The other possible world was not that of the violent G8 protests

Zerocalcare is a comic artist who is emotionally honest. He was 18 years old in 2001, when, at the end of July, Genoa was the scene of fierce clashes between demonstrators and the police, during which a 20-year-old conscripted carabiniere fired from the cab of a van in self-defence against a violent attack, killing a 20-year-old man who was brandishing a fire extinguisher at him by hitting him in the head. The protest was directed against a meeting of eight heads of state and government, the G8. The platform called for ‘another possible world’ in opposition to the economic, social and political developments of globalisation, advocating equality and an end to poverty against free markets, technology and state authority. Everyone lost their heads. The square, which was a mixed crowd divided between dreamers and rioters, was the scene of extreme violence, devastation and looting, with Molotov cocktails and stone-throwing, fires and fierce attacks on the police.

The state’s crackdown was inevitable but ruthless, falling outside the bounds of the rule of law, with indiscriminate arrests, beatings and torture at the Diaz school and the Bolzaneto barracks. It was an urban war, an unfortunate and tragic episode, an uncontrolled escalation of dissent and repression, and that war became shrouded in legend, myth and the demonisation of the enemy.

Zerocalcare was present, and he stands by everything he said in an interview with "La Repubblica". He adopts a nostalgic tone when speaking of armed dissent and guerrilla warfare employing insurrectionist methods, and criticises within his own political camp the tendency towards victimhood – the idea that the focus is on the victims of police repression rather than on organised conflict, and on that particular type of conflict, with its anarchic radicalism, which, in his view, surpasses even the ideas and motivations behind the protest in terms of moral resilience. According to Zerocalcare, the Left has forgotten that the very heart of street protest lies in its violent expression; for a quarter of a century, it has been creating and cultivating a ‘victim-centred pantheon’, yet it does not dare to recall the grandeur of those moments of direct confrontation and succumbs to a right-wing security-first ideology that treats any form of protest as a crime of devastation and looting, or deviant social behaviour. Emotional honesty is not matched – to put it mildly – by the necessary intellectual rigour and historical perspective. The ‘other possible world’ was an elusive myth, as the time that has passed since then has amply demonstrated, and the idea of building it through violent street protests to prevent a legitimate political summit could only provoke social anxiety, despair, loss of life, and the breakdown of the state and the justice system, ideological shadows that still today obscure a legitimate tradition of opposition, right up to the red line of the exercise of political violence by groups and the masses.

Zerocalcare has become a man of letters and an ideologue of the suburbs and the new generational slang, a popular poet on Netflix – that illustrious vehicle of technological globalisation – and it must be said that whilst the world changed and the years piled up, many of the key figures of that era – from Luca Casarini to Vittorio Agnoletto to Anubi D’Avossa Lussurgiu – have, through their lives, (some at Caritas, some in NGOs rescuing shipwrecked migrants in the Mediterranean, some in left-wing politics and at universities) a tenacious and often commendable commitment to the utopia of their youth.

Meanwhile, the other possible world has been created by vaccine researchers, the social democrats of the ‘third way’ at the helm of governments, the populists and the billionaire technocrats who have enveloped the planet in a web of communication possibilities and new data intelligence that brings about both good and evil – as always intertwined – ranging from the cognitive numbness of an almost lost generation to the deployment of defence and counter-attack capabilities by a heroic European country under attack from Russian autocracy. The real world is not a cloud of ideological smoke; it is not a theatre of dreams. Dissent is the lifeblood of democracies engaged in a civilisational struggle against the fundamentalist and imperialist nightmares that threaten the West’s waning primacy, but it is the unarmed dissent of Politkovskaya and Navalny; it is the democratic electoral opposition of a Mamdani or others who fight against every form of populism and demagoguery; it is the daily struggle to break free from the stranglehold of social violence and state repression. One might feel nostalgia for something that vanished with the last century, and which experienced an absurd resurgence at the start of this one, fifty days before the fatal suicide flight into the Twin Towers in Manhattan, but one must realise that it is a comic strip. By Zerocalcare.