Boing Boing » Jasmina Tesanovic

E-Stonia: where the free internet now flows like water

Jasmina Tesanovic — Wed, 15 May 2013 15:59:05 +0000

Photo: Bruce Sterling

First things first: oh, you world travelers, for pleasure or for work, never, ever fly Baltic Airlines. First they will stiff you by making you pay sixty euros to carry regular-sized hand luggage. You will note their particular eagerness to pounce on innocent non-Baltic travellers, especially haplessYankees with credit cards.

During the flight you can expect to be charged for the air you breathe, since they don't even give free water.

Finally, god forbid if something goes wrong with your flight and ticket, for Baltic Airlines will gladly maneuver you into buying a heavily-priced new one. Fleeing home via Baltic Airlines beats prison and deportation, but not by much.

Decades of Soviet occupation leave some deep cultural habits. Despite the proud independence and nationalism of the three independent Baltic republics, it hasn't been that long since 1991. It's hard to find any mishap in Estonia that isn't some blamed on Russians. If the roads are bad (and they are bad enough to burst tires), it's the Russian roads. When the coffee is lousy (the imported Italian coffee is quite good), then it's the communist coffee. If the storks are too big and dangerous, it’s because they were bred to an ungainly size by the Russians.

Photo: Bruce Sterling

I lived under Communism, but not the Soviet kind. The Estonians saw the real deal hard core of totalitarianism, the kind with mass deportations, mass shootings and mass hunger. That kind of regime doesn't leave mere "traces" in society, it leaves trenches. The Estonian nationality barely escaped being one of Europe's submerged or even extinct nations. Well before any Soviets showed up they were gleefully trampled by Swedes, Poles, Danes -- back when they were harmless pagans, they were even massacred by Christian Crusaders.

In the seventies in Rome, I once took part in a magazine called "La Citta di Riga," an Italian pun which refered to the capital of Latvia and also meant "the city of lines." This conceptualist magazine was an art project through which period artistic luminaries such as Francisco Clemente, Alighiero Boetti, Achille Bonito Oliva, Fabio Mauri, Umberto Silva, etc, wanted to change the world. Since this was the 1970s, concepts were considered more important the materialist objects or political policies. "The City of Riga" was a distant, romantic place for these Roman radicals of the Cold War days, a city carrying the flag of the globalist artsy utopia.

At the time, I was the only one in that group who came from a communist country. Most dissidents from the Soviet bloc had a keen understanding of the conceptual differences between alternative culture and the rigorous strictures of their daily lives. But I had my ticket back to Belgrade, the non-aligned way station that was half Moscow yet half Paris. I, too, could treat Riga as a mythical city of drawn lines, instead of a grim urban kolkoz where unruly ethnic populations were mixed, matched and eliminated at the whim of Stalin.

Photo: Bruce Sterling

Our Estonian literary festival in Tartu was full of stories, often stories where Siberia loomed as large as Siberia actually is. It seemed that most every family had lost relatives to Siberian exile: a parent, a grandparent.

A woman poet vividly explained how, during her childhood, her mother was deported. After years of absence a stranger returned: she had no teeth nor hair, but only wrinkles and bones. Our poet said: this is not my mom, my mom was a pretty woman! Until this day she writes patriotic poetry, due to that sense of horror and guilt towards her mother and her country.

At the same festival, a dissident Russian historian passionately described how Russians fail to deal with their impossible past, much preferring to hide the darkness under the carpet.

In Russia, history is an instrument of power, rather like Russian courts where there is no presumption of innocence, so only the guilty show up. When it comes to historical crimes like the Estonian deportations, however, nobody was there, nobody is guilty, nobody is responsible and nobody remembers.

However, this convenient denial and falsification is a poor counsel for peoples who still have to live together in the world, and who tend to repeat the mistakes of their parents.

This story is obviously well known in both the Baltics and the Balkans. It's distressing to hear that some story told in a small, Finno-Ugric language, yet on such a colossal scale. It's especially painful when told in the clear words of the victims, rather than the rambling evasions of the perpetrators.

The Prima Vista Tartu literary festival is keen on the appreciation of words. Words are cherished, and the event was held within the handsome library of the famous university of Tartu.

E-Stonia, the country where Skype was invented, has free internet everywhere. Obsessed as I am with wifi, I checked it obsessively, and I always found that connectivity flowed like water.

What a contrast to benighted nations like Italy and Britain, where free Internet is associated with terror and fraud for the benefit of rapacious and conniving phone companies.

In E-Stonia, the dark prospect of an Internet takeover by global copyright lords brought the population into the streets.

"Respect existence or expect resistance," say these shy and softspoken people, who know what human rights abuse looks like, no matter what mask it wears or what shape it takes.

Someday even the cruel dictatorship of Baltic airlines will be relegated to the ash-heap of history. Occupy Air Baltic, and give a free return ticket to all!

Photo: Bruce Sterling

Occupy SXSW 2013

Jasmina Tesanovic — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 13:00:51 +0000

Image: Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic image from Tim Regan's photostream

I must start with a tweet from my wise friend Xeni Jardin:

"Some of you have asked why I'm not at SXSW: as a person with cancer, have I not suffered enough already?"

Well, some of us still are there at South By South West every year, among hordes of nerds, geeks and unnoticed celebrities in a magnificent carnival of tech in Austin, Texas.

This year, I had Stendhal’s syndrome after day two: I risked a stampede while fleeing the endless queue for Al Gore’ s keynote. At a festival of this size, people queue like in war zones where any queue means available goods. It's only after you get a firm place in line that you ask: what are we waiting for?

Individualism in armies is not tolerated, and by day three the entire army itself seemed as crushed by the challenge as I was. The geeks walked aimlessly, tired, with dark bags around their eyes, dirty clothes, undone laces. Austin is a besieged town in these ten days: with thirty thousand paying attendees and an un-numbered horde of locals and curiosity-seekers, roaming the streets of this proudly weird city.

The headless and dismembered horde of internet geeks overloaded the Internet in the Austin convention center, and phone service also crashed because of too much downloading, uploading, tweeting, flickring, tumblring and whatever new social media was invented this year. Every startup longs to become a Twitter, leaping into prominence among these early adopters and thought pioneers. They may expect a Twitter at SXSW 2007 and find themselves with an Arab revolution of 2011!

When you are at SXSW, you have an anxious feeling of missing just about everything except the event you are actually seeing. Seeing too much too soon upsets the stomach, and how painful to think that your limited human mind will never comprehend the virtual nomadic language of these young natives. Even their body language changes radically year by year, as they invent new ways of poking, stroking or scratching their new devices. You can forget the mannerly habits of looking people straight in the eye, cordially shaking their hand. Their eyes drift when they speak, they stare at their handheld devices and send smilies to distant comrades, and instead of shaking hands they bump fists.

A new esthetics implies a new fashion. This year the crowd was much better dressed than last year: fewer fat desktop jockeys and more girls who "forgot their skirts" it's all about elastic jeggings and beautiful computer generated patterned tights.

A panel explained how to wear gadgets in the future; expect them to vanish into the electric seams of the clothing. Since we are becoming tech fashion victims, why consider it creepy to wander the streets with head-mounted Google Glass? What could there be to fear in enhancing the human experience, by tossing one's clumsy phone aside and wearing it on your forehead? Why hide the technology, for if you hide it too effectively you're being spied upon by surveillance you can't even see. Put GPS inside your beautiful shoes, then draw tender hearts on the fabric of your jeans and have your trousers send that straight to the pants of a loved one. As your heart beats faster with emotional joy, your blouse and your earrings blush with LED color.

Augmented Reality activist/ artists are getting political, using their devices to "invade" the closed locales of NATO bases, or decorating the air around the tents of the Occupy movement in New York and elsewhere.

Half the participants at SXSW seem to be volunteers, a hardworking invisible army of young locals who supply the sweat and labor behind the fancy screens and stages of the interactive superstars. This found a strange parallel in the film "Good Old Freda," which documented the obscure life of hardworking Beatles fan and secretary Freda Kelly. This teenage Beatlemania devotee was the private, invisible secretary of The Beatles, faithfully answering their fan mail from their very first day and after the band split. A woman who once she stopped working for the Beatles, scarcely bothered to tell her story, even to her children or grandchildren. Until today! and boy, Freda is the best of the Beatles, the only one who wasn't destroyed by all the hype!

At SXSW the halls and rooms and ballrooms were set that everybody could be a star for three minutes: you could sit on throne of the "Games of Thrones" fantasy television series, or stand in an ad for some fancy product…the horizontal structure of social media transforms the masses into Good ol' Fredas with a story to tell. We can only hope there is somebody left to listen!

On Tuesday, with the hordes mostly gone back to the coasts or Europe, the event closed with three Austin gurus, futurists and-or hustlers, Hugh Forrest, Jon Lebkowsky and Bruce Sterling, veterans of the event's early days, confronting a second and third generation of geeks.

It was a moving sign that the show must go on… Occupy SXSW!

A report from Webstock 2013: Jasmina Tesanovic

Jasmina Tesanovic — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 20:29:06 +0000

Photo: Bruce Sterling

I've been to tech conferences all over the world, but this one may be the most radical: Webstock in Wellington, New Zealand. It's about web designers as both stars of "new media" and as futurist philosophers. These web people, who normally talk in their geeky way about algorithms, can't resist preaching some morality and politics, all from a handsome wooden stage on which the Beatles once performed in 1964.

Their IQs are as high as boiling water, while their jargon is a multinational meta-language above all national cultures. They are traitors to the sacred values of corporate mainstream business, even when they are part of it.

Here are some Webstock philosophical homilies.

• Structure your information diet. Don't consume too much data, but create a nutritious whole-news movement. Don't advertise, inform.
• Since time is precious, attention must be "paid." Go local! Eat broccoli, not overstuffed pizzas from the Fox News empire!
• Get rid of the clients who restrict your creativity. Use adversity to rediscover your aspirations, the goals you either never set, or that you lost in the money maze.
• The no-client policy says: when you have a creative project, try it immediately. You know more that you know that you know!

This leitmotif: do it immediately, do it for yourself -- is the core of the web designer activism. It's as if protracted thought was bad for their creativity. Ponderous concern is just procrastination in disguise. The web is so uncertain that you must either react with lean, monkey-like agility, or else face psychotherapy.

More key words:

• fail, but fail forward. The problem comes when we don't understand the problem. Don't "think outside the box", change the box entirely.
• Journalism is in crisis. Not knowing your tools means telling bad stories. Designers are natural leaders for creatives less technically deft, those who struggle to survive! Create better content, using design as wedges to make people happier!
• instead of motion pictures, we make emotion machines!

Then we have the dark euphoria design fiction parable of "Fluffy, the Internet-of-Things LOLcat." This darling, hugely popular pet is actually a metaphor for ourselves, the ignorant Internet livestock dominated by moguls like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple... People living in denial while their world falls apart with climate change and finance crisis. No "off" button in real lives of humans, as colorful and hapless as Internet cat pics! Not quite what Vaclav Havel had in mind when he aspired to "live in truth."

Then we go to smart cities, in which the word "smart" disguises an oppressive disaster-capitalism. It is smartness imposed from above, created and dropped onto cities from a scorched-space abstracted void. Cities without history, where we don't live and never will: cities consecrated to the administrative needs of corporate elites.

But another city is possible with these approaches:

1. broadband connectivity to make the city live
2. smart personal devices for individuals
3. open municipal data
4. public interfaces
5. cloud computing

In modern China, we are told, citizens live double lives: a risky, oppressive dangerous real life and a pleasing Internet life. Your intimates, who know too much about you, are a threat to you, while Internet strangers are kindly friends who want to help. Chinese users have elastic selves, stretching back and forth over the limits of official proscription. Is it true of just them, or everybody nowadays?

Web design is a moral issue! Occupy design! Destroy misogyny! Destroy Webstock itself, even! The audience rose with a final roar as this two-day orgy ended and everyone sought a friendly bar around the corner.

I must say that the true winners of this web conference are cats. Clearly cats are winning the Internet without having to do any of the hard work.

The hacktivist blogger gets some attention, but the Twitter profile for his cat "Sockington" has one and a half million followers. Now I am one among them, since I am promoting this stupid cat as a philosopher of the new media. Sockington even has his own Wikipedia entry. Design may be a tool for divine genius for web stars, yet it is cats, the surrogates of humans, who become the protagonists! This is the world as it is!

What else can one say about Wellington, NZ? It has the best mutton and the worst cake in the world. I saw the best sea views and took dreadful photos. People dress in chic, sleek Californian sports gear with the dismal hats of the monarch, Queen Elizabeth!

More: Webstock 2013

Amazons with a Cause

Jasmina Tesanovic — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 17:41:55 +0000

Why are women first to pay for every crisis? In every society, capitalist, socialist, or transition? It's because the bodies of women are expendable.

I always noticed how women over eighty in Turin looked incredibly well, beautiful and loved and taken care of: desirable, because old and valuable. I connected this to Italy's long-established and sophisticated health care system. Italian hospitals were famous for methods which preserved the dignity of the patients, in tumor cures, especially breast cancer: the "invisible mastectomy" was invented in Milan. Rather than simply intervening in crisis, they were good at illness prevention and attentive follow-ups.

The economic crisis and financial harassment of Italy has reached this safe haven of health and dignity. In Turin, one of the best clinics for cure and prevention of breast cancer is about to be closed. The patients are on the streets, their appointments cannot be scheduled, they are paying for their urgent operations because their doctors cannot help them. The doctors are on the streets too.

Public health care in Italy was guaranteed as one of the basic human rights: without class race of gender discrimination. We are all equal in front of death.

The Valdesian hospital was founded by Italy's Protestant minority; it was about spirituality and charity rather than the global health market. However, the church passed the hospital to the state some years ago. They naturally assumed that it was in good hands, but as this tiny church is to the state, the state is to the market.

Although "Italy is not a brothel," as they said during the Berlusconi scandals, the flesh of women is negotiable by other means.

Protests, sit-ins and negotiations have failed to save the hospital. So last weekend, Turinese women decided to take action. They organized a public booth to photograph their breasts anonymously.

They plan to release an affresco of hundreds of their depersonalized female bodies, as a warning.

They are merely doing publicly what the hospital did less visibly.

