Sergio D'Elia, General Secretary of HOC

EXECUTION AT FUN PARK: HANDS OFF CAIN, DEMENTED AND DEVASTATING

July 23, 2008: “It’s a demented and culturally devastating attraction, which undoes years of work on the part of those struggling against the death penalty.” With this statement, the Secretary of Hands Off Cain, Sergio D’Elia addressed the presence of an attraction at a fun park at the Idroscalo of Milan that recreates an execution in the electric chair. The attraction consists of a life-like dummy strapped to an iron chair and convulsed by pistons to seem as though he is being electrocuted.
“The way in which it was done,” explains D’Elia, “in the context of an amusement park, removes any sense of reality from the experience of those condemned to death and from this plague still all too present in the world.” He added, “It is a shameful way to gloss over and reduce to a banality, the problem of the death penalty that, even in literary, film and commercial advertising media, great writers of the past, such as Victor Hugo and Leo Tolstoi, and contemporary artists like Tim Robbins and Oliviero Toscani have represented admirably.”
“It should be said, however,” continued D’Elia, “that the attraction at the fun park in Milan is merely a way of profiting off the base and bestial aspects of our society, which have been fed, particularly in the last two years, by a death-obsessed media flooding the country with sensationalised news, packed with images of cadavers and every other form of violence, served to the Italian public for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Meanwhile,” observed D’Elia, “nonviolence doesn’t make the news, such as the hunger-strike of Marco Pannella, which has gone on for eighteen days so far in order to save Tariq Aziz from a very probable and very real execution.” (Sources: Hands Off Cain, 23/07/2008)