A Selection Of Italian Anarchist Flyers
December 26th, 2010 Italian Anarchist Flyersý in translation from the site Anarchy In Italy. I wish there was some commentary at the site on the background of these flyers, all we have is the translated text without context. If you are familiar with the events these flyers describe then you are in a better position to appreciate the content. If you are not familiar with the events then perhaps you will read them for style and the bravado of the authors who it seems shall remain anonymous.
Number One
ý
"It Was a Bright Cold Day in April…"
So begins 1984, the famous novel that denounced the horrors of a totalitarian society at the door. A society in which words no longer had meaning, in which memory was continually obliterated, in which each individual was kept under surveillance even in the most intimate aspects of his life, in which there was no place for criticism but only for blind obedience. 1984 is the world in which we live, more and more enslaved to conventions and dominated by mass media, advertising, falsifications and adulterations, more and more immersed in a fictitious and manipulated reality.
We are even deprived of an articulate language and trained to express ourselves in monosyllables and clichés. Oldspeak "with all its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning" is replaced with a Newspeak whose main intent "is to narrow the range of thought" with the aim of rendering "thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it".
We are also urged to forget historical events (like the Resistance) and to adapt ourselves to unbelievable contradictions like "clean nuclear power". "If all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. `Who controls the past,' said the Party slogan, `controls the future: who controls the present controls the past'". This is goodthink, "to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it."
We are also periodically subjected to the stimulus of the Two Minutes of Hate (most often in the face of immigrants. "A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will, into a grimacing, screaming lunatic."
We are also under surveillance by the Thought Police, whose video cameras and electronic bugs register our every act and word: "There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they warched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you mad was heard and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."
We also have the Ministry of Truth with its three new slogans that get hammered obsessively into our heads:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SAFETY
REBELLION IS TERRORISM
Finally, for anyone who dared to challenge homogenization and to show any autonomy of thought, the Orwellian Big Brother had Room 101. The present day state instead has the articles of the penal code—360 (armed band), 270 (subversive association), or if need be 416 (association to commit a crime)—to lock individuals up, and article 41 bis to make their imprisonment more unbearable.
On a cold, bright day in April, Friday the 16th, the Florentine prosecutor's office wants to send 19 anarchists back to court with the charge of subversive association. According to the Ministry of Truth, they are terrorists because they demonstrated their ideas without first asking permission of the Thought Police, because they have occupied empty and abandoned buildings, because they have stuck up posters and drawn writings on walls, because they are in solidarity with anyone who rebels against Big Brother. It is the rancorous reprisal of this state that kills and tortures, poisons and desolates, exploits and oppresses, against anyone who does not intend to bow their head, against anyone who is not resigned to not living.
WAR IS THE STATE
FREEDOM IS ADVENTURE
REBELLION IS JOY
———————–
Number Two
Greetings from Greece
They're old things, from another century. Two anarchists get arrested after a bank job. The first robbed it, gun in hand. They say the second helped him, holding the money. It happened in a small Greek village, this past October 1. And so? There are things that happen. And then that is a far away country, with an incomprehensible and untranslatable language. Who do you want to be interested in it? The robber is Christos Stratigopulos, already arrested and convicted here in Italy fifteen years ago on a similar charge. The penalty served, he returned to Greece. Remembered by a few, unknown to most. But the other one arrested is Italian; it is Alfredo Bonanno. Yes, precisely him; who hasn't heard his name? In its own small way, the news has gone quickly around the world, revived by many press agencies: "one of the major theorists of insurrectionalist anarchism", "among the major ideologues of anarchy", "anarchist activist and writer", "international fugitive anarchist robber", "theorist of revolutionary violence", has ended up behind bars again. The promoters of antiterrorism, both Greek and Italian, have rushed in, ready to exploit the juicy occasion. The elements for concocting a fine theorem are all there: a country in which there are still fires blazing after the great insurrectionary conflagration that flared up last December, a Greek anarchist active in the movement, a foreign anarchist known for his subversive theories who travelled around the country holding meetings, a bank robbed.
Christos has taken full responsibility for the act, caused by economic problems, denying Alfredo's involvement. But, clearly, the judge didn't believe him. So both are still in jail. The first, because he dared to reach out a hand toward wealth rather than resign himself to dying in misery. What's more, he is an anarchist. The second, because… because… because maybe he helped his comrade. And, for sure, he is an anarchist. And that's enough.
