For Alfredo M. Bonanno
For Alfredo
It seemed impossible that this moment would come. Speaking with Alfredo has always given me the idea of the present, the moment to grasp. I think many of us owe a lot to the reading of his texts and the long discussions that always left something new. The most crucial thing I learned was always to start from myself.
The large amount of writings and reflections and the huge number of anecdotes and experiences, will ensure that Alfredo remains among us, fortunately, to provide advice and suggestions, to open glimpses and passages but also to raise doubts, make efforts of reflection and imagination, build projects, maintain commitments, equip themselves with tools, destroy cages. Because as he himself said “this is about a method, the anarchist and insurrectional one, but basically it is an experience that we are talking about, not theories that clash or get along. An experience that continues over time and becomes action”. That experience for which at a certain point it is necessary “to close the book”.
There would be many things to say, many things to remember, typical of who has lived their life, of who constantly cultivated projects and proposed analysis. There remains the regret of not being able to still ask questions. But it is up to us now, it would be nice to say, to pick up the baton.
You taught us, like many comrades, the scandal of freedom, and today as in the past it is what is urgent to hear and feel. Your living memory is what you left us and that we will hold on to jealously.
Ciao Alfredo!
Translated by Act for freedom now!
Four and one hundred and fifty
“Dear Teacher my son cannot register for the Balilla [fascist youth organisation] we are poor and we do not need hate”.
A man wrote this message to his son’s teacher in the 1930s, a message that could still be written today. We do not need hate. Not the hatred concealed in the language of the State, that which kills with the coldness of bureaucracy, which justifies even the greatest infamy. A language that we do not even pay any attention to anymore, so addicted are we to listening to it uninterruptedly without reflecting on its real meaning. The language that describes the man with a different skin colour to his own, if poor, as ‘residual load’, waste to be sent to the dump. A language that nothing will alter, not even the tiny bodies of dead children lined up side by side, because in the end even that accountancy is, for many, just a bureaucratic question. It is a question of numbers that will soon be filling up tomorrow’s statistics, not of poor unfortunates who drowned while they had hope in front of their eyes: four days at sea and the coast only 150 metres away. But the linguistic severity of bureaucracy does not give a damn about poor unfortunates. It doesn’t ask how long a night spent rigid with terror is. It doesn’t care if a journey can cost a life, because it travels by State flights.
Yet that language does not come asepticly from nowhere, it is the expression of a very specific way of thinking: that of Domination, which in turn is embodied in men and women with faces, not just in words that hurt.
So here hatred can come in handy, this is where we need it; a healthy hatred not sown by the powerful to justify the war between the poor, but that which clearly identifies the real enemy. A hatred that overflows from the heart and pushes one to arm one’s desires. Because hatred can be a noble sentiment that gives no peace, as opposed to the indifference that leaves one staring blankly at the screen of a smartphone, passing from shipwreck to gossip with the same [lack of] emotive intensity.
Channelled in the right direction, we need the hate that helps us to not simply wet with tears these pages on which we write…
English translation by Act for freedom now!
The State is the slaughterer!
December 12 marks the anniversary of what is known as the “mother of all massacres”, the one in Piazza Fontana, at the Banca dell’Agricoltura in Milan, in 1969. Planned and carried out by fascists in collusion with State apparatuses, many more followed and over the following decade much blood was shed. These were scientifically planned massacres that attempted to impart an even more authoritarian turn to the young Italian Republic.
On December 5 in Turin, the courts began deliberating the sentencing of two anarchist comrades – Alfredo and Anna – accused of “political massacre” for having placed two explosive devices outside the carabinieri school near Cuneo in 2006, without causing any fatalities or injuries. They both risk life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Alfredo is being held under the 41 bis regime since May.
It seems logically absurd to hold a trial for a massacre without a single death, but not when the defendants are anarchists. The State wants to imprison them for life, not for what they have allegedly committed, but for the ideas they carry in their hearts and the actions that are an expression of those ideas.
Whoever placed those devices did not want to strike indiscriminately people in a bank, a station or on a train, but carefully chose their target. A carabinieri school is one of the places where the defenders of the established order are trained, those who enforce this state of affairs and who carry out a slow but relentless slaughter: people killed in the streets, in the barracks, in prison; deported, sent elsewhere to die, or killed directly in war zones around the world where Western States carry out their missions.
