VALSUSA - A violent skirmish between No TAV protestors and law enforcement took place, said the General Investigations and Special Operations Division (DIGOS) who were looking into the case on Thursday. 

 During the three-day festival, on the Sunday, Alta Felicità in Valsusa, organised by the No TAV movement, referring to the high-speed trainline connecting Lyon and Turin, a procession commenced, through the narrow mountain paths, up to a fortified construction site enclosed by metal gratings.

 An offshoot of demonstrators dressed entirely in black, lashed out violently against law enforcement. A volley of stones, cracking of makeshift bombs, and sibilating projectiles of slingshots, converged in a chaotic ensemble. The rioters assailed the walls encircling the yard in an attempt to tear them down. Amidst the crowd a small unit of demonstrators emerged, maneuvering a siege instrument that looked like a battering ram.  

 The police reacted with generous dispensations of water and tear gas, a practical application of the force of law.

 Both the centre-right and the Democratic Party (PD) unanimously denounced the intolerable violence against the police. 

 The League Deputy and undersecretary of the interior, Nicola Molteni, undersecretary of defense and Forza Italia deputy, Giorgio Mulè, and Brothers of Italy’s councillor of the Piedmont Region, Maurizio Marrone, expressed solidarity with the police, calling for "firmness in punishing these violent fringes" and spoke of an “unbearable continuity of attacks.” 

 There was purposive condemnation from the PD, as reported by the newspaper, Il Fatto Quotidiano. 

 "An endless war with the sole purpose of perpetrating violence as an end in itself. We hope that the boys and girls of Friday will condemn these episodes. Those who care about the environment and territory should distance themselves from criminal organisations [...] which speculate on ecological and social battles.” 

 Leader, Nadia Conticelli, and Secretary Marcello Mazzù, for the PD in Turin wrote:

 “For Silvia Fregolent, group leader in the Environment Commission in Montecitorio, "the Susa Valley has nothing to do with these professional thugs who only want to destabilise the territory and prevent an environmentally compatible work and a development tool for the local communities and the entire country from being realised.”

 The high-speed trainline connecting Lyon and Turin, or TAV, is at the heart of this problem.

Conflicting theories have in turn lauded and condemned the project. The different views surrounding the TAV can be condensed into a fundamental dichotomy, the juxtaposition of two necessities of different and disproportionate scale. 

 On the one hand the strategic concern of the state; a project consecrated under an austere pretense of National interest, mobilising the bulk of the state’s constructive capacity, conjured up in the likes of an uncontrollable genie. In spite of the hesitancy and indolence of their political counterpart, the Italian state stubbornly pressed on for the tunnel. The fickleness and wavering loyalty of the French, is pronounced to such an extent, as to speak of a truly “dismaying French impasse,” Il Fatto Quotidiano said.

 "The project is far from Paris. The drawbacks are at the local level. And then it is Europe that has the reins of the project [...] Since politically nobody has found a way to benefit from the project and the Ministry of the Economy says it will take a long time to obtain economic benefits from it, the state has chosen not to give a damn,” a source close to the dossier told Opinion. 

 Nevertheless, after Draghi’s reboot, which set back into motion the plan after five years of immobilism, the Italian government is not swayed its the external constraints. It cannot be persuaded likewise by its primary domestic antagonist on the matter: the No TAV. 

 Born in the 90s the popular grassroot movement positioned itself at cross purposes with the state on the TAV affair. The group posits the twofold necessity of opposing environmental devastation, and the squander of public money. The prolonged, at times violent, resistance, ensuing from these points, is ostensibly justified by means of an appeal to a greater supposed human interest. 

 “We claim the right to defend our territory from the destruction that has been imposed on us daily, and for decades, and we proudly fight for everyone's future, for the Planet, together with millions of people around the world," No TAV says.

 However commendable, this presents a significant paradox, inasmuch as the No TAV is a territorial organization, inclined to prioritise its local exigencies and preferences to those of what could feasibly be considered the vastest, and most concrete human association - the state. 

 In fact, Italians have pronounced themselves largely in favour of  the TAV initiative. According to the results of a 2018 Swg poll for Il Messaggero, 49 percent of Italians believe that the TAV is an indispensable work for the country's growth, 30 percent are convinced that it should be stopped, while 21% do not know where they stand on it.

 A trivial concern for some evidently. An eloquent case of a low-grade political paternalism: the mass is too shortsighted to know what it needs, what’s good for it; we must act in such a way as to benefit the many, but we will do so without consulting them. 

 Defiance here is everything. A moral imperative, prescribed by an ecumenical, intransigent, ecological philosophy, with a touch of environmental catastrophism. The exponential sense of responsibility, the growing sense of encirclement, the harsh and itinerant treatments incurred at the hands of the police, produces a strain of strict and readily belligerent militants, who fashion themselves as the unyielding voices and agents of the environment, or more or less credibly - their existential environment.

 dm