TELEPOLIS: Genoa: �These Things Happen�

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 Genoa: »These Things Happen«
 
 John Barker   24.07.2001 
 
 Escalation and normalization of police violence 
 
 
 
  You would have to be deaf and blind not to have feared Death in 
Genoa. In Gothenberg just a few weeks ago, a young man was shot and 
critically injured with live bullets and, despite the initial shocked 
disbelief of one or two mainstream media people, it was normalized from 
the next day onwards. Regrettably these things happen, was the message. 
In Genoa the death of Carlo Giulliani was for Tony Blair, "tragic but." 
This 'but' has normalized brutal repression one step further, was one 
of many green lights shone out for Sunday morning's police attack on 
the Independent Media Centre where young people 'shook with fear', and 
everyone else beaten shitless, dragged to armoured hospitals and then 
hospitalized jails with their injuries,  These things happen. As if 
anyone who talks civil rights was just a boring fanatic or just never 
reached adulthood. This is the tone for the world set by the way Bush 
and the Texan Dictatorship seized power on Florida. A fait accompli 
accomplished, and anyone who argued the point, just the whinger. Dodgy 
polling machines, blacks not on the register? These things happen. 
 
 These things happen. You would have to have no knowledge of how the 
Italian state operates under right wing governments not to have feared 
Death in Genoa. These guys, the 'secret state' are experts at creating 
situations in which the innocent get the blame, or end up dead. Fascist 
bombings at crowded stations presented as the work of the left, 
handshakes with the mafia, murders, lots of money and infiltration 
specialisation; original training supplied by the USA. 
 
 They are experts too, at making what happened become obscure, 
complicated and dragged out. Scandals are buried in dust before they 
emerge to be dismissed as something that happened a long time ago. Or 
as in the case of the present Prime Minister Berlusconi, ones that the 
judiciary does not have the power to pursue against him. His deputy is 
a self-proclaimed fascist. Starhawk reports a young protester taken by 
the police into 'a room covered with pictures of Mussolini and 
pornography, and alternately slapped around and then stroked with 
affection." 
 
 It is co-incidence that it should be Italy's turn to host the G8, as 
it now is, so soon after the coming to power of Bush and Berlusconi, no 
doubt the rota had been arranged a long time ago, but they were the 
guys for the job. For the job? What is this conspiracy theory? What 
job? 
 
 The job of scaring people, of saying, see how brutal we can be if we 
want to. And this scaring of people is strategic, it aims to put off 
the idealistic, creative young people who have lived largely safe lives 
in relatively comfortable Europe, from protesting in any immediate way 
against the monologue of the rich and powerful, of saying anything 
different. The beatings at the Genoa Social Forum and of the 
independent media had this aim. A one journalist there for the beatings 
but relatively unscarred said, 'the Italian state made us realize that 
all the rules of the game had been thrown out the window', just as Bush 
has done at a global level from Kyoto onwards. In relatively safe 
Britain (safe since the systematic beatings of coal miners in 1984), 
present state tactics with the same aim have involved an unprecedented 
media campaign to scare people from this year's MayDay demonstration, 
and the discomfort obtained by surrounding protestors for hours on end 
and humiliating them with their powerlesness. These tactics will be 
easier to carry out since a clearer example was shown in Genoa. 
 
 The job of creating situations, of agent provocateurs, of 
infiltration. Bring on the Italian state, where fascist bombings become 
left wing ones, and the leftist terrorist group of the 1970s, the Red 
Brigades, was more infiltrated than perhaps any similar group anywhere. 
 
 There is at present a body of anecdotal and photographic evidence that 
many of the most stupid actions pinned on the Black bloc of 
anarchists-the trashing of ordinary people's shops and cars, the 
attacks on other demonstrators ostensibly in the name of 
super-militancy, were the work of people either of, or in collusion 
with the police. A possible British Nazi suipporter named Liam 'Doggy' 
Stevens is quoted as saying the Italian 'brothers' had invited him and 
that they had a free hand. There are accounts of 'black blocers' coming 
out of carbinieri vans, of being given crowbars by them, of attacks on 
real comrades in the Piazza Kennedy. 
 
 The mainstrean media in its various allotted roles say what they might 
be expected to say. The New York Daily Post, a Murdoch paper, says 
Carlo Giulianni deserved to die and only lily-livered European Social 
Democrats have feebly expressed regret, a full-blooded These Things 
Happen. In the UK, broadsheet newspapers do not report what happen and 
there is no fearless investigative journalism into agents provocateurs 
but instead have a string of commentators who, like St Augustine who 
wanted to stop sinning but not yet, worry that they are giving the 
oxygen of publicity to violent rioters, or well-known protesters 
deploring the violence of their own side. 
 
 The Black blocers would appear not to be 'mindless' but selective in 
targets for attack. On the other hand, their essentially vanguardist 
nature is bound to allow the space for provocations by the provocation 
experts. It is the evidence on this matter which it now appears, the 
police were so keen to destroy when the attacked the independent media 
centre, alarmed by reports from one or two courageous mainstream 
reporters. As in Gothenberg in the hours immediately after this attack 
Agence France Presse, Starhawk and even the BBC were able to give 
accounts of that attack, one that scared people so much because the 
violence used was 'beyond reason'. For the state at that moment fear 
brings its own reward, but the fury of the attack was aimed at the 
information on the whole gamut of police violence held on computer 
disks and videos. 
 
 Perhaps the greatest provocation, and the most revealing was the fence 
itself, the elite getting on with its serious work (and how they suffer 
in the process as Tony Blair so eloquently puts it) for the good of 
humanity, not understood by peaceful protestors (stupid), or violent 
ones (criminals). The flim-flam is immense, the results, in relation to 
all the initiatives and treaties Bush will not sign, a mouse. And the 
fence necessary precisely because people are not stupid. The fence and 
the violence of the carbinieri necessary because people are not stupid, 
can see that despite the immense social wealth created by technological 
and other creativities, present global capitalism is more voracious 
than ever before, must find profits in health care and education; must 
sell more armaments, enclose more land. More voracious, it must be more 
violent. And well, these things happen. Or are opposed. 
 
 
 
  
 
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