Next step is the big demo planned for December first, to be followed by a sit-in for December 7th. On that day, the police are scheduled to shut physically the hospital.

It was a place of solace where women felt like respected human beings, and the attack on it has made them into Amazons with a cause.

The Likes of Me: a dispatch from Jasmina Tesanovic

Jasmina Tesanovic — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 18:24:14 +0000

"Lunchtime at Rosa House, a woman-run shelter in Zagreb, Croatia. Photo by Center for Women War Victims. From "The Suitcase: Refugee Voices from Bosnia and Croatia."

A couple of days ago, the two former members of the Croatian military won a "not guilty" sentence in the Hague international war crime tribunal.

I was not present in the general headquarters of the Croatian army while they were deciding on their "Operation Storm" action of 1995. I don't know if the telephone rang there. I also don't know if President Bill Clinton personally told them to go ahead with the largest land offensive since World War II, because the CIA would help. That is what certain Serbian newspapers published recently.

I have a remarkable lack of knowledge about world paramilitary conspiracies, secret chambers in the Vatican, mysterious double-agents doing their jobs badly. Generally, the things I know are in the public domain, because people said these things publicly and I took notes, or because I was just personally standing there.

Consider those days in August 1995, when that "Operation Storm" took place. I stood at the border between Croatia and Serbia, watching the endless caravan of people fleeing on truckbeds, in their cars, on foot, in nightgowns, in torn Serbian uniforms, with guns and babies. I talked to those people. I took photos: I personally saw newborn refugees carried in shoe boxes, babies who were born during the exodus of ethnic Serbs fleeing the Croatian army.

"Dreams of home in a gymnasium of strangers." Photo: Lisa Kahane, 1995. From "The Suitcase: Refugee Voices from Bosnia and Croatia."

I saw angry Serbian soldiers tearing off their military insignia because they were given orders by their military to abandon the region without fighting. I also saw people being given food and shelter by the local Serbian population. I heard the refugee stumbling towards an unknown destiny, since they had lost everything.

Operation Storm put a swift and sudden end in to four years of fighting for Serbian autonomy inside Croatia. The plans for a Greater Serbia torn from the fabric of Yugoslavia had been crushed by 150,000 Croatian Army troops. I heard the fleeing Serbs saying how rich and happy they had been in their rural homes. They had Croatian accents -- if you ask me, that is, a woman with a Belgrade accent. They'd been born in Croatia of a people established there for centuries, but they were keenly aware of being Serbian Orthodox non-Catholic non-Croats.

They rejected a Croatian identity and passport, preferring their own rules and ideas. Their most important aspiration was to live within the Greater Serbia promised to them by Milosevic and his generals. Some were kissing the Serbian flag and the picture of Milosevic. Most of them were tearing the flag and swearing at the broken promises and the reeling military defeat of their beloved leader.

Later, I saw the endless caravan of Krajina refugees being routed by the Serbian police outside Belgrade. Only those Serbs who had relatives in the capital were allowed enter the city. Naturally scarcely any of them could prove that. People within Belgrade did not see or hear the refugees, except for what the official Milosevic tv or radio allowed. Of course that was a thoroughly censored version of events.

I don't know where those people ended up. Their exact number is vague, it varies in the telling, from two hundred thousand to half a million displaced ethnic refugees.

Later I lived as a neighbor and friend to a family of four from Krajina. They had managed to arrive that day in Belgrade, and their entire worldly goods consisted of one suitcase and their car. The family was a man, his wife and their two teenaged sons. They were silent and bitter, never commenting on politics or speaking about their loss.

The father and the boys found work immediately, humble physical jobs. They rented two rooms in my courtyard house. All day the wife washed long shirts and sheets, so that they would stay clean and decent. Rada was a beautiful woman who once had a nice job in the municipality of Knin. I would talk to Rada privately and she would tell me how upset she was by her fate. She blamed the Serbian government for gambling with their lives.

Rada hadn't blamed Serbia before, but now they were actually living in Serbia and knew what it was like. It was a lesser Serbia rather than a greater one, and the state offered them no help: no legal papers, no money, no real jobs. When interviewed publicly, though, Rada would quickly change her story. She grew eloquent with the patriotic male version of endless anti-Croatian lament and Serbian victimhood.

I asked her why, she answered: because I told you a secret. It's the Serbs who brought us misery and not the Croats, but don't tell anybody.

"First night under a roof for refugees from Krajina." Photo: Lisa Kahane, 1995. From "The Suitcase: Refugee Voices from Bosnia and Croatia."

Things haven't changed so much since 1995, for the Serbian refugees from Croatia. No jobs no money and no papers in Serbia: no jobs no papers and no houses in Croatia. Hardly any went back to ethnically cleansed Krajina. When they did, they found that their homes and lands had been settled by other refugees, commonly Croatian ethnics thrown out of Bosnia or Serbia. Some of these new arrivals were not dramatic refugees, just everyday squatters and looters. In a war, everybody becomes uprooted. If you don't already know who the victim is, then the victim is you.

War crimes were committed on all sides, as people in Serbia are keen to point out. The Hague tribunal promised to prosecute all such crimes without fear or favor. That the Serbian army and government were especially bloodthirsty is a common knowledge in the world. But the world is the world.

But it's surprising how forgiving the world can be. Serbia was in fact acquitted of the Srebrenica genocide some years ago; Serbia is not a "genocidal regime," it's just another small regional state. A few days ago, it was further decided that "Operation Storm" and the pogroms that followed were not war crimes, just a Balkan military operation. Serbia then, and Croatia now are celebrating their public innocence. Of course the graves are still there. One has to wonder how many of the survivors believe these findings of innocence. About themselves, or the Other.

During the shelling of Sarajevo, I asked my cousin from Sarajevo about the situation. She was a Serb, so she answered me confidentially: it our own people shelling my city. But, don't tell anybody.

Somehow, she really believed she could keep that fact a secret. She also had a strange faith that sniper bullets fired downtown would hit only the Muslim enemy within her streets.

Two years ago, I happened to meet a veteran Croatian soldier from Operation Storm. Like a lot of demobilized soldiers, he was still fond of military gear, and he was wearing a "boonie hat" from an American pal who had served in Afghanistan. We began talking, and who told me how he had "liberated" an eighty year old woman in Krajina. He'd saved her from captivity among her two adult sons, who were Serbs fighting the Croatian Army. He was sure he had saved her life, and he really believed every word he said. > He too had a family, and he'd saved a captive mother from the clutches of her Serbian outlaws.

I wrote these stories down, I took photos, because I wanted to bear witness, and not to forget. I also want other people not to forget these tragedies, even though we must have the courage to go on as if the world has found us innocent. We must live our lives in peace henceforth, as if this atrocities were not committed, and although most of them will stay forever unpunished.

The courage to forgive should not mean to forget: I will never forget those three days on the Croatian border in early August 1995, writing my book "The Suitcase." The contradictions and bitter disenchantment of those betrayed people is especially memorable. But I am becoming old-fashioned, and my stories of bloody regional mayhem are frankly boring. The world is a big place, with other, newer regions of slaughter, and Balkan tales are not global bestseller material. They don't respect the time-honored James Bond canon of sex, snobbery and sadistic thrills, and even the weirdest Balkan conspiracy theories can't match up to a Dan Brown plot.

Still, somebody has to do the dirty work. Commonly, it is the women who collect the historical rubble. So, let it be the likes of me.

Student Riots in Italy: a dispatch from Jasmina Tesanovic

Jasmina Tesanovic — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 20:05:02 +0000

When I myself was a protesting student, I remember vividly remembered the cold warning in the text by Pier Paolo Pasolini. He reminded us youngsters that the police we faced in the streets were also someone's children, that not all young people were fortunate enough to be in colleges rather than wearing uniforms, and that we should join all together against the general oppressor, the system, capitalism, the corporations, name it…

That was then, and this is now, and while the students and policemen still have the same interests, they are still on the opposite sides of the barricade. Austerity has driven Italy to its knees. Day by day the future of Italy's young people is vaporizing, and now the streets are flooded by torrential rains, to boot. Italian cities rocked by earthquakes might as well settle for witchcraft, rather than find responsible and competent government officials who can rescue the nation's casualties.

A Facebook comment from my Italian friend:

Is it possible that all these years every time there is a demonstration we have to expect the same song: attention to the provocateurs + protestors cruelly beaten by the police + poor policemen beaten by provocateurs = Am I missing something: Democracy!

In Torino, a 15-year old high school student posted on her Facebook a photo of two girls kissing in front of the heavily armed police. With these words: this is how we should face the forces of order!

She told me: those horrible Black Bloc destroy our attempts to do something peacefully, and we are not protesting only because there is no money left in our schools, but also as Europeans who understand that austerity program kills the students in rich as well as in poor countries.

Yesterday during the "No Austerity day in Europe", proclaimed by students and trade unions in major towns in Italy, the protests turned to riot and turmoil. In Torino, three policemen were injured, one badly. The number of students/citizens injured in Torino is not yet known. Chantings and peaceful legal manifestations degenerated into beatings and insults.

In Rome, along with a general strike of transportation, the Tiber flooded, paralyzing the nation's capital. Even on its best days Rome can barely move.

The targets of protesters were banks, public administration offices, and even the twelve-starred European flag, a flag so deliberately dull that it rarely attracts a passionate attention. The center of protests are the countries in crisis, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Italy…but even the well off northern countries are crippled by the Austerity, which is rapidly become a crisis much worse than the Crisis it was supposed to fix. Choked by Austerity, Europe is sliding into Recession again, and there's no sign that this approach will ever restore prosperity.

The word Austerity, that calm and bureaucratic term, is enough to cause panic in the streets of Europe now. National majorities know that it's a weapon against their own interests. Where is the "Austerity" for the one percent of the population dominating the economy? They don't apply any example of severe austerity to their own habits and aspirations. Secured in private jets, or within their high tech mentally-gated communities, they wonder why the streets grow slick with blood, sweat and tears.

This is something new in the world. It's rather like the alienation and anomie of the Industrial Age, but it's a new cybernetic detachment -- the atomized individuals of the Network Society, super-connected to screens, but failing to live and breathe together as a civilization. The Smart City shows its dark side as a gridwork of surveillance, as the peaceable consumers of the 1990s become a rabble to be kettled up!

United Europe just won the Nobel Prize for Peace. Where's the peace and Union from Austerity?

Collective Intelligence: Science on Trial, Berlusconi sentenced. Dispatch from Italy, by Jasmina Tesanovic

Jasmina Tesanovic — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 21:24:43 +0000

The Italian scientific community was stunned when Italian scientists, seismologists, were recently sentenced to years of prison for manslaughter, for failing to predict the lethal earthquake in Aquila in 2009. Other scientists have resigned to their jobs in protest, and even some relatives of the victims condemned the sentence as ridiculous.

The world press was reporting on the dark ages of inquisition in Italian courts and labs. But then, journalistic investigations discovered political scandals that implied a plot to downplay earthquake dangers in Aquila, involving Berlusconi and his cabinet. Silvio Berlusconi can't control earthquakes any more than seismologists can, but he's always been keen on controlling media.

It came as a huge relief to many Italians when, on Friday, a brave court of Milan managed to sentence Berlusconi for his tax frauds. He is condemned to 4 years of prison, but of course he will appeal, stall, and agitate demogogically. Nobody is expecting this potentate to serve time in an Italian prison. It is still a significant moral victory for the brave judges, fighting for years on end to legally prove what was already obvious to everybody.

Of course Berlusconi was enraged and immediately threatened to take over the Italian government and, if necessary, topple the European Union in his ageless feud with the Italian courts. His re-ignited ambitions -- he only feels safe at the top of the Italian state, and often not even there -- caused justified fear among the citizens. Italians are unhappy with Monti governmental solutions, an Austerity imposed by the Central European bank and the EU from Brussels. The Austerity is miserable, but it got there due the wild immoral corruption of Berlusconi, his party members and the court harems.

In Rome an anti-Monti demo blocked the downtown of the city with the usual leftist protests, so dear to the Italian alert activists. But in the outskirts of Rome, in Garbatella, a wise and sharp conference of small enterprises and craftsmen was held. Here political matters were handled in a different way; no more laments and protests, but a search for concrete solutions for getting Italy out of a dead end.

The CNA NeXT 2012 Motori festival was held in a rebuilt theater in Garbatella, the working class neighborhood once dominated by the vanished Italian auto business. Digital and other young Italian craftsmen, self employed artists/businessmen are facing a harsh reality of shocking number of small businesses bankrupting next year. Made in Italy crafts, the nation's most famous and prestigious products from food to clothes, are collapsing in the general economic crisis. There's no sign of plausible political and social solutions, just the black past of Berlusconi laissez faire right winged corruption, or the present European asphyxiating austerity.

The Italians have won the battle on national brands in the EU regulations: they can keep their much-prized "Made in Italy" branding, if any craftsmen financially survive to actually make things in Italy. It's been hard to forfeit control of local affairs to the distant European Union; when it came to deposing Berlusconi the Europeans were lifesavers, but Brussels isn't sentimental about local arts and crafts.

Garbatella has a certain working-class blue-collar romantic air, the part of town was portrayed by artists like Pasolini, the poet killed in 1975 and Nanni Moretti the prestigious Italian contemporary filmmaker. So "Motori" was a conference for "Collective Intelligence," where Italians, who might have once been in labor unions, scratched their heads and wondered if they could organize digitally on new platforms for design, creation, production and export. It may seem farfetched to look for rescue from the Internet and open-source, rather than from Rome, Brussels or panicky business investors. But what else is on the horizon for people who want to get real work done? Just anti-science superstition, financial corruption, and blatant fear of the future.

Besides the young boisterous voices of Italy's lost generation, who are seeking inventive ways to avert the disasters brought on by their nation's elderly "Caste", two Italian celebrities were also present. They were the Oscar winning Italian conductor Piovani and the famous national soccer coach Zeman, both accompanied by Roman paparazzi. How do they manage the "collectivity" of an successful Italian orchestra and a successful Italian soccer team? Did these star managers have any useful hints?

