Last time I took a plane, I guess it was in August, I met someone. There was no immediate attraction, but we talked deeply, promptly. She told me not to take my drinks with me any further, she made me undress my shoes, my jacket and also my belt. That was very fast for the first meeting, but she told me to relax. Hearing strange noises, she told me, she needs to touch me. I was confused, but I accepted and it felt good. While body checking we were talking about regulatory power and questions I never dared to ask. It was so intense. When she stopped touching, I was left alone with an emptiness of not knowing why all this had happened. And then, I guess, it just occurred to me, that I had to kill a girl called reality.

Paolo Cirio and Nina Roth are the people behind check-check.org, a project “designed to deprogram people from the security theatre at airports”. How do they plan to do this? In their own words, deprogramming is a sort of debugging of the social code that is given to us since we were born. In the airport case the social code is the script of “Security Theater” or the “Theater of the Absurd” that is a spectacle in a grand scale done around the world. The deprogrammer “Check-Check.org” operates with a friendly psychological method: everyone can read the experiences, feelings, emotions and unpredictable behaviors of other mind-controlled ‘victims’. So with more consciousness and less embarrassment, because others already unclenched, people generally open up to each other, expressing their self-doubts about their existence and reality. Everyone can share opinions and find confirmations; a practice as an antidote to deceptive brainwashing and a return to a free mind.

Here at Occupied London we are also intrigued by airports. These non-places of Augé (1995), emblematic of a liquid society re-constructing itself around fear while constantly on the move, precursors of a social reality that is already here, long-arrived in their runways and arrival halls. A reality that keeps going further. Imagine: “Ladies and gentlemen, please fasten your seat belts, we shall be shortly landing onto non-places endlessly springing up, encroaching the urban entity and reshaping its reality -creating, in fact, a reality of a new type”. And lowering the microphone, he whispers: “…a reality some of us want dead already”.

The airport becomes increasingly important the more the supermarket, the mall, the library, the pavement and the street come to resemble it. Yet, as pointed out in the interview, airport security initially copied the urban, even if it was the urban in its “state of exception”, i.e. when cities were, or felt to be, under attack. In so doing the airport acts as an intra-urban time hub: it connects the urban state of exception to what would pass for normality. For this it needs our attention and we are grateful to Nina and Paolo for pointing to its direction and for kindly giving us the interview that follows._

[Occupied London] What is it that intrigues you about airports – what blows your mind away in these spaces?

[Paolo Cirio] Low-cost airlines, the global tourism industry, migrants and new youth lifestyles are some of the main causes of the boom in flights, airports and connected infrastructures. Indeed, while airports become a place crossed by a mass of people, at the same time they are becoming a media, to the point where we can now talk of a new “mass media”. Often we study the power of images, TV propaganda and newspapers’ news coverage, but we don’t think about other types of media, media that we often perform more than we listen, read or watch in our daily lives. The idea of “check-check.org” was born when I saw the mass of people repeating absurd acts; they simply obey a symbolic “mise-en-scène”. Most people are probably aware of the absurdity and the uselessness of security checks but they simply follow laws and rules without even thinking of the possibility of rising up against them. Is this not then, a sort of training aiming to sabotage the sense of reality by inserting fabricated truths which are manifestly lies? It’s different from other kind of theories about effect of media operandi. In this case it is not the depiction of reality with strategic use of information and of communication (classical mass media, with images, videos, rhetoric, etc.) that gives us a lack of meaning, but it is in fact reality itself which is directly dramatized and forced in a meaningless representation. The definition of torture given by the CIA is a good metaphor of how contemporary propaganda strategies work: “Torture is a set of techniques designed to put prisoners into a state of deep disorientation and shock in order to force them to make concessions against their will”[1]. We are under psychological torture provided by “semiological signs” tools.

[Nina Rorth] I love the promises I get at airports: the assumed possibility of going wherever I want to and everyone else can do so as well, those consuming all those glittering shops – and you are right there, and just because you take a flight you think you are able to afford all this stuff… and then, after a while, I start thinking and start getting bored and scared and I turn aggressive and nervous, I feel persecuted and betrayed – all at the same place in nearly the same moment. There are so many individuals crossing, all with different destinations, diverse backgrounds – it’s quite a sci-fi moment that I have while being at airports or even thinking of them. Talking of our project, the security measures appear to be absolutely absurd: one day this, the other day that, right behind the “checkpoint” you may purchase most products that someone took away from you minutes ago – where’s the sense in all that?

