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Giap/digest
#27 - The Fascists - 29 March 2005 0- Thank you + pieces of news |
0 Here's a new issue of Giap/digest. Better
late than never. First of all, we would like to thank all the people
who, after our call for help, volunteered translation work. The English
language section of our website is getting richer and this newsletter
might even reach you on a less irregular basis. Some texts are already
on line, some are being edited, some others are still being translated.
1
GETTING RID OF THE CONSTITUTION It is unprecedented that Italy celebrated
an important anniversary of her Liberation (on April 25 falls the sixteenth)
in such a climate of rehabilitation of fascism, its accomplices (the
Savoia royal dinasty, pope Pius XII° etc.), and its heirs. A hysterical
smear campaign against the Resistance is well under way by the Berlusconi
government and its lackeys. 2 THE FASCISTS by Wu Ming 1 I don't remember which sub-species they belonged to, the Youth Front, the United Front... If memory doesn't fail me it was a few days before the student election. The right-wing candidates ran under the name "Sturm und Drang" (we immediately renamed them "Strunz und Sprang", mock-German for "Stronzi e spranghe", Shitheads With Sticks), but the two groups might as well have nothing to do with each other. Someone had seen them before the raid, gathering at a bar in via Belle Arti which I'll call The Maybug. We decided to attack them as they were drinking coffee, make them feel the club between lip and cup (without any implied metaphor). Trouble was, they were waiting for us. They came out from under a scaffolding, wearing helmets and waving their sticks. We stopped across the street, we were not ready for that. I don't know why both groups froze, a few dozen yards from one another. On the scaffolding there was a hodman, he quietly climbed down, crossed the street... and gave us a spade-stick! Wow, thank you very much, brother! You're welcome, have a nice day. Feeling reassured by the people's solidarity, we ran back and unpaved a few square yards of via Zamboni. When we turned up again, the fascists were gone. There were only a few cops, and the bar was unprotected. We threw bricks at the window, just to make the day complete. The bar owner, I swear it, ran out and yelled: - Please, don't, you got it wrong, I'm not a right-winger, I used to give money to Prima Linea! [3] - What a baffling thing to hear. Not knowing what to do next, we called for a public meeting, like the Jewish revolutionaries in "Life of Brian". I have almost no memories of that meeting, the only sentence I remember is: - Fascists are neither a merely political problem nor a merely military problem. They are *both* a political and a military problem. - O what depths of wisdom! The day after some fascists placed a petition signing table at the gates of the Department of Law. We didn't know whether they were the same fellas or not, but, I mean, who cared? The White Room opened and out stepped fully armoured warriors. The newspapers had covered yesterday's racket, and we wanted to cut a fine figure. Woollen balaclavas (at the end of May!) and wooden clubs of various sizes. A fella even had a fire extinguisher, and another guy had made a rudimental flamethrower, using a spray-can and a lighter. Even the most bloodthirsty comrades looked at him as if he were a madman you don't want to contradict. We headed to Piazza Verdi, our Ok Corral. The street was blocked by a riot squad line, beyond which was the signing table. The fascists were down there, about two hundred yards away, nothing more than matchstick men. Between the helmets of the cops we saw raised arms, sticks (or were they rolled fly-posters?), and assholes wearing Ray Bans, although it might be a case of cognitive dissonance: fascists are supposed to wear Ray Bans, therefore we saw them. We were a bunch of clowns. One of the comrades started to explaining his view of the situation, waving his arms in the air, oblivious of the club he had in his hand. He accidentally hit another comrade in the nose. The poor guy had to be taken back to the White Room, blood sprayed all over his face. We hurt ourselves doing fuck all. There we stood with nothing going on when Luca, who's going to become Wu Ming 3, lifted a foot from the ground, pointed a finger at it and said: - I'm wearing these boots made at the Leoncavallo squatters' shop. The sole's coming unstuck, what'll I do if the coppers charge, uh? At that precise moment, the coppers did charge. As we were withdrawing, Luca's sole came apart, the rip started from the tip, it looked like a mouth opening to bite the pavement. Luca stumbled as a cop yelled to him: - You piece of shit! You fucking piece of shit! - Luca tried to protect his head with his arms and was repeatedly hit on them. His hands would remain swollen well into the night. The final body count: two injuries. One had been clubbed by mistake by a comrade, the other had been fucked by the Leoncavallo lace-up boots. Talk about fratricidal fighting in the Left. The day after, the local section of L'Unità newspaper published a picture of us fully armored, it looked like the Carnival of Cento, we were absolutely ludicrous. The caption said: "Autonomia lined up in via Zamboni". Big deal. A few months later, at dead of night, the fascists were caught sticking up flyposters. That time, they got beat up with no fanfares. A quiet, discreet thing. What were we talking about? Oh, yeah, the fascists are