Piovani, the musical director, resplendent in a silk suit and burgundy socks, was entirely in favor of collective work imposing discipline, and, as he put it, the beauty of following the rules. Zeman, the leather-clad soccer coach, was in favor of individual talent -- the stars have to hone their gifts to pull the team to victory. So approaches differed, but everyone involved mourned the painfully obvious cultural and moral decline of such a beautiful and creative country.

It's hard to believe in national salvation by "collective intelligence." On the other hand, it's exhilarating to see proud Italians rallying against obvious stupidity.

Photos: Jasmina Tesanovic

The Decent People: LGBT pride in the former Yugoslavia

Jasmina Tesanovic — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 22:12:36 +0000

Years ago during the reign of Milosevic in Serbia I wrote an essay called "Decent people". It was about that 80 percent of Serbian people, the classic silent majority, who lived in denial of the genocide in Srebrenica, the snipers in Sarajevo, the shelling in Dubrovnik.

These so called decent people who could not grasp cruel political and military reality. Eventually the damage to daily life became impossible; the decent people could not go through with their charade of normality as postmen, engineers and dentists. On October 5th 2000 a million people took to the streets in Belgrade and physically deposed the tyrant.

However, time stopped then in Serbia. An October 6th never dawned for a bewildered Serbia, not even 12 years later, on the anniversary. Milosevic died behind the bars in the Hague, my Yugoslav-era parents are deceased, my postman is on pension but the inhabitants of the Serbian parliament today are the next generation of those decent people. No painful truths were admitted and confronted; there was a rebellion of the decent, but not a thorough change in the society.

Typically, a few days ago the new elected premiere of Serbia forbade the Gay Pride annual parade. He claimed that 80 percent of the Serbian population is against gay manifestations, and warned against the risky and inevitable gay-bashing that would follow in the streets. This new premiere is an old member from the deposed Milosevic' s party. Crushing the aspirations of Serbian gays has become routine, and he has already handled the trouble successfully before.

There's only been one actual, public, blatant Gay Pride Parade, in 2010, held with heavy police escort and, yes, violent incidents from right-wing hooligans. These populists are well-rehearsed agitators, whose extremism is easy to predict, but the decent people are in many ways worse. In 2001 we held a street event for gays, and everyday citizens yelled obscenities, spat on us and pushed us around. I vividly remember a middle aged man, his face was distorted by hate and righteous anger, trailing our pro-gay banners and yelling insults. I thought he was a deranged stalker, but next day I met him in the local green market, along with his wife and a small kid. He was polite, neighborly, saying hello. He was a respectable patriarch of a small family, shopping in public as all decent people do on Sundays, except when society fails so utterly that there's no money left and nothing in the shops. As for spitting on me: he was proud of it and considered it a civic duty.

The Serbian gay pride parade was held indoors this year, more a protest than a parade. There was still a lot of fuss made by the police, who treated the press center as if it were a besieged fortress, ghastly emptying Belgrade downtown and isolating the gays. The activists inside four walls were promising one another a better future, but many avoided the farcical non-parade.

It's become an opportunity for foreign friends and supporters to write mails of support. The western countries are perfectly aware that the Serbian right has made gay existence a wedge-issue, so for their part the West makes it a litmus test for their own attitudes toward the new reign in Serbia. The big picture is grimmer. In Russia and Ukraine there are serious attempts for re-criminalizing gays and the Serbian is quite encouraged by these Slavic examples of a weird new KGB-Orthodox-fundamentalist autocratic alliance.

My friends in Italy recently successfully performed gay parades, plus a gay marriage in public with all the witty joy of commedia dell'arte, in the land of Pope! However, in Italy too the decent people shy away en masse from the specter of gay marriages and legalized gay couples. The Italians were trying to console me with the universality of homophobia.

But Italian society, raddled with the sexual decadence of priestly abuse and Berlusconi's harems, can't possibly be so densely solid in denialist ignorance as the Serbian decent people. The Serbs have been defending their heretical, unorthodox Orthodoxy for centuries, from attacks from east, west, north, south and center. The rigor and the pressure had a fossilizing effect.

In Italy you will be casually ripped off as a tourist -- everyday Italian decent people will cheerfully defraud foreigners, disgracefully cheating and chiselling for a couple of euros. In Serbia the hospitable decent people would feed a guest with their last crumbs of bread and salt, but then put the guest's severed head on a pike if he offended their code of honor. The very strong Orthodox church which dictates aggressively the new-old codes of Christian fundamentalist expansion, is in open alliance with the new/old political regime, the government which was heavily involved in wars and war profiteering.

However, there are fits of disturbance as well. During the gay pride week in Belgrade, a show appeard by a Swedish artist Elisabeth Ohlson Wallin , titled "Ecce Homo." It deliberately and rather hilariously depicted Christ and his disciples as gay leather-boys. This rampantly blasphemous show was protected by two thousand policemen while a rally of so called family people seized the opportunity to push the right wing agenda around the corner. Belgrade, which is after all the home-town of Marina Abramovic ( even though it never acknowledged the work of the world famous artist), attracted some activists and art fans to enjoy and appreciate the show.

Homophobia, nationalism, racism, clericalism, fundamentalism all have the same root: the fear of Other, and the same aim, the homogenization of all differences. If you're gay you at least have the joy of knowing that your struggle is shared world-wide, but the planet's decent people, wrapped in political deceit and faith-based superstition, seem to be shutting themselves into a planetary series of ever-narrower, ever more stifling closets.

My night with the International Space Orchestra: Jasmina Tesanovic

Jasmina Tesanovic — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 18:49:27 +0000

The International Space Orchestra in front of Vacuum Chambers, NASA Ames Research Center. Photo: Neil Berrett.

I never dreamed I would be in a NASA base in California, singing and playing music.

The Ground Control Opera performance by Nelly Ben Hayoun, presented the International Space Orchestra, 50 local technicians and scientists, playing in the city of San Jose at the Zero1 Biennial 2012. The opera reenacts the first minutes of Neil Armstrong's landing on the Moon. It's dedicated to the memory of the recently gone cosmonauts and astronauts, and the endeavors of scientists at ground-control stations, still trying to make our 20th century dreams of spaceflight come true.

My daughter asked me when she mis-heard that I was singing for "NASA": Mom why are you singing to "NATO?" NATO bombed us in Serbia in 1999! I said my dear this is NASA, not NATO, they have planes and rockets but not bombers and missiles! They are searching for habitable planets with the Kepler space probe! Maybe there are other space controllers somewhere out there!

We've never yet settled alien planets, but maybe Silicon Valley will do. Tthe topic of this years art and science biennial is "Seeking Silicon Valley." The show was curated by five women from Korea, Brazil, Germany, Canada, and California.

The Zero1 event brought in thirty pieces of art/installations: Cell phones were methodically smashed in one installation, toasters made out of stone appeared in another, books made of internet addresses in yet another one. You could be hugged breathless by a smart chair, have your face virtually eaten by a mushroom while imagining your grave… You could play with an enormous inflated bubble which would cover you with charcoal smears -- pleasant to interact with, like a giant pet.

This art event connected to local happenings on the ground in sprawling San Jose, the self proclaimed "Capital of Silicon Valley." Silicon Valley, by its nature, is hyper realistic, inflated, shiny, soulless and somewhat scary. Unlike cities elsewhere, a perfect but lonely machine. The morning after the show and party, the Sunday sun was scorching the homeless derelicts in the emptied streets of San Jose... nobody else to be seen there.

In the conceptual essay of Gisela Domschke, one of the curators of the show, we were asked to express our ideas and feelings about the Silicon Valley.

Alessandro Ludovico: a place whose virtual importance transcend its real presence. Marcus Bastos: the counterculture ethos which shaped work environments in todays major corporations. Bruce Sterling: when will Californians realize that their gold rushes always finish ugly? Marisa Olson: I remember a picture in black and white: a handsome young visionary sitting lotus-like alone on the floor of what appears to be a large home: empty save for what appears to be a lamp!

Yes, Steve Jobs is gone now but the iPhone 5 is about to show up, here in the capital of Silicon Valley. People are already queuing to pay and play; like some mystical 13th nomadic tribe of unknown ethnic origin. The virtuals are here, like a horde of a million astronauts -- what souls do they have, what dreams?

Free Pussy Riot [Jasmina Tesanovic]

Jasmina Tesanovic — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 20:04:52 +0000

I used to say, "This will not be my war anyway" to my daughter, to my young colleagues, and friends feminists or not: to girls.

We fought in the seventies eighties nineties for freedom of choice, for divorce, for contraception, for women's human rights, against domestic violence, for peace in the world. We fought incessantly, ruthlessly, risking our careers, our private lives, our security and normality. And we accomplished a lot, all over the world; in Italy, in Serbia, in USA, name it.

The second wave of feminism was standing on the shoulders on the suffragettes from the beginning of the 19th century, who often gave their lives for women's rights. Then I got tired, and not me only. The world took a bad turn, not only in Serbia during the nineties, but everywhere after September 11!

The Globalization of Balkanization put at stake all the conquests of women and not only of women: terrorism, and raging war on terrorism, brought us police right-wing technocrat dystopian states where human rights became just another word for nothing left to lose. I told my young girls then: you must fight it now, this is your world, the one we inadvertedly left you. Learn how much you have inherited from your grandmothers, don't take it for granted because you are may well lose it, step by step, bit by bit. To the church, to the state, to the financiers.

Proof of this new world we are living in is the conviction of the punk Russian band Pussy Riot, convicted of blasphemy against Russian church and state, sentenced to two years of prison because of an art performance in a church. Of course, if women dared to protest in a Moslem mosque, a harsh repression would be “normal,” but since this event happened in a Russian Orthodox church, there are still voices all over the world who link this new repression to past violations of civil rights. Easy to link Putin to Stalin, but what about many long centuries of Christian culture-war and land-war, burning heretics and witches, torturing their dissidents and scientists, and Catholic-Protestant land-wars convulsing Europe for a century? And for that matter, what would happen to American punk artists invading a Mormon Tabernacle to insult Mitt Romney? Would they escape unscathed?

Two of the Pussy Riot activists sentenced to prison are mothers of small babies. World stars like Madonna, Yoko Ono and Paul McCartney have written open letters and petitions for their liberation. Even Putin, the old new Russian leader the main target of their protest performances, expressed his hope that they wouldn't get the maximum sentence of three years. So, they got two years.

They have already even in the slammer for six months; but they have achieved the world fame for their act and their bravery. One wonders if they will be forced into exile, in the style of Taslima Nasreen in the 1990s, or the Russian dissident political artists and scientists of the 1970s. Does this evergreen usual method of uprooting the rioters, so as make them inoffensive in another country, in another language, still work in today's globalized world? Nowadays being forced into exile can make a domestic discontent even more incendiary.

Thanks to the Internet, to the globalization of the activism, music, culture and politics, there is hope for the Pussy Riot girls, if not for their country, Russia, and their fussy sultan, Putin. Putin is one of the best friends of Berlusconi, and the third member of the gang was Ghadaffi, now dead and gone with all his harem. Only a couple of years ago, these three notably macho world leaders would meet in their fancy villas to congenially plot another world order, along with their accompanying harems of Italian showgirls, Libyan female bodyguards, Russian siloviki astronaut spygirls, and so on. Their women were chattel, though often in uniform instead of burqas. The Pussy Riots girls wear red balaclavas when they perform as punks, as rioters -- as those who just won't have any of those new-old fashioned ways of “women and children” first: meaning women as the first sent to the slammers.

Their name is not vulgar, it is provocative; the red of their masks is not Communist, it's the color of blood; their personal story is not private, it is political; and by now they do not stand only for Russia but for a a generation of young women, visible or invisible, wrapped in chains of this new age which wants to destroy “bad girls”.

Whatever they do, they are doing it in my name too!

(Image: @tom_watson)

Earthquake and bombs in Italy: An eyewitness report from Jasmina Tesanovic

Jasmina Tesanovic — Sun, 20 May 2012 18:36:48 +0000

[Video Link.]

A weekend of fear and mourning in Italy.

Early this Sunday morning, an earthquake struck near Bologna: at least six killed (ceramic workers, and a hundred year old person), and big material damage in the region. The US Geological Survey heard the tremor: a magnitude-6.0 quake struck at 4:04 a.m. Sunday between Modena and Mantova, about 35 kilometers north-northwest of Bologna. Civil defence says that the quake was the strongest in the region since the 1300s. And the damaged building are valuable historical sites. In Italy such loss goes without saying.

We felt the earthquake in Torino, 260 kilometers from Modena at dawn. The apartment building shook and the late-night party people yelped with alarm in the streets. As I write this we hear the building crack and we tremble: I am checking on twitter. Yes, it' s an aftershock at 15.19.

Not unusual for Italy to deal with deadly earthquakes, but what comes afterward can be nearly as troublesome: state neglect and real estate speculation. Those who are not under earth may have the skies as a roof forever! The last big earthquake in Aquila in 2009 speaks about that.

On Saturday morning, a bomb exploded in front of a high school, killing a 16 year old girl and injuring several other students seriously. This school bears the name of an antimafia activist, but it seems this was a terror attack. As if this distinction mattered: what cruel frame of mind, what political activism wants to bomb teenage schoolgirls? What is this message supposed to convey?

Fear and anger among citizens: standings all over Italian towns in solidarity with bombing victims in the southern Italian town Brindisi, and loud opposition to the reign of terror of anonymous bombs against civilians. The "strategy of tension" was notorious during the "lead years" in the seventies and eighties.

Italy in these days is targeted as the next country after Greece to be tumbled out of the euro zone into severe recession and collapse. The new Monti government, struggling to undo Berlusconi's long unruly reign in mere months, is imposing grim economic measures. Monti was a banker, and now is a prime minister: the trade unions blame his approach as inspired by and for the financiers rather than the population. Even Italian lighthouses auctioned off to tackle public debt pile.

"They stand on imposing headlands with spectacular views of isolated bays and white sandy beaches, some of the most picturesque in the Mediterranean." (Telegraph, UK)

The rate of unemployment among young people is 40 percent.

Italian flags are at half staff for three days of mourning. The international press has been reporting on the school killing as well as the earthquake: the social networks are full of useful news and active support for concrete initiatives. This awareness doesn't stop the Italian earth from shaking, the euro from falling, or criminals from killing the innocent, but it's a vital sign in our modest domain of life.