[OL] Corporate media reported the following story: “Robert Dziekanski was a Polish worker who was tasered to death by police at Vancouver International Airport in Canada. Robert was migrating to Canada to reunite with his mother, who spent over ten hours waiting for him in the airport’s reception lounge. Only a couple of meters away her son was being assassinated by the police”. The way we understand it, the title of your project -”I killed a girl called reality”- implies that a state of emergency is in place in the airport, where “reality” as we know it elsewhere dies. And yet, Dziekanski’s death was as real – and tragic – as that of De Menezes (the Brazilian commuter shot dead by London’s Metropolitan Police). Does reality as we know it die exclusively in the airport, or does it die everywhere?

[NR] I guess we intended to speak about reality in general. I, for example, have the impression of not knowing why I do stuff, why I react on certain issues and not on others that concern my personal reality. Speaking of structural reality – I don’t know that either. Everything seems to be constructed: which TV series are shown, what sort of popcorn you can buy, why some people can cross a border and others can’t and why there are stateless people who have to live for years in the transit areas of airports. So in fact airports are like a mini-world and so to this mini-world all the measures to fight terrorism or whatever are applied and you see and feel it immediately, without any filter, pretty raw. So the answer might be: reality already died, or it was never alive anywhere.

[PC] Paulo Virilio in his book ‘City of Panic’ has written: “Whence the sudden permutation in which the INFOWAR appears not only as a ‘war of weaponry’ but especially as a WAR ON THE REAL; a war entailing full-scale annihilation of the sense of reality in which the ‘weapon of mass communication’ is strategically superior to the ‘weapon of mass destruction’, whether atomic, chemical or bacteriological… And so, after ‘war tactics’ like camouflage and various lures capable of hoodwinking the enemy, the main stratagem suddenly becomes the ’speeding up of reality’ creating a panic-induced movement that destroys our sense of orientation, in other words, our view of the world”.[2]

In this way, everything has a symbolic impact and reality was killed everywhere, it’s the main tragic crime of our age. I don’t want to appear cynical but the two assassinations that you’ve cited were probably no accidents, or in any case they were useful if only in order to seek consensus for the “state of emergency”, which translates into immense instability, permanent danger and crisis, and henceforth panic for any citizen. The assassinations of Dziekanski and De Menezes were symbolic acts (as is terrorism in general): Of course they are tragic, but the function is in the level of representation, not about real physical repression, like in a riot or in a war. I think they have been sacrificed for the purposes of “terror hysteria” propaganda: yes, this is in the sphere of hyperreality and for this reason, it’s even more sad.

I want to make clear that hyperreality, although just a tactic in order to manage public opinion of citizens of countries who are involved in wars –abroad it is about the citizens of countries under attack, about the brutality of violence on bodies, which is terribly strong. Reality is a serious thing missed in our mind, but it still exists somewhere. We should be thinking about the final goals of power (capitalism and their administrators), its tools and reasons of existence. What I mean by this is that if a way exists in order to stabilize reality in the culture of common values and if we work around media and its message, we will no longer be shields for bombs. But if right now the reality is just the “annihilation of the reality”, which reality shall we kill? Have we tried to kill the worst with our consciences? With the right weapons? I ask myself this question every day.

[OL] In ‘Splintering Urbanism’, Graham and Marvin mention that in London, “the so-called ‘Ring of Steel’ supports electronic surveillance systems and armed guards on every entry point into the financial district. Cars entering have their number plates read automatically. Stolen cars are detected within three seconds. And the potential for the facial-recognition of drivers, by linking automatically to digitised photographs on national licence records, exists in the system and has recently been tested.” This again raises the question of how unique the airport is in its “state of emergency” features. Only a few weeks ago it was announced that most of Britain’s train stations, for example, will be getting baggage scanning facilities similar to those found in airports. Is it the city, then, that is being airportised?