The same carabinieri involved in the Piazza Fontana massacre and all the ones that followed came of one of these schools.
The act for which Alfredo and Anna risk being locked up for life, besides not having claimed any victims, differs from State massacres in another respect: the ethical depth that distinguishes it. The gesture they are accused of did not aim to impose authoritarianism and repression, but its opposite: to open a horizon of freedom in a world of chains, by attacking one of its main links.
As anarchists we cannot yield to a repressive leap that increasingly aims to prosecute ideas and intentions. Precisely because and in spite of this, we must continue to affirm that we are, and always will be, for the destruction of the State and the creation of a world free of prisons, hierarchy and authority, that we are for the violent attack against structures and people of State and capital, and for insurrection – the only possible way to open a path not marked on any map, a path that is called freedom.
The mountain and the little mouse
At dawn on Thursday, September 29, a dozen or more policemen showed up at a comrade’s home with a search warrant for the crime of defacement, which a public prosecutor of the Lecce court had no shame in signing. Having ascertained that only the suspect was present, they decided to send the flying squad officers away to stay only six of the DIGOS, looking for clothing and spray cans. In addition to the house, they also searched his car, a moped and a house in another municipality to which the comrade had easy access. In fact, in addition to a helmet, a jacket and the latest copy of ‘Vetriolo’, which were returned to the owner at the police headquarters, they decided to seize a pair of boots and three stickers in solidarity with Alfredo Cospito, because, according to them, they were very much related to the wall writings they were investigating. This is how we begin to unravel the skein of so much investigative diligence for such a crime; a DIGOS inspector, in fact, informed the suspect that the investigation concerns the wall writings that appeared in Calimera (in the province of Lecce) on September 8 (we learn this from journalistic sources because the report says September 18) during the organized ‘week of legality’ on the occasion of the commemorations for the anniversary of the Capaci massacre, in which a Calimera citizen who was part of the escort also lost his life. The affair is beginning to make more sense: someone, irritated by the doggedness of the State towards Alfredo and perhaps indignant at the sanctification of judges and policemen, must have penned those wall writings to prevent them from sing alone their own praises. It is therefore clear that the state, with or without the government, persists in trying to make Alfredo and the infamous prison conditions to which he is subjected invisible. Having recalled him, claiming him free, during the celebrations of those events that led to the ‘temporary’ institution of the nefarious article 41 bis, must have annoyed them not a little and made them descend into ridicule.
We reiterate our utmost solidarity with Alfredo and all comrades imprisoned in various prisons around the world for love of freedom and hatred of those who deny it!
DOWN WITH THE ARMY!
An act of violence.
This is the definition given to what happened in Taranto a few days ago when insults and stones were launched at a Navy frigate as it pased by. What can we say? We can only agree… It is an act of exceptional violence that a missile frigate, a military operational unit named after the carabinieri army, can return to an important NATO base in grand style following a mission, crew lined up on deck. These are images that lacerate your heart.
Fortunately that day, near the revolving bridge, there were some enemies of militarism who expressed all their disgust at this violent repulsive spectacle. Their shouts and insults thrown at the military broke the deafening, complicit silence of those who held back, enjoying the show, and the stones thrown at the frigate tore away the grey area of silent collaborationism of those who never have the courage to call things by their name.
Giving substance to one’s antimilitarism – especially in this period of war propaganda, which has passed uninterruptedly from covid to war – is the sign of a particularly admirable ethical tension. While the whole of the national press and politicians hastened to label the demonstrators “pacifists” and condemn the gesture, we think that shouting “Murderers!” at the military, regardless of historical contingencies, is the truth, pure and simple.
To expose the role of words that describe soldiers as “heralds of peace”, is the first simple act to be carried out so as not to drift further and further into a reality that wants us to believe that at nightfall all cows are grey …
From the beginning of time, the job – the dirty job – that soldiers have to do is wage war, i.e. kill, and they get specific training and are paid for this. Only propaganda that obfuscates minds, and the debasement of language, can make it possible for the obvious to be forgotten; similarly only a selective memory can forget, for example, that the marines Latorre and Girone who murdered two Indian fishermen a few years ago wear the same uniforms as the soldiers on the “Carabiniere” frigate and work in the same area. A double homicide that the Italian State resolved brilliantly a few months ago by paying over a million euros to the families of the murdered men in exchange for impunity.
