Sunday, April 28, 2013

Unemployment and desperation behind the Rome attack

As you may know by now, Luigi Preiti, 49, unemployed bricklayer and lone desperado, shot several military police agents (carabinieri) in Rome. Himself and a random pedestrian also resulted injured in the shooting. One of the agents is in critical condition. 

Apparently Preiti did not originally intend to shoot the policemen but rather the political leaders of the country, whom he blames for his own desperate situation, which is similar to a quickly growing fraction of the European citizenry.

Recently I met an old friend in the street and she, always so expressive and direct, wondered how with all this situation of growing unemployment, generalized draconian cuts in salaries and social services, absurdly high direct taxes, etc. the situation was still so relatively calm, how is it possible that the people is not taking the streets and burning everything... yet. I shrugged and replied that it was obviously because of fear of the police and that anyhow, it would not be long before that happened.

I also mentioned that some of that was already happening, especially in Greece, but that the level of desperation elsewhere was only then beginning to reach the red lines. 

First people protest peacefully, then they set themselves on fire or jump out of balconies that they don't own anymore and eventually they begin doing what Preiti just did. It's unavoidable: when you destroy the economy to satisfy the greed of the rentier high bourgeoisie behind the banks, when you get people dumped to the streets and tell them to look for a job that does not exist, almost literally removing the ground under their feet... they get very angry. 

When they see that the word "democracy", literally: "people's power", has become empty and meaningless and that the only people ruling here are a bunch of selfish bloodsucking banksters, with almost no hope of things changing with the necessary speed (or any at all, because the electoral systems are rigged everywhere to keep all revolutionary options marginal, while the media is in the same hands as the banks and the non-democratic governments), then you get Luigi Preiti. 

For example. 

And more that will unavoidably come: governments that do not serve the people will unavoidably find the people uprising, no matter what "democratic" varnishes they use. 

Alright, this is so far a single man uprising, but there are obviously so many that feel exactly the same... just that they don't own a weapon, just that they may be hold back out of fear or realization of relative pointlessness of such a solitary act or that they feel it would not be fair to kill any single individual for a problem that is so terribly collective. 

But unavoidably desperation feeds violence and if tyranny becomes more visible, more painfully obvious, as it seems to be the plan of our bourgeois masters, it can only further legitimize any sort of violence. 

I really feel that Europe is in a cul-de-sac in which the only option is revolutionary change. Obviously the managers of the economy, the high bourgeois (or banksters), and their subservient managers of the res publica, political leaders, are failing to provide the basics of life and that can only lead in one direction: revolutionary change. 

It will be painful, of course, but it is already unbearably painful.

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