[NR] Of course the airport isn’t unique in its “state of emergency” features. For example, in Germany for the male soccer world cup 2006 the police, and with them the politicians (or vice versa), were using material and strategies to be prepared for any “emergencies”. That meant controlling people, not permitting assumed dangerous people to leave their houses, re-establishing border controls, using cameras, scan machines, rfid-chips, secret service information, establishing data files without people knowing about it etc. I suppose it was just to get used to the devices and maybe even having the topic appear once in the media, so that next time it is applied it won’t be such a big issue anymore. The G8 summit, its protests and the police reaction made this quite evident. I don’t actually know where and when so-called security measures were first applied but I guess it had something to do with property, so the question we should ask might be: Who owns the place we are staying and we are filmed at? Why can he/she do so? What are the possibilities to counter-act? “I killed a girl called reality” just wants to inform that there is such a “state of emergency” but in terms of freedom. Additionally the project tries to outline, with its interactive features, that there are more people who realize the problem. We are not alone!

[OL] “…in the early days of airports, there was no such thing as the rivers of passengers that flow through the sculpted steel and glass façades of contemporary terminal buildings (…) The huge milelong terminal structures are carefully built to facilitate the mobility of passengers, baggage, and cargo to their destination. To ensure the security of the country the flows are entering, while at the same time to protect the very means of their travel, these flows must be watched and controlled. The airport is well and truly a space under surveillance.”

Here, Adey (2004) implies that the transformation of the airport coincides with its growth and that together with the flux of the populations came the need to tighten the surveillance of these spaces of mobility. Is it the airport, then that is being urbanised?

[PC] Hakim Bey has written: “Our architecture has become symbolic, we have enclosed ourselves in the manifestations of abstract thought”[3] Airports are urbanized as much as other public places of our modernity, at the end becoming “non-places”, to use the term of Marc Augè. I’m ever impressed by how any airport has the same architectural structures, interior design, functionality infrastructures and even the same shops with the same products. They simply look like shopping centres, but in a place completely out of history, geographically not located and culturally not recognized. The airport is the pure new urbanism abstracted from our heritage, it’s the triumph of the pure consumerist world and the controlled society, indeed the perfect place in order to have everyone’s mind and body under control. It’s very well explained with the words of Virilio in his book ‘The Information Bomb’: “The ‘real city’, which is situated in a precise place and in which gave its name to the politics of notions, is giving way to the ‘virtual city’ that de-territorialized meta-city which in hence to become the site of that ‘metropolititics’, the totalitarian or rather globalitarian character of which will be plain for all see”.[4]. In terms of security measures in the urban environment, we know that the first check-points were there before airplanes, so airports have been urbanized and militarized to look like towns and borders in war time.

[OL] You ask: “…and what about the not-scanned suitcases – aren’t they blowing your mind?” They are indeed. Waiting at that never-ending queue, ordered to drop your coffee while your suitcase is swiftly transferred to the aircraft without a glitch. And yet most people will not react to such a contradiction. It is done for the sake of safety, they say – all they need do is to say that, and passengers will obey. Isn’t that blowing your mind?

[PC] Well, and what about the not-checked CIA’s secret flights in Europe (like the “extraordinary rendition program” – Trevor Paglen has done some brilliant work on that), and what about the corruption of administrators and employees at airports – aren’t they blowing your mind? I’ve been informed of illicit traffic at airports, employers stealing everything (a common scandal in Italy) and criminal organizations often using corrupt employees in order to ship all sorts of stuff – yet the largest corruption comes, of course, from the top of the pyramid. We can find contradictions everywhere, but yes, our project would focus on the “security theatre” as a form of spin and on the reactions of people when facing manifested absurdities.

[NR] It is, absolutely. And I guess right there a strategy fulfills itself which I can’t really grasp and which I don’t really understand either. An obeying mass is easier to handle, of course, and if there are more and more people, strategies need to be established that will get them buying, get them smooth, get them obeying – if Prozac can’t do it, a well constructed explanation might help. When I was fourteen, on the envelope of every letter, instead of my name I wrote a saying I once heard in a movie (or read in a book or heard in a song), which was: question everything.

[OL] What is the response of people writing to check-check.org so far?

