Italy: Two counter-informational leaflets in solidarity to the anarchists recently arrested

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To believe, to obey and to work
(Text of a leaflet translated from www.finimondo.org)VERSIONE in ITALIANO

You must believe the words of propaganda, the TV and the press reporting the proclamations of ministers, the communications of executive directors, the declarations of officers.

You must obey the orders of authority, be them rumbled by a government or a businessman, by a bishop or a police chief.

You must (try to) work, that is to say to consume the days of your life in efforts to find money in order to go on. You can’t waste time with original thoughts, freedom taken without asking permission or old-fashioned parties.

There is nothing else you can do apart from ‘believing, obeying and working’; the rest is forbidden by the law. The same law that establishes how much you can drink, where you can eat, what you can say, whom you can love, how you can die and – above all – how you can live. Those who do not resign to an existence of genuflections are considered ‘socially dangerous’, people to be persecuted and repressed, no matter what they do. By now simple intentions are sufficient. To have one’s own ideas, to dare express them and try to put them into practice, all this is more than sufficient to become a target for those who only appreciate applause and consensus.

For these and other reasons investigations on ‘organized crime’, with or without ‘subversive aims’, are multiplying in Italy, with the intent to give a preventive lesson to those who do not want to submit to any party (be it democratic or whatever).

At the beginning of April it was the Bologna anarchists who ended up in prison, accused of protesting too loudly against militarism that imposes discipline and bombards and against racism that builds concentration camps. A month later (as the National Police Celebration was approaching, a yearly occasion for raids set up in order to celebrate themselves), it was the turn of dozens of university students in Florence – very much disrespectful of education reforms and more generally of government politics – to be inflicted the attention of the judiciary. Some ended up under house arrest, others have to report to the police station. In total there are about eighty people investigated by the Florence prosecution because they refused to bow in front of authority.

Who will be next?

It could be anyone. Someone who is no longer obfuscated by football tournaments and reality TV shows, no longer obsessed by social roles to achieve and family traditions to respect, no longer inured by repulsive government politicians and pathetic opposition politicians; someone who will no longer bear the indifference in front of wars and nuclear plants, concentration camps and exploitations, incinerators and high speed railway yards. And for this reason, in order to finally taste a life worthy of being lived, he or she will start shouting, blocking roads, daubing walls, sabotage the instruments that power uses to compel us all to believe, to obey and to work.

Between Indifference and War
(Leaflet distributed in Lecce during a solidarity initiative with the Bologna anarchists)
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Today like yesterday the homicidal potentialities of terrorism are little thing compared to those of State power […]. No organization defined ‘terrorist’ can compare to governments when it comes of kidnapping, torturing and making people disappear.
H.M. Enzensberger

A few weeks ago the news broke of the nth massacre in the Mediterranean sea, off the Maltese coasts. More than 250 people drowned, sunk to the sea bed along with the ship onto which they were crammed. This was not an accident but a massacre deliberately committed: the authority chose not to allow those people in ‘its international water’ and eventually not to succour them as they were dying.

When something like this happens, it is necessary to find the responsible, that is to say the persons behind and the perpetrators of the massacre. This is not difficult. That massacre is the result of a proper terrorist act perpetrated by the States – not only the Maltese one, which the Italian government tried to give the entire responsibility to.

That massacre was not the first and unfortunately it will not be the last. It has been estimated that 16,000 deaths have occurred around the borders of Fortress Europe since 1988. People fleeing poverty, famine, persecution and war. All conditions created by governments and economies – here are the responsible, the persons behind and the perpetrators – in the name of the highest profit at all costs. It is sufficient to think of the Libyan war, which Italy also participates in, a century after its first attempt at colonising that country. Actually Italian colonialism in Libya has never stopped in this century: it has penetrated through Italian companies and bilateral agreements with the Libyan regime. Companies such as Impreglio, ENI, Finmeccanica and Unicredit are among the main exploiters of Libyan people and resources, just as they do with Italian proletarians.

Some people uncovered the responsible – the persons behind massacres, the terrorists – and decided not to stay silent. They chose to publicly denounce the responsible for massacres, to oppose them and attack them. This was the only thing to be done in order not to be accomplices of those responsible, the only effective way of practicing solidarity. Among these people, the anarchists of Fuoriluogo of Bologna, who put themselves between indifference and war, between the persons behind massacres and the massacres. For this reason, five of them were arrested, seven subjected to judicial restrictions and their site was seized. All under the charge of organized crime.

If to oppose wars and the governments waging them, if to recognize the terrorist responsibilities for massacres falling on the giants of world exploitation means to be delinquents, then we are delinquents too. If it is laws that perpetrate and reproduce exploitation and the death of millions of desperate – from both sides of the Mediterranean coast – then it is only by being outlaw that we can avoid to be accomplices of those laws. To attack them is just an obvious consequence.

Anarchists.