The perverse fascination with violence

One might begin, in describing the current, new and perverse fascination with brutal violence in our highly civilised world, with the glorification on display in Western public squares of the inhuman acts committed during the pogrom of 7 October – filmed by a bodycam as if in the most repulsive of porn films, this time a horror porn film. I will return to that point shortly. Instead, I would like to begin with two everyday objects, two ‘tools’ – as they were described in our school textbooks – which have leapt into the headlines amid the now uncontrollable political violence: the spanner and the hammer. During a demonstration in Turin aimed at preventing the launch of a book by Giuseppe Culicchia on the murder, many decades ago, of the ‘fascist’ Sergio Ramelli, some banners prominently displayed – alongside the usual gruesome slogans bellowed by fifteen-year-olds celebrating violence as if at a drunken party – two gigantic stylised spanners.

But why? What was the message? The message was that fascists should not merely be killed – that would be too trivial – but should die in excruciating pain, in horrifying circumstances. Exactly as had happened to Sergio Ramelli: not with a single shot from a P38 revolver, or with an explosive that would have blown him to bits in a matter of seconds, but by a group of hitmen – assassins acting in the name of a grand ideal – who had ganged up on him with spanners to beat the defenceless victim to exhaustion, until every last trace of self-defence slowly collapsed, with calculated cruelty, blow after blow, his skull gradually smashed in, until he was in agony, and then death. This is the funereal symbolism of the spanner. And the hammer? The hammer was (is) the favourite weapon of a gang of thugs formed in Dresden who proudly bore the name ‘Hammerbande’, the ‘Hammer Gang’ indeed, to strike, on the streets with that weapon, in meticulously planned ambushes, at the fascists and Nazis walking alone in Germany and also in Budapest – in an incident which, as is well known, involved the current MEP for Ads, Ilaria Salis, and was later glorified in Italy by spiteful secondary school teachers (poor students). Not the usual, utterly banal stick that thugs typically use to attack a victim ten to one with herd-like cowardice – a derivative and morally identical manifestation of the truncheon used by fascist squads during the dark years of the rise of Mussolini’s regime. No: the hammer. Which causes more pain, strikes deep, and inflicts wider and more agonising wounds. The hammer and the spanners: the triumph of primitive, brutal, bestial, savage violence, to be brandished as a symbol of a new ruthlessness. The cult of violence has been fully legitimised. This is the anthropological novelty of our times, in which it is considered normal for a headteacher and other members of the teaching staff in France to be doused with streams of petrol whilst fires rage all around them. Whilst the newspapers chirp: ‘Student protests over the shortage of classrooms’.

And then, above all, of course, there is 7 October 2023. In the days immediately following that sabbath of blood and pain, in the squares of the West—ready to pounce on the horrendous Zionism—a climate of virtuous separation still prevailed: let us not confuse Hamas’s terrorism with the just cause of the Palestinian people. For a brief period, the images of children slaughtered in the kibbutzim still made an impression. Of women beaten, filmed on television with their trousers soaked in blood – above all, as reported in the police morning briefings, ‘in their most intimate areas’ – whilst the marauders paraded their prey before their cameramen and photographers like a trophy to be proud of. Of an elderly lady with a swollen face, abducted in a pick-up truck bound for some tunnel in Gaza – one of the tunnels forming part of over 400 kilometres of tunnels built by Hamas under the complicit eye of UNRWA – to be mistreated as a hostage. Now, three years on – though this had already been the case for some time before – those scenes have taken on a new meaning; they have breached the barrier of collective modesty and have become the symbol of the so-called Palestinian Resistance. The more violent and sadistic they are, the more they are to be admired. “7 October is not an anniversary; it is, now and always, Resistance,” reads a poster from a shadowy group called “Palestinian Youth”, issued on the very anniversary of the massacre. Poor President Sergio Mattarella speaks of “repugnant acts” committed by marauders with “extreme and inhuman cruelty”. However, the radical crowds, intoxicated by violence, refuse to listen to him (as do, unfortunately, the parties of a now-distorted left). Cruelty vanishes into the ‘Palestinianist’ ideology, as has been said. Even the perpetrators vanish and become victims alongside the true victims who ought to be mourned: the civilians, the children killed in the apocalyptic war waged by Israeli bombs. In the dehumanisation of Israel’s enemy, any distinction is erased between the Hamas militiaman and rapist who calls his parents in a frenzy, boasting of having decimated an entire Jewish family, and the Palestinian civilian killed by IDF bombs. The images of the Jewish baby Bibas, a hostage strangled by his murderers in the Hamas caves, fade into the background. It borders on the implausible, but it is almost as if a paradoxical coincidence of opposites were taking place: the brazen celebration of violence by Western public squares that seek to eradicate every trace of Israeli (and Jewish) presence on earth, intertwined with the glorification of the bloody act, with the unpunished, thuggish arrogance of a Ben-Givr who has his photograph taken with a birthday cake adorned with a conspicuous noose from which to hang some enemy, or who is obscenely immortalised at the controls of a bulldozer as he razes to the ground the legitimate home of a Palestinian family in the heart of the West Bank. What links these two images is the glorification of violence as the world’s sole ‘hygiene’, transforming the words of the Futurist Marinetti into a tragic parody.

