Démocratie Réelle Maintenant des Indignés de Nîmes

Public assembly in Terracina

Internal assembly in Terracina

Sperlonga, January 30

Dear people,

This morning the mayor offered breakfast to all of us in the bar of the cathedral square. It was the perfect closure of our two day stay in Terracina.

Yesterday we held another popular assembly, something which the marchers hardly ever did before arriving in Rome. In this sense, the march is gaining more political meaning. Two of the locals who attended were activists of the ‘Five Star Movement’, which bears a lot of similarity with the movement of the indignados.

The Five Star Movement was inspired by Italian comedian Beppe Grillo, who has been mocking politics and politicians left and right for years in his live shows and on his daily blog. The way he exposes politicians and their petty corruption is hilareous, but for him it’s only a way to express his indignation, and that of many other people.

The cats of Terracina

He famously predicted the collapse of Parmalat, a couple of years ago. Before becoming a comedian he was an accountant, and as such he already knew that the company was going down. After it happened he received a visit by the Guardia di Finanza. They wanted to know how he knew.

“Simply by looking at the numbers.” Everybody who wanted to know, could see it coming. But obviously no-one wanted to know.

In between one joke and another, Grillo speaks of all the existing alternatives which could turn our society into a sustainable one. He presented a hydrogen-car in one of his shows, and he spoke about the cannabis car which was developed by Henry Ford in the 1930s. ‘Don’t you think it’s amazing? This car is completely sustainable. It’s made from cannabis, and it goes on cannabis oil. And when it’s broke, you don’t throw it away. You just smoke it!’

Grillo and his ‘proto-indignados’ have organised various ‘V-day’s’ (Vaffanculo, or: Fuck off! days), directed against all politicians with a criminal record in public functions, and against Italian political culture in general. Two years ago he gave life to his own five star political movement.

The movement is locally based and horizontal. It connects people through the internet. The political program is created by the citizens, who bring in proposals and vote on it. The five stars represent transport, development, connectability, environment and publically owned water.

A handful of local councillor’s got elected in traditionally leftist cities like Bologna and Reggio Emilia. Their job is to promote the program that was decided on by the citizens. It’s a first attempt to turn popular indignation into e-democracy.

So this morning after breakfast we walk. When you leave the gates of Terracina, you can already see the houses of Sperlonga growing from the hills, fifteen kilometres down the coast. Most people take the road, I take a wonderful walk, all the way over the desolate beach.

The gate of Terracina

One of the ugliest aspects of Italian tourism is the privatisation of the beaches. In summertime, each of the beach resorts puts up colourful batallions of beach chairs which you are supposed to rent at crazy prices. The remaining public beaches are often small, dirty pieces of sand. So maybe this summer it would be a good idea to camp here, to make fire, and reclaim all of the beaches for the people…

The rock of Terracina

Sperlonga

Sperlonga is the kind of town you see in the drawings of Maurits Cornelis Escher. White houses one on top of the other, stairs, balconies, gates and angles. And cats. This is the typical town for cats. We camp as always on the central square. The view is fabulous, but not everyone is able to enjoy it. Two of the marchers were shocked today when a car pulled up and someone stepped out wielding a Kalashnikov.

The Italians in our march try to give an explanation to what happened. “It was a warning. We left the territory of the fascists. Now we have entered the territory of the mafia.”

To be exact, this is territory of the camorra, the neapolitan mafia. But I don’t think we have anything to fear, as long as they don’t have anything to fear from us.

My tent in Sperlonga

Day 81-VII, from Sezze to Pontinia, 14 km.

Camping in the station of Sezze

Pontinia, January 27

Dear people,

We have finally descended into the former Pontine swamps, and after a short stroll through the polder we arrived in the new town of Pontinia.

It’s interesting. For me it’s like walking through Pompeii. The fascist era has lasted little over twenty years and it has left various architectonical testimonies. The most famous are probably the railway station Santa Maria Novella in Florence, the Sapienza university in Rome, and most of all the E.U.R. quarter of the capital, built for the world exposition of 1942 which was supposed to celebrate 20 years of fascism, but which was never held because of the war. Many architectural remains are big neo-roman marbles, square and ugly. But here in Pontinia there is something more. This place gives you an idea of fascist city planning.

Former Pontine swamps and the Lepine hills

The town was founded in 1935, the third of the new towns in this area. Obviously it’s inspired by the straight city grids of the ancient Roman towns, but it has its own peculiarities.

There are two main roads. The North-South axis is the ‘civil’ road, dominated by the town hall on the south side. The East-West axis is the ‘religious’ road, dominated by the church on the west side. The two don’t cross in the middle. They cross on the central square in front of the town hall, and their angulations are exact. When I arrived today at noon, the sun was directly behind the tower of the town hall.

The marble sign on the façade is still the original one. It proudly tells how this town was founded when the country was under ‘economical siege’ by the rest of the world, which ‘owed so much to Italy’ in terms of civilization.

In 1935 Italy had invaded the ancient christian empire of Abessinia, modern day Ethiopia, one of only two independent nations in Africa. The fascists wanted their ‘rightful place under the sun’. So they came to bring ‘civilization to the negroes’, and they did so with bombers and poison gas. The League of Nations, whose member states had colonised almost the entire remainder of the continent at the time, hypocritically imposed economical sanctions on Italy. It was oil on the fire of Italian nationalism. Mussolini’s economical philosophy was based on national self sufficiency, and the economic sanctions would prove that Italy could do without the rest of the world.

In retrospect, it was the high point of Italian fascism. When Ethiopia was conquered the Italian king was proclaimed emperor of Abessinia, and Mussolini’s voice over the radio could proudly declare that the empire was restored an that Italians “from the Alps to the Indian Ocean” were united by a single battle cry. “Duce!”

After that, Mussolini came under increasing influence of Hitler, and in 1938 the axis Rome-Berlin was formed. When war broke out, fascism fell apart like a house of straw. The Italian war effort was a joke. Mussolini’s legions were beaten on all fronts, even by the Greeks.

In front of the phallic church

What’s left are towns like this, where some of the very old people on the square still remember those days with a melancholic smile. But in the Italian psyche fascism is still alive. Not as a kind of hereditary sin, like nazism in Germany. It’s alive in the sense that many people still believe in it, and many more people still fear it and feel the need to fight it.

It’s crazy. Fascism, just like communism, was a product of its time. Now it’s dead and buried. It will never come back. But because people are still obsessed by it, they don’t see that there are different, but equally dangerous ideologies which have taken its place, and which need to be resisted, right here, right now. In particular berlusconism, the mixture of populism, disrespect for the rule of law, and the celebration of cultural trash, which has slowly poisoned Italian society for twenty years running.

Fascism ended with a country in ruins. Berlusconism on the other end didn’t end when Berlusconi (temporarily) stepped down. It has become part of Italian daily life, but as long as Italians are more concerned with the phantoms of their past, they won’t be able to address the phantoms of their present.

Assembly in Pontinia