Don’t Cry for Giuliani
Let’s be clear on who was right and who was wrong in Genoa.

By Rod Dreher, columnist, New York Post
July 26, 2001 8:45 a.m.

ry this thought experiment: Imagine that the anti-capitalist rioters who basically forced martial law to be declared in Genoa, fought police with firebombs, rocks and bottles, and who cost that city an estimated $45 million worth of damage, had undertaken their actions to push for an end to legalized abortion.

Is there any doubt how the media would have portrayed the rioters? What right-thinking citizens would think of the destruction? Nearly everyone would be hailing Mario Placanica, the besieged paramilitary policeman who shot and killed urban terrorist Carlo Giuliani during a riot, as a hero.

Owing perhaps to the fact that many in the liberal media harbor an inchoate support for the lefty goals of the anti-globalist movement, there has been little or no sympathy for Placanica, a 20-year-old draftee from Italy's redneck riviera. When the Italian interior minister tried to stick up for him in that country's parliament, a row erupted.

The interesting thing isn't that someone was shot and killed in the Genoa riots. The interesting thing is that more people weren't. Anyone who saw footage of what the rampaging mobs did to that city has to wonder what good riot police are if their tear gas and truncheons can't prevent such catastrophic destruction. Are the police there to keep order, or chaperone?

Anyway, in my New York Post column on Sunday, I wrote that Giuliani — you can't have a police shooting without a Giuliani involved, it seems — had gotten exactly what he deserved. You have to expect that sort of thing if you attempt to throw a heavy metal object at an armed and trapped police officer in the middle of a riot, I wrote.

Well! From the caustic deluge of profane e-mails I received from all over the world, you would have thought poor old Placanica was the equivalent of Bull Connor turning ravenous Rottweilers loose on Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids.

"Carlo was killed for standing up for what he believed in," wrote one typical squish head.

No, dear, Carlo was killed for standing up with a heavy metal object over his head, and attempting to throw it at a Land Rover filled with armed policemen scared for their lives. And don't you forget it.

Here's what the Washington Post said happened the day Giuliani died in Genoa:

For hours, shock troops of the two sides pelted each other. Demonstrators threw rocks and firebombs, police in full-body armor fired tear gas and swung clubs. But then on a street of this city's Piazza Tommaseo, the melee suddenly took a life.

Demonstrators in black ski masks set upon a stopped police vehicle, they jumped on the roof and smashed the window with crowbars. The young officers inside were screaming in pain, terror and fury, witnesses said.

One protester hoisted a fire extinguisher over his head with both hands, and aimed at the open rear window of the vehicle. An officer aimed with a pistol and shot, witnesses said. The protester fell. The jeep then ran over him, according to a Reuters photographer who watched the shooting.

According to Kevin Buckley, a Daily Telegraph reporter who was in the piazza, Placanica and his colleagues in the jeep "had been set upon by half a dozen or so demonstrators, battering the vehicle with bricks and planks of wood.

"I saw one youth with a large red fire extinguisher, presumably wrenched from the back of the vehicle. From 10 yards away on the top of the church steps, I saw him lift it above his head and crash it into the back window. The glass shattered but did not cave in, and the extinguisher bounced onto the ground."

When the tear gas cleared, Buckley saw Giuliani lying dead on the ground. He did not witness the actual shooting, but his report makes clear that the anarchist demonstrators threatened the lives of the policemen — and that Placanica's shot was indeed what the young policeman claims it was: self-defense.

"I had been hit on the head, and was bleeding and feared for my life," a trembling, tearful Placanica told reporters in the aftermath of the event (it took 11 stitches to sew up his head gash). "They were trying to pull me out of the vehicle."

Not good enough, said Giuliano Giuliani, a middle-class trade-union leader who is the dead man's father. "That was not a legitimate defense. This can only be when it and the offense are proportionally similar."

Presumably, then, the carabinieri should have been armed with fire extinguishers only. True, it would have been better had the cornered policemen been able to escape without firing a shot, or by kneecapping Giuliani instead of popping him between the eyes. But who presumes to tell policemen pinned down by terrorists and fearing for their lives what they should have done? Which sane city plays "fair" by sending its riot police out armed with the same weapons as rioters?

(About those oh-so-peaceful protesters: One group claiming pacifist intentions complained when Italian police raided their offices during the summit and beat up protesters. During that raid, cops confiscated weapons.

And don't read too much into the fact that the Italians have charged Placanica with homicide; that's standard operating procedure so that an investigation can be opened.)

Papa Giuliani insists, as do most parents of thugs who come to bad ends, that underneath the gruff exterior, his son was really a nice young man who meant well, who "fought against injustice." It is kind, perhaps, to let a grieving father hold on to his illusions, but let us be clear with ourselves.

The middle-class Giuliani had chosen to live as a squatter, in tune with his anarchist beliefs. His friends admitted he was enamored of violence, and even his girlfriend characterized him as a rebel without a cause. "He felt the world was against him, and he was against the world."

How pathetic. Carlo Giuliani wasted his life living out a nihilistic fantasy. Mario Placanica, in a moment of terror and desperation, chose not to waste his indulging this jackass. He deserves our prayers, and our congratulations — as do all the men and women we ask to risk their lives facing down belligerent hooligans so that we can live secure in the blessings of a free and democratic social order.