translated from guerra sociale
We asked for labour power, men came.
Max Frisch
No one emigrates from their country for pleasure – this is a simple truth that many want to hide. If someone leaves their land and loved ones peacefully, we don’t define them as migrants, but simply as travellers or tourists. Migration is a coercive form of moving, a roaming in search of better living conditions.
At the moment there are 150 million ‘foreigners’ around the world due to wars, ecological disasters, famine, or simply the management of industrial production (the destruction of countryside and forests, mass lay-offs, and so on). All these aspects form a mosaic of oppression and misery in which the effects of exploitation become more or less direct causes of suffering and uprooting in a never ending spiral that makes any distinction between “displaced”, “migrants”, asylum seekers, refugees, survivors, hypocritical. Just think how social so called ecological emergencies (lack of water, growing desertification, field sterility) are: the explosion of an oil refinery, together with the destruction of every local autonomy on which it rested, can sometimes change the fate of an entire population.
Contrary to what racist propaganda would have us believe, only 17% of immigration concerns the rich North, it involves all continents (the African and Asian ones in particular); that means that for every poor country there is an even poorer one which immigrants are running away from. The total mobilization imposed by economy and States is a planetary symptom, an undeclared civil war that crosses every national border: millions of exploited people roam through the hell of the commercial heaven, jolted from border to border, forced into refugee camps, surrounded by police and army, handled by so-called charity organisations – partners in tragedies whose causes they don’t denounce for the mere purpose of exploiting the consequences – piled up in “waiting zones” in airports or stadiums (macabre circenses for those who don’t even have bread), locked up in Lagers called “detention centres” and, finally, packaged and expelled in the most total indifference. For many reasons we could say that the face of these unwelcome people is the face of our time – and that’s also why we’re so afraid of them. Immigrants scare us because in their misery we can see the reflection of our own, because in their wanderings we recognise our daily condition: the condition of persons who feel more and more like strangers both to this world and to themselves.
Uprooting is the most widespread condition in our present society – we might call it its centre – not a threat coming from a terrifying and mysterious elsewhere. Only by directing our gaze at our daily lives can we understand what gets all of us into the condition of immigrants. First though we must define a fundamental concept: that of clandestinity.
The creation of the clandestine, the creation of the enemy
[…] what are you? […]
You are not of this castle, you are not of this village, you are nothing.
But you are something too, unfortunately, you are a foreigner, someone that is always
inopportune and in the way, one that brings a lot of troubles, […]
whose intentions no one knows.
F. Kafka
An alien is simply someone who doesn’t have regular papers. And this is certainly not due to the pure pleasure of risk or illegality, but rather because in the majority of cases, in order to own such papers he or she would have to give certain guarantees the possession of which wouldn’t have made them aliens in the first place, but simply tourists or foreign students. If the same standards were forced on everybody, millions would have been thrown overboard. Which unemploy-ed Italian, for instance, could give the guarantee of a legal wage? What about all the precarious people here who work for temporary job agencies, whose contracts are not even worth a visa for immigrants? And by the way, are there as many Italians living in a 60 squares metres flat with no more than two other people? If we read all these decrees (from both the left and the right wing) about immigration, it will be clear that clandestinization is a precise project of States. Why?
An illegal immigrant is easier to blackmail, to make accept, under the threat of expulsion, even more hateful conditions of work and existence (precariousness, endless wandering, makeshift accommo-dation, and so on). With the threat of the police, bosses obtain tame wage slaves, or rather real forced labour workers. Even the most reactionary and xenophobic right wing parties are perfectly aware that hermetically closed borders are not only technically impossible, but are not even profitable. According to the United Nations, in order to keep the present “balance between active and inactive population”, from here to 2025, Italy should “take” inside its borders a quantity of immigrants five times the present yearly fixed amount. Confindustria, in fact, continuously suggest doubling the quantity fixed so far.
The granting or rejection of year-long or season-long permits contributes to creating a specific social hierarchy among the poor. The same distinction between immediate forced repatriation and expulsion (or the obligation, for an irregular immigrant, who shows up at the borders to be sent back home) allows them to choose who to make clandestine or to expel right away – a choice based on ethnic principles, economical-political agreement with the governments of the countries the immigrant comes from and the needs of the labour market. In fact, the authorities are perfectly aware that no one will ever spontaneously show up at the border to be expelled; surely not people who have spent all that they owned – sometimes even more – to pay for their trip here. Businessmen define the features of the goods they buy (immigrants are goods, like everything else after all), the State records data, police carry out orders.
The warnings of politicians and mass media, anti-immigration claims build up imaginary enemies to drive the exploited from here to lay on an easy scapegoat the growing social tension and reassure them, letting them admire the show of poor and even more precarious and blackmailed people than themselves, and let them feel part of a ghost called Nation. Making of “irregularity” – that same irregularity that they create – synonymous with crime and danger, States justify police control and the criminalisation of class conflict that is getting more and more seditious. In this context, for instance, should be seen the manipulation of consensus after September 11, summed up in the despicable slogan “clandestine=terrorist” which combines, if read in both senses, racist paranoia with the demand for repression against the enemy within (rebels, subversives).
They shout out, from the right as well as the left, against the Mafia that organises the journeys for clandestine people (described by the media as an invasion, a scourge, the advance of an army), when it’s by their very laws that they are promoted. They shout out against “organised crime” exploiting so many immigrants (which is true but only partially), when it’s they who supply it with desperate and ready-for-everything resources. In their historical symbiosis, State and Mafia stand united by the same liberal principle: business is business.
Racism, a means for economic and political necessity, finds room to spread in a context of generalised standardisation and isolation, when insecurity creates fears that can be opportunely manipulated. A moral or cultural condemnation of racism is of little use, since it is not an opinion or an argument, but psychological misery, an “emotional plague”. It’s in the present social conditions that the reason of its spreading ought to be sought and also, at the same time, the power to fight it.
The welcome of a lager
To call the detention camps for immigrants waiting for expulsion Lagers– centres introduced in Italy in 1998 by the left wing government by mean of the Turco-Napolitano law – is not rhetorical emphasis, as most of those who use this formula think. It is a strict definition. Nazi Lagers were concentration camps where people thought by the police to be dangerous for State security were locked up, even in the absence of criminally indictable behaviour. This precautionary measure – defined as “protective detention” – consisted in taking all civil and political rights away from certain citizens. Whether they were refugees, Jewish, gypsy, homosexuals or subversives, it was up to the police, after months or years, to decide what to do about them. So Lagers were not jails in which to expiate some crime, nor an extension of criminal law. They were camps where the Rule set its exception; in short terms, a legal suspension of legality. Therefore a Lager is not a consequence of the number of internees or of the number of murders (between 1935 and 1937, before the start of Jewish deportations, in Germany internees numbered 7500), but rather of its political and juridical nature.
Immigrants nowadays end up in the Centres regardless of possible crimes, without any criminal trial whatsoever: their internment, ordered by the police superintendents, are a simple police measure. Just as happened in 1940 under the Vichy government, when prefects could lock up all the individuals considered a “danger for national defence and public security” or (mind this) “foreigners in respect to the national economy”. We can refer to administrative detention in French Algeria, to the South Africa of apartheid or to the present ghettos for Palestinians created by the State of Israel.
It is not a coincidence if, with regard to the infamous conditions of the detention centres, the good democrats don’t appeal to the respect of any law at all, but to the respect of human rights – the last mask in front of women and men to whom nothing remains but belonging to the human species. It’s not possible to integrate them as citizens, so they are falsely integrated as Human Beings. The abstract equality of principles hides real inequalities everywhere.