—Jasmina Tesanovic

War Crimes trial for Ratko Mladic begins in The Hague

Jasmina Tesanovic — Wed, 16 May 2012 14:27:11 +0000

Photo: Jasmina in a former prison. "Despite the scale of the facility, it was densely crowded once." Shot by Bruce Sterling.

This morning, The Hague tribunal commenced the trial of Ratko Mladic, ex commander of the army of the Serbian republic in Bosnia. Mothers of the slain gathered in front of the court.

Twenty years ago, Mladic started his criminal activities, while still an officer of the army of disintegrating Yugoslavia. A year ago, Mladic was arrested, after years of concealment, mostly within Belgrade. Today Mladic, aged 70, is sitting in the court neatly dressed as a civilian, without his legendary military cap.

As the judge reads the indictment, Mladic cheerily waving to the audience and even applauds certain parts of the recitation. "The wolf loses his hair but not his character," as the Serbian proverb puts it.

The indictment precisely proceeds as a short elementary lesson of the bloody fall of Yugoslavia.

Ratko Mladic is facing 11 charges: ethnic cleansing, genocide, crimes against humanity, torture, sexual violence, the wanton destruction of the urban fabric of Sarajevo, and so forth.

The maps of the indictment are a trail of blood. The borders of these maps were the major outcome of the Dayton peace treaty of 1995, signed a couple of months after the genocide of Srebrenica.

A witness appears to describe the concentration camp where she was systematically raped. I didn't even look at their faces when they would enter the room or go out. They had killed my whole family: I was the only survivor. I was just asking the same question day after day: why?

These people lived together for centuries, and then, in a burst of bloody disaster, some became criminal nationalists when their neighbors, now demonized as Others, had to be annihilated at their hands. There is little going in the Hague courtroom that wasn't described by Hannah Arendt during Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem in 1963.

It outdoes Hollywood, though. Angelina Jolie’s recent movie, "In the Land of Blood and Honey," is a pale replica of this horror reality-show, live from the Hague.

This trial of this soldier is haunted by the conspicuous absence of the late Slobodan Milosevic, the civilian leader. It was Milosevic who transformed General Mladic's Yugoslav army into an instrument of ethnic cleansing.

This much-respected people's army, which had defeated the Nazi genocide and the Fascist occupation, had stabilized Yugoslavia for decades. But, thanks to the machinations of Milosevic, the remnants of this once honorable force, now a micro-state Serbian militia, were liquidating civilians en masse in Srebrenica. Eight thousand ex-Yugoslav men and boys were executed there in three days. The UN protected enclave fell, Mladic raved, lied, and had the Moslems rounded up, confined and shot, while the "international community" turned its attentions elsewhere.

A host of movies, books, and heaps of material evidence didn’t bring justice to that dismal place, which today is a tourist center of crime, but also, still, an ethnic-Serb territory within the Dayton maps. Those who were killed there dwell only within the vast cemetery, so to that extent, Srebrenica was a lasting Mladic victory.

The JNA, once a popular national army, became experts at black operations. Special forces of paramilitary killers, the shadow forces of intelligence services and the mafia, took on themselves the worst burdens of cruelty. Their policy was raiding, arson, robbery, killing, expulsion and rape -- to terrorize all civilian populations that weren't Serbian, leaving a Greater Serbian nation to expand where the victims had fled for their lives.

The capital of this expansionary scheme was Belgrade, but the Bosnian Serb militias headed by Mladic were always formally autonomous and plausibly deniable.

In Belgrade, I lived in the same street with a couple of those notorious criminals: we shopped at the same bakers, and our children went to the same schools. In Belgrade, we were not sniped-at, shot or shelled, we looked peaceful; and the covert war did not touch our streets until it fell from distant jets in the air, in the NATO bombing.

Twenty years later, today, I can ponder the dreadful fates of people I knew, or saw, or lived with, who ripped their country apart to march to power over the bones of their neighbors.

The central mastermind died behind the bars in the Hague. Two major stars are under trial now. A bunch of minor ones are serving sentences. My neighbor, the professor turned war profiteer, committed suicide as a Shakespearean antihero. But there were thousands of others whose activities were just as bloody and sinister, who still live in Belgrade, shopping, sometimes reminiscing over the bad old days.

The Serbian population is still living in denial, and other nations have learned to let this new nation do that. Twenty years have passed, a period longer than the distance between Eichman's Nazi crimes and Eichman's trial. There are other wars nowadays, other covert, armed operations, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, the Sudan, where the lessons of destabilization, pioneered in the Balkans, have been fully modernized.

Even the political party of Milosevic has managed to rehabilitate itself nowadays. They did well in the recent Serbian elections, mostly through ignoring their heritage and talking about Serbia's modern troubles, which are many.

As for me, I follow the trials, and I sometimes write about them.

After twenty years, a new generation has arisen on the bloodily divided ground. They are innocent, but to live in peace with each other in the region will require an understanding of the past.

That past lives in the details of the Hague court's indictment: the snipers in Sarajevo, civilians mortar-blasted in the marketplaces, women raped, children killed, and much of this mayhem cynically described by the killers in their own documents, a host of private conversations and public interviews exposed to the world.

In the dock, Mladic is industriously taking notes as his prosecutor describes his war-crime strategies. I wonder what Mladic has to say to himself? His diaries have been published and translated: his daughter committed suicide during her father's battles. What does this 70 year old have to say to history? One of his favorite quotes is well-known in the record: “Whenever I come to Sarajevo, I kill.”

The word is power and the silence of the dead is loud.

—Jasmina Tesanovic

Titanic Tales: The Costa Concordia

Jasmina Tesanovic — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 18:57:51 +0000

Photo: An oil removal ship is seen next to the Costa Concordia cruise ship as it ran aground off the west coast of Italy at Giglio island, January 16, 2012. Over-reliance on electronic navigation systems and a failure of judgement by the captain are seen as possible reasons for one of the worst cruise liner disasters of all time, maritime specialists say. (REUTERS/ Max Rossi)

When I read hastily the headlines on Jan 14—a shipwreck in Italy, seventy missing, three known dead—I immediately thought: it must be the Africans again. The refugees, the clandestine, the invisible, the nameless, the unwanted… Those "less-than-human" people coming from all over the world to the Italian coast, looking for a safe haven from dictatorships, from hunger.

My Somali Italian friend Suad, who works with her community In Italy now, urges her people in Somalia NOT to take that dangerous ride: even if you survive the trip, what waits for you in Italy can be fatal. Italy is in deep economic crisis today, on the verge of bankruptcy and social disorder. The new government struggling to remain a G8 power while the euro and United Europe are at stake. Italy also struggles to overcome a big moral value crisis after twenty years of Berlusconi's reign of sexism, racism, indolence and corruption.

But I was wrong about the Africans. It was a fancy cruise ship full of wealthy foreigners that wrecked unexpectedly near the island of Giglio.

The splendid Costa Concordia was 290 meters long, and had thirteen decks. The ship featured thirteen bars, five restaurants, four swimming pools and five hundred balconied staterooms.

One woman survivor testified: "It was horrible! The foreign crew was screaming in their language in panic. We broke the glass and then we fought each other to get the lifejackets."

"While we were eating dinner, the first course, the plates started to flow, the glasses all of a sudden to run and then the lights went off. Then we fell on top of each other. People were stampeding while the ship was turning upside down. Now I am trying to find a friend I lost. Her cell phone is ringing but she is not answering."

A young Serbian girl who worked in the ship's gift shop recalled:

"We had to unleash the lifeboats ourselves: the instructors who had taught us how to do that jumped into the boats. There were no signs of ship officers to calm the passengers. Eighty-year-old people in a panic were shoving children, and mothers with babies in arms, in order to save themselves..."

When passing the isle of Giglio, cruise ships often greet the inhabitants of the island with a honk of the ship's horn. They say the habit dates back to an old Italian ship captain who was from Giglio and was bidding his home goodbye. From the land, the illuminated ship looks beautiful, and from the ship it's romantic to see the dark shape of an island speckled with lights. But for the Costa Concordia, everything went wrong.

Every tragedy becomes romantic if it's the last day of your life. All ships that sink carry the aura of the Titanic. All big disasters reveal the good and bad in people tested by adversity: people transform into heroes or cowards, and you never know who lurks within your own self at that ghastly hour.

A son of two elderly parents on the ship -- they had never left their home since their honeymoon years before -- personally came with his whole family to rescue them. He managed to save his mother, but for his father, it was too late.

A quiet Korean honeymoon couple was found alive after two days of fear, hunger and cold.

An Italian actress, also a survivor, said: "I was like an idiot, completely lost! When this ship tipped over on its side I tried to stop it with my feet!" In a further irony, this actress had once starred in a film about the famous sinking of the Andrea Doria.

There were four thousand people on that cruise ship: mostly Italian and French, but also tourists from many other nations. Students on a training course, hairdressers who had won a competition excursion worth 100 000 euros, many retired people, handicapped people and children. A floating Babel of different languages and cultures: a ghost nation.

Once the Costa Concordia showed her bad karma, of course it was recalled that on the day of her launch, the bottle of champagne smashed against her bow did not break.

A bad omen.

The captain of the ship was arrested and accused of manslaughter. He was charged with abandoning his position of command by cravenly saving himself, reaching the coast where he was found on a rock while his passengers fought for their lives.

The captain, in his distress, claims that his maps did not show the "Ghost Rock" on which his ship foundered: but his crew tells a different story. A deliberate decision to cruise far too close to the coast, to the bella isola di Giglio...to whistle a fond goodbye!

Naturally the Italian social networks spread their wisecracks: That's what happens when you hit the rock of Italy, the sinking country!

Other tourist cities in Italy like Venice are changing the security rules for cruise ships. A potential ecological disaster lingers: the fuel tanks in the carcass of the Costa Concordia might rupture.

My dear friend, Maja Mitic, an actress and activist from Belgrade, was aboard the Costa Concordia. She was there on her honeymoon, and to celebrate Serbian New Years. She wrote this on her Facebook profile:

"Dear friends, Ljuba and I are finally home.... after cruising seven days on Costa Concordia where we spend our last night, Friday the 13th of January, like on the movie Titanic... thank you all for your messages... What does not kill you, make you stronger!"

Bye-bye, Bunga-bunga: "Addio Berlusconi"

Jasmina Tesanovic — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 05:27:39 +0000

"I haven't been so inspired since 1994," an Italian friend of mine posted on her Facebook page.

Well, I too can remember the year 1994, when I was in Milan, giving a public speech among some so-called intellectuals, soon after Berlusconi was elected. I had come there directly from Serbia, struggling in the thick of the Milosevic reign of terror.

I remember warning my Italian friends, feeling frightened, extremely emotional. I described a 'soft dictatorship,' how a small caste of oppressors gets into power legally, because WE vote them in, and then they steal and fake everything that WE, the people, never delegated them to do. And how, finally after waging wars against all the OTHERS in our own name, they finally turn on their ultimate victims and wage their war against US.

How they destroy every aspect of reality that stands in the way of a total exploitation: meaning the destruction, the ruin, of the people, ideas, customs, habits, prosperity, morality, of a nation and its history, of a time and a space. Afterwards, after the dreadful crash, who feels empty and responsible? We, the citizens who voted, we whose states were surrendered to the exploiters and profiteers, we, the participants, we are the ones humiliated in front of our children and the whole world.

Tonight, while Italians danced in front of the parliament, impatiently waiting for Berlusconi to officially resign, I remembered, once again among many times, how Milosevic was finally toppled after his miserable endless reign. Milosevic stumbled in the elections. He took Serbian support for granted, since he controlled all the Serbian mass media, and all the local means of patronage and favors.

Milosevic admitted his electoral defeat, promising to regroup and return to power soon. He faked a compliance with democracy, but we believed in his defeat. We didn't allow him to return to the statehouse. Instead we paralyzed Belgrade by occupying the streets in a crowd of a million, surrounding the parliament until the police and army deserted the criminal and agreed with the population.

Italian change came more smoothly: but the exasperated crowds in Rome were harshly insulting their premiere. "Mafioso," "buffoon," "go to jail now," "up your ass, Silvio," between sentimental fits of patriotic singing, huge crowds of people in the nation's capital called their elected leader awful names that haven't been heard since the fall of Mussolini.

Italian state TV channels were very prudish about reporting the rude scenes in the streets and squares of Rome. Only one Italian TV channel, plus online video streaming from Italian newspapers, recorded the historic moments. Italian journalists had to rely on Al Jazeera, BBC, Sky and other foreigners to tell the Italian people about the public scenes and public events within their own capital city.

As usual, Twitter was raving and reporting live. These 140-character messages from widely-scattered cellphones are hard to repress. However, bandwidth on the net got very patchy as Italians poured online massively: their government was collapsing headlong while their leader's pet TV machine offered them nothing but game shows, vapid repeats and busty dancing girls. So much for their national media and their role as informed citizens.

Silenced and humiliated.

Anonious people are courageously shouting in the public streets: the buffoon is gone! We lived for this day! Prison for Berlusconi, out with all the cowards!

People around me are more than happy. They are extremely frightened. They don't need the somber warnings of Italy's President, Napolitano, an old man in a figurehead post whom many now credit with saving the country -- for the time being. It is as if, only now, the Italians can realize the obvious truth of their dramatic situation, the grave national crisis they have somehow survived.

The future carries a worrisome burden of long-denied truth. After so many blatant and revolting personal scandals, people somehow imagined that they knew the truth about their Big Boss. They knew how to maneuver and how to protect their own interests in the minefield of official illusions. But that is not what real life is like, after the Fall.

The aftermath is like a mudslide after a torrential rain: it carries away the innocent as readily as the guilty. Since every citizen is entirely implicated in a nation's official fantasies, you cannot tell the clean from the polluted. Berlusconi brought out the worst instincts in every Italian, Eugenio Scalfari said.

Tomorrow is a big day for Italy: the first day of reconstruction. A new government, a new prime minister. Emergency stability law has been passed, as required by EU in a terrible haste, as Prime Minister Berlusconi crept from the President's house through the side door after resigning.

He finally departed his TV stage-set in a cloud of angry Twitter #hashtags: #byebyebungabunga, #finecorsa (end of the road), #maipiu (never more) #rimontiamo (Italy rides again)!

[Video Link]

Berlusconi Bye Bye?

