Anarchoblogs in English

At the age of seventeen, Charles Malato, the son of Paris communards, was exiled to New Caledonia with his parents. That's perhaps a natural start for a life that would be largely dedicated to anarchism. Malato was an activist and a prolific writer, producing journalism, autobiography, anarchist theory, drama and fiction for both adults and children. It's probably no surprise that New Caledonia features in a number of his writings, or that those writings bear the mark of a youth in the region. 

I've started to collect and translate some of Malato's writings on New Caledonia, beginning with an odd little book for young people, the 1897 New Caledonian Tales, written under the pen-name "Talamo." Knowing Malato's history and politics, readers may find some of the details of that text curious, and they are perhaps even more so when compared with the section from the autobiographical From the Commune to Anarchy (1894), reproduced below. 

There are more New Caledonian tales to come. Malato contributed one more Kanak tale to Louise Michel's collection of local stories, wrote a serial novel about young lovers among the exiles, and contributed a serialized collection of "Memories of New Caledonia to L'Aurore in 1901. And that last serial includes another long account of the life of the indigenous chief Damé.

This is, well, I'm not sure if it's original since I'm building on others, but one perspective on the Renaissance and on its development was that it was a fusion of the rediscovery of southern classicism with a new sense of introspection from the north. South and north here refer to Italy, and Greece, on the one hand, and the domains of the Holy Roman Empire on the other. Northern Italy was key because it was in fact a border land between the two realms.

But the Holy Roman Empire was the remnant of the Dark Ages, of the barbarian hordes that invaded Italy and destroyed the Roman Empire, ending classical learning and putting back culture in Europe for hundreds of years. However, after being nice and medieval for a long period of time, there was a movement in art, and possibly in literature, to examining the everyday events of life in a naturalistic way, with Dutch and Flemish artists paving the way. This may have been made possible by the very barbarian sense of freedom that the people there still embodied.

However, the Reformation, as opposed to the Renaissance, shows what could happen if that sense of naturalism isn't tempered with an awareness of the classical past and of the range of scholarship and insight into the human condition that it brings. Martin Luther, and indeed most of the more Germanic reformers, had an awareness of the natural progress of life, but he yoked it to a regressive Christianity that instead of providing liberation, like the Renaissance in Italy did, brought people even more into a repressive denial of life than they had been in before. Fueled by religious fanaticism, the naturalism of the Germans became an obsessive examination of personal faith, salvation, and sin.

It seems that we in the U.S. have certainly got the Naturalism, via Protestant Christianity, but we are woefully unaware of the realms of human life that the classical heritage deals with, leading certain parts of the country to resemble Dark Ages feudal islands of backwardness rather than liberated, Renaissance, city states.

I'm very glad that Knox has been convicted, because the reaction to her trial, the fact that she was even put on trial, in the Seattle media and to a lesser extent in the media of the United States as a whole has been terrible. It's been riddled with the idea of Italy as a country where someone can't get a fair trial, where justice isn't in the 20th century but instead dependent on corruption...almost like in a Mafia movie.

In fact, Italy is a modern country like every where else in Europe, and the Mafia doesn't have as much influence as people in the United States would like to believe, but the stereotypes that Anglo Americans have about Italians were set long before Amanda Knox participated in the slaying of Meredith Kercher.

Take this as an example: when was the last time you saw a person of obvious Italian origin in a movie playing just one of the guys, as a generic character whose identity did not depend on his ethnicity? In other words, a group of friends where one is Joe, another is Nathan, another is John, and one of them, normal in every other respect, just happens to be Italian? It doesn't happen, for the most part. People who are obviously Italian are either cast as gangsters or as idiots, as emotional and stupid good guys who you wouldn't take seriously outside of the context of the film.

Being partially Italian myself, and having ancestry involving several Eastern European ethnicities that tend to have darker skin, I can tell you that the difference in treatment is derivative of racism, and not of much else. There are plenty of European ethnicities who have cultural patterns that are different from those of Anglo-Americans. Slavic cultures, for example, tend to be more expressive and less buttoned down. However, Polish culture, if it's thought of at all, isn't really regarded as being weird and overly passionate, as Italian and Hispanic culture is, despite in some cases sharing similar attitudes.

European integration in the United States is based on skin color and facial features. People who are Polish or from elsewhere in Eastern Europe do fairly well, despite having a pretty different culture, because there are many people from these backgrounds who have fair skin, blond hair, and blue eyes. They can meld in and assimilate to the dominant ethnic look. Others from Southern Europe can't.

I know from personal experience, often having been mistaken for being partially Hispanic or some other ethnicity identified as Non-White, especially in Florida, that the one drop rule is still in effect in different parts of the United States. Living in the "Fake South" of Northern Florida, it was pretty apparent in the small towns that if you looked like you could be something that was non-white, in part or in whole, then you weren't one of us, so to speak. The fact that that something might not be black, or even that it might not be non-European at all, made no difference, even if the people in question knew that. The attitude was based on who was 'one of us' and who wasn't, and who wasn't was pretty well defined.

All of these attitudes, in my opinion, come down to skin color, and are present throughout the United States, even in the great tolerant city of Seattle, where because Knox was accused of killing Kercher in Italy, in Perugia, the system had to be corrupt, it had to be unfair, because the Mafia is down there, and the people look like Al Pacino.  Somehow, I think that they would be a little bit easier on the justice system if it happened in some backwater of Germany, because they're civilized.

*on edit: a perfect example of who Italians are cast as on television and film when they're not cast as Mafiosi is Matt LeBlanc's character on friends: a complete moron who's mostly there for comic relief.