A sensitive and well-drawn, informative article from Italy.

It takes only one...
by Douglas Ord 9:31am Mon Jul 23 '01

[snip]

Sunday July 22nd 2001

On Friday night, I went to a candlelight vigil outside the Italian embassy for Carlo Giuliani, the protester who was shot in Genoa.

There were 2 photographs hung on the fence that showed him lying on the pavement with blood coming from his head & he was wearing what looked to be a gas mask, so his face was hidden.

I wore a gas mask in Quebec City, after being badly tear gassed on the opening day, so it was hard not to feel some pretty intense empathy.

There is obviously a pattern of escalation taking place, & doing so within a very short time frame.

Tear gas & plastic bullets in Quebec City in April.

Live (?!) ammunition in Goteberg a month or so later, where three people were wounded.

& now a young man shot dead in Genoa.

The similarity & continuity of the events themselves –– FTAA, WTO, G8, whatever –– abolishes the sense of physical distance, which is pretty much abolished these days by global capital & the internet anyway.

The dynamics are also very much the same:

Red Zones & exclusionary fences, behind which an Earth-Gobbling Corporate-Friendly cabal of The Powerful go about Business As Usual...

While the brightest & most sensitive young people the world over realize that they've got No Future unless the machine that is poisoning the earth for the sake of profitable trinkets is replaced by something a lot more humble, a lot more gentle.

& replaced soon.

How to get Them to listen to this?

Because They, along with their lapdog corporate media, are not listening.

Instead, They’ve now upped the stakes exponentially.

Look closely at the photographs that are circulating of Carlo Giuliani, & especially at his eyes.

Does this look like a thug to you?

Don't think so.

Look closely also at the pictures of Carlo Giuliani's last moments that you can find at http://italy.indymedia.org .

Do they suggest that he was about to throw that fire extinguisher at the paramilitaries in the back of the jeep?

Or do they suggest that, as the smallest, skinniest guy among the protesters, who had not -- if the pictures are any indication -- engaged in any violence to that point...

He was actually giving it back to them?

Note that the masked paramilitary in the back of the jeep had already pulled his pistol, & had levelled it at someone else, who fled.

This is called pre-meditation...

Especially given that, with the pistol already leveled, & at such close range, there was no reason on earth why he had to shoot Carlo Giuliani fatally in the head.

So ask: What was a masked & lethally armed twenty year-old paramilitary doing travelling around Genoa's Yellow Zone in a jeep to begin with?

Looking for trouble maybe?

Let me tell you a quick little story about when I was up at The Fence in Quebec City on Saturday afternoon, April 21st, in my gas mask, & was in effect trapped there, with about a dozen other people, & with the police in their armour & helmets & gas masks directly on the other side, for about an hour, so we were eyeballing each other.

The police were using a kind of mortar to hurl tear gas behind us to keep the other "protesters" back, because The Fence had come down farther up the street.

They were completely anonymous except for large letters on their backs; I don’t recall seeing other cops wearing these so maybe they were a tactical squad or something.

But there was one cop who kept strutting back & forth behind The Fence with a gas gun, obviously getting off on his power & on the circumstances that gave him both this power & this anonymity.

Every once in a while, he would suddenly turn, put the gas gun against the fence, & fire through it, so the canister landed right in our midst & began to spin.

He was so obviously enjoying himself behind his gas mask & face shield, & was just as obviously trying to provoke us into doing something stupid... though some of the other cops were hanging back, embarrassed even in their anonymity.

The point I’m making is that it just takes one, who hides behind this anonymity & abuses the power it provides...

& it has just taken one with a pistol in Genoa to push this whole thing onto an exponentially higher level of tension & anger, from which there may not be any way back.

Carlo Giuliani was wearing a little bit of padding around his extremely thin upper arms, perhaps anticipating blows with a baton.

A lot of good that padding did him, because now it just looks naive & sad.

& will those who miss him stop with padding the next time?

Not likely.

So the wider question I've got to ask is this:

What is it about these meetings of "democratically elected" but corporately dependent leaders that is making, in the foreground of their "protection," for the accelerating development of iconographies & methods that are overtly fascist...

& that thereby offer just the anonymity & opportunities that the real thugs get off on?

I also can’t help but realize that, just as the FTAA Summit in Quebec started on the 2nd anniversary of Columbine & the 112th anniversary of Hitler’s birthday, so did the G8 conference in Genoa start on the 57th anniversary of the attempt on Hitler’s life by some of Germany's most decent officers.

Such that Carlo Giuliani died also on the 57th anniversary of the execution of Count Claus von Stauffenberg, who tried to kill Hitler.

Unsuccessfully.

The glimmer of hope is that, after this, the Nazi régime lasted less than another year.