Jasmina Tesanovic — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 16:01:05 +0000

Is this really the final end of the Berlusconi era, or just another pause for the Cavaliere to catch his breath?

Will he return on a fresh horse as the savior of an ever-crumbling Italy, as he has done repeatedly for the past 20 years? Will my Italian friends finally be able to travel abroad without a miasma of shame, and not be forced to explain to all what a bunga bunga orgy means? Will the numerous foreigners living and working in Italy, legal, clandestine, and semiclandestine, be able to face their children and say: we did the right thing to come here? Will they say: a new day dawns on the peninsula, the specter of crisis, gloom and crime has finally lifted! Work hard for your future!

These are open questions, and frightening questions today in Italy after yesterday's dramatic countdown, and Berlusconi's declaration that he will step down only after passing an emergency law on the Italian economic crisis. United Europe and its presses have closely followed the saga of the decadent emperor. They know that it was global economics and not his domestic scandals that pried the scepter from his hands.

Italians are wondering : whatever next? How badly off is the Italian political culture, which after all is to be blamed for many times that Berlusconi has managed to take and hold power? Where was the legitimate opposition, why were the counter-forces so weak? After the fall of Milosevic in Serbia, the deeply corrupted and dysfunctional state system was hard put to maintain any pretense of a normal government. Can Italy recover, and behave like a major G-7 power again? How is that possible?

Berlusconi was not a genocidal warmonger like Milosevic, but he inflicted years of steady ruination on Italian culture, health, education, research and reputation, not to mention state finance. Whoever comes in power after him will have to either clean cut with the past, or slowly purge the present. Either that, or just accelerate the collapse and scramble for the spoils, as Milosevic did.

What new, fresh faces may emerge from an Italy in moral and financial crisis? Young people without jobs, homes and children, a nation without funds or diplomatic credibility, a health care system without doctors and technology, brilliant students without no prospective but to flee elsewhere for careers, foreigners fighting for their basic human rights, women claiming back their long-fought victories of freedom and dignity.

Berlusconi was refused power by his own majority in the parliament. He loses little by resigning from a state so dysfunctional. Fear is in the air that he will create new elections, pose once again as the last-hope knight on horseback, and win over voters much as he did before. The Dignity people in Italy, together with Se non ora quando women's movement, anticipate a lot of activism and square action.

Berlusconi and the Italian power-structure seem to have an addictive relationship. Even mutual ruin cannot free them from one another. Sometimes I think that professional parties and politicians should be banned, to give anonymous alternative networks some chance to grow from scratch.

Italian stock markets are crumbling. Twitter messengers are raving. The daily press updates their websites by the hour. Italian TV comedians and stars are improvising political buffoonery like commedia dell'arte. Floods and rains are still drenching Italy, and even Pompeii, that victim of an ancient volcano, is a scene of the modern deluge.

Rome Burns

Jasmina Tesanovic — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 13:13:04 +0000

Photo: La Repubblica, Italy

That is the graffiti in one of the destroyed streets in this Saturday's "indignati" demonstration. It ended in violence against the police, city security, and last but not least the pacifist organizers of the manifestation, in tune with the world wide movements OCCUPY.

The graffiti sounds like some epic motto of ancient Rome when power struggles burned palaces, libraries, and streets.

Roman life may not be too different after all, except that 2000 years later, we somehow believe that those conflicts should be resolved without arson. Maybe we are wrong. Maybe the fact that people are organized using web networks does not free them from timeless forms of treachery and palace intrigue, or the manipulation and destruction of good political intent.

Anyway, after the mayhem, the search was on for the hooded arsonists, organized through the Internet and through private video shots by participants.

Italy remembers very well the violent "Years of Lead" (late 60's to early 80's), when red and black terrorists planted bombs in public places, blasting innocent citizens in the name of their distorted concept of supreme justice. For years they rampaged beyond the reach of police, courts and other institutions.

Even today, after many years, some cases of public terrorism have not been resolved. Books have been written by important authors to explain the supposedly important difference between a red and a black bomb detonated in public. The Nobel prize authors Dario Fo wrote a play where he showed how easily the police could frame anarchists for terrorism, killing them by legal means. There was a famous question about crime: a chi giova, who profits from it?

Today decades political violence is less sophisticated and ideological. Rome on fire Oct 16 2011 could have been Belgrade Feb 18 2008, when nationalist hooligans, upset about Kosovo, burned foreign embassies.

This is how Italian press reported:

"Black bloc, the day after.

Rome woke up after the nightmare of violence. Devastated, injured, the city counts the wounds. In the streets cars are burned, roads left without precious sanpietrini stones used as bullets, the facades of banks hotels and shops destroyed, black from smoke: at least one million of euros is the damage.

135 injured people, luckily no dead. 500 violent intruders destroyed a protest of 300 000 pacific protesters: the battle lasted for 5 hours in Rome downtown: a boy has lost one eye, one men has lost two fingers and a policeman suffered a heart attack.

International day of anger, Roman version"

"You can recognize them immediately by they clothes: pants, hoodies, helmets, masks, backpacks. All in black. Sometimes they even hold a banner in front of them: we are not asking for the future we are taking the present. They individuate the target, make a cross, take off they backpack , take out their hammers and other tools and hit. They started with the cars…"

Eugenio Scalfari , in La Reppublica editorial commented:

And who are the indignitati? They are neither right or left winged., in the traditional sense of those words. They are however not conservative, they have concrete objectives: they want public goods for everybody, they have no faith in private property including the state administrated property by political and power elites.People should possess and rule the goods they have where they live as water food forests, communication networks, houses, factories hospitals. And banks should stop to exist except for elementary transactions based on use and exchange value."

It' s a sad end of an attempt in Rome of the globalized protest starting from Madrid through Occupy Wall street in NY and other 80 cities which managed a peaceful protest.

It all happened while the usual protestors where on the streets; in somewhat a bigger number: plus a feminist , an angry teacher, a perky granny, a guy who lost his job hand in hand with an extracomunitario and finally a indignado youngster. Then black bloc stormed in and all hell broke loose: the spectre of bloody Genova riots between the protestors and the police ten years ago, anni di piombo of public terrorism and police mafia 40 years ago and Rome in flames 2000 ago.

A chi giova, who profits from all this? Premiere Berlusconi has been confirmed in power again after months of public sex and corruption scandals as if nothing happened. As if indignity did not exist or protest. The Italians seem not to need a foreign enemy: they bring it all alone on themselves.

La Repubblica: "Outraged, burned the flags of Italy and the European Union"; "The broken windows"

Belen, Berlusconi, and bunga-bunga

Jasmina Tesanovic — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 16:44:17 +0000

[Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi (R) talks with members of the parliament during a debate in the upper house of Parliament in Rome September 14, 2011. REUTERS/Max Ross]

The foreign press is raving about Berlusconi's escort scandals and his unfortunate declaration that he is the prime minister in his spare time. Sometimes, between important orgies, he finds a spare moment to meet with the Pope, UN officials, financiers and so forth.

The founder of one of the major dailies in Italy, Eugenio Scalfari, wrote that it was impossible for the scandal to continue until the formal elections in 2013. Yet at this point the Italian population seems to be beyond embarrassment.

The "If not now, when" women' s movement has been protesting for more than six months now in mass public demonstrations. Even world pop stars like Madonna, normally not an icon of sexual rectitude, have expressed their contempt for the premier.

Analysts are dismally recording the spreading decadence and lack of democracy as Italian society sinks into ever-growing economic and moral crisis. It might be possible to serenely overlook all this, if not for the leaked wiretaps.

Berlusconi's leaked conversations with his friend/pimp Tarantini are all over front pages. Here the premier and his bunga-bunga henchman discuss the charms of the most famous showgirl in modern Italy, the Argentinian supermodel Belen Rodriguez (a former model-spokesgirl for Italian TIM wireless internet).

Berlusconi: How is Belen?
Tarantini: My God in heaven how beautiful she has become!
B: Ah…ah...
T: l've seen her in good shape.
B: Check her out in my name.
T: I know, I know, I have to catch her at her ease for a second…anyway tonight we are dining together again.
B: Great! Tell her that I always admired her as a beauty, but also as a woman.
T: But you never met her personally?
B: Who, Belen? Of course I did.
T: Ok, ok.
B: I met her and she spent one night with me, but we didn't have sex since she was the woman of my soccer player.

In another wiretapped conversation, Berlusconi boasts of bedding eight girls in one night, out of eleven paid escorts he had standing by. However, even Bluebeard has some standards: he turned down a liaison with one showgirl because of her vulgar manners.

In an hard-hitting YouTube interview, one of his hottest escorts explains the harem's code of honor from the women's point-of-view.

"If you are a dog, then stay at home! Beauty has its value and has to be paid. Whoever doesn't get this, and speaks about the 'role of women,' should not break the balls… Every woman should run to Berlusconi's bed…"

Italian politics has become the dysfunctional utopia of a delusional sultan. A sick dream-world where an aging premier brings young girls from his bed to the millions of the Italian TV audience, and back again. Whenever they bore him, he retires them and their relatives into the parliament or his government. This is Ottoman harem politics in a modern western guise.

The term bunga bunga, borrowed from Ghadaffi, has become the trademark for Italian gender relations. It's claimed that every Italian man shares Berlusconi's sexual fever-dream, but even if that's true, only Berlusconi actually does it.

The judges in Italy, on the premier's case ever since he was caught consorting with an underage Moroccan illegal immigrant, are relentlessly trying to criminalize his behavior. Berlusconi behaves as if he is a victim of communist persecution, avoiding all legal instances by using his legal and de facto power. He delays and denies.

Some politicians are speaking of a possible referendum to depose Berlusconi, some for asking President Napolitano to intervene with all his legal might… Some from Berlusconi's party speak of purging the party from the inside. Yet others speculate about somehow creating an emergency national government. But nothing stops the drift toward the abyss. It is hard to build a functional state with the same crew that deliberately destroyed it.

Today he appeared in court of Milan escorted by numerous police, this time however his supporters were not around. He refused to speak to the judges, but addressed the journalists outside:
I am doing fine, while your faces are really ugly!

Jasmina Tesanovic: blog, twitter.

Texas: Bastrop Fires

Jasmina Tesanovic — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 22:17:23 +0000

Helpful tents with water, food and clothing are installed by the highway, in parking lots and prefabricated buildings. People just pour in with stuff to give, and we did that too. It feels normal.

Insurance companies and lawyers are also very present with their advice and offers. The patrol cars of Texas Rangers block small roads and prowl for looters. The scene looks American. My American friend comments; there is some harsh eerie justice that Texas, the petroleum state, is so stricken by wildfires. George Bush's war for oil still grinds on as his native soil is parched by global warming.

This is the true Texan stoic mentality, I am told; we hear no laments and see not a tear; just people waiting for the wind to turn, for the rain to fall.

As we walk the burned areas, as we crunch the crisp black grass, sometimes glimpsing burned cars and houses behind the police barricades, we notice that many trees have their crowns still intact. Sometimes the places of the worst distress have a weird beauty. A spinning ash devil swirls across the highway and blows off into the blackened woods, like some supernatural power. I manage to photograph it.

Six days after the first wildfires in a state park in Bastrop, smoke photographed from the orbiting Space Station has reached the Gulf of Mexico. Things have calmed, but nobody dares say that the fire season is over. There is no rain and no end to the drought predicted, while the sun glares fiercely and the temperatures rise yet again, here in our stricken part of the world.

Some call us "rubbernecks" because we choose to personally witness this vast public disaster. As we crunch over the cinders in our boots and hats, sipping bottled water and taking notes, people often kindly offer us help. Fires, wars and earthquakes don't merely strike the rescue professionals, for disaster is part of the world that we experience. My own experience of disaster tells me that Texas will never be the same after this. This huge disaster is not nearly over yet, and four years of the last six have had bad droughts. This is the modern Texas, and to avoid it would be living a lie.

Almost 1400 houses have burned around Bastrop, two dead people. In the past week 179 fires burned over 170,686 acres. President Barack Obama on Friday night declared that a major disaster exists in central Texas. Those are facts, figures and official declarations, but we also have our own eyes.

I survived a war once, mostly through spreading and reading online information. Sometimes I got hate mail for doing that; it was called meddling in domestic issues, or using improper language, or comforting enemies, or mostly it was ignored, because nobody in my shattered region knew what email was.

Now I can see Facebook and other social media seething with this activity. Just people, saying what they see in their own lives:

"My son saw some pictures that somebody has on FB and it showed the front of his property of KC Drive intact!!! He doesn't know when the pictures were taken or who took them. Is anyone aware of pictures of this type????"

"We are just off 290, 3 miles on Austin side of D.S. We have two spare bedrooms in our home, each with dedicated bathrooms, on 2 acres. We'd be pleased to take in a family who has lost their home in the recent fires."

If we lose our property, homes cities and even our lives, we still have solidarity in tragedy. Adversity bares the human condition, and if there is hope, it is not because we are told that we should have hope, but because there is some human being who is hopeful.

Web | Twitter

Texas in Flames

Jasmina Tesanovic — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 15:59:21 +0000

It's Labor Day.

We woke this morning with the smell of fire in North Austin. During the night 300 houses were consumed by wildfire, west of the town of Bastrop. We decided to visit the flames: we put our boots on and hit the road with an iPhone, iPad, and an iMac. Thank you Jobs.

Witnessing the places of disaster is the best way of coping with fear and anxiety. After months of severe drought in Texas, and record temperatures almost every day and up to 112 F, massive wildfire was only to be expected. Climate change activists are angry with the denial of history and science, fossil politics, fossil corporations.

As we approach the growing disaster area, we see the cars of refugees, trucks, tractors fleeing a wall of smoke. An old black settler tells us: never seen a drought like this in my life, born here raised here… Reminds me of numerous refugees flows I saw in war zone areas: same blank frightened faces, and a stubborn will not to depart from the scene of crime.

An agitated girl approaches the police car that blocks off a back road: I must go in there, I have a dog…after a pause she says in a lower voice, and a house…

Everybody around here has a house. They are drinking beer in a local roadside bar under the smoke volcano. Everyone has a mobile phone. There is air conditioning and sports on TV.