They are old things, from another century. Two anarchists get arrested after a bank job. Outside, solidarity is organized. Funds start to be collected; initiatives are prepared. But that's not all. In Athens, the two prisoners get explosive greetings from the group Conspiracy of the Cells of Fire, which had just disturbed the crowning of the new Greek premier. In Villejuif, France, someone renders their homage by smashing the windows of the local offices of the Socialist Party. One of the beauties of anarchy is that it doesn't recognize borders. And in Italy? Bah, here it has been limited to communicating the news, faithfully and coldly reporting the journalists' poisons. No comment. The drafters of daily virtual communiqués say nothing. The tenders of militant gardens fall silent. The little strategists of the new alliances hush up. The movement has now become a community, and anyone who doesn't share its rules and language doesn't exist. He is nameless. In the rush to follow the masses, have individuals been forgotten? Perhaps it's better this way. Better a sincere silence, if in the face of such an act, one no longer knows what to say, than hypocritical chatter about solidarity. Let's leave that to the Stalinist annoyances and other ruins. Or to a few third millennium fascists, who on one of their forums rendered "honor" to the two arrested anarchists.
They are old things, from another century. Two anarchists get arrested after a bank job. The first is 46-years-old, the second 72. Whether guilty or innocent, for them being anarchists doesn't even have the excuse of being an infantile disorder of extremism. Stubborn as they are, they haven't understood that now is the time to ride the wave of social movements, to defend who knows what in front of places of power, to act as social workers for the damned of the earth. No, they haven't understood this. The dream that they have in their hearts is much too big to adapt itself to the tick-tock of modern times.
No pardon, no pity.
Good-bye, beautiful Lugano.
——————————-
Number Three
Warning
This past September 24, in the United States, thousands of men and women went to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to protest against the G20 summit, which was devoted to giving new rules to an economic system whose devastation is visible to everyone. Along with truncheons, fire-hoses and rubber bullets, the government presided over by the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner used "the Scream", that is, LRAD—the sonic cannon for dispersing crowds used up to now only in war operations—against the demonstrators.
HAS THE MESSAGE GOTTEN THROUGH?
In Genoa Italy, in July 2001, hundreds of thousands of women and men converged from all corners of the planet to protest against the Earth's Masters, each demonstrating their rage in the face of a social organization based on profit and privilege in their own way. The reaction of the state, the Italian state in this instance, was unforgettable: indiscriminate butchery. The demonstrators were beaten bloody in the streets and tortured in the barracks. One of them was shot down on the street in front of the whole world. This past October 7, the Italian justice system absolved the police chief and others responsible for the bloodbath. Two days later, on October 9, the same Italian justice system sentenced ten demonstrators to punishments ranging from six to fifteen years in prison. The state's lackey's who break bones and heads are kindly protected; free individuals who break windows are harshly punished.
HAS THE MESSAGE GOTTEN THROUGH?
This past October 8, in Athens, Greece, the newly elected leftist government ordered a huge raid in the Exarchia neighborhood, which led to the detention of more than eighty people. Exarchia was the initial hotbed of the generalized uprising that broke out last December following the murder of a young student by the police. For some weeks, fires of rage burned throughout Greece, heating up many spirits chilled by the social winter. The first thought of the new leftist government has been to strike at the heart of revolt, launching four hundred officers against it.
HAS THE MESSAGE GOTTEN THROUGH?
Yes, it has gotten through. Pittsburgh is like Fallujah, Genoa is on the way to Abu Ghraib, Athens is near to Gaza. There is no elsewhere in the one-way world of authority and merchandise. In less than a month, the state sent out its warning several times, clear and unequivocal: order must reign undisturbed; whoever dares to challenge it will be suppressed without mercy.
During the Vietnam war, one of the favorite slogans of the anti-militarist movement was Bring the War Home. Besides being a parody of the more pacifistic "Bring the boys home", it also had a precise meaning: the war overseas had divided the country to the point that the moment had come to trigger off a war at home. Today, the institutions have brought the war home. The streets are filling with soldiers, divided between patrols and road blocks.
If we don't want to remain victims or become accomplices of this war of extermination of every form of freedom, the only thing left to us is to take up the challenge.
ABANDONING FOREVER THE DAYS OF POLITICS IN ORDER TO BEGIN THE DAYS OF RAGE
———————-
You can find more like these at the site
https://sites.google.com/site/anarchyinitaly/
No comments:
Post a Comment