[NR] We had some nice feedback that hasn’t been published on the website. Some was on the topic itself – a lot of people told me their personal stories that they didn’t dare to leave in a comment, but the ones who left a story were from all over the world, some more bizarre than others. Some comments were on the music (which was composed specifically for the project) and others highlighted that there are more problems to be solved and more urgent security issues; in Germany something like the new passports with biometric data or new laws on saving online data for half a year. So there’s still some work to do…

[PC] Right now we have visitors from all continents and from over fifty countries. The website is just a tool for sharing impressions and experiences around the world, but to be honest, I have heard and seen the best stories directly at the airport. I enjoy seeing the faces of the people while they act out absolutely absurd things, when they become angry about the confiscated bottle of water and when they have to have their shoes checked. We want to do a movie, a sort of documentary about it, so we are looking for producers… The topic is ever more in discussion, as can be seen by the research paper by a team at the Harvard School of Public Health, published on 20 Dec ‘07:
“Researchers could not find any studies showing whether the time-consuming process of X-raying carry-on luggage prevents hijackings or attacks. They also found no evidence to suggest that making passengers take off their shoes and confiscating small items prevented any incidents”[5].

[OL] Having recently visited London, can you describe your experiences of the city?

[PC] I was in London on 7 July ‘05, so I saw the panic in the streets the weeks after. Inspiration for “check-check” probably came from this experience – during those days I did a fake “Public Notice” label around East London in Banksy’s style, with these words: THIS IS A HIGH PARANOIA AREA. If you suffer from fear, anxiety, panic, please support our troops in Iraq or buy something.”

Recently, Prime Minister Gordon Brown said that Britain would begin improving its security systems at train stations, airports, utility buildings and other crowded or strategic places to decrease its vulnerability to terrorist attacks. But any kind of new anti-terrorist plans are “largely ineffective and they come at an enormous expense, both monetarily and in loss of privacy” in the words of Bruce Schneier who has introduced the idea of the “Security Theater”[6]. Additionally, the lack of prevention of previous attacks is proof of the inefficacy of surveillance systems. Again, I see the hype of anti-terror measures as an internal PYOPS strategy aiming to raise consensus in war, spreading the culture of fear and tighten control over citizens’ lives. One example: While measures in the ’70s against European’s terrorism in cold war time and measures for contemporary radical Islamic’s terrorism are incomparable, at the same time, the number of terrorist attacks today is smaller. It’s just one of millions of contradictions. When in London, I always think of the movies “Brazil” by Terry Gilliam and “Children of Men” of Alfonso Cuarón.

References

[1]
The Shock Doctrine, Page 24, Naomi Klein, 2007, Knopf, ISBN 9780676978001

[2]
City of Panic, Page 34, By Paul Virilio, 2005, Berg, ISBN 1845202244

[3]
Hakim Bey, ‘The information war’, Ctheory, 18 (1), 1995

Virtual Futures, Page 5, By Joan Broadhurst Dixon, Eric J. Cassidy, 1998, Routledge, ISBN 0415133793

[4]
The Information Bomb, Page 11, By Paul Virilio, 1998, Galileè, ISBN 1844670597

[5]
Reuters, 21 Dec 2007, the whole research is available here

[6]
Beyond Fear, Page 249, By Bruce Schneier, 2003, Springer, ISBN 0387026207

“Seven winds in the lower calendars and geographies:

first wind, a worthy and angry youth”.

Subcomandante Marcos, Ezln, Chiapas, Mexico.

Message to the greek rebels on december 2008.

On July 8^th, 9^th and 10^th the president-master of the italian government, Silvio Berlusconi, will host the summit of the “Big Eight” of the Planet. The summit will take place in the fortress of a State Police Corps, in Coppito, a town close to L’Aquila, a city where people and land are still devasted by the earthquake of the 6^th of April 2009. The president moved there the summit from its original destination: a luxury liner off the sardinian coast of La Maddalena.

Due by the action of this arrogant governor, leader of a speculation and war system responsible for the crisis, is taking shape an attempt to validate again the failed global political governance. The situationist of reaction, Silvio Berlusconi, gives to the “Big” of the Planet the opportunity to perform a show of “sobrity”, as he called it. A show he would like to be appropriate to face the growing ostilities and rebellions rising in every corner of the World against the G8’s decisions and dominance.

Behind the pitiful cabaret – set up to take for a walk the highest political offices of the world, along  the tent-camps of the earthquake’s victims – the summit will confirm those decisions and that dominance: to fund again the financial speculation; to save the banks; to make labour more precarious and instable; to reinforce the security architecture; to implement cooperation among Nations in the matter of repression; to keep on with the no-border exploitation of human beings and natural resources and to build up, at the same time, new frontiers of blood and shame, to appease universities through control and police.