The local radio is reporting on needs of fire refugees, electricity repairs and the merciless weather. Nobody knows if this outbreak of fire is going to last a day, a week… We gaze around the horizon and count the columns of smoke rising, east, west, south.

My American friend looks at the ranches around us, remembering his dad's land and how Texas ranchers always fret over the skies for their crops. But this new war with unnatural nature looks like Kuwait aflame during the Gulf War. Federal airplanes and helicopters are like gnats against the smoke plumes.

Don't trespass, warns a sign on the barbed wire: my American friend risks the thousand dollar fine to get a good shot of the sixteen-mile smoke panorama. High tech surveillance choppers supervise the endangered territory. They dump huge buckets of water on long swaying cables. I carefully study the pane of glass in my palm and learn how to tweet an Instagram.

As 9/11 approaches its 10th anniversary I think how much the world has changed. Disaster scenes are the new normality: with blurry but efficient technologies that witness the death of progress, the denial of science.

PHOTOS: Bruce Sterling.

Jasmina Tesanovic is an author, filmmaker, and wandering thinker who shares her thoughts with BoingBoing from time to time. Email: politicalidiot at yahoo dot com. Her blog is here.

Europride and Gaga in Rome

Jasmina Tesanovic — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 06:31:36 +0000

(Lady Gaga performs during a gay pride concert in downtown Rome. Stefano Rellandini / Reuters)

The gay icon Lady Gaga was there wearing her green wig, together with up to one million people marching chanting singing in a carnival gay pride march.

Rome is the capital of Vatican too, the place where Pope lives and preaches from his balcony every Sunday morning about how people should live and love. Lady Gaga's motto this Sunday was the power of love. She recalled her Italian origin and name ( La Germanotta) and, in a passionate speech, demanded immediate equal rights for the gays, meaning the right to get married, have children etc. While singing her new song Born This Way, an anthem to diversity...

But only few days ago, the Pope announced his firm opposition to equalize even straight informal marriages, that is, unions not sanctioned by God in a marriage sacrament. Where the Catholic church is concerned, gay marriages are not only a taboo topic but even a place of severe demonization and homophobia.

[Video Link]

The Italian state has fought a long and heavy battle against the Catholic church, which reached a certain status quo with the "Concordato" in 1929, signed when Mussolini was in power. With this arrangement canonic law became the civil law too, regulating marriages, prohibiting divorce, freedom of choice, sexual diversity...Only in the seventies did civil society activism manage to pass Italian law that made divorce and abortion possible, as well as non legalized marriages.

However gay rights never became a focus in Italian society. Civilian gays have been battered, criminalized and persecuted, notwithstanding the huge sex pedophilia scandals running among Catholic priests who have been getting away quite easily all these years with their criminal abuse of power. Italy today is still a macho society mirrored publicly by its premiere Silvio Berlusconi who very often justifies his sex scandals with minors and prostitutes with the words, at least I am not gay.

By contrast, a gay politician of Rome caught with a transvestite prostitute had to resign because of his public image being ruined.

This parade yesterday in Rome was extremely well organized by the LGBT community even though many antipope offensive banners were flying together with the drag queens, masques of famous icons, wigs, rainbow flags; Pope Ratzinger was renamed Natzinger.

Gay politicians from the Italian parliament gave speeches pointing out that Italy is ranking at level 0 in the European community regarding minority rights. The Cinderella of Europe, as Italy is called as of today, would not be accepted to join the European community nowadays. Yet Italy remains a G8 powers and a founder of united Europe.

Italian double standards baffle other European countries as well as the progressive italian citizens. Only a couple of months ago, the right winged regional government in Piemonte northern Italy, tried to impose a new measure on abortion. Women who have the national constitutional right to abortion, would have to face a restrictive treatment with the pro life volunteers manning hospitals.

The right winged elected politician, immediately after his victory, announced his antiabortion and anti gays policy. Somehow women and gays are always the primary target of conservatives and the civil rights of gays and women should also be the first test for the real level of democracy in a country. Democracy must include all citizens, notwithstanding their diversity.

Yesterday Italy also voted against nuclear power after Germany said a definite no, after Japan suffered the tsunami catastrophe with numerous leaks, 25 years after Chernobyl, in the midst of global warming tragedies, and religious antiDarwinist denials.

Looking at the parade in Rome, with the association of parents of gay children proudly marching for the rights of their posterity, I wondered what kind of world is coming, and how responsible and guilty are we today for making it worse rather than better.

Blog: jasminatesanovic.wordpress.com

Mladic in The Hague

Jasmina Tesanovic — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 05:26:31 +0000

PHOTO: Bosnian Muslim woman Alic Mina cries near the grave of her son Mihrudin before a mass funeral in the village of Memici, about 30 kilometres from Zvornik, June 1, 2011. The remains of eight people, victims of an "ethnic cleansing" campaign that former Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic is accused of instigating, were retrieved from mass graves in Zvornik and buried during the mass funeral on Wednesday. Mladic, extradited to the Netherlands from Serbia on Tuesday after 16 years on the run, will appear in court on Friday, according to a statement issued by the court on Wednesday. Mladic was indicted over the 43-month siege of the Bosnian capital Sarajevo and the massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the town of Srebrenica, close to the border with Serbia, during the 1992-95 Bosnian war. (REUTERS/Dado Ruvic)

Now that the Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic is safely behind the bars in the Hague international war tribunal, some questions are becoming more urgent.

Where was Mladic hiding all these years? Who helped him evade justice? Why did his protectors stay silent and unpunished? Will there be a investigation and a punishment for them, too? In Serbia, in the Hague, in hell?

In 2008, Radovan Karadzic, Mladic's best-known ally and also a highly wanted war criminal, was arrested in Belgrade while posing as a New Age medical guru. Karadzic had been living undercover for years, with a semi-public persona as a quack medical expert. He often appeared in conferences and wrote for fringe medical papers.

I interviewed some people who worked or spent time with Karadzic.

Somehow I believed those rather simple-minded devotees, who burned candles to cure cancer. Surely people this gullible could not imagine that Dragan 'David' Dabic, this hoarse-voiced impostor with his gloves, long beard and white topknot, was actually Radovan Karadzic. After all, Karadzic was a blustering politician who was always clean-shaven and in dark suits.

But at one point, one of my informants from the clinic became conspiratorial. He pulled out his cellphone showing me a snapshot of the worn, thin face of an elderly man.

Do you recognize him? he asked me. At the time I had no clue, but a week ago, when Mladic was arrested with his new look as a gaunt, reclusive rural villager, I thought I recognized his face. There was also surprising news that Mladic had been seeking treatment for lymph cancer.

It's a strange addition to the Mladic legend, because, for years, most everybody in Serbia has glimpsed Mladic somewhere or other. Mladic was a mountain warrior hiding armed in the caves. Mladic was in drag as a peasant woman selling eggs in the Belgrade downtown market. He was working for peanuts as a common construction worker. He was hiding in an Orthodox nunnery after suffering a stroke. He was dead and buried in various tombs.

There also remains a tragic mystery of two young Serbian soldiers killed on duty -- they allegedly had seen Mladic and had to be eliminated. That story itself has many suspicious twists and turns, and is still pending without a plausible and honest explanation to the parents of the dead.

In the days between May 26, when Mladic was arrested, and June 1 when he was extradited to the Hague, the pace of these stories accelerated. The official stand is that Mladic was simply on the run, continually changing places and finding new circles of comrades to help him with money and shelter. In short, he just plain outsmarted the authorities, which clearly is nobody's fault!

The Serbian mainstream press has excelled in its pathological interest in the broken heart and soul of Mladic, who is clearly one of the cruelest people in contemporary history. Not only did Mladic methodically liquidate eight thousand Muslim men and boys in three days of machine-gun fire, he was particularly clever and cold-blooded about this crime. He bullied the helpless prisoners, tricked their families into collaborating in their own death program, and methodically lied to the UN officers who were there to protect the Muslim enclave. The famous picture of Ratko Mladic feeding the children with chocolates before executing their fathers has become his lasting icon.

There's also the repugnant fact that Mladic was a pious holy warrior. Pictures of the general and his soldiers being blessed by the priests of the Serbian Orthodox church were broadcast widely by the national Serbian TV in the nineties.

In my book: "Scorpions, the Design of Crime," I followed the trial of a paramilitary troop from Serbia which participated in the Srebrenica massacre. The infamous six paramilitary marauders arrested because of a movie they made, in which they executed captive civilians. This underground movie circulated as a boost to the killers and their ideology during the war. Then it surfaced in 2005 as damning evidence against the Scorpions.

Now that Mladic is old and sick and jailed, the bells of mercy and tolerance are ringing as if Srebrenica never happened. The people's hero and militant demigod is re-branded as a martyr and object of pity.

Mladic expressed a regret before going to the Hague: that he would never return alive to Serbia was to visit the grave of his daughter. This daughter committed suicide in 1994 shooting herself with his favorite gun. At the time Mladic and his allies blamed the opposition press for his daughter's despair of life. I remember journalists threatened because of texts they wrote detailing the cruelty of General Ratko Mladic. It never occurred to him, then or now, that hordes of innocent people including his daughter had died from his demonic activities.

Mladic's lawyer has already announced that he will not plead guilty. His son who visited him in the Belgrade jail with his wife announced that his father was a patriot who had diligently performed his duty.

Mladic, in prison, asked for strawberries and a doctor. Not just any doctor, but the President of a the Serbian Parliament, who is a woman from the Milosevic party, presiding over Parliament due to the bizarre power diplomacy of the pro-European Tadic government. She duly attended the prisoner and gave him a medical examination. Mladic was treated with maximum compassion and humanity, which, of course, made relatives of his victims rage with disbelief.

He also asked to visit his daughter's grave -- or, failing that, that they disinter her coffin and bring her corpse to his prison cell. This bizarre demand was a typical Karadzic-Mladic blood-and-soil declaration -- but why not bring Mladic all the coffins that he hammered shut?

Outside his prison and in the Belgrade major square, thousand Mladic supporters violently demonstrated, doing a good business with their now-standard commemorative books and T-shirts. More than a hundred would-be rioters were arrested, despite the prisoner's meek request that they keep quiet and stay out of trouble. The Serbian police seem determined to clear the streets and the path toward United Europe.

Efforts to thwart and repress Serbian war criminals have always come with a heavy cost in Serbia itself. In 2003, Zoran Djindjic delivered Slobodan Milosevic to the Hague tribunal. This bold act meant the end of criminal dominance in Serbia, but it also cost Djindjic his life. Djindjic was gunned down by a radical nationalist gang who declared themselves to be patriots killing a traitor.

How much have things changed since then in Serbia? They have changed a great deal, and never more than lately, but for every strawberry there has been a bloody coffin nail.

Blog: jasminatesanovic.wordpress.com

Ratko Mladic, "God of Genocide," arrested

Jasmina Tesanovic — Thu, 26 May 2011 09:19:11 +0000

(PHOTOS / REUTERS. At left, in 1993: Bosnian Serb army Commander General Ratko Mladic (L) salutes.)

The self-proclaimed "God of genocide" in Srebrenica, the Serbian ethnic general Ratko Mladic was arrested today in a small village eighty kilometers from Belgrade.

Mladic sheltered there with a relative, and lived under a false name. For years on end he hid like a house-mouse, and was arrested with a similar meekness.

Old, docile, with one hand crippled, the formerly ferocious warlord lived peaceably and invisibly in a house that had been searched repeatedly by the Serbian police. This long-wanted war criminal and exceedingly successful fugitive from justice had a 10 million euro award on his head.

And yet, recent polls say that, despite the suffering and ignominy he brought them, 51 percent of Serbian citizens would not have given him up to the international war tribunal in the Hague. No, not for any money. Serbian stubbornness has gone beyond the period of Mladic's bloodstained hero-worship. Nowadays the Serbs have grown indifferent to Mladic while actively resenting the European Union, whose economic disorders have made Serbian life miserable.

And yet it appears that somebody did betray Mladic for the reward: someone among his circle of close friends. Some years ago, an entire group of people, who were all accused of actively sheltering Mladic, were released from a Serbian court through lack of evidence.

(Above, Mladic (C) arrives at special court in Belgrad, May 26, 2011. Bosnian Serb wartime general Mladic was arrested in Lazarevo in the early hours on Thursday after years on the run from international genocide charges.)

After his arrest, only a few drunken people gathered before his hideout, and also in downtown Belgrade: the usual hooligan nationalist bands. Mladic was taken to the special court of war crimes in Belgrade to be interrogated. But this effort was interrupted because of the former general's "difficult psychological and physical condition."

Mladic seems to have been babbling, but he managed to say, according to his lawyer, that he does not recognize the war tribunal in Hague, and will not plead guilty or innocent. He was armed with two pistols when he was arrested, but he gave himself peacefully.

Who will pick up the 10 million euro reward? How much prosperity did Ratko Mladic cost Serbia over these 16 years? These money issues are the big questions in Serbian press. Although the police said they will not take a penny, they did their regular job.

As a further financial twist, the state still owes the general his regular pension, which he never received (as a fugitive). Handsome lump-sums have paid by and to the other citizens of the state -- mainly, blood money for his victims.

And what about the dead? Do they have a price? Gone without a name, many of them still without graves since their bodies, dismembered and scattered all over the territory are still being sought. The silence of the ghosts is loud as ever in this moment of joy and victory.

More recently, European pressure has intensified from the Hague tribunal; on June 6 the Serbian government faced a grim report from Serbia by Serge Brammertz, citing them for non-cooperation with the United Nations. Europe is experiencing many difficulties, but Serbia, like a tin can tied to a cat's tail, suffers them even more so.

The primary obstacle to Serbia's European harmonization is and was, of course, the genocidal war criminal Ratko Mladic.

We citizens of Serbia all knew that Mladic was hiding among us in Serbia; don't ask me why, but we never believed the many tales spread about his death or his exile. Given his modest rural circumstances, he was concealed more discreetly than the Pakistanis hid Osama bin Laden -- but the parallels there are obvious. Mladic had his protectors in the covert wing of the government, and the Serbian government is traditionally an enterprise in which everything is covert, and yet everybody knows. Ask them not why they turned him in, but why they delayed until today.