Now the news is talking of a brutal Russian army prepared to massacre civilians and rape women; but they don’t say that this practice belongs to all the armies in the world and that the vile serial systematic rape of women belongs to the history of all conflicts and has been widely documented from Vietnam to the present day – just to mention the most recent massacres. News that is written not with the pen but with the bayonet, that says nothing about the practice of torture as a scientific system consciously applied by all armies, trained to do so by their States, as Italian paratroopers did in Somalia and the US military did in Abu Ghraib.
By virtue of this, we can only be on the side of the anonymous protesters from Taranto, whom the Digos are now trying to identify in order to accuse them of “insulting the armed forces”. A crime, if it were ever to be proved, which can only be something to be proud of.
Blow it up
In order to “convince” people to be vaccinated, but above all to loyally follow the imposed rules and be obedient, the State through its Governments with the support of its technicians and the media, has terrorized and blackmailed, taken away rights and freedom, threatened, humiliated, denigrated and ridiculed, censored, suspended work, prevented work, divided society in two, nourished the epidemic, pointed the finger, condemned, criminalized, lied, misled, confused, created anxiety and fear. Still before and even worse, it murdered 14 prisoners in March 2020, prisoners who were demanding not to die like mice in a cage by rebelling along with many others.
The State chose to eradicate the problem by murdering some so that it would be clear to everyone that the so-called emergency phase that was opening up would take on precise connotations. Restrictions on freedom and abundantly spread terror, but with the leitmotif of “everything will be all right”.
Not only were prisoners killed in a State massacre, thousands of people also died due to incompetence and negligence in managing the situation, decimating cuts of resources, staff and hospitals, funds and privatizations. The fact of having found a scapegoat for the entire failure of the pandemic management can’t make us forget the responsibility of those who determined this situation. The pandemic has precise responsibilities and causes to be found in the techno-industrial system which is imposing itself more and more. The fact that it involves health clarifies even better how the latter is considered a commodity from which stratospheric profits are to be made. For a long time health is no longer synonymous with curing or wellbeing, but medicalization and profit. Finally, and perhaps more importantly,being digitalized and controlled, more and more data, personal and commercial, private and public accumulated and administered is the result achieved in the short term which is opening up scenarios of a new economy based on this commodity. The green pass, in fact, is no more than this: control, accumulation and management of data, as well as the habit of showing ourselves to be docile and obedient, being controlled and reachable anywhere, of being ruled and filed, moving codes. At work, on the bus, at the restaurant, bar, the hairdresser’s, cinema, bookshop, shopping mall, library or museum, on the plane or train, at the post office or the bank, at the gym or the swimming pool, at the tobacconist’s. How many times a day will you show your green pass? And how many times will you see it turning you into cops of yourselves?
And what will be left in the end? A society that discriminates and divides, without solidarity or responsibility, contrary to what they make us believe because the responsibility they are talking about is blank proxy which involves mere obedience.
It’s time we blew up this normality, refused and deserted this war. Otherwise, we are resigning ourselves to die of it, in silence.
