With the restrictions on car use in Beijing during the Olympic Games, Wu Kaiqin might expect her Heavenly Peak motorcyle shop to be doing well. But business has declined sharply. Wu thinks it might have something to do with the wall:

[T]he 8-foot brick wall Chinese authorities have erected down the south side of Luomashi Boulevard, obstructing a row of rundown storefronts, including Wu’s, and the alleyway “huttong” housing of the neighborhood. Walls like it have been built in many parts of the bustling city, as some 500,000 foreigners have come to town for the Games - part of the government’s pursuit of perfection, albeit sometimes a Potemkin perfection, in the way the ancient capital presents itself to the world.

“It is all because of the Olympics,” said Wu, 33, standing on the sidewalk between the wall and her store. “They wanted to make the street look prettier.”

Silvio Berlusconi has deployed 3,000 troops in Rome to ‘fight crime’. In reality this is to enforce his government’s racist antizigan policies after he declared a so-called ‘Roma emergency’. Berlusconi’s measure against an alleged Roma crime-wave has so far resulted in a single arrest for pickpocketing. While antiziganism is hardly unique to Italy — see the European Roma Rights Centre — it is only the Italian government which has made antiziganism central to government policy, singling out Roma for compulsory fingerprinting and adding them to an ethnic register, a move redolent of the 1940s when Roma were separated and then deported to Vernichtungslager.

Mr Bezzecchi, who was fingerprinted at his home near Milan last month, feels history is at risk of repeating itself. “These things were done in the Fascist days when gipsies were killed or sent to concentration camps,” he said. “The politicians should remember that we are human, not garbage.

As has been noted before, it is Romani people who are the victims of crime — subjected to violence and discrimination whipped up by racist myths, while the government makes no serious effort to catch or prosecute the gangs who terrorise Roma communities.

In short and to paraphrase:

Everything that should have been eliminated from the national organism in the form of cultural excrement in the course of the normal development of society has now come gushing out from the throat; capitalist society is puking up the undigested barbarism.