In this epoch of total falsification (“of facts and of news supporting facts”), certain words of our everyday lives tell the truth, unwillingly. “Notification” is one of these. That the word expresses simultaneously an algorithmic order that comes up on a smartphone and a police-judicial document whereby you are fined or subjected to custodial measures, here is something that tells us a lot about the world we live in.
The latest operation in Trentino – so bizarre that it doesn’t even merit one of those names with which carabinieri’s and the political police’s special units express their literary desires – contains some elements that deserve to be known.
The first concerns the modality of execution. It had never happened to us to see eight face-covered police in plain clothes come to notify… a mandatory residence order to a comrade, without even a house search to follow.
Another significant fact – in this epoch so full of emotions – is that three proceedings different and distant in time appear in the order, without the usual bond of crime of association. Three different proceedings might well lead to the same custodial measures, but they would lose the sense and gusto of the Operation.
The techniques (comparison of alleged DNA traces and linguistic analysis of the communique of claim) used to attribute an attack on the Trento court of surveillance that took place on 28th January 2014 to a comrade are not new. On the contrary, what is new is the historical passage where mentions of genetic reports included in the order are inserted; because in the meantime the scientific instruments employed have become familiar to millions of people. In order to “detect DNA quality of concentration” they “proceeded with reaction of amplification of genetic areas” (Polymerase Chain Reaction – PCR)”. Perhaps before labelling as “paranoid” and “conspiracy theorist” anyone who fears that Covid-19 tracing through tests is giving way to the widest genetic filing in history, well, it is worth thinking twice. But let’s not digress.
The power of the State and the profits of capitalism need to assign an identity to each individual, an identity that has been written in records for decades but which today is also digital. It is consequently normal that those who try to escape identification by falsifying identity cards or, in these times, a green pass based on a QR code, are being struck. Then if anarchists already sentenced for fabrication of fake documents are accused of aiding a comrade on the run with this practice, cops and investigators will try to embellish it as much as they can, adding to the sentence yet another mandatory residence order so as to keep them away from their relations of love and struggle.
As for the last measure, however, it is worth pausing a little longer. Because on this point magistrates were really good in “creative use of the Law”, you can’t deny that. In order to appreciate all the subtleties of prosecutors, we need to do an exercise of memory of the present.
Mid-April 2020. Millions of people are under house arrest following a decree of the prime minister; they can only go out if they have “self-certification” and only for “essential activities”. In the weeks previously the State killed fifteen prisoners, beat up and tortured hundreds more (police violence in the prison of Santa Maria Capua Vetere, which months later would acquire media coverage, was already known in solidarity milieus). A small group of comrades – who don’t want to stay put at home – wonder how they can break the silence around the revolts and the massacre. To whom can they talk in deserted cities that evoke post-atomic scenarios? What should they do so that other humans realize the situation? Certainly the idea is not a stroke of genius because it has already been realized on a number of times in Italy and abroad, but it has its sense: given that people are locked up at home, a communique can be transmitted through a widely followed radio station.
The attempt fails for reasons not very interesting to report.
Almost two years after that event which no one was thinking about any longer, a comrade, already under house arrest, is searched for “attempting to impose a radio broadcast coherent with his ideologies”; he is put under investigation and subjected to house arrest for “attempted extortion” with the aggravating circumstance of “purposes of terrorism and subversion of the democratic order”. Why on earth “extortion”? Here comes the first piece of resistance. Do follow the syllogism as it is remarkable. A commercial radio offers its slots at a cost. If someone demands to transmit a communique without paying, this someone causes “financial damage” to the owner of the radio (as the latter is deprived of his right to sell the radio slot to whoever he wants), and exercises “contractual extortion” on the radio owner (because the latter could lose customers who don’t like the contents expressed in the communique). The judicial precedent mentioned is a sentence against a guy who forced the manager of a venue to hire him as bouncer. Only a subversive wouldn’t find an unequivocal similarity between the two “cases of crime”.