The G8/G14/G21 is not just taking place on a scene devasted by an earthquake, whose consequences are worsened by speculation and social injustice, but it will be held in the middle of a global crisis, in a period of riots against oppressions bursting at different latitudes. From the Argentinazo to the revolt in El Alto, Bolivia; from the Appo, in Oaxaca, Mexico, to the resistance of  indigenous people in Peruvian Amazonia; from the rebellions in the french banlieues to those of migrant people against the lagers they live in, and against the deportation systems that work in the buttres of European Union – as in Ceuta, Melilla, Peloponnese and Lampedusa; from the recent riots in Greece after the murder of Alexandros Grigoropoulos – 16 years old, shot dead by the police – to the protests against the G20 in London – where Ian Thomlison was murdered by the police too – until the night of the riots in Berlin, on the first of May, and the Nato meeting in Strasbourg.

The July appointment has been preceded in Italy by a sequence of campaigns, protests and marches addressed to the highest ministerial offices and to the lobbies that organized the G8. As in the cases of the summits on Agriculture and Environment; of the meeting organized by the chancellors in Torino – ended with a clash between the march of the students and the repressive police; of the encounter among the Ministers of Economy in Rome, on March 28^th, welcomed by a demonstration of students, unions and flex workers that succeded in breaking the prohibition to access to the center of the city; of the actions on May 29^th and 30^th in Rome: the one against Oim, the symbolic occupation of churches, the contacts with the migrant people inside the Cie (centers of identification and deportation for immigrants) at Ponte Galeria, and the antiracist and antisecuritarian march that went all over the streets of the city, in line with the march in Milan a week before.

On the first of June a national meeting in L’Aquila launched a call-out for realizing an “extended mobilization” in the name of “radicality”against the G8. On june 21^st, a following meeting  drew up a calendar. Into this frame, the No-G8 network of Rome – a convergence of different movements of social struggle that organized the March and May actions reported above – proposes a “Welcoming Day for the Mighty of the Planet” on July the 7^th, when the international deputations will pass through the italian capital. Moreover, the No-G8 network proposes to practice a “Map of the crisis”, through actions carried out by affinity groups. A “Map of the crisis” based on the one sperimented in London during the G20: decentralized actions in different cities during the days of the summit – in Italy, in Europe and in the countries belonging to the “Club of the Mighty”.

We, social activists, natives and migrants, flex workers, builders of indipendent ways of life, jealous of our sincere and convinced political indipendence, anticapitalists and antifascists as much as antiauthoritarians and antimilitaristics, antiracists and antisexists, support the final demonstration in L’Aquila. In the meantime, we intend to realize during the “Welcoming Day” on July the 7^th, a block of the traffic and of the mobility that, by combining creative and smartly radical practices, addresses our worthy rage to obstruct the functionality of the celebrations of the Mighty of the Planet and of their bankruptcy. Cooperation between different subjects scares the Crisis rulers, and so we believe in this interaction as fundamental.

We propose the same to all the no-border networks, movements and individuals that want to join us. We are going to receive you at the best of our possibilities, through the resources and the initiatives of the movement, in the frame of the local features and of the methods shared by the unitary mobilization in Rome.

We propose again, to all the networks, groups, movements, activists living in the big cities of the “Club of Mighty” to share a “Map of the crisis”, as much as possible open and global, and to practice it actively, in a reciprocal communication, during the following days.

We propose to make converge actions in the guiding lines of growth and continuity, of a protest  movement to develop during the months to come, through the public denunciation and the social siege:

-        of the principal responsibles for the crisis and for the subtraction of income, freedom and rights.

-        of the structures belonging to the security architecture.

-        of the principal responsibles for precarious labour, for firing, for death on the job.

-        of the centers responsible for the distruction of resources and life on the planet.

-        of the centers responsibles for the aggression against the material conditions of life.

-        of the centers responsibles for the expropriation of social wealth and knowledge.

With these suggestions and purposes, we are open to an active political cooperation and to a connection with alternative social practices. From the July days of the meeting and on.

“Akat qhiparux waranq waranqanakax kutinixa (I’ll be back and we’ll be millions) Tupac Katari, 1781

Purple: is, among the colors of the visible spectrum, the one that has the shortest wave length and the highest frequency, it’s the color of the women’s liberation movement, of the sexual self determination, it’s the color of dreams, of metamorphosis, of transition, of magic, of children’s urgency to express themselves.