The virus of violence has, hopefully not irreversibly, weakened the defences of a civilisation that might look on with horror and dismay at the outburst of sadistic inhumanity that is polluting our Western world, even in times of peace, which is, in theory, tolerant and pluralist. And yet, not even a pacifist – if one can still apply this insult to the memory of Gandhi and Aldo Capitini, for which proven followers of Putinist terrorism, disguised as non-violent activists who wish to see Ukrainians humiliated and defeated, are responsible – is seized by a shudder—let us call it a shudder of indignation—at witnessing the very recent scene of Russian grandparents being beaten up in the street by thugs in uniform, simply because they wish to spare their grandchildren from death in a war devoid of legitimacy and humanity. Beating elderly people savagely: an excess of brutality that fails to stir the hearts of fanatics addicted to boundless violence, already locked in ethical silence even when faced with images of the bodies of civilians in Bucha, abandoned by the roadside and bound like animals with wire. And what of Iran? Not even the monstrous figure of thirty thousand people killed in a single day by the political police in Iran has shaken the professional protesters. The name of Masha Amini, beaten to death by the ‘morality police’ for wearing her veil of submission incorrectly, has been all but forgotten. Alongside Putinism, Trumpism has also contributed to this contagion of uncontrollable violence, with ICE officers killing protesters in Minneapolis with impunity. A toxic cloud of cruelty and ostentatious violence hangs over the entire planet. Those who lived through the explosion of terrorist violence in the 1970s, particularly in Italy, feel that the contagion of the myth of violence has spread enormously in the absence of moral and cultural ‘vaccines’; it has poisoned our souls, normalised violence as an everyday practice rather than an exceptional state, numbing our consciences, without even the cry of horror from a Kurtz who, in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, departs from this world uttering a phrase that will remain etched in the collective memory, later echoed in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now: ‘The horror! The horror!’.

Now, however, we are in an era of the aestheticisation of violence, with all the guerrillas clad in black for the cameras, which glorifies and even renders glamorous – in France as in Italy – the hooligan-style devastation, the vandalised streets, and the dozens of police officers who, at the end of demonstrations marked by increasingly brutal violence, have to be treated in A&E: as if it were normal. The ambush on an isolated police officer, who, during a clash with Askatasuna militants, was attacked with hammers by a marching assault group firing off fireworks at head height, ends up being met with the usual ritualistic condemnation: as if it were normal, precisely. As if the dominant cultural climate were clouding any value judgement on the actions of those serial violent offenders.

And indeed, confirming that it is not the individual concrete act but the general atmosphere, heavy with violence, that leaves its mark, verbal squadrist violence – and more besides – against dissenting views and those who dare not conform to the prevailing line of thought is now accepted in Italy as if it were normal and obvious. Intimidation, the high-handed demand for silence, the witch-hunt for heresy by an inquisition that may be operetta-like but is no less arrogantly censorious. The violence of gagging, of culture erased by decree; the symbolic burning of books; the aggressive intolerance of those who decide who may publicly present their books and who, as outcasts, are denied the fundamental rights of freedom of expression. The case of Erri De Luca is a prime example: revered and appreciated when he does not deviate from the dominant orthodoxy, his name is servilely struck from the cultural events to which he had been invited – even those accompanied by great media fanfare (in Salerno) – simply because, in an interview, he had dared to challenge, with arguments that may be debatable but which, in a civilisation of healthy cultural debate, are precisely that: debatable and not subject to censorship – the cliché of the ‘genocide’ in Gaza. He was disinvited with zealous promptness, blacklisted, and struck off the programmes by a small group of ridiculous, petty inquisitors who arbitrarily wield a scrap of cultural power defended tooth and nail. This is to say nothing of the countless instances in which police vans have been called to park outside venues and bookshops to prevent an onslaught by those seeking to disrupt a book launch. Their parents admired the Red Guards who, during the Cultural Revolution in Maoist China, mistreated recalcitrant professors by forcing them into the pillory with humiliating donkey’s ears pinned onto the heads—in many cases bleeding—of the victims who were beaten and mocked. Their children, on the other hand, want to become Red Guards themselves, practising rather than preaching: a parody, but a violent one, which replaces free discussion with threatening shouts. This is justified by an educated class which, blinded by ideological fury, is incapable of distinguishing between legitimate protest – ‘after’ having listened to the words of those being protested against – and the clamour intended to prevent, ‘beforehand’, those who are to be protested against from even beginning to speak.

