In expressing our solidarity with the comrades raided, investigated and subjected to precautionary measures in operation “Sibilla”, we are going to make some considerations (pending a more precise analysis from those who have the police-judicial papers of the investigation).
If the framework of “subversive association for the purpose of terrorism” has been repeated incessantly for the last forty years, the increasingly frequent accusation of “incitement to commit crimes” – aimed at striking anarchist and revolutionary publications, or even simply that which is non-aligned – informs us explicitly about the era we have entered. In the last month, in fact, there have been numerous searches carried out throughout Italy on this charge.
What for some decades had been mainly reserved for anarchists and antagonists is now becoming the norm, even for democratic dissidents. For example, there is already a certain qualitative difference between an expulsion order being imposed on a subversive and one imposed on a grassroots trade unionist “guilty” of taking part in a workers’ picket; and the difference becomes even more indicative if the person kicked out of a city is a dock worker who set up a stall in the square in the name of democracy and the Constitution. Just as it is quite different– in terms of the extension of the State’s coercive powers – if a city centre is banned for anarchist demonstrations following a demo with clashes and attacks on the power structures or if it is banned for peaceful demonstrations against the green pass, all on the basims of decrees passed in the name of “public health” or to protect shopkeepers’ “right” not to have their takings reduced.
It is not the same thing to be arrested on the charge of having carried out sabotage or an attack against the bosses or for having written that sabotaging and attacking the bosses is right (all the more so if in a press conference a prosecutor hints at the moral aggravation committed by some of the accused through the circulation of printed paper during the lockdown…). If those being compared to ‘brigatisti’ are simple opponents of the green pass; if those who don’t want to be vaccinated are described as deserters who would be shot in other times, it means that only one response to orders is allowed: “Yes sir!”
The “incitement” charge is particularly ridiculous (“You are murderers, but ridiculous murderers”, Armand Robin wrote in relation to the Gestapo officers who searched his home with the intention of stopping the publication of Le Temps qu’il fait, his bulletin against the false words of all the sides in the war). Government officials consider a logical-factual assumption what in fact is their own historical project: a world of humans deprived of any autonomy and conscience, at the mercy of those who instigate them more astutely or by more suggestive means. If an exploited person is not incited to break the law and rebel against the daily butchery of dignity and freedom that is capitalist and State society, will they perhaps be incited to do so by the words of the anarchists? Is the explosive material on which the subversive detonator could act not produced by the State, by the violence of profit and of a techno-military order now incompatible with life?
Finally a few words about violence
One can say on television without any of those present timidly whispering “Sir, maybe you are exaggerating” that those who don’t get vaccinated are rats to be hunted down; that those who criticize the government’s “health” measures are terrorists and should be treated as such; that Bava Beccaris’s machine guns would be needed against “no green pass” protests; that special wagons should be reserved for plague-spreaders, that they should pay for their medical treatment, that the army is needed to keep them locked up at home… In short, a state virologist, a politician, a trade unionist, a president of the Confindustria can instigate the most ferocious and petty violence – which, yes, translates into very precise authoritarian facts and measures. Whereas if you say it is right to strike the bosses you end up in jail or locked up at home with an electronic bracelet on your ankle. It’s called democratic order. You are not happy with that? Sorry, that’s all there is.
We, simple souls, continue to think, and say, and write, that the structural, inhuman and infamous violence is that of the State and the bosses; while revolutionary violence against those responsible for domination and exploitation is as necessary in deed as it is right in principle.
When the treatment that a social system inflicts on its impoverished, harassed and discriminated against subjects increasingly resembles the brutality that the State generally reserves for its sworn enemies, they are pushing too much. The Istituto Luce* in the service of power can do much, but it can’t do everything. Because even the violence against words ends up polluting the air and driving anyone who still wants to breathe to the clandestine use of critical sense.
There are lashings – and you, gentlemen, are inflicting them in huge doses – which cannot be soothed with the chloroform of virtual reality.
To think we can control everything with algorithms and numbers certainly goes to your head. But in the living world of living beings, one humiliation plus one humiliation plus one humiliation do not necessarily make three humiliations. They can also make something else. For example humans with vitriolic rage.
*Translator’s note: The Istituto Luce was an Italian corporation created in 1924, involved in the production and distribution of films and documentaries intended for being screened in cinemas. It was a powerful propaganda tool of the fascist regime.
In expressing our solidarity with the comrades raided, investigated and subjected to precautionary measures in operation “Sibilla”, we are going to make some considerations (pending a more precise analysis from those who have the police-judicial papers of the investigation).