Nicola Tommasoli: A Death in Verona

Five held for Italy gang killing
BBC
May 6, 2008

Italian police have arrested the last of five suspects accused of beating a man to death in the city of Verona because he refused them a cigarette. Police say the suspects have links to a far-right [bonehead] group. The victim, 29-year-old Nicola Tommasoli, has been declared clinically dead. He had been in a coma since the attack in the northern city on 1 May. Two of the gang had fled to London, but were arrested when they returned on Monday, a day after the other arrests. The attack happened in the centre of Verona, whose mayor Flavio Tosi belongs to the right-wing, anti-immigration Northern League. Mayor Tosi dismissed any far-right motive for the crime. “Verona is not a city of neo-Fascists and it does not deserve this shameful label because of the actions of a few hooligans,” he said. The five are believed to be neo-Nazi hard core fans of the local football team, Hellas Verona.

See also : The Forgotten Scandal of Serie A, Satish Sekar, empower-sport-magazine.

In Italy, following closely on the heels of the Corrupt Knight’s glorious victory and Gianni Alemanno’s triumphant march on Rome, comes the murder of 29-year-old designer, Nicola Tommasoli, in Verona, beaten to death by a gang of boneheads. The assault on Tommasoli follows previous assaults on the Circolo di cultura omosessuale Mario Mieli in the San Paolo neighbourhood of Rome by a fascist squad — shouting “fucking poofs!” and praising Mussolini — who damaged the club’s entrance while activists were meeting in an upstairs room, and another on an anti-fascist near the “Cannizzaro” school, while he was posting bills for the anti-fascist demonstration of April 25. (To his eternal credit, upon his victory Alemanno urged supporters to avoid “excesses” after a small group gave him the right-armed Roman salute associated with fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and chanted Duce! (leader), as Mussolini’s followers called him. Bit embarrassing, really.)

The life, times, and possible crimes of the billionaire Berlusconi are relatively well-known; Alemanno is a leader of the National Alliance, an Italian ‘post-fascist’ party (the NA formed in 1993). Formerly, he was a member of the fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), which included elements of Mussolini’s Fascist Party, and was established in 1946 by the remnants of the Salò Republic, immortalised by Pier Paolo Pasolini in Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (‘Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom’). The film, incidentally, is banned (that is, refused classification) in Australia, and has been since 1998. Alemanno is also married to Isabella Rauti, the daughter of far-right activist Pino Rauti (a former member of the MSI and also the fascist terrorist groupuscule Ordine Nuovo (New Order)), and wears a Celtic cross, which in Australia, Italy and elsewhere is recognised as a symbol of the far right — though he of course insists it is a ‘religious symbol’, bless his little (white) cotton socks.

Peter Popham, Italian fascism is once again on the rise, The Independent, May 6, 2008:

Guido Papalia, the public prosecutor of Verona who is investigating the attack on Tommasoli, explained it like this. “There is a way of thinking which is very widespread these days, which rejects what is different, those who don’t dress like us, don’t eat like us, don’t speak with our accent, in defence of a system that they simply maintain is better than that of others and that therefore must be defended with violence.”

Rejecting what is different: that primitive reflex was at the source of the anti-Semitism of the Nazis, and also explains the electoral success of the Northern League in northern Italy over the past year. The League’s first fight was against the corruption of central government in Rome: it demanded secession. But when that demand began to look like a fantasy, it cast around for new causes, alighting finally and profitably on local chauvinism.

The Northern League mayors of the Veneto, smooth, professional men in comfortable offices, toss out their simple, excluding ideas: foreigners can live here only if they have a legitimate job, a home and an adequate income. Illegal immigrants should be excluded from schools and universities, their children from day-care centres. Veils should be banned by law. No mosques permitted within the city boundaries. Only those with excellent Italian and close familiarity with the constitution should be eligible for citizenship. Immigrants, including those from within the EU, should be repatriated en masse if they commit offences. Gypsy camps to be torn down.

Walter Veltroni, the former mayor of Rome and now head of the Democratic Party which took a whipping from Silvio Berlusconi at the general election, spelled out the link between the men in suits and the men in boots: “There are lots of gangs like this and they are much more dangerous in a cultural and political climate in which principles of intolerance and hatred towards the weakest are affirmed…”

Yet Mr Veltroni has much to answer for. It was his centre-left regime in Rome which ran the capital for the past 15 years and whose skewed priorities made the right’s triumph possible. Mr Veltroni and his predecessor Francesco Rutelli – the centre-left’s mayoral candidate beaten last week by Mr Alemanno – ran the city for the benefit of the post-communist intelligentsia, who lapped up the endless film and art and music events and believed it when Mr Veltroni told them that “Rome is the locomotive of Italy”, and that culture and tourism were the locomotive’s fuel.

But meanwhile the majority of the city’s population were shut out of the loop. They lived outside the city’s exquisite centre, in benighted and desperately ugly dormitory suburbs with pathetic transport links, scarce policing, negligent local authorities and every indication of official contempt. And those nightmare suburbs continue to multiply. So now the Romans have risen up and thrown the champagne communists out. And the cry is out with the gypsies, in with the police; out with the 20,000 foreigners who have committed crimes; restore the city to those who rightly possess it. The crude and simple appeal of fascism has always been to blood and soil, and so it remains today…

Hmmm, maybe. Certainly, the ‘left’ has done a great deal to pave the way for the ‘right’, and similar political evolutions appear not just in Italy but England and also Australia. And the ability of yuppie scum — the “smooth, professional men in comfortable offices” — to successfully pose as saviours of the working class depends in part on the destruction of radical working class cultures and institutions, something which social democracy has always aimed at achieving… but I think I’ll blog about that in a separate entry.