessity, the state treasury bonds of the indebted states. The indebted states – this is the trade-off- must “only” adopt ulterior and still more incisive measures of savings, as a precondition for the rogation of credit on the BCE’s part and everything will work out fine.

However, the technocratic prophets of this “solution” have forgotten that one is dealing with human beings. The rigorist policies with which Europe is responding to the financial crisis unleashed by the banks, has been perceived by citizens as an enormous injustice. The apparently callous and nonchalant way in which the bankers have pulverized unimaginable sums of cash at the stock markets, in the end gets paid by the middle class, workers, by the emerging generation, with the cash of their very existence.

If today in Spain, Greece, Portugal, though also Italy and France, things have been shaken by union workers’ strikes, this should not be necessarily interpreted as taking positions against the EU. Rather the images of rage and desperation tell us that it’s time to change course.” (Me: how this is to be done, when it is finance and not the politicians that’s really in control, I wouldn’t know; however that it must be done in the general interests of democracy seems to be the implacable case. A revolt? A revolution? Certainly, feeble protests like OWS won’t do, etc.)

One of the female student protesters in Rome the other day had this to say about the current state of affairs: “We are in the piazza to protest against Monti’s new law that implements financial cuts to the public schools. How can we continue with our education if our schools have no desks?” Is this how liberalism plans to build a “brighter future” for the next generations?

 

[aphronesis]

In connection with the Saturday’s Rome protests I had previously mentioned, which fortunately did not degenerate into something like a sack of the Vandals; this excerpt of an article by Ulrich Beck jives with my analysis and interpretations:

How this is to be done, when it is finance and not the politicians that’s really in control, I wouldn’t know; however that it must be done in the general interests of democracy seems to be the implacable case. A revolt? A revolution? Certainly, feeble protests like OWS won’t do, etc.)

One of the female student protesters in Rome the other day had this to say about the current state of affairs: “We are in the piazza to protest against Monti’s new law that implements financial cuts to the public schools. How can we continue with our education if our schools have no desks?” Is this how liberalism plans to build a “brighter future” for the next generations?

Link to the Beck? Or is it in one your dailies?

 

[rhubroma]

Link to the Beck? Or is it in one your dailies?

In one of the dailies. Though you might try to Google it. Cheers

 

[rhubroma]

Link to the Beck? Or is it in one your dailies?

Here's a follow-up on the Beck article. A lot of ifs and one still doesn't know how the financial establishment and their cronies the politicians would voluntarily oblige (when not putting up openly hostile resistance), but his idea is correct:

"We don't need to save the banks anymore, but a shield of social protection for the Europe of workers, the middle class, pensioners and, above all, for the youth knocking on the door of the work market. This united Europe will no longer betray its own values and before the eyes of the citizenry. That's because they will see something in Europe that has a sense, for which its motto should be: more social security with another Europe!

The social question has become a European question, for which it is thus no longer possible to give a national response. It will be necessary in the future that this conviction becomes affirmed. In effect, if the strikers and the protest movements were to take to heart the "cosmopolitan imperative," that is if they were to cooperate throughout Europe beyond the frontiers of their own national borders and if they were to commit together not for a less invasive Europe, but for a different one; a new situation would be created. "Another" Europe should basically be constructed based upon an architecture inspired by social policy and should be re-founded democratically from its very foundation.

In the end Europe - the crisis has demonstrated exactly this - depends upon the money of the individual states. For this reason, a democratic and social Europe would need a communal fund into which this cash is deposited and administered. Now it's not at all difficult to imagine how citizens would react if they were to have to give up some of their income for this "extra solidarity," or if their taxes were to be increased while trusting that this taken supplementary income is properly administered by the European Commissioner Bureau. At this point one could take into consideration taxing the financial transactions, a tax on the banks or a Euro corporate business tax. This way, on the one hand, one succeeds in domesticating the capitalism of unchained risk, putting the responsibility of the consequences of the crisis upon those who provoked it and, on the other hand, this social Europe would finally become a tangible and effective idea.

If there were to be forged an alliance between the social movements, the unemployed generation of young Europe and the union leaders - on one side - and the political architects of Europe in the banks and political parties, the national governments and the EU parliament - on the other side - a potent movement would be born, capable of imposing a European tax on financial transaction against the opposition of the economic establishment and the obtuseness of the orthodoxies of the sovereign national State.

If this were to succeed, it would even be possible to earn new allies for this other Europe: in the first place (for as much as this may seem paradoxical), the protagonists of the global financial markets (who today place the single states under ferocious speculative bond attacks), who would perhaps acquire new faith before a clear direction choice made by this Europe of social policy: since it would be evident that such a Europe would instantly respond to the loses caused by a crisis. Then, in the second place, the populations of the indebted states, which today are attracted by nationalism and xenophobia, would rather commit themselves to a democratic and social European project voluntarily since it would be in their own interests to do so. A European Spring, therefore?”

 

[aphronesis]

In one of the dailies. Though you might try to Google it. Cheers

Yeah, here. Thanks.

http://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubb...un-nuovo-vento-unisce-leuropa.html?ref=search

This cosmopolitanism has been floated before--or increasingly--but it remains to be seen how it can be crystallized. Certainly, I think there's a more cogent groundswell of youth, some sober--and not merely paternalistic--members of various parliaments--and awareness of the part of various workers, of the deep need for reform. Relative to the US that is. It's still going to be half measures at best for the time being.

 

[rhubroma]

Yeah, here. Thanks.

http://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubb...un-nuovo-vento-unisce-leuropa.html?ref=search

This cosmopolitanism has been floated before--or increasingly--but it remains to be seen how it can be crystallized. Certainly, I think there's a more cogent groundswell of youth, some sober--and not merely paternalistic--members of various parliaments--and awareness of the part of various workers, of the deep need for reform. Relative to the US that is. It's still going to be half measures at best for the time being.

I agree. Under the present regime such "cosmopolitanism" is merely a pipe dream, especially considering society "in the field" as it were, as my initial post evidences.

My point has always been that globalization isn't going to guarantee a fortuitous multiculturalism, neither is the EU, in its purely economic setup, going to promote a beneficial cosmopolitanism. Although the conflict of forces in action so far inherent to this historical moment, after a period of high tension and strife we are only beginning to see now; might pave the way for the type of cosmopolitanism to which Beck aspires. Political bodies are the most conservative, as are the financial ones. Though they can be revised with epochal societal transmutations. Left to themselves they become hostile to all forms of change though.