On the walls of Lecce…
Urgent measures for the management of the COVID-19 pandemic
The head of the Government and his ministers:
GIVEN THAT the health system continues to be a huge burden which still hasn’t been cleared after funds being cut for decades
GIVEN THAT from now on the health system will only be private or fee-paying and the poor will die in any case
GIVEN THAT we want to gorge ourselves in peace without unnecessary hassle
GIVEN THAT we want Christmas to be full of commodities, gadgets, and various trifles and we are tired of the fact that there is a clampdown on their production and transport
GIVEN THAT we no longer want to have “the nightmare of closed ski resorts” and want to ravage the mountains as much as we please
GIVEN THAT nature is our enemy and we will completely transform it into a machine so as to eliminate any unpredictability
GIVEN THAT the Economy and Confindustria have so far dictated the rules for the pandemic management and that factories were opened when it was the moment to close them, ignoring deaths and contagions
GIVEN THAT, following the will of the Economy and Confindustria. we imposed a green pass to undertake all daily activity, that the pass prevents those who don’t comply from living tranquilly and working and it will allow constant monitoring of all those who use it
GIVEN THAT this pass will further serve to make people comply with rules which must never be questioned
GIVEN THAT fear and terror are now part of our lives and you can no longer live without them
GIVEN THAT SCIENCE is our ally in the military management of this pandemic
GIVEN THAT to SCIENCE one owes only loyalty and condescension, never doubt or criticism
GIVEN THAT in order to face the pandemic SCIENCE, SCIENTISTS and the multinationals of disease have prepared vaccines and vaccinations to see us to the end of our days
GIVEN THAT the profit they gain from all this is declared to be strategic interest
GIVEN THAT doubts, criticism and perplexity are not allowed by the one and only truth
GIVEN THAT refusal, disobedience and opposition are considered acts of desertion and high treason towards the State, the Economy and its citizens-consumers
O R D E R
that the non-vaccinated and more generally those who won’t comply with the emergency plan of pandemic management be
ALL L O C K E D U P
so that we can return to the much longed-for normality without any further obstacles and with the obedience due to the saviours of the Homeland and Capital
The Ministers of the Government of National Unity for the definitive management of the pandemic;
All the Ministers for the Clearance of every form of dissent;
The Ministers of War, Truth, Disease and the final Transition
Rome, year II of Artificial Life
CHATTER AND IDENTITIES
The democratic system is the best you can aspire to live in: in it all freedoms are guaranteed. Let’s take freedom of the press and freedom of expression as examples; under democracy it is possible to say and publish everything, provided it is what the democratic system allows one to say and publish.
One of the most important guarantors of these freedoms is to be found in public prosecutor Manuela Comodi of the Perugia prosecutor’s office, who in a brilliant police operation unleashed her watchdogs – the ROS carabinieri – to raid the homes of numerous anarchists in Italy, looking for anarchist publications no less! And think, she even managed to find them… To tell the truth it wasn’t that difficult; like looking for philosophy books in a philosopher’s home or paintbrushes in a decorator’s workshop…
As a matter of fact this fine bloodhound of the democratic State was not looking for anarchist publications in general, but for one paper in particular, Vetriolo, where among other things it is written that it is necessary and ethical for anarchists to attack domination and consequently the persons and things that are the direct emanation of it. It is a discourse that many anarchists have been carrying forward in their publications and in their lives for about a century and a half. How can you be surprised after all? What else can you think of doing to put an end to the exploitation which for centuries the bosses, States, economists and so on have been inflicting on those excluded from any kind of dignified life? What else can you think to do to put an end to wars, the exploitation of the planet, human and animal suffering, to stop death projects such as nuclear power, the transformation of the human being into a machine and countless other questions which the State, the Economy, industry and technology are responsible for, if not attack the things and the people who are directly responsible? Above all, it is an ethical discourse, which we feel absolutely the same about.
And not only us. It is a simple discourse, which many people agree with in their heart of hearts; when at work or chatting in cafes they exclaim that certain people, those responsible for the disgusting living conditions and exploitation, should all be killed, or that Parliament should be blown up with all of them inside because it is just a den of parasites with fat cats’ wages, while many outside are starving. Of course, this is often barroom chatter dictated by an outburst of anger due to a life of misery, whereas anarchists sometimes actually do raise their hands against those they identify as enemies.
And yet, following the twisted logic of this public prosecutor’s office, perhaps one day investigations will also be opened against those who do this cafe chatter, and we are sure that, during the raids, hundreds of coffee cups will be found in their homes – proof of their criminal plan…
It would be a laughing matter if it wasn’t for the fact that a comrade in prison has received another arrest warrant and that there is another house arrest plus four compulsory residence orders. To them all our solidarity, without victimism, as we are convinced that we must continue to say and do what we have always affirmed.
The freedom we dream of is right there.
Addio Lugano bella.
Humanity is a risk to be run. Against green pass, compulsory vaccination and much more
We have understood for a time that the various questions that present themselves to the world are not disconnected. A world of war presents its bill of misery, dead, people running away. An exploited and polluted planet presents its bill in terms of climate change, devastation of nature, diseases and more people running away. In a world where accumulation of wealth means accumulation of power, the consequence is exclusion and repression of those who can’t access this wealth. These arguments, repeated for centuries, don’t seem to be hitting the point in a period when all the conditions described are becoming quickly and exponentially real. The discourses made around the pandemic, health and the repressive and commodified management that followed, how can they be separated from all the rest?
