Capitalism in Decay

Once [the Fascists] completed the military occupation of Ethiopia, a large stele from the city of Aksum was plundered by [Fascist] colonial troops and transported to Rome. In antiquity, the Kingdom of Aksum (100 BC – 700 AD) represented the earliest form of Ethiopian civilisation.¹⁴

The city hosted (and still does so in its rôle as a UNESCO heritage site) an impressive number of stelae originally carved and erected to mark the location of underground burial chambers. The theft of the stele and its re‐erection in Rome in 1937 allowed the fascist régime to proclaim itself as the successor of Ancient Roman conquerors.¹⁵

The placement of the stele at the ancient heart of the city was meant to create vistas and axes that would connect the Circus Maximus to the Colosseum and the pyramid of Cestius, as well as creating an artery that would link the city to the newly built EUR42 imperial quarter and the nearby port of Ostia, permitting access to the Mediterranean Sea.¹⁶ The construction, facing the Aksum stele, of a new building to host the Ministry of Italian Africa, was therefore meant to celebrate Italy’s imperial geography.

[…]

The […] 1947 Paris Peace Treaties set the terms for the return of the stele to Ethiopia. Article 37 stipulated the restitution of looted works of art, objects of religious, and historical value to their legitimate owners. But, despite these obligations, Italy kept the restitution on hold until 2002.¹⁷

By then new bilateral agreements were signed between Italy and Ethiopia, focussing around business, infrastructural projects, and development aid. These agreements, and through UNESCO mediation, eventually led to the complete restitution of the stele in Aksum in 2008, thus leaving the square empty and the FAO headquarters in Rome standing alone.

However, after the removal, the apparent sense of emptiness led to a new mutation. On 11 September 2009, the Mayor of Rome, the right‐winger Gianni Alemanno, inaugurated a memorial to the victims of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York eight years earlier.

The memorial, placed nearby the original location of the stele, consists of a plaque placed between two columns taken from the fountain of Curia Innocenziana in the Piazza di Montecitorio in Rome. This new spatial intervention clearly reproduces the profile of New York’s Twin Towers. Paradoxically, on the plaque are carved the words of the philosopher George Santayana: ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’.¹⁸

[…]

The […] substitution in the late 2000s of the Aksum stele with a 9/11 memorial has reinforced the coloniality of power, making room for other memorialisations and new civilisational messages. This latest intervention has triggered the attempted making of new global historical memories that are not necessarily bound to the sense of belonging to the nation or an ethnos, but, on the contrary, they inform the identity of those communities who did not directly experience specific traumatic historical events.⁴⁷

The experience of catastrophe following the Holocaust and the Second World War came to create a global political and moral space where collective trauma is held hostage by an exclusive Western interpretation, providing inspiration and justification for military and non‐military interventions to prevent outbreaks of major threats to the global hegemonic order.

Within this context, 9/11 acted as a historical turning point for the West out of which a transnational sense of ‘vulnerability’ started spreading. This has generated, and continues to generate, justifications of military aggression and war on a global scales a way to protect Western interests and concerns.

(Emphasis added.)