This week marks 8 years since various groups of the Anarchist Black Cross (ABC) and different individuals around the world raised the initiative to maintain a week of international solidarity with imprisoned anarchists, and that this week coincides with the day on which the anniversary of the legal murder of anarchists Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco by the U.S. government in 1927 is commemorated.
The official history written by the powerful plus the progressive democratic left and a part of anarchism have been especially concerned with creating a victimized image of Sacco and Vanzetti and far from any illegalist practice. All this based on the recognition by the American judicial apparatus that within the criminal process that condemned Sacco and Vanzetti there were many irregularities and that they would be legally “innocent” (information that became known many years after the murder of the comrades). Probably the comrades had no relation with the expropriation of South Braintree, which is important to know and make visible, as it is also important to emphasize that Sacco and Vanzetti were anarchists of action, who propagated anti-authoritarian ideas and exercised different illegalist practices.
In the territory we call the USA in the early 1900s there were several informal anarchist groups dedicated to expropriations and to the spread of ideas antagonistic to domination. Nicola and Bartolomeo actively participated in one of these groups, specifically in the one surrounding the newspaper “Cronaca Sovversiva”. These last elements “the official history” has omitted them as in the same way they have taken special care not to remember the international solidarity that the comrades had during the year 1927. There were many demonstrations of repudiation in different localities of the political/legal/police process, as well as explosions in the name of Sacco and Vanzetti, one of the best known being the action that destroyed the Italian consulate in Buenos Aires.
It is not by chance that those who sustain the Power and its false critics use and make up the history related to Sacco and Vanzetti, certainly it is not the first time and it will not be the last.
The repressive apparatuses of the State break with their own legality constantly: they create montages, rape, torture and a long etc… These practices, for those of us who position ourselves as enemies of the hegemony of Power, should not surprise us… Trusting in the democratic legality of the State is not part of my political construction. This does not mean that I intend to naturalize the abuses exercised by the powers of the State on a daily basis; making visible is not the same as being a victim.
I see a week of solidarity specifically with anarchist prisoners as one more occasion to make visible what happens behind the high walls. Prison for me is yet another scenario of confrontation, which is felt in the smallest and most everyday things.
The first step I took in a prison was a long time ago, since then I have never stopped feeling the solidarity of my comrades, that solidarity I have had in a fraternal embrace or in a beautiful seditious light in some icon of Power.
94 years after the legal assassination of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, nothing and nobody is forgotten.
Those who fight against Power do not cease to be remembered.