How is it possible to look at war, going on in many countries of the world, for which arms sellers (Italy in the lead) are responsible to the marrow, and not realize to what extent militarism has also invaded our everyday lives, with a continuous request for obedience and discipline? How is it possible to regard and oppose big works and nocivities that devastate and colonize a territory and not realize that the profit and exploitation which are their causes are the same as those that regulate the production and administration of vaccines (or rather genetic therapies) which are using billions of bodies around the world as guinea pigs, because it is capitalism we are talking about?
Finally, how is it possible not to realize the security, discriminatory and totalitarian grasp that the use of an instrument such as the green pass implies? It is not only sociality that will be precluded for many people who refuse vaccination so as to stigmatize those who decide to continue to choose, but many people will find themselves dealing with survival, suspended from work and unable to find another job. What should be intimate and personal, to be vaccinated or not, becomes constant blackmail to be shown off and paraded, to be constantly controlled, to be punished.
Humanity is a risk to be run. To obey and passively accept what is unjust will only tighten the chains, for everyone. Because freedom is not a frontier, it increases wherever that of others increases and vice-versa. On the contrary, instruments such as the green pass are instruments of control, blackmail, exclusion and as such are unacceptable. No longer human beings, just numbers and codes. It is important to refuse to request it, download it or exhibit it wherever possible. And not care about the legal consequences. Not give in to the blackmail of fear, and practice solidarity.
Because no important change is possible without opposition and refusal.
WHO BUILDS PRISONS, WHO BUILDS FREEDOM!
“He who builds prisons expresses himself less well than he who builds freedom,” said an anarchist poet a few decades ago. And language in fact, understood as the expression of a world, is a central issue in this period, although in a reverse way to that recognized by the poet; those who build prisons are establishing a single dominant thought, while those who want to build freedom are forced into the corner, as often happens, after all. They started with confinement for everyone, then came the curfew; now the attack is directed towards those who are not vaccinated, who will be deprived of even the smallest freedoms if they are not convinced to do so. What is more frightening is the applause of the gray zone, that is the majority of citizens, especially of the left, convinced that taking away freedom is the way to solve the problems of all. If you do not align yourself with the single thought, you are considered irresponsible. It is not understood that the application of these measures will be extended gradually to all, regardless of health aspects: if you are not in compliance with what is prescribed by the State, whatever it is, you will be excluded from services and social life.
Yet the questions multiply. Why should we trust those who are using the bodies of billions of people as guinea pigs to make stratospheric profits and genetic information? Why should we trust those who created the health emergency: ignoring for years that it could occur, dismantling health care for decades, both territorial and centralized, in fact creating the conditions for the death of many people – we should remember this when we are continually clouded with numbers and we say that intensive care units are collapsing. Why should we trust those who feed a permanent war, in order to manage in a military and emergency way any problem that arises and to accept any abomination? Why should we trust those who exploit and devastate the planet, creating the conditions for epidemics to occur? The species jump has, in fact, an environmental cause. Why should we trust those who carry out criminal research in the laboratory to increase the danger of a virus? This happens and is allowed in the name of science. That science is the master of the world, accepted in a fideistic way, like an oracle. No doubts, no critical thinking, only obedience. This is the world that lies ahead. A world of digitized and medicalized slaves, without experience, without autonomy, without freedom. Unable to carry out any daily activity without the help or the imposition of a machine, an app, a device. Where it will not be the same machines to permanently replace the human being, now surplus of an economy and a world governed by computer processes and fear.
So be it.
There are not only those who build prisons. There are also those who build freedom. Who is banished, excluded, clandestine. Those who defend their autonomy, their experience, their culture, their history. Who will not be subjects, slaves, soldiers, who will not be a body to be recombined.
Who will continue to sabotage this world!
THOUGHT AND ACTION: 3RD YEAR OF THE ANARCHIST PUBLISHING FAIR 2021
Three days of diffusion and propaganda of anarchist ideas. Three days of books, meetings, presentations and discussions to talk about the history and actuality of anarchist thought and action, about the indissoluble link that unites them and about their ability to affect the world in the perspective of changing it.
