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The village of fear



Barbara Spinelli La Stampa today.
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The village of fear

Barbara Spinelli

is not the first time in the history of Europe that the crime takes an abnormal and symbolic space: in government decisions, in election campaigns, in becoming the career development policies, strategies of the media. Accadde once before in the belle époque: time eager impatience and brawls, which Thomas Mann called era of the great nervousness. In 1907, the newspaper La Petite République, founded by the socialist Jaures, headlines: "Insecurity is stylish, this is a fact." The climate was very similar to ours: similar fascination of crime, similar illusions of showdowns. Insecurity and crime was politicized in France, against the backdrop of extensive disputes on the death penalty. They were feared gangs of young people in tough neighborhoods, just like today: Apache was their name. Just like today s'invocava a break. Category that Foucault came to define, in an interview with Telos 83, pernicious: "One of the most harmful habits of modern thought is to speak of today as a present strength." Much of Apache vanished in the carnage of '14-'18.

Today the ghost reappears, with special force since 11 September and the disappearance of the USSR. It is the thesis of Laurent Mucchielli scholar, who published a collection of texts on the role that insecurity has played in the rise of Sarkozy. In fact, the security had become intrusive for some time, with the expansion of the extreme right in Europe. Back in the 90's the figure of the enemy change ("I do, you Westerners, the worst thing you can do to an opponent: you remove the enemy," said Georgi Arbatov, the USSR).

became less visible the external enemy, it turns out Islam is not only outside but inside the house, coming up with new offenses (among them, begging), and the public is offered the enemy within, the scapegoats to be killed. The riots in the suburbs are described as civil wars Los Angeles '92, France 2005 and 2007 and the counter is becoming militarized. The yeast becomes afraid of politics in the U.S., France and now Italy. Mucchielli's book is entitled: The Frenzy of Security (La Découverte). The frenzy

responds to real needs, especially in areas of lawlessness, where urban planning has made havoc: gray areas, called the private consultants called upon by governments, of 'guerrilla degenerate. "

Pellegrini The company, which often occurs Sarkozy, speaking of civil war. You quest'esagerazione that raises questions, experts in the suburbs. Theories of the internal enemy insecurity is not an evil to be remedied by reforming justice, prevention, control. The age of insecurity becomes nervous problem, which was in solution when space. The fear cease to be a problem and solution becomes, political investment. The newspapers do their part, a bit 'to sell a little' to conform. Hardly seem notice the manipulation that suffer, profits that politicians and private companies derive from fear.

The emotion takes the place of communication, the obsession of the figures, the language of war, the "long trail of blood": the press mimics the politician loses autonomy, instead of recording and interpreting escogita securities-harpoons. That's what the politicians want: "The media silence is a mistake," said Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy in a speech to the prefects of 2003. So we have: the news open to a crime, then seamlessly tie in electoral battles. And the viewer is drawn into the vortex, becomes an actor drone of what David Garland, in a 2002 book, called criminal society: with his vote and his anger imagine demiurge of new orders (The Culture of Control, Assayer, 2004).

The frenzy is desperate passion and panic, not confident in social progress, but dominated by catastrophism, the idea that the criminal is an individual's genetically predetermined, unchangeable. Are the beliefs of Sarkozy: no longer makes sense to policing, which attempts to integrate youth in the banlieues. "The best prevention is the penalty." Decades of work on the roots of violence are settled, judged gooders, sociological. When fear and insecurity become the solution, the problem disappears. Penal Populism overflows, imposing wide-ranging reforms, but not bloated ad hoc laws, policies and declarative, symbolic, motivated by permanent indignation.

In France, that Italy is today the country laboratory, the military adapted to public vocabulary is borrowed from the colonial. He explains Mathieu Rigouste, social scientist: the consultants most popular politicians, on the banlieues, the combined counter-insurgency doctrine developed in the Battle of Algiers with today's war on terror. So you erase the boundary between the civil and military, peacetime and war, internal and external. Certainly it is early to assess conclusively the results of these policies, but an initial assessment is possible. The obsession of the figures, the speed, chronic drama did not give real results for now.

The cop-executioner is even more unfair in the suburbs. The prisons are full, opening the way for a hasty pardons. Especially not the panacea military and technological works (video surveillance, biometrics): the terrorist is not afraid of death nor the eye of others. The speed is only partially successful: it prevents accurate analysis, the result-running show. It is in Britain, where Blair has intensified the repression, the proportion of juvenile offenders is the strongest (20 per cent on global crime). In Norway, where the model continues "sociological-protectionist ' the percentage is less than 5 percent. Mucchielli then cites a distortion that we know well: the slogan is Zero Tolerance for all crimes, "except for economic and financial markets: in contrast to other types of crime, the government (in French) looks in the name of" modernization "of the right of business, to decriminalize the conduct criminal. " It is the dual society described by Garland: one who has advantaged the liberal deregulation, the other a society governed by moral rules more traditional and made more stringent.

The politics of fear is hard to reconcile with the pragmatism that Sarkozy embodies the eyes of many. Pragmatism increasingly incensed, and always more equivocal policy is to be effective, not enough to say that it 'is not right nor left. " There's nothing pragmatic obsession of the figures, in contempt of the police of proximity, in the hurried rush to the spectacular result, whatever it is. Are no minimum sentences for repeat offenders the pragmatic, that reduce the autonomy of judges. Or the pre-trial detention is up to those who have already purged the pain but is still considered potentially dangerous (from a panel of experts, as desired by President Sarkozy).

Patrols proposed by the League may make sense: some people involved in the control of the territory, "armed only with mobile phones." But not must mean that state police and lower arms. That the company not only represses but self-control (maintaining large economic zones of impunity, as we have seen). This is to prevent the lynching that we have judges and police separated from society. When each light, complaint, other than represses, the world is likely to be the village, literally, not cosmopolitan order, but his native village where the social control protects without brakes, and the citizen loses the anonymity of the metropolis, can not escape the gaze, and learns to live in suspicion, no longer allowed to live.