We want to stress the new repressive step the Italian state did against militant proletarian groups. We want to denounce that state action and solidarise with all comrades hit by it. We want to make a broad call for fight and for solidarity with this further warlike action of the world-wide state terrorism.
This huge laboratory of the counter-revolution that Italy has been; this model-like repressive state, that the Italian state has been for years; this apparatus of Law and Repression producing examples in an international level on how to produce and to mix up repentants, collaborators, and abjurers... did once again a new and representative step forward.
Some years before the Italian state distinguished itself world-wide on how it used the tactics of mixing up to lump together entire sectors of the proletarian movement to accuse them of terrorism that were officially not to blame for a single specific offence. Since several years it has been the repressive tactic of the Italian state to use bombs laid by the police or sectors manipulated by it to spread fear and terror amongst the population, and thereby to legitimise all the state terrorist acts. Since more than 15 years the Italian state combines its terrorist acting that is common amongst all states (especially physical and psychological torture) and a legislation favouring betrayal, repentance, and collaboration that is an international model that is copied by police and law in more and more countries.
Beginning with some repressive measures finding guilty some "anarchist" and some house raids finding weapons, but especially with some vague statements of a constructed chief witness (1) the state's inquisitors, represented by the prosecutors of Rome, puzzle up a state campaign bringing a charge against several groups and militants calling themselves "anarchists". In fact they are not in search for specific offenders but are trying to illegalise an entire contradictory movement with different structures and different stands that has one in common: they define themselves being "anarchists" (2).
Of course state attacks of this kind are not aimed at "anarchists" in general - after all parts of those calling themselves like this are clearly reformist and pacifist, in Italy as well as in the rest of the world, and this way are doing a good job for the state. On the other hand the Italian state puts big pressure to all the sectors it is mixing up to make them renouncing, apologising etc. And it achieves superior results in doing this. Like in former times, when there was a deluge of declarations of renounce in view of the repression against Brigate Rosso, Prima Linea, and other groups, the some sectors of the official anarchism like "circolo Berneri" and FAI, didn't lose time in declaring the accused not to be anarchists but provocateurs, and, getting to the bottom of it, they tried to apologise to the state by declaring anarchists never would do some armed action.
So it is clear that the agents of repression, while leaving alone the official "anarchists", try to identify those considering as the state's true enemy and to hit them badly. Proceeding from a cop's or judge's point of view that do not view subversion a "natural" result of misery and oppression not to be prevented but a conspirative gang's deed it naturally leads them to erroneously condemn even militants and secotrs not doing any revolutionary activity.
Since end of '95 and during the while '96 year there has been a complex of proceedings, house raids, arrests, charges, mixing ups, declarations, campaigns with its climax on Sept 16th and 17th: on that day about 60 houses and flats in several Italian cities were searched, dozens of militants got arrested and some more forced to go into hiding. While some of the arrested are charged with bank holdups, murders, and robberies, most of them - without any difference and any proof - are blamed for being members in the same armed gang (an organisation that allegedly is called "Organizzazione Rivoluzionaria Anarchica Insurrezionalista"). A conglomerate of associative typification is used: "armed gang", "subversive association", "possession of weapons and explosives", "attacks against public structures".
We don't stress this notorious mixing up of militants that can't be proved neither an armed action nor any using of weapons because we want to solidarise with "unguilty" and not with those that did armed action against private property and against the state - like so many reformist and opportunist political organisations do - because the "guilty" have been and always will be an important part of our movement in the widest possible sense; as revolutionaries always demanded beginning in the era of Marx and Bakunin until the time of Flores Magón and Rodolfo Gonzalez Pacheco. We do it as we think it important to proclaim that the state doesn't want to get rid of those that did this or that offence but those that are a real danger for it - whether or not they can be proved to have done this or that. Shortly speaking - because this has to be clear - to unmask the state tactics of mixing up as well as of using abjurers and collaborators as a way to hold down a broad social movement, to support and to reproduce class domination. We emphasise that the accused formally disputed being members of a single clandestine organisation and declared a "revolutionary anarchist organisation for insurrection" as a specific and separated structure not to make sense for somebody calling him/herself anarchist as the concept taking this short cut was a leninist one and not corresponding to their position.
"Of course the judges know that the anarchist organization doesn't exist. The know that the pattern of an armed gang - derived from their look in the mirror - is not to be used in the real relationship amongst the anarchists. Individuals meeting based on affinity, i.e. starting with their differences, and developing initiatives without formally build up own associations, individuals that organise - that's true - but not in the rigid and vertical way an armed gang would be. And that not only because they disapprove of clandestine (that's important) but because they are not willing to join a structure - neither as a short cut nor as programme - that makes armed meeting a reality departed from the subversive entire. This is still true if an anarchist decides, individually, in whole responsibility for himself, to take arms. Even if anybody in charge, or even if each anarchist in the whole world had - in addition to writing, discussing, loving, distributing manifests, giving bad names to bosses, staying away from work, squatting room and taking back goods - had taken arms this would not evolve them into an armed gang. It is the power that has to invent this... What the judges aim at is the illusion that, except surviving and waiting for better times, an armed organisation is the only way. Luckily insurrection is not what the institutions of repression want it to be like..."
(at this point some contact addresses are listed. We removed them as they are listed on our address page too.)
from "Comunismo #40"
You may contact "Comunismo" via Correspondencia, BP 54 - BXL 31, Belgian 1060 Bruxelles.
(1) Based on the statements of the constructed chief witness Namsetchi Mojdeh, containing many proved and serious, an entire scene is charged.
(2) One of the imprisoned comrades is Alfredo M. Bonanno, that is blamed being "head of the armed clandestine gang". Despite differences in our political positions he did some good work, for example when he unmasked the amnesty in Italy, and when he re-published and distributed a collection of historical papers of communists (of so-called "left communist Internationals" like Pannekoek) in "Anarchismo Editions".