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Italian comic artist Christian Mirra is making his comic "Quella notta alla Diaz" ("That night, at Diaz") open for everyone to read.
https://www.christianmirra.com/diaz-project
In Italian (for now), the comic originally published in 2010 recount the night raid at the Armando Diaz in Genova during the G8 2001.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_raid_on_Armando_Diaz
a short 馃У
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25 years from that shameful event, beyond the horrors of turture and police violence, even a worst outcome has come to pass, which the author clearly spells out:
"Ma quel che 猫 peggio: quasi nessuno ricorda pi霉 perch茅 eravamo l矛."
("Even worst: almost nobody remembers why we were there")
The back-then Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi, to me the precursor to Trump and the Epstein class, set the tone of the new millenium clear and straight:
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@alx I was there, and remember very well why.
Also, I remember many of us had very serious reservations about the Black Bloc. What was their gameplay, exactly? What were they hoping to achieve?
Imagine that, through good military organization, they could have seized the G8 itself (way unrealistic, but OK). Then what? Kill the diplomats? Read a statement? We just could not see a possible outcome the advantages of which would outweigh the disadvantages of the repression.
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@alberto_cottica I am not justifying the "Black Bloc". The No Global movement simply wasn't just them, but a larger diverse group. And the police brutality use for repression that day set a very dangerous precedent, that fed the "war on terror" and today's anti-protest legislation. Your personal experience is yours and legit, but I don't buy that the police brutality witnessed there and the torture inflicted to those arrested are solely a responsibility of "Black Bloc" actions.
@alx of course the police (and the Berlusconi government) are responsible for the violence they inflicted. What I am saying is: the Italian police prefers to smash into demos that are not peaceful, so much so that it infiltrated demos to make sure they overheated. This was known, so when the Bloc started breaking things they knew what was coming. And come it did.
So, what did the Bloc buy with that sacrifice? Was it worth buying? Real question.
On the other hand, they were certainly playing into the Italian anti-riot police's playbook: infiltrate the protest with "agents provocateurs", who then escalated it and justified violent repression: firing rubber bullets, teargas, and "cariche" (like cavalry charges, but on foot).
Italian police has been doing that since the 1940s and has a special division for this ("la Celere": https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reparti_mobili_della_Polizia_di_Stato?wprov=sfla1).
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I used to know some people who demonstrated with the Black Bloc. They were sincere. And in fairness, smashing ATMs and the windows of bank branches did have a potent symbolic meaning. But the end result of their action in Genova was that the demo broke down. The concerts and talks were cancelled. People were stranded and cut off. Not all: I personally still finished the march, as it was so big that people far from Piazza Alimonda were not affected.
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Violence and torture are back (maybe they never left) even in the so-called democratic world, anywhere, any moment, if you start to organise to much to become a proper challenge to the "neoliberal" order that allow us, the rich, to enjoy and expand our hedonistic lust.
What happened in Genova - the brutality of the repression, the murder of Carlo Giuliani, the indiscriminate torture - and especially the following institutional cover up and absolution of the entire armed force
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would reverberate in all movements afterwards, up to today, 25 years after.
There are many voices today (so-proclaimed left, & let's take it at face value) that lament the "lack of movement, vision, unity" on the left. "We never won", "We never be united", "the Left should stop purity testing".
What I never ever see, especially in our US dominated fora, is an historical analysis that will put that into perspective.
200k people went to Genova in that summer 2001. From all nationality
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I had friends belonging to many different groups that went to the protest: environmentalists, vegans, leftist punk, communists, socialists, even catholics. These groups had a lot of disagreements, but where united on one single front: end a system of extraction and inequalities. Looking back now, it seemed to me (as a teenager) that the basic idea was: first we dismantle the system, then we address how the new one will work.
It was maybe naive, but it certainly was united
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