A new eradication
Immigrants that for the
first time landed on Battery Park soon
realized that what they had been
told about the marvelous America
wasn’t true at all:
maybe land belonged to everybody,
but the first come
had largely served themselves already,
and to them there was nothing left
than to crowd together in tens in windowless
hovels
of the Lower East Side and work fifteen hours
a day. Turkeys didn’t fall roasted
straight in the dishes and the streets of New York
weren’t paved in gold.
Yet, most of the times, they weren’t
paved at all. And then they realised that
it was just to get them to pave these streets that they
were allowed to come. And to dig tunnels
and canals, to build up streets, bridges, big
embankments, railroads, to clear forests, to exploit
mines and caves, to make cars and cigars,/
carabines and clothes, shoes, chewing gum,
corned-beef and soap, and to build
skyscrapers higher
than the ones that they discovered when they first arrived.
Georges Perec
If we go a few steps back, it will become clear that eradication is a crucial moment in the expansion of the State and capitalistic domination. At its dawn, industrial production drew the exploited away from country and villages to gather them into the city. The ancient skills of farm workers and artisans were thereby substituted with the forced and repetitive activity of the factory – an activity impossible to control, in its means and its finalities, by the new proletarians. So the first children of industrialization lost both their ancient spaces of life and their ancient knowledge, that which had allowed them to autonomously provide for the most part of their means of subsistence. On the other hand, forcing millions of men and women to similar living conditions (same places, same problems, same knowledge), capitalism unified their struggles, got them to find new brothers and sisters to fight against that same unbearable life. The 20th century marked the apex of this productive and State gathering, whose symbols had been the factory-neighbourhood and the Lager, and at the same time the apex of the more radical social struggles for its destruction. In the last twenty years, due to technological innovation, capital has substituted the old factory with new productive cores ever smaller and more widely distributed throughout the territory, also breaking up the fabric of the society within which those fights had grown, thereby creating a new eradication.
There’s more. Technological reorganisation has made trade faster and easier, opening the whole world to the most ferocious competition, overthrowing the economies and the ways of life of entire Countries. So there is, in Africa, in Asia, in South America, the closure of many factories, mass lay offs. All this, within a social context that has been destroyed by colonisation from the deportation of inhabitants from their villages to the shantytowns, from their fields to the assembly lines, produced a crowd of poor people who became useless to their masters, of unwanted children of capitalism. Add to this the fall of self-styled communist Countries and the debt racket initiated by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and we will get quite a faithful cartography of migration, of ethnical and religious wars.
What we now call “flexibility” and “precariousness” is the consequence of all this: a further progress in the submission to the machines, fiercer competition, a worsening of material conditions (deals, health, etcetera). We’ve seen the reason why: capitalism has dismantled the community that it created. Anyway it would be partial to see precariousness in an economic sense alone, as the lack of a steady work place and the old pride for professionalism. It is isolation inside standardisation, or a fanatical conformity with lack of common spaces. In the distressing void of meaning and perspectives, mystified, the unfulfilled need of community returns, giving birth to new nationalistic, ethnical or religious counterpositions, a tragic re-proposition of collective identities just where any real communality among individuals has diminished. And it’s exactly within this void that the fundamentalist argument finds its place, false promise of a redeemed community.
Civil war
All this leads to a scenario that is more and more that of an ongoing civil war, with no distinction between “time of peace” and “time of war”. Conflicts are no longer declared – as the military intervention in the Balkans has shown –, but simply administrated to grant the establishment of the World Order. This endless fight goes through the entire society and the very individuals. Common spaces for dialogue and struggles are substituted by adherence to similar commercial models. The poor go to war against each other for a fashionable sweater or a hat, since the possession or not of particular goods creates the illusion of a social or clan-like hierarchy. Individuals feel more and more irrelevant, so ready to sacrifice themselves to the first nationalist blunderbuss or for whatever flag. Abused daily by the State, here they come defending zealously any Padania (desolated and polluted, with factories and mall everywhere – is this the “land of the forefathers”?). Tied to that mirage of property that is left to them, they are scared to face themselves for what they really are: interchangeable gears of the Megamachine, in need of psychotropic drugs to get to the end of the day, always more envious towards everyone who looks even just happier than themselves. To an always colder, more abstract and more calculating rationality, correspond increasingly brutal and untold drives. So, what better than someone different by colour of the skin or religion to throw their grudge upon? As a man from Mozambique said, “people have taken war inside them”. A few external conditions can be enough for all this to explode, just like in Bosnia. And these conditions are being carefully prepared. To capitalist Universalism is opposed, in a tragic game of mirrors, ethnic particularism. Under institutional order, with increasingly anonymous and controlled places, lies concealed the implosion of human relationships. It all looks like the same quicksand from whence in the 30’s totalitarian man arose.
Two possible ways out
Why have we talked so much about immigration and racism, as we are not directly touched by problems of wandering and expulsion? Dictated by some of its peculiarities such as precariousness and the impossibility to decide for our present, this same capitalism is joining our lives more and more: that’s why we feel like brothers, in deed, with the all the exploited who land on the shores of this Country.
In the face of the despoliation of millions of individuals towards a commercial imperialism that is forcing everybody to dream the same lifeless dream, there can be no appeal to dialogue or to democratic integration. Whatever the legalistic anti-racists might say, it’s too late for hypocritical civic education classes. When the fields in which misery is confined – from the shantytowns of Caracas to the suburbs of Paris, from the Palestinian territories to centres and stadia where aliens are locked up–are growing everywhere; when the state of exception – or the juridical suspension of every right – becomes the rule; when millions of human beings are literally left rotting into the reserves of the capitalist heaven; when entire neighbourhoods are getting militarised and armed (Genova doesn’t tell you anything?), to talk of immigration becomes a despicable joke. There are only two ways out from these conditions of desperation and fear, from this planetary civil war: the fraticidal clash (religious and clannish in all its manifestations), or the social tempest of class war.
Racism is the grave of every exploited individual’s fight against the exploiters, it’s the last trick – the dirtiest – played by those who would like to see ourselves killing one another. It can only evaporate in moments of common revolt, when we recognise our real enemies – the exploiters and their servants – and we recognise ourselves as exploited individuals that no longer want to be like that. The social fight that took place in Italy during the 60’s and 70’s – when the young workers immigrated from the South met those from the North in the field of sabotage, wild strikes and absolute disloyalty to the firm – has shown. The disappearance of the revolutionary struggles after the 70’s (from Nicaragua to Italy, from Portugal to Germany, from Poland to Iran) has crumbled the foundation of concrete solidarity among the dispossessed of the World. This solidarity will only be conquered again in the revolt, and not in the powerless words of the new Thirdworlders or the democratic anti-racists.
So, or religious and clannish massacre, or class war. And at the end of this we can only catch a glimpse of a world free from State and money in which there’ll be no need for money to live and no visa required to travel.
A machine that can be broken
A slogan in the 80’s said: “It’s not the noise of boot that should scared us today, but the silence of the slipper”. Now they’re both coming back. With a holy war speech (the police as “army of good” protecting citizens from the “army of evil”, as the Prime Minister said recently), day after day the State has put up curtains at the expense of immigrants. Their homes are devastated, aliens are rounded up in the streets, locked up in Lagers and expelled in total indifference. New detention camps are already under construction in many cities. The State, wants to limit the number of visas according to the exact length of the work contract, blacklist all immigrants, make being clandestine a crime and strengthen expulsion. The democratic mechanism of rights and citizenship, wide as that might be, will always presuppose the existence of excluded people. To criticise and try to prevent expulsions signifies realising a critique of racism and nationalism in act; it means creating a common space for revolt against the capitalist uprooting that affects us all; it means obstructing a hateful as it is important repressive mechanism; it means breaking the silence and indifference of the civilized ones who stand looking on; lastly, it means confronting the very concept of law dictated by the principle “we are all aliens”. Finally, it signifies an attack on one of the pillars of the State and class society: competition between the poor, the increasingly seditious substitution of social war with ethnic or religious wars.
