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Rating: "The police kids whom you, out of sacred hooliganism (of the noble Risorgimento tradition) of spoiled brats, have beaten, belong to the other social class. In Valle Giulia, there was a fragment of class struggle: and you, friends (although on the side of reason) were the rich, while the police (who were on the wrong side) were the poor. What a victory, then, yours! In such cases, you give flowers to the police, friends, "Popolo" and "Corriere della sera", "Newsweek", and "Monde" kiss your ass."
P.P. Pasolini, "Spoiled Brat Students... I am with the Police", in Nuovi Argomenti, n.10, April-June 1968
Eight years ago, the "G8 clashes" took place in Genoa, with several people injured among the citizens gathered to protest, sometimes peacefully, and the same law enforcement officers present in the city to ensure the proper conduct of the demonstration, as well as the unfortunate death of young Carlo Giuliani, hit by a shot fired by a young carabiniere as he was throwing a fire extinguisher towards an Army van.
With this review, I obviously do not want to revisit the "Genoa events", well known to everyone and amply disclosed in print and online, but to analyze a recent documentary that reconstructs those events in a not entirely partial way and, in my humble opinion, not always correctly from a strictly historiographical perspective: the title of the documentary is "G8: Make a Coup and Get Away with It" by Enrico Deaglio, already in "Lotta continua", Beppe Cremagnani and Mario Portanova.
The thesis of the documentary is, in fact, simple and fully explained by a title that leaves no doubt in the viewer: in Genoa, the police forces were sent not as guardians of legality, public order, and the same freedom of peaceful demonstration by the attendees, but solely to practice systematic violence against the gathered civil society which, for the most part, identified with center-left positions, limiting with violence and abuse the free carrying out of protests against the G8.
The fact that police officers and some of their top representatives, as well as the then Minister of the Interior, were present in Genoa during the G8 would indicate that the military did not act – nor could they have acted – autonomously or randomly, but carried out acts of repeated aggression against protesters based on a more organic plan with a recognizable political matrix.
The whole documentary moves from this thesis, and the interviews, editing, and testimonies rendered are treated by the authors in the perspective of supporting this idea: the idea that in 2001, in Italy, a political party and law enforcement organized at the expense of the community an authoritarian plan, the general tests of which were held, according to the authors, right during the Genoa G8.
The thesis, in a democratic and open-to-dialogue country, is respectable and must be defended as an act of free expression of thought, but I do not find it convincing, seeing in it more than anything else a suggestion and an unproven speculation, probably tainted by the horror and indignation with which the documentarians assess the G8 events. Horror and indignation that can be well understood – just review some of the photographic reports of the event on the internet, not least the dramatic images of poor Giuliani's death – but which perhaps lead to rushed conclusions about the affair, ultimately making broad generalizations.
Certainly, the police exceeded during the Genoa G8 in acting or reacting against protesters, hitting in some cases even totally innocent and harmless subjects. Such actions constitute a crime, and it is up to the Judiciary to ascertain their elements and punish the guilty, as occurred in the same "Giuliani case." Thus, one must defer to the judgments of the Courts for a balanced assessment of what happened, with no concessions for representatives of the police who, overstepping their mandate, used illegal or disproportionate means against protesters for the purposes pursued.
At the same time, it is necessary to recognize the state of extreme pressure and tension to which military personnel, not always prepared to face situations of urban warfare in a country like Italy — where such situations occur periodically only in stadiums, there being no longer, since '77, mass demonstrations of scale comparable to the Genoa G8, nor daily experiences of anti-riot actions easily replicable in the Ligurian capital that far away 2001.
Furthermore, it should be recognized that part of the protesters did not arrive in Genoa entirely peacefully and harmless, as they too wanted to engage in skirmishes with law enforcement, sparking small outbreaks of protest and revolt: the reaction, perhaps marred by unpreparedness or fears of the same law enforcement, might thus have been disproportionate but subjectively justified by a state of presumptive and assumed fear.
But even setting aside these observations, it seems to me that the documentarians' thesis intends to prove "too much" in this case: that is, that episodes of violence were the symptom of a deeper subversive design, whose armed wing was represented by the police by implicit mandate of a political party.
Thus, the suspicions cyclically spread arise against the soldiers towards the Army and other bodies (most recently the Forest Guard) starting from the early '60s, bringing shadows of coup or authoritarianism against military leadership and reference politicians, shadows that did not spare, in the tumultuous '70s, even recognized heroes like Gen. Dalla Chiesa or, in a lesser key, Commissioner Calabresi.
In my view, it seeks to prove too much, because even admitting that a "design" did exist, it does not seem that it led to any authoritarian turn in our country in the subsequent five-year period 2001-2006, and how the role of the Armed Forces themselves was, over recent years, entirely physiological in the life of the Republic, without significant discontinuity compared to the past.
No coup plot seems to have developed in Italy, considering also the trend of free elections in 2001, 2006, 2008 was not marked by democratic anomalies but was characterized by full alternation between center-right and center-left forces, which have moreover confirmed without solutions of continuity their respective confidence in the Armed Forces and their leaders.
The G8 episodes should thus be relegated to criminal records, raising, of course, doubts about the advisability of a more effective training of the Armed Forces in facing street demonstrations and a better coordination of means and people employed in such places, resorting to less harmful means than batons or anti-riot tools, or even firearms, with the usual tools used outside stadiums (dogs, tear gas, water cannons) being sufficient.
The events should open more serious debates even on the left: verifying the advisability of confusing the demonstrations of thought by the moderate fringe of the electorate, often representing civil society with no violent or seditious attitude, with the more extreme bodies of the so-called "no-global movement", characterized by more aggressive and potentially harmful behaviors to public order, against whom law enforcement reactions are more probable and, at times, necessary.
Extreme fringes that should be isolated by the left itself or, alternatively, integrated into the democratic circuit through inclusive actions that lead the "no-global" movement to engage with the rest of society on the plane of political-administrative debate and not only on the level of mere ideological confrontation, unproductive and sectarian, as well as often uninformed and a priori, if not even self-referential.
This should probably be the objective of the center-left intelligences, in analogy to what happened in the early '80s by PCI of Berlinguer and PSI of Craxi, which brought the extreme fringes of the left back into the democratic arena, as in the paradigmatic case of "Lotta Continua" itself by Sofri and Deaglio, who joined in the early '80s the PSI of the Milanese statesman after spending the '70s on decidedly more extreme positions and leading to significant judicial complications.
In conclusion, I believe that the focal point of the Genoa G8 should not be identified in an attempted coup by the Armed Forces or a political party, but in the tragic awareness that in those protests a fracture between various parts of the country was felt, a conflict among citizens similar to that of the mid-'70s that none of us would want to see again, as it is far preferable to witness peaceful demonstrations or rational and content-rich forms of dissent rather than mere slogans or assaults on law enforcement, and police actions focused on the repression of different forms of crime and wrongdoing rather than the expression of thought by civil society.
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