Purple is the color of slavery too. In England, during the XVI century, it representesed deep mourning; for the candomblé, a brasilian religion, it is linked to the Orixà Iansà, Goddes of Storms; in Lima it is the color of the cult to the Black Christ, “God of Miracles”, venerated by the african slaves, the same on which the indigenous transfered their devotion for Pachacamac, “He, who moves the World”, God of Earthquakes.

During the days of the protests against the G8, Purple will be our color.

Revenge: It’s a strong word that doesn’t leave any space.

It’s dedicated to the ones who get up in the morning, take a bus, their car or a motorcycle, get to their workplace and find their death. It’s dedicated to the statistics that count the deaths on job, statistics longer than the war’s ones. It’s dedicated to the people that leave their countries, their roots, to go and look for a better future, but find borders, walls and racism: in Italy it is not strange to ear about a shame called Cie – centers for the identification and deportation of immigrants – a dull definition to hide what history already knows as lagers. Our words, our hands, our emotions, our reasons trace the revenge. It’s a collective body that moves along the metropolis. We turn upon who dispossess us of our life, the same speed that bring us from a place of exploitation to another, from the uncertainty of the present to the negation of a future.

Victory: the classical image, the two fingers signing a resistance that will win. Because it’s necessary to desire and pursue a real and radical change. Victory we are looking for and power we are struggle against are not birds of a feather.

We want the time they steal from us, the participation they prevent us from, the voice they stifle, the richness they take away. What move us is our necessity of new political, economic and social choices, opposed to a crisis that will reproduce itself endlessly, to recreate the capital and its dominion. The kind of victory we are looking for is that of wresting a meter more, of taking a full breath, of stating that a project of liberation is feasible. It’s the anticapitalist victory we are trying to reproduce and support. Victories can be little but they build a way. We are resolute in pursuing it. This time, and many others again.

It will be difficult to stop us.

Rome, Italy, June 2009

Illuminated by plane-warning floodlights,
clouds wisp past the tops of tall buildings
whose insides are empty of life at this hour.

Walled-in halls and rooms sectioned into
squares leveled stories upon stories above
ground, fixed as firmly as centenarian
trees by their grappled root structures,

are dark and unseen, though lit ambiently
by light that has somehow crept like vine
up the walls and through the atmosphere,
compressed into substance by the flat rigidity
between walls, so windowed they are sheer

glass cliffs, shooting off the translucid
streets, blackened by recent rains; and
the red and green day-glo of exit signs
perennially pointing down cavernous
evacuation routes that are the conduits

whose night-long drafts whisper the
empty buildings’ seething potentiality.

The object that fell through a tear in the awning
and softly smacked hitting the ground is half of

a bluish green eggshell spotted with brown and black
smudged matter of the mother bird’s patient incubation.

The edges where it broke open are jagged and the surface
that sustained the impact is cracked yet still intact.

Inside, chinks in the white are stained with watery
blood and albumen goo, smelling overbearingly of birth.

A group led by an Italian lawyer has begun collecting signatures for a petition to nominate Mr Berlusconi for the Nobel Peace Prize on the ground that because of his close links to Vladimir Putin, the Russian Prime Minister, he helped to resolve the conflict over Georgia last summer.

Giammario Battaglia said that no Italian had won the Nobel Peace Prize since Ernesto Teodoro Moneta in 1907. He added that in view of Mr Berlusconi’s achievement, “we think it’s a good moment”.

Source: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article6433541.ece

was that?
Berluschitler
Berlustalin
Francusconi
Berluşescu
right hand in lapel
Berluscoleon
or some very Roman heritage
builder + imperium
the citizen a little more equal
a larger than life
Berluscolini

but then
is it not the little Silvio
in each of us
the fairy-tale “selva”
a forest
a jungle all to ourselves
where anything’s possible
where the whim of
the fortune-maker
rules every little world
Berlusconismo
that seeps
creeps
and corners
the last crevice
of every single day

was that
cuckoo in the nest
liar
shammer
card-sharper
fiddler
rigger
Berluscon man

(the word bears
no longer importance)

Silvio Berlusconi has launched a fierce attack on La Repubblica, accusing the newspaper of defamation and denigration after it challenged him to explain his relationship with Noemi Letizia, the teenager who calls him Papi.

A statement issued by the Prime Minister’s office said that there was a media campaign against Mr Berlusconi, 72, fuelled by “envy and hatred of a Prime Minister who has achieved historic levels of public trust”.