In order to function the expulsion framework requires the collaboration of many public and private structures (from the Red Cross which cooperates in the management of Lagers, to companies which supply services, to airline companies which deport aliens, to the airports that put up waiting zones, to self-styled charity associations which operate in collaboration with the police). All those responsible can easily be seen and attacked. From actions against detention camps (as happened a couple of years ago in Belgium and a few months ago in Australia, when demonstrations ended up with the liberation of some clandestine immigrants) to those against “waiting zones” (as in France, against the Ibis hotels chain that supplies the police with rooms) or obstructing the flights of infamy (in Frankfurt, the sabotage of optic fibre cables some years ago put all the computers of an airport out of order for a couple of days) there are thousands of activities that a movement against expulsion can carry out.
Today like never before it’s in the street that it’s possible to rebuild class solidarity. In the complicity against police raids; in the struggle against military occupation of neighbourhoods; in the restless rejection of every division that the masters of society want to impose on us (nationals and foreigners, legal immigrants and aliens); aware that every outrage suffered by any dispossessed on Earth is an outrage to everyone – only in this way will the exploited people from a thousand countries recognise themselves.
Showing posts with label immigrants. Show all posts
Showing posts with label immigrants. Show all posts
Friday, 7 May 2010
Thursday, 6 May 2010
Touching the heart – about the blackmail concerning the immigrants
Over the past 10 years many comrades in various countries have been involved in struggles around the question of migration, be it people without documents wanting to get regularized, struggles for housing in poor neighbourhoods, against raids in the streets and on public transport or against detention centres. They have often ended up in dead ends or powerlessness concerning concerning possible interventions.
We have no recipe, but we feel it is necessary to break with cetain militant mechanisms that have seen us struggle on an activist basis with no perspective, or agitate under the guidelines of authoritarian groups. These reflections simply want to evaluate experiences of struggle and work out some possible tracks for the development of a subversive projectuality around migration and its management that we can call our own.
Beyond the illusion of the ‘immigrant’
A classical approach in the attempt to understand social conflicts in order to intervene is to take a closer look at the protagonists of the conflict and submit them to more or less militant sociological analyses. As well as focusing on finding the answer to the mysterious question “who are they?” instead of examining what we want ourselves, it is also based upon some doctrines that affect our critical reflection. Alongside the usual leftist racketeers desperately in search of no matter what political subject to can put them at the head of resistance, there are also many sincere people to be found alongside illegal immigrants. But since they consider the specific situation of those without papers as something external to themselves, they tend to be driven more by outrage than a desire to struggle alongside those that share a common (although not exactly the same) condition: exploitation, police control on the streets or on public transport, housing in the outskirts or in neighbourhoods that are being upgraded, illegal activities that are part of the art of survival. Both often reproduce all the divisions that play into the hands of power. To create a new general image of the immigrant-victim-in-struggle is tantamount to introducing a sociological mystification that not only hinders every struggle in common but also strengthens the State’s grip on all of us.
Libertarian or radical activists (who nonetheless have a certain intuition about what could be possible common ground) are often not adverse to swallowing this pill in their need for collectivity or in the name of autonomy of the struggle, as though the struggle was started by some sort of homogeneous block instead of by individuals, potential accomplices at least against a specific form of oppression. As far as the people without documentsre concerned, all of a sudden the methods of struggle (self-organisation, refusal of institutional mediation, direct action) became way more relative. Some good Samaritan will always appear to explain, using a few classical arguments pulled out of the militant tirade, that breaking the windows of an airline company that deports people during a demonstration will expose the paperless ‘to danger’ (they who nonetheless face up to the police day by day); that the struggle against fascists (e.g. the members of the Turkish Grey Wolves), nationalists (e.g. certain refugees who came here after the disintegration of former Yugoslavia) or priests (e.g. the priest who ‘gives refuge’ to the paperless in ‘his’ church to later kick them out, the Christian associations that take up the vile task of the State such as Cimade, Caritas International or the Red Cross) ends at the doorstep of the ‘undocumented’ collectives; that you can spit in the face of a French or Belgian ambassador but not in the face of a Malian one that comes to mediate a struggle that is threatening to radicalise (idem the leftist politicians who are generally considered unacceptable but are tolerated in the name of a false unity demanded by some chief of a collective of people without papers).
Everybody knows that a struggle always starts from the existent and that initial particularities often differ a lot (e.g. the relation to the trade unions in most of the struggles concerned with exploitation), but in our opinion it’s all about going beyond the latter in a subversive dynamic. We will certainly not succeed in this by accepting the variety of authoritarian straitjackets – the goal is already there in the means you acquire. Moreover, because this relativism doesn’t lead to confrontation in the struggle but to some sort of reverse colonialism that turns the immigrant yet again into an object with a supposedly different-being (“they” would be like this). In that case misery is not intended to scare off but to excuse all renunciation.
The “innocent immigrant”, the eternal passive victim that is being exploited, arrested, locked up and deported is one of the most prominent characters of this ideological stricture. As a reaction to the usual racist propaganda aimed at giving the immigrant the role of the social enemy, source of all evil (from unemployment to a safety threat and terrorism), a lot of people de facto deny the immigrant any criminal capacity at all. They aim at presenting immigrants as servile, begging for integration with all hopes set on a less detestable place in the society of capital. In this way thousands of refugees are being transformed into sympathetic and therefore integratable victims: victims of war, of ‘natural’ catastrophes and misery, of human traffickers and rack-renters. But what is forgotten are the changes these tracks make to individuals: they create solidarity, resistance and struggle that allow some of them to rupture the passivity that is attributed to them.
Surprise and and embarrassed silence rule the leftist camp and its democratic antiracism when these ‘innocents’ defend themselves by all means against the faith imposed on them (e.g. in revolts in detention centres, confrontations during raids, wildcat strikes…). Collectively expressed revolts might still be seen by some as “acts of desperation”, but a prisoner setting fire to his cell all alone, a deed that most certainly does not constitute part of the “struggle”, is called a “maniac”. Hunger strikers in a church are wanted, not arsonists or escaped prisoners from detention centres; people who have been thrown out of the window of a police station or drowned are understood, not those who resist the cops during a raid; parents of schoolchildren get helped with pleasure, in contrast to bachelor thieves. Revolt and individuals who rebel do not fit into the sociological framework of the immigrant-victim that has been constructed by the good conscience of the militant aided by the academic parasites of the State.
This mystification hinders a clearer understanding of migration and migration streams. Clearly, in the first place migrations are a consequence of the daily economic terror of capital and the political terror of local regimes and their bourgeoisie, all of which make profit for the rich countries. Nevertheless it would be incorrect to state that only poor proletarians migrate to the rich countries as is sworn by third-worldists in their construction of the immigrant-victim subject. The migrants who succeed in entering the gates of Europe clandestinely are not necessarily the poorest (since the latter are forced into internal migration to the cities or to neighbouring countries according to the fluctuation of the market and its disasters) – be it even only because of the cost (financial and human) of such a journey or the social and cultural selection within the family of those who can afford taking such a step.