Friday 4th June
6:30pm: Opening of the fair and of the anarchist press stands
8pm: Live music with Past&Fasul, between swing, gipsy, folk and jazz
Saturday 5th June
11pm: Control of the body and compulsory vaccination: a question that can’t be postponed – By some comrades and followed by discussion
1pm: Lunch
3:30pm: A look at war and borders through the identification of some of those responsible
Discussion from: Nemici di ogni frontiera. La lotta contro il Cpt nel Salento, ed. Anarchismo, 2019, by Some enemies of all borders
Leonardo-Finmeccanica and militarism in the Taranto territory: short recognition by some comrades of the Masseria Foresta
5:30pm: Radical critique of techno-industrial society in the thought of Ted J. Kaczynski – By some comrades and followed by discussion
8pm: Dinner
9pm: live music with Pippop, rap hardcore
Sunday 6th June
11am: Fuoco! Sangue! Veleno! Patto con la morte. Anarchici a Marsiglia alla fine del XIX secolo, Ed. Indesiderabili, 2020 – Presentation of the book by the editors followed by discussion
1:30pm: Lunch
4pm: Science, technics and technology are increasingly invading every aspect of the existent, aiming at the realization of total Domination. What can this awareness suggest? A multiple voices discussion with one of the editors of Contre le scientisme, by Pierre Thuillier, S-edizioni, 2020 and some of the editors of Chrysaora, anarchist magazine, Chrysaora edizioni.
8pm: Dinner
Via Silvio Pellico Lecce, side street of Via Taranto
disordine@riseup.net
Distributions of anarchist press and radical critique are welcome
We ask those coming from far away to let us know a few days before so that we can be organized
Without Authority
“It wasn’t the orators who won me over to anarchism, but life itself” – Pavel Golman
This was the expression of a Russian anarchist who, in the early years of the twentieth century, fought without quarter against the Authority and the iniquity that presented itself before him. The defense of property and the wealthy classes meant hunger and misery for everyone else, as well as jail and torture if these interests were undermined. More than a century later, the history of Russian and Polish anarchists, including the anarchists of Bialystok, a small minority of Jewish origin, speaks of the human and ideal struggle against the ferocity of the established order that starves and kills. It speaks of lives living in terror (from Katorga to pogroms, to the demonstrations of peasants and workers repressed in blood) and who respond to that terror in many ways. They study and defend themselves, attack and expropriate. In the general climate of strikes and revolts, they act out of conviction and anger.
It is curious that, today, some defenders of power refer to this experience, recounted in a book published some time ago, to “guard” in their homelands jails some anarchists accused of sabotage and solidarity.
With the arrest, a few months ago, of some anarchists in Bologna, guilty of having sympathized with the protests in prison in times of state of emergency, the theoretical basis according to which solidarity has become a crime has been declared; the umpteenth repressive operation called Bialystok against some comrades, serves to consolidate the fact that to sympathize with the arrested anarchists or with the prisoners in revolt must be incriminated. That to spread and propagandize, in practice and theory, ideas of revolt and insubordination is a crime. That preventing the isolation to which other comrades would be relegated (Operation Scripta Manent) and even defending the wealth of gestures and ideas of the anarchist movement, must be repressed and hindered in order to better strike those comrades.
But after all, if so much has changed since that experience of the early twentieth century, so much is unchanged. That it is life itself that pushes to revolt seems to be quite clear, where anger and violence are the only languages that can be used against the ferocity of state and economic repression. It is undeniable that it is the prison institution itself, made up of deprivation of liberty and humiliation, childishness and torture, that drives people to revolt. It is undeniable that it is the Centers of Permanence and Repatriation [CPR prisons – deportation prisons for refugees], made to lock up and dehumanize the undesirables of society, that drive to revolt. That it is undeniable that it is nuclear power, technological control and energy infrastructure, designed to fuel a world of deadly and totalitarian goods, that is the driving force behind the revolt.
It is enough to realize it, to rely on one’s own body and to refine one’s ideas. And if all this is a crime in the sad and narrow horizon of power, for those who fight authority is life.
Solidarity with all anarchist prisoners.
Alcuni beznachalie
Interruptions…
There is nothing new about social life taking place at a distance. For a long time now people have been persuaded that the best way to communicate and relate is through the use of a device. Prostheses of the human being, the smartphone and its like, have transformed the way of being together, of being informed, learning, communicating, writing and reading.
