[Nettime-bold] snafu: 130.000 marches against global war in Rome

[geert lovink <geert@xs4all.nl>]

From: "snafu" <snafu@ecn.org>
Sent: Sunday, November 11, 2001 7:23 PM
Subject: 130.000 marches against global war in Rome

Us versus them always works. Especially when those who are still enough
stubborn to call themselves "we", are completely misrepresented or even
denied to exist. That happens worldwide, everyday, in Palestine, Kurdistan,
Ireland, Tibet and everywhere nationalist, religious, ethnical oppression
take place. But in our times, oppression is not only practised towards
minorities or differences, but also against majorities which happen not to
be aligned with the actual system of command.

This is certainly the case of Italy. Four days ago the vast majority of the
Italian Parliament (513 votes against 35)  voted the participation in the
war in Afghanistan.  The almost unanimous decision was the result of the
unusual convergence between the right wing coalition lead by media tycoon
Silvio Berlusconi and the moderated side of the left wing opposition, that
registered the defection of the Greens and of the communist party. Three
days after the Parliament vote, on November the 10th, two different
national demonstrations confronted in Rome. One organized by the Government
in support to the United States and another one from the Italian Social
Forum against the "economical, social, military war" and the WTO meeting in
Quatar. Even though the "USA Day" had received so far a much larger media
coverage and was clearly indicted on N10 to divert the public attention
from the no-global rally, the demonstration was nearly a flop. The
organizers claim the participation of forty thousand people (against the
one hundred thousand expected) but the square, Piazza del Popolo, showed
large empty areas. The strategy of the Government after Genoa's disaster
shifted from police repression to the pure propaganda war. But the the sad
spectacle given by the real time broadcast of the USA-Day (RAI public
television was able to say that the anti-war protest was raising only
7-10,000 protesters) was countered by a total different reality. The
anti-war march was endless (200,000 according to the demonstrators, 100,000
for the police, independent sources estimate 130,000) and representing many
of the souls which have taken part to Genoa, as the Women in Black, the
Disobedients (ex White-Overalls), the Naples network No Global, several
squatted community centres and anarchists groups, recreational NGOs such as
ARCI, the communist party Rifondazione Comunista and the new territorial
subjects born after Genoa -- the Social Forums, plural organisms that have
the double function to foster the dialogue amongst different components of
the civil society and to become the rings of a chain from the territory to
an alternative global governance.

This multifarious, often complicated and tiring way to say "us" was taking
the squares yesterday, and even it was once again almost ignored by
mainstream media, demonstrated to be self-sufficient enough to be an
autonomous form of life, with its own unerasable beliefs, its own media
and, in some cases, its original way of living. This strange attractor,
that in Italy is called "the movement", is not self-referential but
potentially represents the majority of the public opinion, if it is true
that all the polls say that 60% of Italians are contrary to the war in
Afghanistan. But how it is possible then, that the 80% of the Parliament
voted for an intervention disregarding the Constitution -- that written
after World War II expressively impedes the eventuality of non-defensive
wars -- and the opinion of those who voted them?  There are different ways
to answer this question, but one of them surely resides in the redefinition
of the traditional tasks of the state. As Italian philosopher Giorgio
Agamben writes (full text at
http://www.nettime.org/nettime.w3archive/200109/msg00269.html): "In the
course of a gradual neutralization of politics and the progressive
surrender of traditional tasks of the state, security becomes the basic
principle of state activity. What used to be one among several definitive
measures of public administration until the first half of the twentieth
century, now becomes the sole criterium of political legitimation. The
thought of security bears within it an essential risk. A state which has
security as its sole task and source of legitimacy is a fragile organism;
it can always be provoked by terrorism to become itself terroristic."

If the state function is exclusively measured in terms of security and
control, a society does not live or survive exclusively around these
feelings. These feelings are not enough to be turned into cohesive values,
to work as a social glue. On the contrary, fear and terror are powerful
solvents, that invite the people to stay home and behave like scared dogs.
This is the reason, i guess, the anti-war rally was crowded by very young
people, by those who are not only believing that another world is possible,
but in a certain sense, indispensable.


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