If we try to understand everything that forms and traverses each individual rather than setting down the difference and otherness in order to justify an exterior position of ‘support’, we can view a whole complexity including class differences. At that point we can determine that the collectives of paperless also exist of over-qualified graduates, failed politicians, local exploiters who manage their travelling money at the expense of others… who migrate to this side of the world because they want to take their enjoyable place inside capitalist democracy. Thus many groups of people without documents are dominated by those who were already powerful (be it on a social, political or symbolic level) or were striving for it. These class differences are seldom taken into account by comrades engaged in a struggle together with paperless people, a struggle in which language becomes an unavoidable and invisible barrier assigning the immigrants coming from the richer classes of their country automatically to the role of spokesman and translator. Sharpening class differences as we do everywhere is not simply a contribution that can be made by comrades but is a necessary condition for real solidarity.
In order to understand these struggle dynamics, throwing some comfortable illusions into the garbage bin is necessary as well. Only stubborn determinism can claim that a given social condition necessarily implicates the revolt against it. This kind of reasoning used to offer the guarantee of a revolution, a guarantee that many cherished for a long time while simultaneously degrading the perspective of individual rebellion which generalizes in insurrection to the level of an adventure. The criticism made on a determinism that has shown its failure in the old workers’ movement is suitable as well for the proletarians who migrate to this side of the world. Many amongst them look at the West as some kind of oasis where you can live nicely as long as you’re prepared to make great efforts. Undergoing conditions of exploitation that resemble what they’ve been running away from, with bosses who moreover play on the paternalistic snare of belonging to a so-called common community; being chased; having no or very few perspectives of climbing higher on the social ladder and daily racism that tries to channel the dissatisfaction of the other exploited, all of this makes up a rude reality to confront. Contrasting the resignation that can sprout from this painful confrontation or the reflex of locking oneself into authoritarian communities based for example on religion or nationalism, we advance the perspective of not linking up with all paperless in a ‘categorical’ way but with those who refuse their role as exploited and by this also open the identification of the enemy. We don’t want blaming between capitalist universality and particularities but a social war in which we can recognize each other beyond the question of papers and different degrees of exploitation, in a permanent struggle for a society free of masters and slaves. As in any struggle in fact, would it not be that the struggle around migration mostly ends by the weight of the affective feeling of guilt, the urgency to prevent a deportation and its possible consequences, and all of this mostly via a relation based on exteriority instead of on a shared revolt.
The impasse of the struggle for regularisation
In several European countries, a lot of ‘massive’ regularisations took place at the last turn of the century. Although the State follows its own logic, the paperless in struggle were able to influence the criteria and rhythm of the regularisations. A comparison can be made with all “big social reforms”, some of which have been achieved through bloodshed while others were buy-outs to maintain social peace or simply granted in function of capital’s need to keep the working class grouped and to increase internal consumption. In those days debates about demands that suit the capital’s movement in contrast to insurrectional attempts were going on in the working class as well. A lot of revolutionaries only accepted these demands as a possibility towards permanent agitation while at the same time it was put clearly that the social question could not be solved inside a capitalist framework.
During the time preceding these regularisation waves States were divided between two opposing logics: on the one hand the growing stream of clandestine migration fitted the economic need for flexible workers (as in construction, the catering industry, cleaning sector, agriculture) of countries with an ageing population, on the other hand this partly denied (as in countries knowing a more recent migration as Spain and Italy) but especially in nature less controllable population disturb the drastic will to manage the public order. While this issue was quickly resolved – more specifically by closer cooperation between the different authorities (through the exchange of services between the imams and police offices as well as through the distribution of tasks amongst the different foreign and autochthonous mobs, despite some previous bloody games which had to do with unavoidable concurrence) -, the issue of the need for workers was resolved by a tighter interdependence between migration streams and the labour market. It seems to be one of the ruling tendencies on a European level to aim at a more worked out migration management that is tuned up in real time to the needs of exploitation. Next to the classic labour form of the migrants (work in black) stands the migration that links the stay permit to a working contract which will become the rule over time, fitting the reorganisation of the labour delicacy which extends to everybody.
The state has almost put an end to political asylum, has tightened up family reunion and the obtainment of citizenship by marriage, has abolished permission to stay for a longer period (like the one of 10 years in France), while on the other hand it is rejecting regularisation demands with an iron fist. The state directs itself towards what was called “selected migration” by a certain president. We’re returning to the era in which recruiting sergeants went to the villages and loaded trucks with the amount of migrants needed by their bosses. The modern formula is simply asking for a rationalisation of this recruitment on the borders, co managed by the state and the employers (2). The workers are absolutely not supposed to stay and settle down. At the same time different camps at the external borders of Europe are under construction by the state, camps for those who have not been chosen by the grace of the slave tradesmen.
Because all the others are there. All those standing in front of a closed gate and all those continuing to arrive. That’s what’s at stake for the change in the degree of the police rationalisation of the deportation system which continues to multiply its camps and is organizing more and more massive deportations, national quotes and European charter flights for those who managed their way through the locks of the waiting zones and the racketeering of the human traffickers and other mobs. However nobody cherishes any real illusions: the number of migrants without papers will increase as long as the economic causes continue to exist no matter what deployment (as can be seen at the border between Mexico and the States where a wall of 1200 kilometres is under construction), which will have no consequences apart from the increase in the cost of passage and the number of dead. Only the multiplication of her deportations would enable the state to apply her laws concerning forced expulsion from the territory. But that is not the question, because these deployments do not primarily aim at deporting all paperless, but serve to terrorize the whole of the migrant workers (the regularized as well as those chosen to have a stay permit) so that their condition of exploitation, which resembles the one they escaped, can remain unaltered (internal delocalisation in a certain way) while pressure is put on the whole of the conditions of exploitation. The racist excuse moreover serves to deploy the arsenal of social control which touches everybody.
But let us not forget about the changing character of migration itself. Industrial capitalism used workers as pawns on a chess board following an easy logic: here we have too many workers and there we need them. And whenever the need was rather small, other aspects of this population politics were put into action. However, this specific form of migration control has changed as a result of the restructuring of the economic aspect and because of the consequences of industrial growth. It becomes more difficult to speak of a point of departure and a point of arrival. The points of departure have been devastated by hunger, war and disasters while the destinations are changing all the time. In this way migration becomes an endless track consisting of different stages; it’s no longer a movement from points A to B. These new forms of migration are not only being defined by the needs of a constantly flexible and adjustable capital. Millions of people, uprooted by the devastation of the places where they were born are swarming all over the world – ready to be put to work. And the deployment of this control is quite visible: the humanitarian refugee camps, the camps at the borders, the slums and the favelas. The struggles for regularisation seem to pose rather few questions concerning this new fact. The situation in Belgium is a good example of the current impasse of the struggle for regularisation. The State acted like a lion and a fox simultaneously when the tension around the closed centres began to rise in 1998. As a lion she repressed the most rebellious parts of the movement (murder of Semira Adamu (3) who was resisting unflinchingly in the centres; house searches and arrest of comrades active in this struggle). As a fox she started negotiating about regularisations with the other part of the movement. Clearly, the demand for regularisation (besides the fact that it amounts to a demand for integration) requires avcertain credibility, a recognized mediator. The movement got hit in this way. Regularisation, which once used to be the State’s answer to the tension and agitation that challenged the whole of migration politics (using slogans against all camps or for free circulation), became the goal for most of the groups of undocumented people. Instead of forcing the State to give a bonus by struggling, the collectives started a dialogue which was followed by negotiations which attracted a whole army of professional negotiators and juridical charlatans who would solve all problems. On the one hand the dynamic was broken by the repression and on the other by the start of a bureaucratic dialogue. Neither the successive self-mutilations (such as the hunger-strikes outside the camps), or the most servile self-abasements were enough to win what in a certain way used to be the State’s response to agitation. The first answer of the state was combined with a rationalisation of the detention centres and a stricter adjustment of the permits to stay in accordance with the needs of the economy (the State itself changed the cards).
