arch/ive/ief (2000 - 2005)

A woman is dead in Padua, her naked body found strangled in a canal. One of our sisters, someone who marched with us on the streets in Genoa, who marched again in her home town in support of those beaten, arrested and tortured. Maria Jose Olivastri, a union organizer and postal worker, mother of a daughter, forty-two years old.

The post that gives us this news begins "This appears not to be a political killing, after all."

I say that it was.
Yes, it is important to know if she was targeted for her political activities or not. If so, the implications are far reaching and grave. But whether she was specifically targeted or not, her death was as political.

If someone killed her because she was an organizer and an activist, the killing is political. If someone murdered her in revenge for Genoa, because she took part in demonstrations and marched in protests, the killing was political.

And if someone killed her because she was a woman, the killing was also political.

Violence against women is political violence. When a woman cannot safely walk the streets of her city, when a woman is afraid to go out alone at night, it's political. When a woman goes with eagerness and hope to meet a new lover, and ends up dead in a gutter, that's political.

If we doubt the connection, consider how many of our comrades in Genoa reported being tortured in rooms with pictures of Mussolini and pornography on the walls.

Fascism is fueled by the fear and hatred of women's bodies. Capitalism is sustained by women's low paid and unpaid labor. All forms of hierarchy are supported by the power men wield over women.

We need to understand these connections, if we are going to overthrow the underlying structures of power and not just exchange one set of masters for another. Our brothers in this movement are courageous and beautiful, but we need you to name these connections, too. Then we can trust that we are truly building another world, in which women's courage and beauty and intelligence is honored, as well as men's.

I didn't know Maria, but I cry for her. I mourn her as a sister, as a comrade in this struggle, and as a victim of political violence.

I would like to think that the streets of Italy, and every city, would be filled with marchers protesting her death, as she marched to protest Guiliani's.

It shouldn't need to be said, in 2001, but it does need to be said, and I say it again:

Her death was political.

Starhawk
http://www.starhawk.org