Fanart100

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James Potter

( Fanart100 | James Potter | Table of Prompts )

oh, damn.

I'm so late. Tons of things I should be doing. Damn damn damn. All right, I'll suppose I should just get back and actually WORK. *sigh*


Let me say something first, though. Actually, I should have posted this the last 2 November, but well, better late than never. I'm not exactly proud of being Italian. Italy is a beautiful place to come and visit, but it's becoming less and less a place one can live in. It's just - we're this big, awful joke, which is funny only in a very bitter kind of way. I'm not going into the details, but really, it's not exactly something you might want to know. Still, it's good to know that there are people who still get angry, who refuse to take whatever shit others want to feed them. It makes me believe that things can change. And, well, thirty years ago died one of those people. This is my way of remembering him.

I know.

I know the names of those responsible for what has been called a coup (and what was in fact a series of coups set up as a power protection system).

I know the names of those responsible for the bloodbath of Milan on December 12th 1969.

I know the names of those responsible for the atrocities of Brescia and Bologna in the early months of 1974.

I know the names at the "top", those who manipulated the old fascist coup organisers, the neo-fascist authors of the early massacres and the "unknown" authors of the more recent attacks.

I know who is behind the two different, indeed opposite, phases of tension: the initial anti-Communist phase (Milan 1969), and the second anti-Fascist phase (Brescia and Bologna 1974).

I know the names of the powers-that-be who, with the help of the CIA (and of Greek Colonels and the Mafia), first tried to launch an anti-Communist crusade (which failed miserably) and stop the 1968 momentum, and then, again with the help and inspiration of the CIA, tried to claim for themselves an anti-fascist virginity to somehow help pick up the pieces from the disaster of the referendum.

I know the names of those who, between one church Mass and another, have given orders to, and guaranteed the political protection of, old Generals (kept in reserve, ready for a coup d'état), of young neo-fascists, or rather neo-nazis (to create a real base of anti-Communist tension) and lastly of common criminals, whose names are as yet, and may always be, unknown (to create the subsequent anti-fascist tension).

I know the names of the serious and important people who are behind such comic characters as the General of the Forestry Commission who worked, albeit somewhat theatrically, at Città Ducale (while the forests went up in flames) or behind the greyish, purely organisational characters, such as General Miceli.

I know the names of the serious and important people who are behind those tragic youths who have opted for suicidal fascist atrocities, and the common criminals, Sicilian or not, who have declared themselves available for murder and assassination.

I know all the names and I know what they are guilty of (attacks on institutions and public bloodbaths).

I know. But I have no proof.

Not one evidence.

I know because I am an intellectual, a writer, who tries to follow what is happening, to read everything that is written about it, to imagine things nobody admits to knowing, or things that are left unsaid; who links even distant facts, who puts together the shattered and scrambled pieces of a whole, coherent political picture that puts logic back where arbitrariness, madness and mystery seem to reign.

All this belongs to my profession and to the instinct of my profession. I think it unlikely that my "plan of a novel" is wrong, that it doesn't correspond to reality, and that its reference to true facts and real people is inaccurate. I also think that many other intellectuals and storytellers know what I know as an intellectual and a storyteller. After all, it's not so difficult to reconstruct the truth about what has been happening in Italy since 1968.

Pier Paolo Pasolini, Il romanzo delle stragi
published on "Corriere della Sera", November 14th 1975

Translation from here;

The original (and full) text is here.