During recent years the current situation with its cycle of occupations/hunger strikes/deportations suffocated us in a struggle experience which offered only a few possibilities to go beyond and share a perspective: experiences of self organisation that accept neither politician nor religious or trade union leaders; direct actions that permit the development of a real power balance and the identification of the class enemy in every aspect. These observations lead us to feel the need and desire to develop a subversive projectuality starting from our own bases, instead of running behind a widening out (which seems to be further and further away) based on the demand for regularisation. This projectuality could find her first anchors in the revolt which is factually shared amongst those who struggle for the destruction of the centres and those who (e.g. the rebels of Vincennes or Steenokkerzeel) turn the critique of detention into deeds by setting their prison on fire.
Against the deportation machine
While facing these difficulties a debate that is still going on nowadays arises: the debate about solidarity. A lot of comrades continue to defend the necessity – at whatever cost - of our presence inside the groups of those without papers, until they retreat from any such struggle, disgusted after so many blows. The justifications are diverse and most of the time they are a reflection of activism or of comfortable recipes devoid of imagination, lacking any real desire for subversion. And here as well: although the collective character of an action is no criterion for us, we do understand the need “to break the isolation” felt by some comrades. Nevertheless we doubt whether we can manage this by participating in endless meetings, being locked up with 30 people in a squat or in an apartment block of undocumented and leftists. We tend more towards the development of our own project and so to starting from our own bases. As long as solidarity is understood as support to certain social categories, it will continue to be an illusion. Even if it were to entail some more radical methods, it would continuously be dragged along in a conflict with bases, methods and perspectives that are not ours at all. The only justification left is claiming that by taking part in these conflicts we can ‘radicalize’ the people because their social condition would necessarily lead them towards sharing our ideas. As long as this concept of ‘radicalisation’ is understood as a task of missionaries wanting others to swallow their ideas it will continue to be stuck in the impasse that we notice growing everywhere around. This ‘radicalisation’ however can also be understood as openness of our dynamic towards others, enabling us to guarantee the autonomy of our own projectuality. In this way, ‘being together’ in a struggle and going forward on the level of perspectives as well as methods demands an existing basic affinity, a first rupture, a first desire that goes beyond the usual demands. In this way our demand for mutuality can become meaningful. There are many more tracks to explore than the continuation of the connection whose only reason for existing is the maintenance of the fiction of the political subject that, in the name of its status as being the main victim, monopolizes the reason for the struggle and in this way the struggle itself. To put it clearly we could say that solidarity is in need of mutual recognition in deed as well as in words. It is difficult to be in solidarity with an undocumented person “in struggle” who demands his regularisation and that of his family with no interest whatsoever in the perspective of the destruction of detention centres. Maybe we would still meet somewhere but this will be on a purely practical base: we don’t need to analyse the reasons or perspectives that bring somebody to revolt in order to recognize ourselves, at least partly, in these deeds of attack which automatically turn against those responsible fo this misery. As counts for most intermediary struggles: there is only a very limited sense in participating in a factory conflict that starts off from wage demands and does not overcome the trade unionist framework or develop any sign of direct action. It is limited because there simply is no common base. New perspectives open up at the moment when these workers start sabotaging (even if they regard it as a means to pressure the bosses) or kick out their deputes (even if only because they feel betrayed).
So, instead of holding on to more and more slogans such as “solidarity with the immigrants / in struggle” (but which struggle?), we could develop a projectuality against the detention centres using methods and ideas that are ours and are subversive in the sense that they question the foundations of this world (exploitation and domination). This projectuality would be autonomous and strengthened by deeds of revolt contrasting the overall resignation, and strengthening these deeds in return. Again, recipes do not exist but today it is important to go beyond the impasses of a more or less humanist activism that hinders any radical autonomy in favour of an agitation that conceives the cadence of power or follows the logic of the only actors of the struggle that are conceived to be legitimate, while it is actually the freedom of all that is at stake, as for example in the case of raids. As it is important to put forward perspectives which, beyond the partial goals developed in these intermediary struggles, are able to widen up the matter to a horizon that finally questions the whole of this world and its horror; i.e. perspectives that are always able to put forward the question of domination and exploitation. Diffuse attacks could be the heart of this projectuality. Not only do they offer the advantage of going beyond the powerlessness felt while standing in front of the wall or the barbed wire of a camp, or while being confronted with a raid by a police deployment that can adjust itself and count on the passivity and fear of the passers-by, but also and especially they offer us on the one hand the possibility to develop our own temporality and on the other hand to show everyone that the structures of the deportation machine that are to be found on every street corner are vulnerable and at last they offer real possibilities of action to everyone, regardless of how many they are.
Enthusiastic internationalists.
We have no recipe, but we feel it is necessary to break with cetain militant mechanisms that have seen us struggle on an activist basis with no perspective, or agitate under the guidelines of authoritarian groups. These reflections simply want to evaluate experiences of struggle and work out some possible tracks for the development of a subversive projectuality around migration and its management that we can call our own.
Beyond the illusion of the ‘immigrant’
A classical approach in the attempt to understand social conflicts in order to intervene is to take a closer look at the protagonists of the conflict and submit them to more or less militant sociological analyses. As well as focusing on finding the answer to the mysterious question “who are they?” instead of examining what we want ourselves, it is also based upon some doctrines that affect our critical reflection. Alongside the usual leftist racketeers desperately in search of no matter what political subject to can put them at the head of resistance, there are also many sincere people to be found alongside illegal immigrants. But since they consider the specific situation of those without papers as something external to themselves, they tend to be driven more by outrage than a desire to struggle alongside those that share a common (although not exactly the same) condition: exploitation, police control on the streets or on public transport, housing in the outskirts or in neighbourhoods that are being upgraded, illegal activities that are part of the art of survival. Both often reproduce all the divisions that play into the hands of power. To create a new general image of the immigrant-victim-in-struggle is tantamount to introducing a sociological mystification that not only hinders every struggle in common but also strengthens the State’s grip on all of us.
Libertarian or radical activists (who nonetheless have a certain intuition about what could be possible common ground) are often not adverse to swallowing this pill in their need for collectivity or in the name of autonomy of the struggle, as though the struggle was started by some sort of homogeneous block instead of by individuals, potential accomplices at least against a specific form of oppression. As far as the people without documentsre concerned, all of a sudden the methods of struggle (self-organisation, refusal of institutional mediation, direct action) became way more relative. Some good Samaritan will always appear to explain, using a few classical arguments pulled out of the militant tirade, that breaking the windows of an airline company that deports people during a demonstration will expose the paperless ‘to danger’ (they who nonetheless face up to the police day by day); that the struggle against fascists (e.g. the members of the Turkish Grey Wolves), nationalists (e.g. certain refugees who came here after the disintegration of former Yugoslavia) or priests (e.g. the priest who ‘gives refuge’ to the paperless in ‘his’ church to later kick them out, the Christian associations that take up the vile task of the State such as Cimade, Caritas International or the Red Cross) ends at the doorstep of the ‘undocumented’ collectives; that you can spit in the face of a French or Belgian ambassador but not in the face of a Malian one that comes to mediate a struggle that is threatening to radicalise (idem the leftist politicians who are generally considered unacceptable but are tolerated in the name of a false unity demanded by some chief of a collective of people without papers).