closer, sewer cleaning, septik tanks, etc. I just wanted to say this: the fascists are not vague flickerings of Ray Bans anymore. They are no longer either the blokes you chase off or those you're chased off by, and sometimes you brawl with each other and they put out a knife or something like that but it's as if they live in another world, like the aliens in those 1970's Japanese cartoons. I don't know how to explain it, but it's like they're really *too close* now, and they're loathsome in a way you can't imagine. Maybe it was that bullshit on the "foibe" which pissed me off, maybe all those squats burned down by the nazis, maybe this or maybe that, but the situation is dreadful. Oh, I forgot to tell you: the guy, the aviator, was downed by the Brits in 1944. How come he's listed on a fascist website (the "Amici della Folgore") as a victim of post-war 'communist rough justice', as though he'd been killed by underground cells of former partisans? Did they mistake Winston Churchill's RAF for Ulrike Meinhof's one? Who knows. Anyway, it is a good example of how reliable these "lists of victims" are. And it's nothing compared with the "foibe" scam, but that's another story. TRANSLATOR'S NOTES 3
Wu Ming interviewed by "Cem Mondialita' - magazine of multicultural education", November 2004 Translated by Manola Q. The experience of Luther Blissett, your precursor, was based on mockery and guerrilla warfare against the media. You adapted a slogan by Sun Tzu (author of "The art of war"): "You can act within the media only fighting fire with fire". Do you still adhere to this concept? A. We never created theories on the media or philosophies regarding the media. We simply and practically criticised it and the way it works. Quite obviously, we did it through the media itself. None of our contemporaries lives outside of the media landscape. Society wouldn’t even exist without the information reported in the media (either of the old or new kind). To act within the media is not only possible: it’s also inevitable. The system is systemic, in fact: we live inside it, it engulfs us, it in-forms us. A strategy of resistance and counter-attack must aim at deepening the crisis in the relationships between the informers and the informed, producers and consumers, top and bottom, broadcasters and receivers. All these dichotomies are on the verge of extinction thanks to new technologies, new behaviours, new tools and new spatial-temporal dimensions. Not to mention blogs, peer-to-peer networks and sms used for organising spontaneous demonstrations. More often than not it happens that a piece of top-down information gets lost along the way, gets torn or twisted or misinterpreted and goes back to the sender failing to accomplish its task, or even achieving the opposite. Many people and communities are now working in order to decode, disavow, demystify and discredit this kind of information. Moreover, all this is happening in the media realm, not in any imaginary "outside". Q. Luther Blissett used to have a name and a face (even if virtual and mischievous). Wu Ming lost them both (quoting from your home page "this revolution is faceless"). What’s the meaning behind the purpose of ending Luther Blissett’s experience, not to mention the ritual suicide? A. Actually, Wu Ming *has* a name: "Wu Ming". Wu Ming is the name of a five-member band as "The Beatles" was the name of a four-member band. Wu Ming has got five faces, because people have faces. What has no face is the anthropological revolution taking place nowadays (we’ve just mentioned some examples). This is to say that it isn’t ruled by any star, leader or celebrity. Luther Blissett represents the eventual anthropomorphism of this process. He used to be the folk hero; he was everybody and nobody, the one who embodies everyone’s desires and aspirations. Anyone can be Luther Blissett, the imaginary folk hero of the Internet era, simply using his name to move into action. We did it for five years then we stopped, but his name is still used in the Net, in many countries like Spain and Brazil…It’s *our* experience which has stopped. We've been the pioneers, the veterans in the use of this name. It had been planned since the beginning, in fact it was a five-year plan. Q. "Anything is a story and stories belong to everyone", you said. Our magazine supports the need of a "narrative pedagogy", thus we feel complete empathy with your statement. Does it make sense to speak of a "narrative turning point" in your experience? And if so, which means do you intend to develop it with? Do you think it could have a pedagogical or educational impact? A. Even in the Luther Blissett days we created and told stories. The difference is that, at that time, we used to tell them on the streets, on the stage of the world, in order to smuggle them into the media: poisoned scoops devoured by journalists as if they were forbidden fruits which would eventually rack their stomachs and intestines with painful cramps. Our faked plots had a huge amount of characters and actors who were mainly unaware of it. So, we’ve always been story-tellers, but the means used to be different. Today we focus on a more specific narrative dimension and it’s our job. We think of ourselves as story-tellers. Narrating has always had an educational value (or a misleading one, depending on the point of view): an anti-racist person considers educative what a racist one sees as completely misleading, and so on…). We all educate (or mislead) our neighbours and ourselves twenty four hours a day