A couple of years ago, Radovan Karadzic, the mastermind of the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, was arrested in downtown Belgrade. Dr. Karadzic had been hiding under a long beard as a New Age quack guru. Witnessing this travesty on television, my aged father said: Ratko Mkadic is a soldier! He will never do a thing like that! He will rather commit suicide than humiliate himself in that manner or get arrested by police! Mladic will never go to The Hague!

The same myth of fearless valor was running for the late president of Serbia, Milosevic who actually was arrested and died in The Hague. Milosevic was a close collaborator with the Bosnian Serb warlords, Karadzic and Mladic, in surpressing the Muslim population of Bosnia.

This demon dream team of Balkan genocide: Milosevic, Mladic and Karadzic, were all destined for The Hague. They were playing chess with one another in the anteroom of justice, waiting for a sentence longer than their lives. Only death could bring them peace and liberation. Radovan Karadzic sent immediately from the Hague a message to arrested Mladic: I am sorry this happened, but I will help you out, we will work together for the truth!

Some years ago I wrote a book on genocide in Srebrenica, the largest single war crime in Europe after World War II. My first question, after analyzing the design of crime was: how did they manage to exterminate eight thousand people in a couple of days? How could they hide thousands of bodies from the international community, from the people present there, from the bereaved families?

After the recent capture of Osama Bin Laden, Ratko Mladic was the fugitive number one in the world. The US president Obama said he was happy Serbia perfomed its duty. The world press is giving all the credits to the pro-European government of president Boris Tadic, and his determined policy to pull Serbia away from the criminal past.

Today in Serbia even the radical right wing opposition is officially pro-European. No one in or near power aspires to dirty their hands with the Balkan wars; that brings no benefit. Modern Serbia has a cult of tennis stars rather than warlords. These Millennial adults have won some credibility, since they impress the outside world, without any taint of the distant 1990s.

The mothers of Srebrenica victims declared themselves contented with this turn of events. They expected it many years ago; but better later than never. These women have learned to be deeply suspicious of the tribunal in The Hague; the international lawyers there declared their prize mementos and personal evidence to be bulky and useless; unfit for a modern court proceeding. So much for their cherished mementos of their dead, their hoarded proofs that the vanished dead had really lived, that they were murdered.

A moment of justice is commonly liberating for the offended as well as the criminals. But the moment of truth even more so. There is no justice without truth. The arrest of Ratko Mladic and his adamant transfer to the Hague tribunal will be a litmus test for this universal and ancient motto. And for our globalized world of crime and punishment.

Jasmina Tesanovic: blog, Twitter.

Sultan Berlusconi on Trial

Jasmina Tesanovic — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 07:44:02 +0000

[video link]

Silvio Berlusconi will be the first head of a G-7 state to be arraigned in court on charges of paid sex with a minor.

A few days ago, the court from Milan issued a subpoena for the Italian premiere, on a charge that could carry a penalty of 15 years of prison. This April 6, sugar daddy Silvio will face three adult female judges from Milan, the Italian women that the press here in Italy call his "Nemesis."

A right wing commentator of the TG1, one of the TV channels owned and controlled by Berlusconi himself, said: I believe in his innocence, but by the time he proves that, his reputation will be gone forever. And to tell the truth he worked hard on that himself! What on earth did he think he was doing when he meddled with minors and showgirls?

The Church as well as Catholic believers are divided. It's not about sex, says one of the high ranked church officials: hardly any Italian anymore confesses those misdeeds as sins. It's his way of doing it. Then there's the hardcore of Italian machismo, who aspire to that level of misbehavior themselves, and frankly admire Berlusconi for his orgies.

"Ruby The Heartstealer," the Moroccan illegal belly-dancing minor, was the last-known in the lengthy chain of Berlusconi's sweethearts. Ruby may have triggered a final avalanche of shameful publicity that will crush the lascivious premiere... but, Ruby nevertheless just cheerily appeared in Italian television, in black lingerie, peddling a tell-all book. Italians have always adored sexy foreign girls: Belen Rodriguez, the Argentinian top model, is the star of the Sanremo music festival although she cannot sing, and also the spokesmodel for a wireless Internet service, though her appeal is by no means high-tech. Italy's high-fashion business puts a premium on female beauty, not to mention a bald market price.

So what did Berlusconi do so wrong in his unfortunate dalliance with Ruby, and the numerous other girls that he invited to his home and paid generously? The court in Milan issued 27 pages of evidence. Ruby was a minor when she was partying "bunga bunga" style at his place, and he knew it. Ruby was caught stealing from friends, and he freed her from the police although the cops had her in custody as a minor. Ruby was an illegal immigrant, and he smilingly promised to forge her papers for her.

Finally, he arranged to deceive the Italian police by absurdly claiming that Ruby was the niece of recently deposed president Hosni Mubarak, in order to set her free. In short, Berlusconi abused his political position and flouted the law so as to keep his harem running smoothly. This cost him hundreds of thousands of euros given away to girls as presents, cars, and lodgings. Ruby at a certain point asked for 5 million euros in hush money, and that didn't seem to be a problem.

Berlusconi answered to the subpoena with a stonewalled denial and a large smile: he refuses to speak to press about sex scandals, he bluntly refuses the authority of the Milanese court, and has no fears of the consequences to the state or himself. He is trying however to move the case away from the court in Milan to a kinder jurisdiction that he can control, or possibly buy.

Last night, at the festival of Sanremo, the Oscar wining Italian author and actor Roberto Benigni, gave a long, emotional speech about the subject of a united Italy. March 17, 2011 is the sesquicentennial of the country's unity, and San Remo was draped in tricolor Italian flags. 2011 is a symbolic year for Italian democracy and the Italian national way of life.

The new economic data are showing Italy as the slowest-growing EU country. The expectations of Italian young people are very low, if not nonexistent. The nation is torn by the anti-federalist demands of right-wing parties, which want to split the country into rich regions (theirs) and poor regions (everyone else). Long-standing cultural differences among Italian regions are being exaggerated and manipulated, as the power-brokers quarrel over the shares of a pie that grows smaller. Petty regional bosses are fighting for more autonomy and their own power centers.

Divide and reign, united we stand. We are stronger together, said Benigni in his moving speech. He analyzed word by word an idealistic poem written by a twenty-year-old Risorgimento martyr for Italian unity: the Italian anthem. We cannot give democracy away, we cannot squander it, Benigni appealed.

Today, Wikileaks on Italy is published by major dailies. These leaks from the American state department have become a kind of news agency that bluntly states truths about Italy that every Italian already knows. Americans are increasingly worried about Italian national stability, and not merely because of its leader's reckless sex scandals. His relationship to the autocratic Putin, his prolonged overtures to the tyrant Moammar Gadhafi, his crooked money interests, organized corruption methods and mafia connections... His rude remarks to other heads of state and his sheer unpredictability all worry the American Big Brother. But he is still useful, they conclude.

Meanwhile, in a YouTube clip mentioned on the front pages of all the Italian press, Roberto Benigni is singing, with his quivering tender voice, the anthem to the tricolor flag inspired by the legendary Dante and his vision of beautiful Beatrice. Next to this glorious peak of Italian high culture, we have excerpts of the young Moroccan girl's evidence, where she explains that: "Bungabunga" means an orgy of nude dancing girls. This jolly term was borrowed from Gadhafi by the premiere's amazing seedy entourage of pimps and madames, most of them happily employed in Italian political life, when not busy catering to Berlusconi's private amusements. Bungabunga participants get power and money in the all-too-blatant privacy of the sultan' s castle, and in Italian public life as well; they fight the outside world to protect their cozy racket, and fight each other inside over their share of the spoils.

The Italian women of all ages and views, who held a one-million demonstration a few days ago all over Italy, protested that the sultan of the nation has no right to transform Italy into a bordello. It's a democratic state and a major Western power, not a brothel for an ultra-wealthy mogul. But to say that and to prove it are two different things. Is Italy just a "geographical expression," as the foreign diplomats used to say before the Risorgimento?

Jasmina: blog, Twitter

Italy: Bad Day for Sultan Berlusconi as Millions of Women Demand He Resign

Jasmina Tesanovic — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 07:23:22 +0000

Photo (click for large) by Francesca Ottobelli: anti-Berlusconi protesters in Italy today.

"If Not Now, When?" was a national demonstration of Italian women, against Berlusconi and, to put it bluntly, his porno-democracy. The demo had other slogans as well: Resign! Basta! I don't give up! ADESSO, NOW!

A flash mob in 280 cities of Italy and 50 cities abroad, millions of people, mostly women, but also men and children. The demonstrations have been growing in the months since Berlusconi got caught up in the sex scandal vertigo with minors, prostitutes, pimps and orgies.

A week ago in Milan, in a big rally, the prominent intellectuals in Italian public life threw themselves into the campaign: the distinguished professor and writer Umberto Eco, Roberto Saviano the star of the antimafia campaign, the judges of of the constitutional court, trade union leaders and many others. But as one of the speakers, the orchestra director Pollini remarked : Berlusconi will never step down.

Berlusconi did not leave public life. On the contrary, he sped up his counter-campaign, attacking the judges in Milan who brought the latest of many legal cases against him. He even threatened to take his case to the European Parliament and sue the nation of Italy. He organized rallies in his support , claiming that his innocent altruistic interest in young girls had been cruelly misunderstood. He also accused the investigators of orchestrating a communist-biased coup against himself as head of government.

But his luck may be turning these days, after sixteen long years of media monopoly and political domination. Even the Catholic daily, Avvenire, came out with a big editorial claiming that decent Catholic women should be in the public squares on the 13th of February. It's rare of the Church to urge women to take to the streets to defend their dignity. Then there is the dignity of the state to consider, for the ludicrous shambles of Italian public life has become a matter of international concern.

(photo: Francesca Ottobelli)

(photo: Sara Zampieron, Click for large)

A British comment in the Guardian justly noted that European Union as the monitor of high democratic standards within the community of states. Yet while they preach good governance to applicant countries like Turkey and Serbia, they ignore the calamitous decline of democracy in Italy, an EU founding state. Italy has become a European laughingstock, all harems, dictators, old men and underage girls.

An irate 18 year old guy in Italy demanded publicly: how am I supposed to get a girlfriend of my own age, since Berlusconi, the grandad of the nation, is buying them all? I don't have his years, his money and power, I don't even have a job or a decent education. University and hospital funds are cut, jobs are in recession and Berlusconi's parliamentary allies are cutting the country apart with regionalist laws. Berlusconi' s government still holds the majority in the parliament. The president of Italy had to admonish him that the country is not his private property.

The president also alleged that Italian democratic institutions are sound, but clearly Berlusconi doubts that and so do the millions of Italians today in the squares all over Italy. In Torino, the capital of Italy in its unification years ago, a protester said: we are the head of the boot extending toward Africa.

The demo today lacked party or ideological symbols: it was a flash mob with umbrellas and screams; RESIGN. It was extremely successful, unitary and grand. It brought out of the closet what is left of Italian decency after long reign of a small macho dictator, who has publicly realized the worst dreams of Italian macho culture. As a woman demonstrator put it: some men after all do prefer a partner to a harem.

Today women of all ages and political opinions were in the squares and streets; I saw Italian women, foreign women, clandestine women, special needs women, female beggars and hobos, girls, babies, even nuns!...and I saw men, boys, old men... The performance was to open the umbrellas, scream RESIGN and spread colorful woolen threads among the crowd to bind those different people. Music played: Patti Smith, Fabrizio de Andre. Girl bloggers asked for a ban of internet use of nude bodies. Women have a value, not a price! Men made fun of their macho patriarchal language with banners and in drag clothes. Pornocrazia!

Today 13th February is the "international day of mistresses." Tomorrow it's Valentine's day, the day of love. Whatever this meeting will bring to future of Italy and the reign of Berlusconi, it's clear beyond doubt that nobody doubts Berlusconi's guilt. They despise his use and abuse of girls and money. Now the big question is -- does public indignation matter? The old Sultan will leave his thone someday, and if not now, when?

Women toppled their rich, remote, corrupted regimes in Tunisia and Egypt. If not here, where? So why not in Italy too?

Jasmina's blog: jasminatesanovic.wordpress.com

(photo: Francesca Ottobelli)

Berlusconi's "Rubygate" in Italy: Private Vices, Public Virtues

Jasmina Tesanovic — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 04:06:54 +0000

(image: a shot from the movie "Private Vices, Public Virtues")

Many years ago, I took part in a movie directed by Miclos Jancso, called "Private Vices, Public Virtues." It was a dissolute story of sex drugs and rock-n-roll, anachronistically set in the Austro-Hungarian empire.

In the film, the rebellious heir to the crown of Franz Joseph gets murdered by his own father, the Emperor, for a criminal public display of orgiastic excesses, which involve the nobles of the court, plus the many less noble participants of the collapsing empire.

I remember vividly when a group of girls arrived from Rome to participate in the film. "Il gruppo Max," they were called, and they brought their film assignment with them: "pronte a tutto," ready for anything. Meaning ready to do anything requested by the film production, ready to dance, to sing, to strip, to have sex on camera. Ilona Staller, who later became the famous Italian parliamentarian Cicciolina, was one of that group.

And they perfectly performed that task: it was in the seventies, make love not war, hippies, free love, with men and women, among men and women, kings and beggars, friends and foes...

The movie was a commercial flop, and an artistic failure.

However, from today's perspective, that film was clearly a futuristic experiment. These days, all the Italian dailies have headlines which are paraphrases from that Movie: "ragazze pronte a tutto," "vizi privati pubbliche virtu," "il re perverso e triste," papi of the nation....

Of course they refer to the Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi, and his endless squalid story with underage girls, professional paid escorts, TV stars who become deputies and government officials, all thanks to his protection.

"Rubygate" they call it in the Italian press: it's named after his biggest and weirdest sex-scandal yet, with an illegal, thieving, juvenile delinquent belly dancer from Morocco.

The most recent public confession of the girl, who is an Italian media star these days, is that she was raped at nine by her Muslim uncles, then almost killed at 12 by her father, when she declared her intention to become a Christian. This appalling story, told in tears, won her an eager audience of millions, and suddenly her affair with the 75 year old premiere seems a true happy-end to her tragic destiny, if not, indeed, true love.