Everybody knows that a struggle always starts from the existent and that initial particularities often differ a lot (e.g. the relation to the trade unions in most of the struggles concerned with exploitation), but in our opinion it’s all about going beyond the latter in a subversive dynamic. We will certainly not succeed in this by accepting the variety of authoritarian straitjackets – the goal is already there in the means you acquire. Moreover, because this relativism doesn’t lead to confrontation in the struggle but to some sort of reverse colonialism that turns the immigrant yet again into an object with a supposedly different-being (“they” would be like this). In that case misery is not intended to scare off but to excuse all renunciation.
The “innocent immigrant”, the eternal passive victim that is being exploited, arrested, locked up and deported is one of the most prominent characters of this ideological stricture. As a reaction to the usual racist propaganda aimed at giving the immigrant the role of the social enemy, source of all evil (from unemployment to a safety threat and terrorism), a lot of people de facto deny the immigrant any criminal capacity at all. They aim at presenting immigrants as servile, begging for integration with all hopes set on a less detestable place in the society of capital. In this way thousands of refugees are being transformed into sympathetic and therefore integratable victims: victims of war, of ‘natural’ catastrophes and misery, of human traffickers and rack-renters. But what is forgotten are the changes these tracks make to individuals: they create solidarity, resistance and struggle that allow some of them to rupture the passivity that is attributed to them.
Surprise and and embarrassed silence rule the leftist camp and its democratic antiracism when these ‘innocents’ defend themselves by all means against the faith imposed on them (e.g. in revolts in detention centres, confrontations during raids, wildcat strikes…). Collectively expressed revolts might still be seen by some as “acts of desperation”, but a prisoner setting fire to his cell all alone, a deed that most certainly does not constitute part of the “struggle”, is called a “maniac”. Hunger strikers in a church are wanted, not arsonists or escaped prisoners from detention centres; people who have been thrown out of the window of a police station or drowned are understood, not those who resist the cops during a raid; parents of schoolchildren get helped with pleasure, in contrast to bachelor thieves. Revolt and individuals who rebel do not fit into the sociological framework of the immigrant-victim that has been constructed by the good conscience of the militant aided by the academic parasites of the State.
This mystification hinders a clearer understanding of migration and migration streams. Clearly, in the first place migrations are a consequence of the daily economic terror of capital and the political terror of local regimes and their bourgeoisie, all of which make profit for the rich countries. Nevertheless it would be incorrect to state that only poor proletarians migrate to the rich countries as is sworn by third-worldists in their construction of the immigrant-victim subject. The migrants who succeed in entering the gates of Europe clandestinely are not necessarily the poorest (since the latter are forced into internal migration to the cities or to neighbouring countries according to the fluctuation of the market and its disasters) – be it even only because of the cost (financial and human) of such a journey or the social and cultural selection within the family of those who can afford taking such a step.
If we try to understand everything that forms and traverses each individual rather than setting down the difference and otherness in order to justify an exterior position of ‘support’, we can view a whole complexity including class differences. At that point we can determine that the collectives of paperless also exist of over-qualified graduates, failed politicians, local exploiters who manage their travelling money at the expense of others… who migrate to this side of the world because they want to take their enjoyable place inside capitalist democracy. Thus many groups of people without documents are dominated by those who were already powerful (be it on a social, political or symbolic level) or were striving for it. These class differences are seldom taken into account by comrades engaged in a struggle together with paperless people, a struggle in which language becomes an unavoidable and invisible barrier assigning the immigrants coming from the richer classes of their country automatically to the role of spokesman and translator. Sharpening class differences as we do everywhere is not simply a contribution that can be made by comrades but is a necessary condition for real solidarity.
In order to understand these struggle dynamics, throwing some comfortable illusions into the garbage bin is necessary as well. Only stubborn determinism can claim that a given social condition necessarily implicates the revolt against it. This kind of reasoning used to offer the guarantee of a revolution, a guarantee that many cherished for a long time while simultaneously degrading the perspective of individual rebellion which generalizes in insurrection to the level of an adventure. The criticism made on a determinism that has shown its failure in the old workers’ movement is suitable as well for the proletarians who migrate to this side of the world. Many amongst them look at the West as some kind of oasis where you can live nicely as long as you’re prepared to make great efforts. Undergoing conditions of exploitation that resemble what they’ve been running away from, with bosses who moreover play on the paternalistic snare of belonging to a so-called common community; being chased; having no or very few perspectives of climbing higher on the social ladder and daily racism that tries to channel the dissatisfaction of the other exploited, all of this makes up a rude reality to confront. Contrasting the resignation that can sprout from this painful confrontation or the reflex of locking oneself into authoritarian communities based for example on religion or nationalism, we advance the perspective of not linking up with all paperless in a ‘categorical’ way but with those who refuse their role as exploited and by this also open the identification of the enemy. We don’t want blaming between capitalist universality and particularities but a social war in which we can recognize each other beyond the question of papers and different degrees of exploitation, in a permanent struggle for a society free of masters and slaves. As in any struggle in fact, would it not be that the struggle around migration mostly ends by the weight of the affective feeling of guilt, the urgency to prevent a deportation and its possible consequences, and all of this mostly via a relation based on exteriority instead of on a shared revolt.
The impasse of the struggle for regularisation
In several European countries, a lot of ‘massive’ regularisations took place at the last turn of the century. Although the State follows its own logic, the paperless in struggle were able to influence the criteria and rhythm of the regularisations. A comparison can be made with all “big social reforms”, some of which have been achieved through bloodshed while others were buy-outs to maintain social peace or simply granted in function of capital’s need to keep the working class grouped and to increase internal consumption. In those days debates about demands that suit the capital’s movement in contrast to insurrectional attempts were going on in the working class as well. A lot of revolutionaries only accepted these demands as a possibility towards permanent agitation while at the same time it was put clearly that the social question could not be solved inside a capitalist framework.
During the time preceding these regularisation waves States were divided between two opposing logics: on the one hand the growing stream of clandestine migration fitted the economic need for flexible workers (as in construction, the catering industry, cleaning sector, agriculture) of countries with an ageing population, on the other hand this partly denied (as in countries knowing a more recent migration as Spain and Italy) but especially in nature less controllable population disturb the drastic will to manage the public order. While this issue was quickly resolved – more specifically by closer cooperation between the different authorities (through the exchange of services between the imams and police offices as well as through the distribution of tasks amongst the different foreign and autochthonous mobs, despite some previous bloody games which had to do with unavoidable concurrence) -, the issue of the need for workers was resolved by a tighter interdependence between migration streams and the labour market. It seems to be one of the ruling tendencies on a European level to aim at a more worked out migration management that is tuned up in real time to the needs of exploitation. Next to the classic labour form of the migrants (work in black) stands the migration that links the stay permit to a working contract which will become the rule over time, fitting the reorganisation of the labour delicacy which extends to everybody.
The state has almost put an end to political asylum, has tightened up family reunion and the obtainment of citizenship by marriage, has abolished permission to stay for a longer period (like the one of 10 years in France), while on the other hand it is rejecting regularisation demands with an iron fist. The state directs itself towards what was called “selected migration” by a certain president. We’re returning to the era in which recruiting sergeants went to the villages and loaded trucks with the amount of migrants needed by their bosses. The modern formula is simply asking for a rationalisation of this recruitment on the borders, co managed by the state and the employers (2). The workers are absolutely not supposed to stay and settle down. At the same time different camps at the external borders of Europe are under construction by the state, camps for those who have not been chosen by the grace of the slave tradesmen.