through stories told on a train, at a bar, at school, in front of the office coffee-machine, on stadium terraces, in parish recreation centres. People’s lives wouldn’t be the same without the stories, anecdotes, gossip, jokes, tales, and recollections we tell one another everyday. Story-telling is the prime and primordial social act of human beings. Q. "A story-teller is someone who tells stories and re-elaborates myths, i.e. stories with symbolic referents shared - or at least known, or even put into question - by a community". This is the outset of the Preamble of your *Declaration of rights (and duties) of story-tellers*. In which way myths and symbolic references affected your experience? A. They affect everyone’s lives, not only ours. Same concept mentioned above: there’s no society without legend-making, there’s no community without symbolic references. There’s a popular, but incorrect, way of saying: "It has only symbolic value". "Only" is utterly inappropriate because any symbolic reference has an immense value which often goes beyond its use-value and exchange-value. Take the peace flag, for instance, it doesn’t protect you from missiles or bombs (it's only acrylic fabric, it doesn’t fend off blows), nor a prisoner’s hunger strike physically affects the jailer (the jailer’s forced fast eventually would), and yet we hang peace flags out of our windows, and people go on hunger strike. This kind of actions have symbolic effects, they mean to undermine consensus, to create feelings of shame, to highlight inconvenient attitudes, to draw people’s attention to a possible need of social sanctioning. They can have a material effect. A storyteller’s work consists of constantly exploring the symbolic dimension, understanding and helping other people to understand its function, creating stories that can startle people and bring symbols to life. Q. The title of our dossier ("The art of appearing") aims at being discussed, questioned. (Is appearance a trick? Or the ultimate truth? Is disappearance an art in this world of appearances? To disappear in order to stand out? ) What’s your opinion about this dichotomy Appear/Disappear? A. "Transparent towards the readers, opaque towards the media". We are always *present* but do not *appear*. We don’t go on tv and, when possible, tend to avoid having our pictures taken. The natural place of a story-teller is seated in a circle with his or her listeners. Nowadays, paradoxically, your public image is an obstacle between your story and your public. Authors are marketed, their stories seem less important than their faces. The star is the real commodity, not the book or the movie. All this might have reasons to exist from a commercial point of view, but it’s not the kind of relationship we’re interested in.> Q. Could you synthetically explain your collective writing experience? How did you organise yourselves while writing, for example, "Q"? Do you receive external help from collaborators? A. Any writer receives external help from collaborators who are often unaware of it. No writer, no human being actually, can abstract himself or herself from the rest of the world. An isolated story-teller would have no story to tell. We are links to a huge net, the human species’ net. It comprises the living, the dead, and the yet-to-be-born. We authors simply receive, elaborate, and then spread their messages. In any book you can find, for instance, what the author heard on TV, the phone s/he received, recollections of his/her mother, the very first love, the most embarrassing situation, the caricature of someone the author can’t stand at all and so on. A writer is like a sponge, all you have to do is squeeze it. In our case, of course, it implies certain methods, but we keep on changing them, sometimes radically, depending on the book. It can depend on the story we want to tell, on the sources we rely on, on the time we have, on the presence or absence of any of us and on the implements used. Methods can be very different if you’re doing your research with the help of a recorder or by consulting microfilms. Moreover, when it comes down to sharing duties, we have no rule. None of us have a specific duty, it’s an open and interchangeable type of work. Q. Recently, you’ve collaborated on a movie with Guido Chiesa, "Lavorare con lentezza", and promoted a book of Girolamo De Michele (whom you’ve discovered) "Tre uomini paradossali". They both try to observe, from different points of view, the ’77 Italian movement. The ‘77 insurgence has been subterraneously "working" inside Italian social history along the years. Do you think it's still a powerful, moving legend? A. Cum grano salis, definitely yes. The problems the ‘77 insurgence faced are the same ones we are facing nowadays. Superficially, the two periods have many things in common: there was an energetic crisis as there is now, actually the one we’re living these days is much worse because it's 100% structural while in 1977 it was due to the economic situation. Close your eyes and petrol's gone forever. There was stagflation as there is now - but nobody admits it because the capitalistic economy hasn’t the means to solve stagflation. At that time the key word was austerity, nowadays an economical decrease is needed, as some bright-minded economists claim. In 1977 mobs of kids used to go to gigs without paying, today they download music from the Net because CDs are too expensive and so on… we wonder if we’ve answered the question. |
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