While he is in power, I will eat, declared the girl, after Silvio politically survived by a single vote in the parliament. In the meantime, a very restrictive and harsh law on university and students has been passed in Italy, notwithstanding huge students protests. Factories are closing. Workers are forced to work for minimal wages, or in the black market. Fake bankruptcies are also commonly reported these days, because business owners can earn more profit using state support.

Every day, a new economic model of survival, in an economic crisis where rich become fewer and richer, and poor poorer and vaster in numbers.

In the meantime, the nation's premiere, pressured by the unrestrainable torrent of confessions and leaks from entire squads of party girls, declares candidly that he has found a steady relationship. The search for la dama Bianca of his heart instantly takes the front pages of Italian press.

What makes all this paparazzi nonsense so credible and plausible is the amazing resemblance of these girls, Silvio's sweethearts, to his wife, who recently divorced him. She said that she couldn't endure his dalliances with underage woman, and sure enough, all these starlets seem to be under thirty, if not, indeed, under the age of legal consent.

Somehow, the Italian audience and people manage to behave as if nothing unbearably strange is going on. For centuries, tales of sex and power, perversion and violence have lingered over Italian history: from Caligula to Mussolini, from Caesar to the pedophile scandals in the Catholic church.

However, the new development is that this sinister behavior has become a public fact, and yet, that makes no public difference. On the contrary, those who once secretly envied and admired the immoral dissolution of the premiere of Italy nowadays are loud and public in their firm support of him. Silvio, as the role model, has become the mainstream,not the excess.

Perverse curiosity and passive voyeurism accompanies the daily leaks from the court, the wiretaps, the police investigations. There is fatalist expectation of the worst, which is yet to come. A international Twitter stream of those two vulgar simplistic words, "bunga bunga," makes Italian public life a reality show.

Berlusconi owns almost all the media in Italy, and he has become the star in every one of his own properties. His personal scandals overshadow the mafia killings, the economic crisis, the earthquakes and the floods. Italy, a G7/G20 major world power, is losing its credibility, honor and dignity day by day, sometimes hour by hour.

The president and the Vatican are asking for caution and clarity. As my American friend noticed: the frightening thing is not the slipping façade of Italy, but the genuine face behind that mask. The time of "ragazze pronte a tutto," of court politics as pornography, is finally here.

Jasmina Tesanovic: blog

Temple of Dawn: visit inside a Brazilian UFO cult

Jasmina Tesanovic — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 08:03:20 +0000

Don't trifle with spirits, said my American friend as we enter this weird syncretic Brazilian sanctuary in the outskirts of Brasilia, called the Temple of Dawn.

I am wearing my white Brazilian dress with big black Brazilian ants on it, and I cover my bare shoulders with a colorful silk shawl with tiny celebrity faces: from Hitler to Jesus.

It is about to rain outside, one of those tropical storms is coming. But inside the barn-like temple, it is stuffy and misty with incense, like a science fiction movie-set from the 1930s. My eyes are burning, my nose is running, but I am glimpsing incredible figures and paintings on the walls, on the brick labyrinths, numerous thrones, veil like fabrics.... The Temple of Dawn worships UFOs, Tutankhamen, Jesus, the disembodied spirit of an Indian chief named White Feather... name it. "Aunt Neiva," the cult's prophet and founder, created the church in a trance some 50 years ago.

Neiva used to be a truck driver married with four kids, before her spiritual gift descended on her and she became a prophet. She founded this cult community, and, advised by spirits of the dead, she dictated the cult's highly elaborate costumes and rituals. Our spiritual guide is a very warm pleasant church functionary in a complicated black, white and orange uniform, with a sash and a white surcoat adorned with crosses, badges and stars. He is telling us this elaborated story, without much philosophical or religious consistency. Every logical question makes him wriggle.

They don't need to seek answers, says my American friend, they have their dogma and faith.

I guess that goes for all religions. As I try hard to understand the incomprehensible, it strikes me that, in this gaudy, rambling UFO temple, I feel exactly as I feel in a Catholic cathedral or an Orthodox church. It's the same situation, only with less transparency.

So I decide to surrender and go with the spiritual flow. A procession of cult women of all ages, dressed as Disney queens with hooded capes and billowing skirts in cartoon-bright colors, is chanting and marching though the brick labyrinths. They smile at us and ask us to stand aside. This ritual marching and toneless singing goes on for hours every day, while two other religious orders, costumed differently but just as strangely, carry out other tasks, such as washing in trough-sized baptismal fonts and hailing shrouded idols with stiff-armed salutes. This ruckus seems agitated and messy at first, but some firm military structure underlies it. They are calm, focused and persistent, like hospital orderlies.

The high priests of two orders, doctrinaires and mediums, perform the purification of souls of the patients (as they call us, the non-believers). The cult doesn't lack for clients. Many common people are there in the temple, sitting on painted cement benches to watch the cultists meditate on colored thrones and fly into trances. Some are poor, simple local people, some are on crutches or in wheelchairs. Of all ages and races. Rich ambassadors come over from Brasilia sometimes, I am told. Tourists come to gawk. Culturologues film them and study them.

Every day, the cult offers spiritual guidance to those who have not yet realized that they are incarnated from other planets. Our guide is a former general who has been reincarnated nineteen times, and he confesses shyly that he needs to help people because of the large numbers he slaughtered in his former military career. People, says our guide, are continually pestered by ghosts, whether they know it or not. His general keeps coming back to him, asking for this and that, and struggling to find a new order where he can purify himself through good works. The spirit of the dead man is doing that now, in the body of the priest. It's not fun, it's demanding and suffocating work. But it is rewarding: these kind people don't ask for money. They even refuse donations. It's unclear how they manage to eat, much less built their private lake, cement pyramids and giant plywood Jesus effigies. One never sees them doing anything but performing their sacred duties. The mediums sometimes writhe, moan and gasp in woe as the spirits of the dead take direct hold of them. This elite group seem to have life especially hard.

There are 670 temples all over the world, they tell us, and about 36 000 believers here in Brasilia. Even though a woman founded the cult, only men become the priestly "doctrinaires," who go out among the public to preach and proselytize. The spirits have never called another woman to be adequate to that job, I am told.

The temple is full of dreamlike imagery: of the Sun and the Moon, in the middle an arrow, framed faces of ghostlike creatures and big-eyed spirit guides, six-sided stars pasted all over with mirrors, crosses draped in cloth, pillars, veils, and painted flames. It reminds me of my grandmother' s stories from inner Serbia, when the dead used to come back and ask for justice, or their earned reward, or sometimes even for peace.

Although I feel uneasy, I don't feel endangered. I look at a young, very thin boy with a bandanna on his head: obviously he's come here in some pitiful hope to get well again. Will faith healing help him in his plight, or just speed him to the grave?

All these New Age cults have some vague aura of criminality. When Radovan Karadzic, the Serbian war criminal was hiding as a guru of alternative medicine, disguised in a weird costume, I met sick people who believed his cover stories. He never cured them.

Although we are in rather good health, when our guide presses the issue, we volunteer to get a diagnosis by trance mediums.

My personal medium has a hard time with me. We have no language in common, and four different spirits take over her body and then run away as she tries to give me good advice. My Brazilian friend has a different problem, his medium is speaking ancient Portuguese to him, through a spirit who is several centuries old. Nobody can get his true meaning, as he urges my Brazilian friend to drink plenty of water and bang on the earth with a cane.

Outside it is storming and getting cold in the summer: the women are chanting on the cult's private lake. Other women sit in specific cement thrones inside the temple, in immobilized silence, gathering spiritual power. We're warned not to touch them, or even the barriers and chains that surround them. When fully charged, they rise unblinking in their starry cartoon costumes and go sit in another chair somewhere else. Nothing much happens.

The droning songs, endless marches and reeking incense are leaving us tired, empty and badly in need of a drink. The calm chaos has come to seem normal; it's the everyday Brazilians, in their summer shorts, Tshirts and rubber zories, who seem exotic now.

We are urged to purify ourselves though long ritual procedures in brightly-painted antechambers, but we don't feel up to the challenge. We'll try that next time, we promise gratefully. Kindly they salute us, with good wishes for the foreign wanderers. Many have come before us from all over the world, they confide. Some have come back to the Temple of the Dawn. Some join us and stay.

This prospect gratifies our eccentricities. It makes us feel humble and grateful for the wonders of our life as it is. Religion can be soaringly inspirational as it becomes impossible to describe.

More: jasminatesanovic.wordpress.com

(photographs: Jasmina Tesanovic)

The Shroud Crowd: a dispatch from Torino, Italy

Jasmina Tesanovic — Thu, 20 May 2010 10:28:34 +0000

Since April 10th of this year, Torino, Italy has been crowded by a strange mob of tourists: endless streams of international and local people, old and young, pious and less pious. They are Catholics, and believers of other religions, too.

The Shroud Crowd walks the majestic straight streets under the portici of this city, the first capital of Italy. Italy is celebrating its 150th anniversary next year, in 2011. Actually, people in Torino are wondering if that event will become an official "celebration," since the right-wing government of premier Silvio Berlusconi is so eager to split the country between the north and south, the rich and poor, the locals and the foreigners. With the separatists of the Northern League in power, the unification of Italy is presented as a curse more than a benefit.

The crowd meandering the streets of Torino is not here for political reasons. They are here to see the shroud of Christ: a piece of fabric appertaining to the most famous martyr in the world, after his crucifixion. Now, that's the legend. The scientific and historic truth is that this frail and stained cotton wrapping, of obscure origin, was brought to this part of the world by Anne de Lusignan, Princess of Cyprus, and Duchess of Savoy. In the year 1452, Anne bought the Shroud from yet another woman, the widow Jeanne de Charney, in exchange for a minor castle.

Anne seems to have picked up this holy relic on a whim, for she was known for extravagance. However, Duchess Anne made one of the best tourism deals in all Italian history. The Shroud has been repeatedly proved a fake—it was very doubtful even in the 1400s—but that has never changed its importance. On the contrary: it has been kept in a box in a church in Torino, only to be exhibited every ten to fifteen years.

This is one of the good years: the Shroud is exposed in the central church on the central square, near the royal palace, until May 23. Tourists have made their reservations months in advance: queues are endless in front of the church, and all languages can be heard. The presence of the Shroud Crowd is so thick that they have even chased off the gypsy beggars who commonly man that locale. Don't ask me why. Perhaps all people become humble beggars before the miraculous fabric.

On May 2, the Pope himself visited Torino to honor the shroud. Unity between the Roman Church and the Italian state has rarely been so strong as today, perhaps because both Pope Benedict and his ally Silvio Berlusconi have been racked with endless sex scandals, involving either prostitutes or pedophilia.

During the Pope's one-day stay, many antipapal protests were held in this beautiful city: the Savoy capital, the Fiat industrial capital, and today the cultural capital of Italy. From atheists, Communists and anarchists to lay Catholics, gays and lesbians, people were protesting loudly and wittily in the collateral streets of Torino—the streets not closed because of the many pious visitors and the Pope.

The pious have a specific look these days in the new millenium. They don't act or look particularly pious any more: they consume a lot of Italian food, dress in lively colors, seem rather happy and wealthy by the modern standards of the debt crisis. Like all pleasure tourists, they buy a whole lot of souvenirs. A whole local industry was triggered by this occasion; from t shirts to wall pictures, calendars, blobjects, books....unimaginable designer fantasies connected to the piece of fabric with the face of Christ faintly bloodstained within it.

Surviving members of the former royal family of Savoy were sitting in the first row admiring the Pope. These former royals are rather unpopular in Torino today, a city of workers and engineers. The royals are resented for their tight historical connection to the fascism of Benito Mussolini, when the treaty between Mussolini and the Church was signed. Il Concordato delegated the control of many civil and human rights (such as abortion and divorce) to the ecclesiastical authorities.

The Savoy royals are living descendants of Duchess Anne de Lusignan, that woman who brought the Shroud and who bred 19 children for the dynasty in her 43-year lifespan. This amazing feat makes Anne the grandmother of all European nobility, though her role in snagging the Shroud is rarely mentioned today. This exotic Crusader princess, brought from her distant island in a marriage swap, seems to have been an eternal foreigner in the Savoy Alps and foothills.

Ever loyal to her palace clique of Cypriot emigres, Anne was a strong willed and beautiful woman who collected art and music as well as spare shrouds. Anne brought to Torino and maybe even Italy the biggest gift that any foreign spouse can bring: a token of global culture. It has proven to be an enduringly popular culture.

Previous essays by Jasmina Tešanović on BoingBoing:

• Violence in Milan
• Report from anti-Berlusconi demonstration in Rome
• On Marina Abramovic, a "grandmother of performance art"
• The Murder of Natalya Estemirova.
• Less Than Human
• Earthquake in Italy
• 10 years after NATO bombings of Serbia
• Made in Catalunya / Lou and Laurie
• Dragan Dabic Defeats Radovan Karadzic
• Who was Dragan David Dabic?
• My neighbor Radovan Karadzic
• The Day After / Kosovo
• State of Emergency
• Kosovo
• Christmas in Serbia
• Neonazism in Serbia
• Korea - South, not North.
• "I heard they are making a movie on her life."
• Serbia and the Flames
• Return to Srebenica
• Sagmeister in Belgrade
• What About the Russians?
• Milan Martic sentenced in Hague
• Mothers of Mass Graves
• Hope for Serbia
• Stelarc in Ritopek
• Sarajevo Mon Amour
• MBOs
• Killing Journalists
• Where Did Our History Go?
• Serbia Not Guilty of Genocide
• Carnival of Ruritania
• "Good Morning, Fascist Serbia!"
• Faking Bombings
• Dispatch from Amsterdam
• Where are your Americans now?
• Anna Politkovskaya Silenced
• Slaughter in the Monastery
• Mermaid's Trail
• A Burial in Srebenica
• Report from a concert by a Serbian war criminal
• To Hague, to Hague
• Preachers and Fascists, Out of My Panties
• Floods and Bombs
• Scorpions Trial, April 13
• The Muslim Women
• Belgrade: New Normality
• Serbia: An Underworld Journey
• Scorpions Trial, Day Three: March 15, 2006
• Scorpions Trial, Day Two: March 14, 2006
• Scorpions Trial, Day One: March 13, 2006
• The Long Goodbye
• Milosevic Arrives in Belgrade
• Slobodan Milosevic Died
• Milosevic Funeral