And what about “purposes of terrorism”? Someone will say: the instigating content of the communique. No. The subversion of the democratic order consists of limiting the radio owner’s freedom of expression, given that his opinions differ from the “anti-prison ideology of the accused”. Because, as the prosecutors remind us, the pillars on which the constitutional order is based are three: freedom of expression, freedom of movement and freedom of association. The fact that the event in question happened in full confinement – i.e. during the weeks when the only authorized freedom was that of singing, preferably the national anthem, on balconies – adds a Re Ubu touch which might as well be useful. Alongside the humour of writing that the facemask worn by our “extortionist” was an attempt at “misrepresentation”…
What is the moral of the story? For us, it is always the same.
Solidarity is the most precious sentiment between humans. In our world, which is the reverse side of power’s reversed one, to risk for one’s comrades or for the exploited one doesn’t even know, is something to be proud of.
As for courts of surveillance, the essential points have already been written in the poster that came out on the same day of the attack on the court of Trento, which we report here.
Breathing the same air
On the attack on the court of surveillance in Trento
Today at dawn air was circulating in the building of the court of surveillance in Trento. At around 5am (a time when passers-by couldn’t be affected) anonymous persons made a pressure cooker containing a gas canister explode, destroying glass and windows.
This time we read the news not in newspapers but on the search report made by the Digos. Mid-morning, in fact, the political police turned up at four flats where comrades lived, later also searching anarchist places El Tavan in Trento and La Nave dei Folli in Rovereto. With the usual article 41 Tulps: “search for weapons and explosives”.
News of the searches came out “in real time” on online newspapers but not only this. In a few hours, Cgil, Cisl and Uil [Italian institutional unions] issued a communique of condemnation of the attack and of solidarity with magistrates. Then, in order of appearance, video interviews and communiques from the president of the Province, the president of the Provincial Committee, the chief public prosecutor of the Republic, the president of the court of surveillance and various politicians. Even the provincial Committee opened in the morning with a speech of condemnation of the gesture and of solidarity with magistrates (and while they were at it, also with the Northern League, whose premises had their windows smashed a few nights ago). In other words, a choir of unanimous, immediate and diligent servility.
We are not interested in knowing who carried out the action against the judicial offices. What we know by experience is that the court of surveillance and its magistrates are the institutions and characters most hated by prisoners and their families. These officers turned what should be automatic for thousands of prisoners into a prize to be gained: concession of days of early release and of so-called alternative measures to jail.
Behind the self-harming acts and suicides in prison there is often precisely a gallows-decision made by a surveillance judge. Behind the beatings of the guards there is the magistrate’s protection. We were not aware that politicians and unionists were so steadfast in condoning screws’ beatings or neck-breaking measures striking the poor, which constitute magistrates’ “work”.
Today at dawn air was circulating in the building of the court of surveillance.
We guess they celebrated in prison as soon as the news came out. We did it ourselves, notwithstanding the Digos, magistrates and unionists.
28th January 2014
Anarchists from Trento and Rovereto
From Bologna:
MAKE THEM PAY IT ALL
Opposing imperialisms are bringing war back to European soil. A military management of the pandemic has left death and psychic suffering, redesigning the social body through the pedagogy of blackmail and obligation. Nationalism is gaining strength, with the purpose of making the social body compact in anticipation of a new austerity that is about to come.
Economic recovery, i.e. the bosses’ profits, remains the final goal to be achieved in a shaken society. In the face of price increases, of a health system in dissolution, of the environment. In spite of everything, in other words.
Workplaces are becoming increasingly disciplined and unguaranteed, wages inadequate and non-negotiable. Jails are getting overcrowded. Wider social sectors are becoming poor and proletarian.
As all this is happening and in order for it to happen, the Italian State continues to strike incessantly those who for years have not concealed their hostility towards power and its endemic violence: on 25th February three custodial measures, ranging from prison to house arrest and mandatory residence, were notified to anarchist comrades because they didn’t let themselves be domesticated in spite of the already heavy repressive blows they have received in recent years.