Because all the others are there. All those standing in front of a closed gate and all those continuing to arrive. That’s what’s at stake for the change in the degree of the police rationalisation of the deportation system which continues to multiply its camps and is organizing more and more massive deportations, national quotes and European charter flights for those who managed their way through the locks of the waiting zones and the racketeering of the human traffickers and other mobs. However nobody cherishes any real illusions: the number of migrants without papers will increase as long as the economic causes continue to exist no matter what deployment (as can be seen at the border between Mexico and the States where a wall of 1200 kilometres is under construction), which will have no consequences apart from the increase in the cost of passage and the number of dead. Only the multiplication of her deportations would enable the state to apply her laws concerning forced expulsion from the territory. But that is not the question, because these deployments do not primarily aim at deporting all paperless, but serve to terrorize the whole of the migrant workers (the regularized as well as those chosen to have a stay permit) so that their condition of exploitation, which resembles the one they escaped, can remain unaltered (internal delocalisation in a certain way) while pressure is put on the whole of the conditions of exploitation. The racist excuse moreover serves to deploy the arsenal of social control which touches everybody.
But let us not forget about the changing character of migration itself. Industrial capitalism used workers as pawns on a chess board following an easy logic: here we have too many workers and there we need them. And whenever the need was rather small, other aspects of this population politics were put into action. However, this specific form of migration control has changed as a result of the restructuring of the economic aspect and because of the consequences of industrial growth. It becomes more difficult to speak of a point of departure and a point of arrival. The points of departure have been devastated by hunger, war and disasters while the destinations are changing all the time. In this way migration becomes an endless track consisting of different stages; it’s no longer a movement from points A to B. These new forms of migration are not only being defined by the needs of a constantly flexible and adjustable capital. Millions of people, uprooted by the devastation of the places where they were born are swarming all over the world – ready to be put to work. And the deployment of this control is quite visible: the humanitarian refugee camps, the camps at the borders, the slums and the favelas. The struggles for regularisation seem to pose rather few questions concerning this new fact. The situation in Belgium is a good example of the current impasse of the struggle for regularisation. The State acted like a lion and a fox simultaneously when the tension around the closed centres began to rise in 1998. As a lion she repressed the most rebellious parts of the movement (murder of Semira Adamu (3) who was resisting unflinchingly in the centres; house searches and arrest of comrades active in this struggle). As a fox she started negotiating about regularisations with the other part of the movement. Clearly, the demand for regularisation (besides the fact that it amounts to a demand for integration) requires avcertain credibility, a recognized mediator. The movement got hit in this way. Regularisation, which once used to be the State’s answer to the tension and agitation that challenged the whole of migration politics (using slogans against all camps or for free circulation), became the goal for most of the groups of undocumented people. Instead of forcing the State to give a bonus by struggling, the collectives started a dialogue which was followed by negotiations which attracted a whole army of professional negotiators and juridical charlatans who would solve all problems. On the one hand the dynamic was broken by the repression and on the other by the start of a bureaucratic dialogue. Neither the successive self-mutilations (such as the hunger-strikes outside the camps), or the most servile self-abasements were enough to win what in a certain way used to be the State’s response to agitation. The first answer of the state was combined with a rationalisation of the detention centres and a stricter adjustment of the permits to stay in accordance with the needs of the economy (the State itself changed the cards).
During recent years the current situation with its cycle of occupations/hunger strikes/deportations suffocated us in a struggle experience which offered only a few possibilities to go beyond and share a perspective: experiences of self organisation that accept neither politician nor religious or trade union leaders; direct actions that permit the development of a real power balance and the identification of the class enemy in every aspect. These observations lead us to feel the need and desire to develop a subversive projectuality starting from our own bases, instead of running behind a widening out (which seems to be further and further away) based on the demand for regularisation. This projectuality could find her first anchors in the revolt which is factually shared amongst those who struggle for the destruction of the centres and those who (e.g. the rebels of Vincennes or Steenokkerzeel) turn the critique of detention into deeds by setting their prison on fire.
Against the deportation machine
While facing these difficulties a debate that is still going on nowadays arises: the debate about solidarity. A lot of comrades continue to defend the necessity – at whatever cost - of our presence inside the groups of those without papers, until they retreat from any such struggle, disgusted after so many blows. The justifications are diverse and most of the time they are a reflection of activism or of comfortable recipes devoid of imagination, lacking any real desire for subversion. And here as well: although the collective character of an action is no criterion for us, we do understand the need “to break the isolation” felt by some comrades. Nevertheless we doubt whether we can manage this by participating in endless meetings, being locked up with 30 people in a squat or in an apartment block of undocumented and leftists. We tend more towards the development of our own project and so to starting from our own bases. As long as solidarity is understood as support to certain social categories, it will continue to be an illusion. Even if it were to entail some more radical methods, it would continuously be dragged along in a conflict with bases, methods and perspectives that are not ours at all. The only justification left is claiming that by taking part in these conflicts we can ‘radicalize’ the people because their social condition would necessarily lead them towards sharing our ideas. As long as this concept of ‘radicalisation’ is understood as a task of missionaries wanting others to swallow their ideas it will continue to be stuck in the impasse that we notice growing everywhere around. This ‘radicalisation’ however can also be understood as openness of our dynamic towards others, enabling us to guarantee the autonomy of our own projectuality. In this way, ‘being together’ in a struggle and going forward on the level of perspectives as well as methods demands an existing basic affinity, a first rupture, a first desire that goes beyond the usual demands. In this way our demand for mutuality can become meaningful. There are many more tracks to explore than the continuation of the connection whose only reason for existing is the maintenance of the fiction of the political subject that, in the name of its status as being the main victim, monopolizes the reason for the struggle and in this way the struggle itself. To put it clearly we could say that solidarity is in need of mutual recognition in deed as well as in words. It is difficult to be in solidarity with an undocumented person “in struggle” who demands his regularisation and that of his family with no interest whatsoever in the perspective of the destruction of detention centres. Maybe we would still meet somewhere but this will be on a purely practical base: we don’t need to analyse the reasons or perspectives that bring somebody to revolt in order to recognize ourselves, at least partly, in these deeds of attack which automatically turn against those responsible fo this misery. As counts for most intermediary struggles: there is only a very limited sense in participating in a factory conflict that starts off from wage demands and does not overcome the trade unionist framework or develop any sign of direct action. It is limited because there simply is no common base. New perspectives open up at the moment when these workers start sabotaging (even if they regard it as a means to pressure the bosses) or kick out their deputes (even if only because they feel betrayed).
So, instead of holding on to more and more slogans such as “solidarity with the immigrants / in struggle” (but which struggle?), we could develop a projectuality against the detention centres using methods and ideas that are ours and are subversive in the sense that they question the foundations of this world (exploitation and domination). This projectuality would be autonomous and strengthened by deeds of revolt contrasting the overall resignation, and strengthening these deeds in return. Again, recipes do not exist but today it is important to go beyond the impasses of a more or less humanist activism that hinders any radical autonomy in favour of an agitation that conceives the cadence of power or follows the logic of the only actors of the struggle that are conceived to be legitimate, while it is actually the freedom of all that is at stake, as for example in the case of raids. As it is important to put forward perspectives which, beyond the partial goals developed in these intermediary struggles, are able to widen up the matter to a horizon that finally questions the whole of this world and its horror; i.e. perspectives that are always able to put forward the question of domination and exploitation. Diffuse attacks could be the heart of this projectuality. Not only do they offer the advantage of going beyond the powerlessness felt while standing in front of the wall or the barbed wire of a camp, or while being confronted with a raid by a police deployment that can adjust itself and count on the passivity and fear of the passers-by, but also and especially they offer us on the one hand the possibility to develop our own temporality and on the other hand to show everyone that the structures of the deportation machine that are to be found on every street corner are vulnerable and at last they offer real possibilities of action to everyone, regardless of how many they are.
Enthusiastic internationalists.