Modernity seems to be taking a step backwards. In his book The Decline of Violence, the psychologist Steven Pinker argues that modernity has even brought about a ‘humanitarian revolution’ in the Western world: a refinement of sensibility that intensifies the sense of horror at gruesome scenes, a revulsion towards the most inhumane practices of torture, and a reduction in the gory spectacle of public executions (without the ‘tricoteuses’ cheerfully knitting whilst the blade of the guillotine severed the heads of counter-revolutionary nobles). Pinker even identifies one of the causes of this decline in violence as the spread of literature, which allows us to experience lives different from our own and to put ourselves in another’s shoes and understand their feelings. Pinker writes: ‘It is harder to stone to death a person imprisoned in the pillory in the town square once you know what it feels like to be in their shoes’: a claim that is easily refuted, as is all too evident. Norbert Elias, too, in The Civilising Process, pointed to the ever-widening gap between the kitchen and the dining room for an ever-increasing number of people as reflecting a desire to banish from the plate the stench of the horribly mangled carcass – which is then brought to the table duly disguised, purified and sterilised of the burden of violence, suffering and mistreatment associated with the animal’s slaughter. What would today be considered unacceptable for an urbanised and civilised child—the slaughter of a pig amid the victim’s terrifying screams—was once regarded, at the heart of peasant culture, as a rite of passage and initiation into the harsh realities of adult life. Today we continue to eat salami, but we would be sickened if we knew just how far from clean and non-violent its journey has been.

Yet it seems clear that Pinker and Elias were overly optimistic. The horrifying series of hangings in Tehran, punctuated by the repeated, terrifying spectacle of cranes in the square that seem to reach up to the sky, from whose tentacles dangle the corpses of the victims of an infinitely violent repressive apparatus, does not elicit in the civilised West – not even in that part which likes to imagine itself as ‘good’ and enlightened by righteous principles – not even the slightest hint of a reaction of horror. And after all, if the spectacle of a death-row inmate in the electric chair in the United States is the legacy of a barbarity mistaken for justice, the recent repugnant spectacle of Christa Pike’s body—a survivor of two lethal doses of poison—points to a callousness to which we now seem to have become accustomed, so much so that Trump has recently gone so far as to call for the execution by firing squad of a condemned man on live television: yet this repulsive spectacle has provoked only a very moderate and fleeting sense of revulsion. Furthermore, at the heart of the new and unrecognisable feminist movement—which, in theory, ought to place the abuses suffered by women anywhere in the world at the top of its agenda—not even a whisper of indignation is raised in the face of the obscene spectacle of women in Kabul being stoned to death in their shrouds, known as burqas, in the public square, either for adultery or simply because they dared to walk down the street without a male chaperone. ‘Stoning’ remains a neutral term in its banal formulation, but it is the name given to the killing of a woman by stoning, in excruciating agony, whilst the men present stand in a circle, witnessing this brutal ritual as if it were a welcome sacrificial practice. No reaction whatsoever; quite the opposite, in fact.

During a demonstration in Italy against femicide, a young woman held up a placard commemorating the Jewish women (among others) who were victims of gang rape on 7 October and during their months of captivity in Hamas’s caves: she was forcibly removed from the scene and subjected to ridicule. Francesca Albanese has become a fixture in the rowdy pro-Hamas circus; on several occasions, defying documented evidence, she has questioned the veracity of the sexual violence committed on 7 October, shamelessly betraying the principle of ‘sister, I believe you’ that has underpinned the women’s movement since the ‘MeToo’ movement took off. Yet the body of the enemy—or, in this case, the female enemy who is no longer a sister—may be violated, torn apart and held up to public ridicule without even a shadow of compassion. The force of extreme fanaticism accepts every kind of violence inflicted upon those who do not deserve even a crumb of comfort or solidarity. The French journalist of Moroccan origin, Nora Bussigny, in her ‘undercover’ investigation into the most radical fringes of the pro-Palestinian movement in France, *The New Anti-Semites* (recently translated and published in Italy by the Setteottobre association), quotes a passage from a text written by two ultra-radical trans activists: “My body is not truly mine except for that brief moment when, with a hammer in my hand, with adrenaline mingling with oestrogen, I smash the windows of a bank or yet another accomplice to colonial genocide.” This is claimed verbal extremism, almost a quest to set a record for violent and murderous expression, which is now accepted as if it were merely an expression of eccentric language. The spirit of the times speaks through the glorification of murder and devastation. All whilst awaiting the usual, conventional, ritualistic, lacklustre, pointless, lacklustre statement of condemnation.