Among them Juan, an anarchist comrade already in prison since 2019 on charges of massacre following an attack on the Northern League premises in Treviso, was accused of an attack on the court of surveillance in Trento, which took place in 2014; Massimo, already under house arrest, was accused of attempted extortion with purposes of terrorism, because he sneaked into the site of a radio station to read out a communique in solidarity with the rebels in prisons all over Italy in 2020, following the massacre perpetrated in the State’s jails; Agnese and Stecco, after years between prison, house arrest and mandatory residence following operation “Renata”, were given mandatory residence orders once again, for procured non-compliance of a sentence and falsification of documents, in relation to Juan’s being on the run.
We want to mention these comrades because they are parts of our hearts, because we know their generosity and determination. Because in the face of all that is happening in the world, they never turned the other way and never lost the spirit of solidarity among the oppressed, the rebels.
Moreover, because in an “increasingly unjust and unbreathable” world, their struggle and the accusations against them show us how we should use the little freedom left to us to smash the cogs of power’s mechanisms instead of making it an ephemeral privilege to shelter us from the claws of these bastards. They must pay it all. It is up to us to make it happen.
SOLIDARITY WITH JUAN, AGNESE, MASSIMO AND STECCO AND WITH ALL ANARCHIST PRISONERS
A leaflet handed out during the initiative “Per chi sente il ticchettio” [to those who can hear the ticking] (on pandemic management, emergency and war) that took place on 3rd March in Catania.
Solidarity with the comrades from Trentino
For an International of flaming hearts
On 25th February, the day when the Draghi government didn’t miss the opportunity to send its contribution to the war on the “external front” deploying 1,400 Italian soldiers on behalf of NATO, magistrates didn’t miss the opportunity to contribute to the war on the “internal front” repressing some enemies of all armies, generous comrades who for years have been nourishing with passion the critique of militarism and the world that produces it.
The investigation produced four custodial measures: two arrests, one in prison and the other house arrest, and two mandatory residence orders. While we certainly don’t expect any common sense or ethics to bond us with the gentlemen of the Prosecution, we still cannot remain indifferent to the intensification of the inquisitorial logic and that of the internal enemy to the detriment of any other human logic, including the judicial one, that these subjects should observe.
From the tangle of court papers, the most varied episodes of crime come to the surface, varied both in terms of time – actions dating back to 2014 alongside with more recent episodes – and the typology of actions and contexts of the struggle where the former were developed. In this theatre of the absurd, an accusation stands out shining with imagination, that of “Attempted extortion with purposes of terrorism” against a comrade who along with others occupied a local radio station in April 2020 to read out a communique of solidarity with prisoners in revolt (a revolt later broken off in blood, with fifteen prisoners dead).
One thing is certain, in the world of algorithms, of “all isolated” and of the totalitarianism of binary thought, those who pursue solidarity between the exploited are enemies and the State treats them as such.
Even more so in a period when solidarity among the oppressed could take a run-up in the form of sabotage, direct action against the war apparatus, wider mobilization against the States’ war.
If we have printed pamphlets brought out by these comrades, it is because in this way it is as if we had the comrades here with us.
And also because their words and acts are catapults to tear off the curtain that is forming, of “wider western nationalism” signed NATO.
Have a good read!
From Trieste:
We learn of the umpteenth repressive operation against anarchists in Trentino: with the usual pretexts typical of judicial bureaucrats, 4 custodial measures were imposed, concerning episodes whose only connection seems to be the struggle against prison.
Beyond the squalid reasons of the oppressors and the system that defends them, we can see yet again the threads of the State’s revenge against anyone who struggles and is not pacified by the present state of war. To lock up, and to lock us up, is now their not so hidden goal.
A warm hug to those struck by the umpteenth operation. Solidarity and complicity with those who struggle!
