A new pamphlet, circulated in London, recalling the proud rebellion and ‘total objection’ to militarisation and its logic from a period of escalated social-conflictuality in Italy in the 70s/80s.
“I don’t want these words, fruit of a gut refusal to do military service, deepened and enriched with the critique and practice from the movement of total objection that was a force in Italian anarchism at the time, to disappear into oblivion. Surely they are more than mere sheets of paper among the many clogging up the anteroom of the paper shredder.
And the protagonists? What has become of them? Would they say the same today decades later, and be ready to pay the consequences: years of prison or a life on the run? Or were their discourses forged with the fire of youth, arrogant in the ugly face of the warmongering State avid for their bodies and minds to dull and indoctrinate, train as insensate killers in uniform prepared also to be killed or maimed themselves? Does it matter, does it detract from the power that the words still hold? Still today military service is a plague in many parts of the world, and our hatred of armies, killing machines, prevents us from becoming indifferent to the plight of millions of young people all over the world should we just stop to think of them for a moment, all the more so as new tanks are beginning to trundle and populations are egging on thousands of enthusiastic youth (killers or corpses?) in staged photo shoots.
In the advanced democracies there are other ways of filling uniforms, now enlightened assassins ‘on a mission of peace’. Marketing techniques have far surpassed the macho man flexing his muscles as he sets off to see the world: even gay pride is old hat, the State wants to sweep up the misfits, the ‘snowflakes’, and all the gender letters of the alphabet in its all-inclusive massacres. Meanwhile global State terror has not abated as on a daily basis hundreds of men, women, children and babies, ‘respectable citizens’, prisoners, refugees, continue to be bombed out of existence or end up maimed and agonising thanks to armies, an assortment of human beings in uniform with arsenals of deadly weapons at their disposal.”
