A-Infos (en) Italy, Umanita Nova: Remaining Still (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

We are pleased to receive and publish ---- Web Editorial Staff ---- On 
June 29th, in the late afternoon, a brawl broke out in Piazzetta 
Montesanto, in front of the Cumana and Funicular railway stations, 
escalating into chairs and helmets being thrown and a gunshot being 
fired into the air. Shortly thereafter, videos circulating on social 
media showed a hooded man crossing the square brandishing an AK-47. The 
rifle, equipped with a double magazine, was recovered by police from 
under a car parked nearby; in the following hours, three people were 
arrested. The incident provided the media and politicians with the usual 
pretext for a purely aesthetic and security-related condemnation, 
reducing reality to yet another crime fiction. The true political 
element, however, emerges from the background of those images: while 
some of those present fled toward the station, the pizzeria workers and 
bar patrons remained motionless, waiting for the gunman to pass. This 
impassivity is neither a code of silence nor mafia complicity. It is the 
application of a cold calculation of survival. Those who live within the 
same operational perimeter as the clans learn to deactivate the 
emotional response of panic because they know that, in certain 
circumstances, moving can be more dangerous than remaining still. The 
immobility of the alley thus becomes the last remaining means of 
protection for an honest majority that rejects violence, yet finds 
itself forced to submit to its rules in a state of total institutional 
isolation. The short circuit becomes dramatic when it is discovered that 
this immobility on the streets is the perfect synecdoche of the 
institutional immobility that crushes the territory. Those who live in 
this no-man's land experience a dual and mirrored alienation: on the one 
hand, the need to tolerate physical violence so as not to succumb; on 
the other, the forced economic immobility to which they are condemned by 
a policy that has replaced ordinary land-use planning with permanent 
emergency management. When the road floods, the state's response is 
reduced to a mathematical alternation between the extraordinary 
militarization of the territory, regularly revived just before 
elections, and the provision of fixed-term welfare benefits. This is the 
practice of an extractive economic system that progressively replaces 
productive investment and universal welfare with the management of their 
consequences, then demanding that legality be defended on the sidewalk 
by the civic-mindedness of individuals, transformed into the biological 
shield of an invisible trench. Amidst this lack of structural investment 
and this programmatic isolation, the state has progressively outsourced 
social cohesion policies to the industry of projects and short-term 
tenders. A segment of the third sector, often closely linked to segments 
of the film and fashion industries, cyclically descends into the back 
alleys, transforming marginality into accounting raw material: it serves 
to unlock European funding, fuel temporary projects, and, not 
infrequently, generate cultural prestige and reputational value for 
export. The problem, however, doesn't necessarily lie in the intentions 
of individual operators, but in the economic architecture of the system. 
Once the budgets are exhausted and the cameras are turned off, the 
project closes without having built a stable employment infrastructure 
in the area from which it extracted social value. If a young person born 
and raised in the neighborhood makes the monumental effort to study, 
train, and attempt to access those same cultural industries, they often 
find the doors barred, because access is often filtered through 
requirements that end up transforming into class barriers disguised as 
technical criteria: elite academic qualifications, exclusive training 
programs, and networks of relationships that those who start out in that 
alleyway are unlikely to possess. The result is that inclusivity is 
proclaimed through social-washing campaigns and training programs that 
too often end up exhausted by their symbolic function. In reality, 
however, stable positions continue to be filled predominantly by people 
from outside the area. The conclusion is the defense of a monopoly on 
speech and positions of power that prevents authentic testimony from 
becoming institutionalized, relegating those who manage to emancipate 
themselves to the role of folkloristic extras, useful above all to 
certify their own marginalization. This is why the media and political 
outrage over the Kalashnikov in Montesanto is revealed to be profoundly 
hypocritical and shortsighted.
The final point is that sociological mitigating factors should not be 
introduced to accountability that remains entirely individual. The goal 
is to broaden the indictment, because limiting the analysis to the armed 
wing means obscuring the institutional framework that enables the 
context in which that episode unfolds. A weapon of war is not born on 
the pavement: it crosses borders, ports, international traffic, and 
controls that clearly failed. Focusing exclusively on the last link in 
the chain is infinitely less costly than tackling the most difficult 
task: redistributing investments, building stable employment, and 
restoring productive capacity to the regions.

Structural development requires time, continuity, and resources. An 
emergency, on the other hand, generates immediate consensus, legitimizes 
new extraordinary interventions, and fuels the ongoing narrative of the 
crisis. This is why the Kalashnikov in Montesanto ends up, 
paradoxically, serving all levels of the system: it allows politicians 
to invoke new security measures, fuels the demand for emergency 
planning, and provides the media with powerful images to sensationalize. 
In this assembly line of consensus, the immobility of the crowds on the 
streets and that of the institutions at the tables of power become two 
sides of the same coin. The only truly expendable entity remains the 
honest majority of the neighborhood, condemned first to suffer the 
violence of weapons and then the social exclusion of those who continue 
to present themselves as their saviors.

Serena Parascandolo

https://umanitanova.org/restare-immobili/
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