It said this took the form of “low attacks” which were aimed at influencing the European and local elections in June. Because it lacked “concrete political arguments” the opposition was exploiting “exclusively private matters for political ends”.

Mr Berlusconi’s office did not reply directly to ten questions posed by La Repubblica, which the left-leaning paper said it had put to the Prime Minister on Monday. The paper said that the issues were not private but political. It said that Gianni Letta, Mr Berlusconi’s chief aide, had promised a reply in two days. Since none had arrived the paper decided to publish the “contradictions and omissions” in Mr Berlusconi’s account of the row over Ms Letizia and his relations with starlets, which nearly two weeks ago led Veronica Lario, 52, his second wife, to demand a divorce.

The unresolved issues include how and when Mr Berlusconi met Ms Letizia, her father, Benedetto, and her mother, Anna; why he claimed that he had not put foward showgirls as candidates for the European elections – saying that the allegation was a “left wing plot” – when Il Giornale, his own newspaper, confirmed that he had; and why he denied that he was involved in selecting European election candidates yet maintained he had consulted Ms Letizia’s father on MEP candidates in Naples, even though Mr Letizia had no political standing locally.

Mr Berlusconi, who is under attack from the Church, the UN and human rights groups as well as the Left over his hardline policy towards immigrants, appears to have been stung by a poll this week in La Repubblica which showed that his approval rating had slipped three points to 53 per cent. He maintains that his own soundings show a popularity rating of 75 per cent.

Mr Berlusconi has used his control of Italian media to fight back, hinting that Ms Lario is unstable. Corriere della Sera said that she was distressed by this tactic, telling friends she had not expected such a ferocious reaction from her husband.

It said that she was particularly alarmed that the right-wing paper Libero had run front-page pictures of her topless when she was an actress 30 years ago under the headline: “Veronica Ungrateful Showgirl”.

The opposition Democratic Party said that Mr Berlusconi would “do better to answer” the questions.

The questions

1 Mr President, how and when did you first meet Noemi Letizia’s father?

2 During the course of this friendship how many times, and where, have you met?

3 How would you describe the reasons for your friendship with Benedetto Letizia?

4 Why did you discuss candidates with Signor Letizia, who is not even a member of the PDL?

5 When did you get to know Noemi Letizia?

6 How many times have you met Noemi Letizia, and where?

7 Do you take an interest in Noemi and her future, or support her family economically in any way?

8 Is it true that you promised Noemi you would help her career in show business or in politics?

9 Veronica Lario said that you “frequent under-age girls”. Do you meet any others or “bring them up”?

10 Your wife says that you are not well and that you “need help”. What is the state of your health?

Two days after the United States Presidential Election, Prime Minister of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi, said to the President of Russia President-elect Barack Obama “has all the qualities to get along well with you: he’s young, handsome and suntanned, so I think you can develop a good working relationship.” This statement was harshly rebuked by Italian politicians as being racist. Berlusconi’s opponent in the last Italian election, Walter Veltroni, went far enough to say that his comments “seriously damage the image and dignity of our country on the international scene.” Unfortunately for Italy, this statement is insignificant compared to the racism rampant in the Italian government and population at large. The Roma (Gypsy) are an ethnic group that emigrated from South Asia to many countries primarily in Southern and Eastern Europe almost a millennium ago. For many centuries, Europeans have been at odds with the Roma community due to their cultural differences and physical appearances. The Roma have experienced injustices for centuries including losing their children, suffering discrimination, and even being forced into labor.

Italy is no different from many European nations in that there is conflict between native Italians and Gypsies. However, today, the magnitude and scope of the conflict is uniquely Italian. Berlusconi, shoring up support from extreme-right political groups in Italy such as the openly racist Northern League and previously fascist Alleanza Nazionale, has moved to pass extremely repressive legislation that would “identify immigrants as the chief source of Italy’s economic and social problems.” This legislation included several stipulations that called for fingerprinting of all Roma to reduce crime, jailing of illegal immigrants, increasing police authority, confiscating the property of illegal immigrants, as well as the immediate expulsion of all immigrants upon possession of a criminal record. The shocking parallels Berlusconi’s government has with Hitler’s may have gone unnoticed in America but not by the rest of Europe. The EU has declared that the fingerprinting is “an act of discrimination based on race and ethnic origin” and that the Italian government should “refrain from collecting the fingerprints from Roma, including minors.”