The next step is the robotization of living, technique pervading every place, every aspect of daily life. An overcoming of nature and the natural in favour of artificial beings and places. Such a scenario needs no social life, it does not need relationships, feelings, thoughts, it only needs order, discipline, regulation, machines. Maybe Dominion is trying to take a step forward and use a health problem, the spread of a virus, to reach generalized regimentation at least, the rest will then take care of itself. Science fiction comes to mind, but States have centuries old instruments to draw on without having to resort to the unknown.
The social distancing imposed by laws prohibiting kisses and hugs and the suppression of most social activities, recalls states of emergency in which the rules of social life are imposed and must be obeyed so as not to run up against getting charged or being arrested. And indeed the establishment of red zones and checkpoints, limitation of freedom of circulation, obligation of home isolation for those coming from areas considered infected controlled by police, but above all the ban on gatherings, i.e. public meetings, is the police management of a health problem. Not surprisingly it is foreseen in the ten rules recommended by the Italian State to avoid the spread of the virus that in case of fever the carabinieri must the first to be contacted. But states of emergency are also the measures provided for in situations of conflict or insurrection, as happened recently in Chile.
The State decrees by law that citizens are its property and it can dispose of them as it sees fit. States of emergency are not imposed for health reasons or the population’s welfare, but to make rules become introjected, to instill discipline. And indeed, the surest way to obtain obedience is to spread terror, fear. Create anxiety and panic, continually divulging data, making everything sensationalistic and exceptional. Frightening is a practice of war and torture as well as of government, and States are specialized in this too. And war has forcefully come back into vogue after being removed and cancelled out for many years. Today the war is here, indeed everywhere. Heads of State are declaring themselves at war against a somewhat singular enemy, a virus, but their real adversary or target is not that, it is their very subjects. For this reason the issue at stake, perhaps the most important, is to keep critical thinking alive without downplaying anything. Having, arm in arm with the Economy, industrialized and devastated nature and desertified thought, now feelings are being cancelled out. No kisses, no hugs.
However, if Dominion wants us totally dependent on it, if the State cancels social and in part also economic life, that means that we don’t need the State. That we can self-organize our initiatives, our forms of education, our economies, our leisure. And also in this case we don’t need to resort to science fiction but to experience, memory, our will and courage.
The prisoners fighting in the Italian prisons that this state of emergency would like to see buried alive are showing a way. That normality be interrupted, yes, but by revolt.
Break down the walls of power
It now appears that “Lecce city of tourism” no longer tolerates any dissent. A city now completely gentrified, synonymous with a controlled city. The walls erected following the eviction of the new anarchist occupation in the historic center, in a building owned by the municipality, speak for themselves. Outside of consumption, nothing is granted. And the historic center of Lecce is now totally a place of consumption, including bars and restaurants, trendy bars and luxury shops, hotels and B&Bs. For residents of the past, pointed because inhabitants of the historic center, there is no place left. There is no place for refractories of any kind. The walls stand for those who do not adapt or are different: whether they are immigrants living in the Giravolte for more than twenty years, or those who want to take a space to express their ideas and desires. Those walls are the exact expression of power. That is called Us with Salvini [“Noi con Salvini”, electoral party coalition led by Matteo Salvini, leader of the “Northern League” party, currently renamed “League]” or that is called Us with Salvemini (mayor of Lecce), in fact the processes carried out are the same. With brutality the first, with a smile the second, security and decorum are the central part of the agenda of power. Agenda that means more and more police in the streets, TSO, annihilation of social life, expulsion of undesirables, total control, homologation. Because everything is connected and it is not possible to feel strangers.
Only those who have their eyes closed cannot realize how much and how this territory is changing, how and how the people who live there are increasingly dispossessed of their existence. Trees are eradicated and the landscape is erased, replaced with structures, power stations and cement. Spaces are closed to eradicate critical thinking, dissent, rebellion. By police or by bureaucracy, the Authority wants only to affirm itself and its totalitarianism. This basic concept of a police State is basically the basic concept of a democratic State and its administrators. The rest is bar talk. But if the walls are erected, the simplest and most urgent thing to do is to demolish them, whatever they represent. Borders, morality, annihilation of critical thinking. Eradicating the refractoriness of wild nature, as well as anti-authoritarian nature, is not an easy task.
“Knock down, always knock down, because many more abuses are eliminated in the present, many egalitarian solutions you will prepare for the future” – E. Cœurderoy