The clashes in Rome: The different color of Evil

12.10.2021

On this Saturday 9 October, so recently passed, Rome saw a great demonstration against the Green Pass. One hundred thousand Italians gathered in the capital to protest peacefully and demonstrate to the government that not everyone agrees with its discriminatory policy based on the green card, the Nazi laissez-passer necessary to go to work if you are not vaccinated with the blessed but still experimental serum.

A human tide, which was also flesh and blood of our land, tried once more to challenge without violence what more and more often appears as the pure and simple propaganda of an oppressive regime, a propaganda that for almost two years it poisons our life but from which most Italians do not want or cannot detach, at least for the moment.

Suddenly, clashes with the police began, triggered by an “assault” against a headquarters of the largest Italian “Leftist” trade union. The perpetrators were some people belonging to the right-wing Forza Nuova movement [New Force movement], identified and arrested. From what I read, there are no material damage or beatings to trade unionists but that was enough for the Union entailed to cry all its tears and immediately receive the solidarity of the government, parliament and even the President of the Republic.

It's strange, but I don't remember such concern when the Nazis of Pravyj Sektor [Right Sector] in Ukraine set fire to the House of Trade Unions in Odessa. Dozens of people died, many of them also hit by snipers stationed outside, lurking to kill the poor people who managed to escape the flames. No major Italian media shed a tear for those innocent dead nor ever protested when Pravyj Sektor paraded through the streets of Kiev giving the Nazi salute and praising its spiritual father, Stepan Bandera.

There are many pictures and videos of what happened between police and protesters last Saturday, some gruesome, but the results can be summarized by this photo:

Three policemen. Two women and one man. The woman in the middle laughs happily, as you can easily see. The one on his knees, with his head bowed, handcuffed with his hands behind his back, his pants stained with blood, passed off as a “dangerous fascist”. With the sweater knotted around the waist… I wonder how dangerous a beater he can be.

Italy too praised the death of the American George Floyd. In our parliament, “women of the Left” knelt in memory of him and in those days, it seemed that the whole of Italy was George Floyd and there was a new martyr in Heaven.

But for the man on his knees in the photo, neither the Italian Left nor the useless Right that so much support it, will have had words of consideration. That man, so white and so Italian, is not important. And anyway, he will certainly be a “fascist” and therefore guilty.

Yet I remember every time that Italian policemen, men or women who were, ended up in hospital because they were unable to manage a drunk or drugged immigrant who had gone into a rage. Those who at first glance seemed capable professionals (sic) were actually inept, only good at collecting broken noses and concussions. And all their colleagues whining because they didn't have the taser to use at will.

What a police of this type is for, a police that so easily mistake the people they are supposed to defend as an invading enemy and are instead weak and inept with ungrateful foreigners who dominate our streets?

To the man on his knees, who seems to me everything except a dangerous thug, and to all the others who were beaten up by an angry police on Saturday 9 October, I dedicate the poem that Primo Levi wrote in 1946, just survived Auschwitz:

You who live safe

in your warm homes,

you who find returning in the evening

hot food and friendly faces:

consider if this is a man

working in the mud

who knows no peace

struggling for half bread

who dies for a yes or a no.

Consider if this is a woman,

with no hair and no name

with no more strength to remember