30 March 2010

Passaparola Monday 29 March

Text:
Good day to you all. We are not going to talk about the elections obviously, because we don’t know how they have gone, even though more or less we can forecast how things have gone apart from a couple of regions that are in a precarious position.

Raid on Sky
Instead, let’s talk about a topic that I believe is becoming important, namely the role of the police forces in our democracy. As you know, things are coming out all the time, cases of people who have been beaten up after being stopped, after being arrested. We know the names of some of them, as in the case of Uva, of Aldrovandi, and many other cases whose stories have been told, in the last few years, the last few months that indicate a dangerous increase in the violence carried out by those who instead should be suppressing or containing violence or using it for institutional reasons.
Just recently we have had the overturning at Appeal of the first level verdicts and in part giving absolution for the torture and the violent acts in Bolzaneto at the G8 in 2001, with the convictions and either prison sentences or obligation to pay compensation in the case of the crimes that were timed out due to the Statute if Limitations by some dozens of officers of the police force or the prison forces and in recent days we have had indications about people who were picked up during the demonstrations, just because they were expressing their thoughts by talking, shouting, waving banners, placards and it’s not known for what reason they have to be identified or even taken away. There are even people who are summoned by the police at the same time as there are Centre Right demonstrations in such a way that it is sure that they are at the Questura or at the Police station and that they don’t go to the Centre Right demonstrations. These are not things that can be done, even though, unfortunately, they are being done all the same.
From this point of view, it’s not so worrying that these things happen, given that in every set of people there are some “bad apples”. I personally start from the point of view that the Police forces are right, that the Carabinieri are right, that the magistrates are right. When it’s a matter of “cops and robbers” I am on the side of the “cops”, until there’s evidence to the contrary. Unfortunately, in recent days, evidence to the contrary is coming in and not only in amazing cases, like that of Cucchi, but also in other less well known cases and in cases that are not talked about so much.
For example, yesterday I happened to tell the story that was told to me by some eye witnesses, that happened in the Sky building in Via Salaria in Rome on Friday, when Berlusconi arrived with the usual escort armed to the teeth and this is right, the escort of the President of the Council is something really necessary. He went to the Sky building for a live interview that the newspapers then talked about. Few people saw it live even though it was very well publicised. I think there were 50 thousand TV viewers and thus a media share , a very poor share of 0.3% on RAI for a night. The broadcasting event of Thursday evening at the Paladozza put together by Michele Santoro on Sky got 2.5%, whereas Berlusconi got 0.3%.
Berlusconi went in with his followers, with his escort and with the whole caboodle and meanwhile what was happening in the building was something else like the RAI Director General, Masi, would say: “not even in Zimbabwe!”
Two men of the building’s internal security staff, discovered that in the graphics department, on a great big four metres by four glass wall, an A4 sheet of white paper had been attached with a saying printed on it. What was printed was: “Odiare i mascalzoni è cosa nobile” {to hate the scoundrels is something noble} this is one of the sayings of Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, an intellectual born in 35 AD in Calagurris in Spain, later moving to Rome and he became the really famous Quintilian. It was he that wrote this. Why was it printed out and stuck up on that glass wall in the Sky graphics department? Because Daniele Luttazzi on Thursday evening, the day before, in the Paladozza, in her monologue, had recalled this saying and with a single phrase from Quintilian, she demolished months and months of bullshit about the party of hate, of love, the ones that incite to hatred and so on. She said what I personally think and that I had said after the throwing of the souvenir at the face of the President of the Council, that anyway that guy was mad and that he’s nothing to do with hatred, but in any case even if a person in his own home wants to hate, he’s absolutely free to hate whom he likes. What’s important is that the hate doesn’t get transformed into acts of violence.
Thus two young people in the graphics department in the Sky building found that they wanted to share this phrase and they had stuck it up. The men of the building’s security staff, the internal security, took note of that wording and they told the presidential guard, the escort of the President of the Council and at that point something happened that for a democracy is at the limits of the incredible, in fact beyond the limits. Two broad-shouldered officers of the Digos {Division of General Investigations and Special Operations}, two human mountains, landed on that floor where there is this glass wall, they noted that there really was this sheet of paper with this wording attached there. They closed all the windows so that people outside couldn’t see what they were doing inside, evidently realizing that they were doing something big. After that, one of the two, after having sequestered the “evidence”, the piece of paper, moved towards the main computer. He started to operate on the keyboard. He tried to open the last files that had been opened to try and corner, to identify the person who had written and printed out that wording, but unfortunately for him, the graphic designers don’t use a mouse, they use a graphics tablet and this officer didn’t know how to use it, so he asked a young woman to help him to open the last used files in an attempt to discover the authors of this horrendous misdeed, without knowing that anyway the two young men had already been taken down below, to the entrance and were being interrogated by another pair of Digos officers and that they had immediately declared, given that they had nothing to hide, that they had printed out and stuck up this wording.
At that point they were identified and it seems they were about to be taken to the Questura. I don’t know if it was a procedure of “stop”, or what they would have wanted to do to these two young men, above all what crime they were meant to have committed, “sticking up a saying of Quintilian”, “using prohibited Latin citations”, “unauthorised carrying of Latin culture”, it’s not known what the crime is that these donkeys had identified for the crime-filled behaviour that is according to me absolutely legitimate and in fact to be done. Anyway it happened that someone from the company’s legal office intervened and he managed at least, to prevent these people being taken away by the Police.
Quintilian however has not yet been found. But they are looking for him with the dog unit, and with road blocks so they have not lost hope of being able to grab this leader of this gang of terrorists that is settling in, in the graphics department of the Sky building.
Do you see that you get to these extremes, to punish ideas, to punish culture, only because with an excess of zeal, worthy of the best causes, as soon as they read “Odiare i mascalzoni è cosa nobile” they immediately thought of Berlusconi, and yet it did not say “hate Berlusconi” but it said “hate scoundrels”. We would need to interrogate the private police officers and the Digos officers and say to them: “How is it that you immediately thought of Berlusconi when you read that message, given that it’s unlikely that Quintilian, in the first century after Christ, was referring to Berlusconi when he wrote “odiare i mascalzoni è cosa nobile”? If you skip over these things, if there is no one who takes the responsibility for what happened, if this item of news remains marginalised in the pages of “Il Fatto quotidiano” or on our blogs, if no one starts to ask very politely for an account of the episode from the Rome Questura about the behaviour of these officers and if the Rome magistracy does not take action against these gentlemen, and if their own colleagues don’t start saying: certain types of behaviour have nothing to do with us, it will mean that we have taken another step forward towards the “regime” on Friday afternoon at 2:30pm, when this incredible fact took place and a police officer went into the PC of a worker to try to find out who stuck up on a wall a message from a Latin author. If we madly let these things go by, we get used to them and the inurement makes another piece of the “regime” get into our heads and thus it makes us ever more willing to tolerate new episodes of abuse of power, because this is clearly an abuse of power, as big as a house, to the detriment of two citizens who have done absolutely nothing wrong, having exercised a constitutional right laid down in article 21 of the Constitution.

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Posted by Antonio Di Pietro in Information