Aready at 7.00 in the morning groups wandered the streets around our house draped in their rainbow flags proclaiming a commitment to 'peace'. As the morning progressed it became evident that what had been heralded at the biggest demonstration in the world against war in Iraq would rather be a thronging, an occupation, an inundation of the city by millions. One did not have the impression of being at a 'political' event, but rather a strange sociological experiment, perhaps akin to the mass mourning for Princess Diana. Thousands of buses and special trains converegd on Rome from all over the country and from the windows of almost every condiminium hund banners and flags. Somewhat vexed, as ever, by consensus, I decided that the Florence- Hub slogan "Stop the World - Another War is Possible!"was more appropriate. My housemate instead opted for the tried and tested appeal to universalism: "Every day they trample on our rights, let's not let them take our right to live - Peace!".
Children peppered the participants, strange visibility in a country where the average age is now over 38, numerous nuns and priests - interestingly almost none of them white europeans - responded to the exhortations. The communists were there of course, the counterculture of the social centres in ritual black garb, stray American citizens pronounced their opposition to the Caligula's USA in speech, placards and banners.
Curious bedpartners abounded. At one point in the demonstration a large red and black banner bearing a slogan if favour of drug decriminalisation advanced in step with the stabdard of the local administration of Spoletto - anarchists and municipalists together at last! Nearby, just off the Piazza del Cinquecento a group with a pink banner anxiously pressed leaflets into the hands of passersby. Big deal? A cursory examination revealed them as none other than the Raelian Movement, masters of human cloning hoaxes and specialist in the creation of media surplus value....
Elsewhere I read that they had in fact also been present in Florence, but the lesson I drew was that something has snapped in the air, in long neglected corners of the human mind, and its resurrection attracts every band of monstrous philosophers extant.
Just around the corner another spectacle was in course: the Campo Anti-Imperialista, a marxist-leninist group of the old stripe and surprisingly young adherents, marched with quasi-military step wielding a massive banner that stated:
God Smash America!
(Hard on atheism!) My arrival was perfectly timed as the announced that they would now present the national colours of Iraq! What a thrill! Each of their perfectly presented militants - impeccably presented with yellow construction hat and equipped with a sort of wooden club - be prepared! - held an emergency flare and their precise choreography achieved the desired affect to the delight of photographers present, some of who approached these hardened revolutionaries to take their portraits. Cheekbones remained taut in defiance as the semiotic gift was conveyed to the media - good work, comrades!
Our friends from Forte Prensetino arrived shortly thereafter to return some carnivalesque defiance to the day, mostly thanks to the hordes of youthful ravers mustered behind their truck-platform. By the time that we reached Santa Maria Maggiore - almost a mile from the designated destination of San Giovannni in Laterano - the crowd was backed up so far that further advance was impossible. Weary bums were rested on the curb, beer bottle-tops popped open, spliffs ignited and torsos heaved to the audio fugue.
Back in the neighbourhood the mechanic and sculptor who lives downstairs confronted me on my return: why did we have these things hanging from our windows, who did we think we were demonstrating against etc. Despite my exhaustion I braced myself for one last outburst, but it took only the mention of our beloved Prime Minister's name, 'Berlusconi', for him to tun on his heels and walk off leaving me in mid-sentence! Pissed off perhaps? My point is that despite the jamboree quality and the superficial consensus of last weekend, there are still plenty of people supportive of the murderous political class or at least acquiescent or apathetic to their schemes.
What struck me politically was the inability of the radical edges to act significantly within the context of these mass mobilzations, similar to our experience in Florence. The political parties and historical civil-society actors are searching to grasp once again the collective desire to exert control over the social and political environment, to recuperate it, and the World Soicial Forum is just one example of the models they are using to successfully achieve this. Challenges on this scale put into perspective the sniping between different radical factions and pose once again the problems of representation. How can practices of self-organisation proliferate?
Anyhow, enough. In many ways I'd rather have been in Dublin - having never seen 100,000 demonstrate in my hometown - or in NYC - where moments of collective action are more special for their rarity and anti-war sentiment has a different reasonance in the shadow of September 11.
Not a bad day, a strange day but not a bad one. The vast nature of the 'demonstration' will have an effect on Don Berlusconi - if only for its value as focus group -
but Italy ultimately is only the bit player in this bad movie. Caligula has abandoned Rome and now sits in Washington DC, directing this grotesque performance.
Neither their war nor their peace.
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"It was a sinful union. A goddamned fallen angel. It was a sin to lay down with the past. Those who lie with the past die, they grow old. The fall in love with their yesterdays and stay there forever, petrified, congealed, powerless to return."
PIT II
Frontera Dreams, 94.
Then quite unobtrusively, an event of fundamental significance for his future occurred. The USSR, which they'd begun to renopvate and improve at about the time Tatarksy decided to change his profession, improved so much that it ceased to exist (if a state is capable of entering Nirvana, that's what must have happened in this case)......
Victor Pelevin, Babylon, p.3