If the quasi-fascist government of Berlusconi is scary, the behavior of some Italians has been downright appalling. Jean-Léonard Touadi, Italy’s only black Member of Parliament, recognized this saying “with an economic crisis under way, Italy has found a scapegoat to blame its woes on.” This chilling indifference to the plight of Roma was displayed this summer on a beach in Naples after the drowning of two teenage Roma girls. After a sunbather put a blanket over the two corpses, other sunbathers on the beach continued to resume their activities as if nothing had happened, some even relaxing only a matter of feet away from the corpses. De-humanizing hatred towards the Roma is not an isolated incident. Gangs burned down Roma camps in Naples due to the uncertain allegation by an Italian woman that a Roma girl tried to steal her child. In some cases this racist behavior has not just been condoned by Italian politicians, but encouraged. Northern League leader Umberto Bossi declared before the pogroms that “it is easier to destroy rats as [to] wipe out the gypsies.”

According to a recent newspaper survey, almost two-thirds of all Italians support the expulsion of all Romani, even those with Italian passports. This de-humanization of a segment of Italy’s population is indicative of a hard right government becoming fascist, and unfortunately non-binding resolutions by the European Union do little to stop these actions. Italian xenophobia is not limited to just the Romani; it extends to African immigrants as well. In soccer games it is not unusual for fans to boo every time an African touches the ball and to yell “Die!” when African players are injured. One chilling example of such sentiments comes from Giancarlo Gentilini, mayor of the Italian city of Treviso, who openly said “I don’t want to see any blacks, browns, or greys teaching our children” and “I want our streets cleansed of all the ethnics groups that are destroying our country.”

Reminiscent of America only a quarter century ago, police brutality against Africans in Italy has gone on nearly unchallenged. In the Italian city of Parma an innocent Ghanaian student was beaten by the police under false allegations that he was helping a drug deal while hurling racial slurs at him. These policemen are being investigated but hide behind Berlusconi’s legislation that has expanded the authority of the police. Interestingly enough, in another parallel to Hitler, Berlusconi’s government passed legislation that granted the Prime Minister immunity from all criminal courts. These abuses of power by Berlusconi’s government, supported by racists and fascists, have gone too far and are not likely to stop anytime soon without serious, enforceable, condemnation of these acts. With Italian discontent with the economic recession rising, and a more militant government expanding, the recipe for a twenty-first century Nazi Germany is nearing completion.

In his first term, President-elect Barack Obama should let Berlusconi know under no uncertain terms that the actions he and his government are taking are completely unacceptable. Obama should also reinforce that America will be watching and will not be afraid to publicly rebuke Italy if the government continues to sanction human rights violations. With Obama’s clout and position he could help persuade the European Union to impose sanctions on Italy similar to those placed on Austria for its extremely far-right government in 2000. This includes measures such as preventing Italian ambassadors from having meeting at an inter-governmental level with other European nations. Oh, and finally, Obama may want to help Berlusconi with that tan.

The Trapeze Artist is a new play by Paul Bilic opening at Tara arts Theatre Studio on April 22 and running on April 22, 24, 28, 30, May 2, 4, 6, 8 at 7.30. It tells the story of how Kafka’s manuscripts ended up in Oxford, which is where they are housed to this day. At Kafka’s death in 1924 his close friend Max Brod was supposed to burn all his remaining manuscripts, but Brod disobeyed Kafka’s request and published them. Brod took the manucripts with him when he fled Prague on the final train before the Nazis moved in. He kept them in Palestine until 1956 when Marianna Steiner, Kafka’s niece, returned them to Europe where she had them housed in a bank vault in Zurich. A chance encounter between Michael Steiner, Marianna’s son and a student at Oxford, and Malcolm Pasley, an Oxford German don, in 1961 meant that Pasley contacted Marianna Steiner and was given permission to drive the manuscripts across the alps and house them at the Bodleian library Oxford.

‘The Trapeze artist’ , directed by Hannah Pantin, takes this story and splices it in with ‘ First Suffering’ one of Kafka’s shorter fictions, to produce an original and physical piece of theatre. On April 28 Michael Steiner, Kafka’s nephew now in his late 60s, will be attending the performance. For more information visit www.tara-arts.co.uk