THE TRUE FACE OF WELCOME IN THE SALENTO CONCENTRATION CAMP OF SAINT FOCA
‘Welcome’: this is what bureaucrats, priests and politicians call the infamous practice of locking up in concentration camps like the Regina Pacis one in Saint Foca (Salento, southern Italy) all the people waiting to be deported because they don’t fit into the immigration quota which has been fixed by the bosses. We must come out and say it: immigrants are merchandise (like everything else in our society). The bosses decide on the quantity and character of what they want to buy, political power collects information, the police does its roundups, and finally the jailers look after the prisoners in the immigration camp in order to prevent them from moving freely. These camps are surrounded by huge walls and barbed wire, with bars on the windows and cameras and guards all around. In spite of the fact that they are presented as places of welcome and solidarity, they are actually prisons for those who are to be deported from the rich western world where there is only room for the ones who are useful to its awful machinery. This is their great welcome.
Monsignor Cosmo Francesco Ruppi, archbishop of Otranto and prestigious figure in political and religious circles of Salento, is fundamental to this perverse machinery. Through his lackey father Cesare Lodeserto he controls the prison Regina Pacis in Sain Foca where men women and children whose only guilt is that they landed on the shores of southern Italy without any identity documents in order to escape from miserable living conditions are locked up: for this stupid reason alone these human beings are called ‘clandestine’. The archbishop hides himself behind a false and reassuring mask of benefactor and succeeds in gaining many common people’s confidence. The truth is that he is just an unscrupulous criminal, a very mean man who takes advantage of hundreds of human beings’ hopes and desperation. Ruppi regards them as animals for the slaughter who serve only for him to get rich as quickly as possible during their imprisonment while waiting to be sent back to their countries to face hunger, war, misery, sickness, exploitation once again … These conditions are all being created by the western world. In addition to this, we have to consider the hundreds of people who die during these so-called ‘journeys of hope’. And Ruppi and his accomplice Cesare Lodeserto, a criminal of the same category, are also morally responsible for such deaths. These two vultures, along with anyone else who does the same job as theirs, are our enemies, whereas we are side by side with the immigrants who reach our shores. We know well that capitalism is making our existence similar to that of the exploited immigrants, full of uncertainty and the impossibility to decide about our present and our future. If we share the same conditions of exploitation, we can also share the struggle against this life which is becoming more and more deprived of any freedom.
ENEMIES OF ALL BORDERS
Monsignor Cosmo Francesco Ruppi, archbishop of Otranto and prestigious figure in political and religious circles of Salento, is fundamental to this perverse machinery. Through his lackey father Cesare Lodeserto he controls the prison Regina Pacis in Sain Foca where men women and children whose only guilt is that they landed on the shores of southern Italy without any identity documents in order to escape from miserable living conditions are locked up: for this stupid reason alone these human beings are called ‘clandestine’. The archbishop hides himself behind a false and reassuring mask of benefactor and succeeds in gaining many common people’s confidence. The truth is that he is just an unscrupulous criminal, a very mean man who takes advantage of hundreds of human beings’ hopes and desperation. Ruppi regards them as animals for the slaughter who serve only for him to get rich as quickly as possible during their imprisonment while waiting to be sent back to their countries to face hunger, war, misery, sickness, exploitation once again … These conditions are all being created by the western world. In addition to this, we have to consider the hundreds of people who die during these so-called ‘journeys of hope’. And Ruppi and his accomplice Cesare Lodeserto, a criminal of the same category, are also morally responsible for such deaths. These two vultures, along with anyone else who does the same job as theirs, are our enemies, whereas we are side by side with the immigrants who reach our shores. We know well that capitalism is making our existence similar to that of the exploited immigrants, full of uncertainty and the impossibility to decide about our present and our future. If we share the same conditions of exploitation, we can also share the struggle against this life which is becoming more and more deprived of any freedom.
ENEMIES OF ALL BORDERS
Statement to the court, Lecce 2007, Cristian Paladini
There are two fundamental reasons for which I am sitting in this court as a defendant, the only role that, in spite of my will, I can play in a court room.
First of all I am a revolutionary and an anarchist; and if you consider how many comrades are still being held in Italian jails, that in itself seems to be reason enough. After all, what can those who want to break this damned murderous social organization based on misery and exploitation, expect from the ruling class, which does not intend to renounce its power, and the interests of which this court is bound to defend?
The second reason is closely linked to the first, or rather it is its direct and logical consequence: the struggle that, as an anarchist and revolutionary in this society, I have been carrying over the past few years.
So, after the ground had been prepared with a long period of preventive criminalization thanks to the usual journalists of the press and TV, imprisonment was not surprising. First imprisonment in a proper cell of 8 square metres, that three people shared twenty hours a day, then house arrest where the b,ars on the doors and windows cannot be seen, yet are there. House arrest, which is certainly less hard in certain respects, serves the project of total isolation carried out by the State even better: you do not have any contact with other prisoners and your only way of communicating is by mail, which, as this prosecutor well knows, is not at all reliable.
One year and ten months have passed since May 10 2005, during which my comrades and I have endured isolation, transfers, continuous intimidation and abuse of all kinds, but always cheered by practical solidarity by many other exploited like ourselves. Certainly it was not easy, as it never has been for all the men and women who have locked up throughout time all over the world, but I do not intend to complain or to present myself as a simple dissident who, by a judicial mistake or for whatever other reason, finds himself involved in a sensational judicial frame-up and is now waiting for justice.
Nothing is more extraneous to my way of thinking and living. Condemnation or absolution, justice – real justice – cannot be found in a courtroom.
It is true that this is a frame-up, quite a clumsy one, and in some aspects even a ridiculous one. The prosecutor, in fact, not having any evidence in his hands, relied on the old and always useful habit of inventing it by deforming reality, transforming conversations that he infamously listened to and omitting the context in which they occurred, so that he could make us members of a subversive association punishable by article 270bis. When you are a liar by profession, as time goes by you probably end up losing track. I think that it is how this prosecutor, trying to conciliate what cannot be conciliated, went quite further and established that anarchists, who refuse all authority, were part of a hierarchical structure composed of leaders and followers.
Apart from these dirty tricks, power was right as regards me: it has singled out an individual who refuses the State, does not care about its laws and strongly desires the subversion of this system, the destruction of all authority and the creation of a free life for everybody. This is the dangerous idea that power cannot tolerate, in spite of what they declare, and which is well beyond the worn-out old chatter about liberty and rights upon which the ideology of the regime is based.
Actually there is no freedom in rights. The latter are a concession given to vassals and as such they can be suspended or suppressed, and they strengthen the power of those who concede them. In other words, the State concedes and removes rights according to its needs. This said, it is not surprising that article 270bis, which we are accused of, comes from old article 270, which was first produced by the fascist dictatorship (Rocco code) in order to repress rebels, and eventually passed from the fascist regime to the Republic that boasts it was born from the Resistance. In other words, the most efficient legal weapon against dissent during the time of dictatorship is being used today; moreover it has been refined and adapted to the different social conditions, going through decades and governments of all colours, as a sign of continuity between two powers that, basically, are not so different from each other. This article, which establishes a six-month imprisonment that can be reconfirmed every six months up to two years, cost us to be locked up for quite a long time before any jury decides our sentence. In this way the principle of ‘presumed innocence’, which any good democratic subject feels he is protected by, has been clamorously denied.
Many of the specific charges against us concern the struggle for the closure of all detention centres for immigrants and in particular the infamous Regina Pacis in San Foca, which was run profitably by the homonymous Foundation Regina Pacis [a foundation of the Lecce clergy] up until March two years ago. CPTs and deportations are another thread that links past and present: fascist and nazi concentration camps, before becoming centres of systematic massacre, were places where people were locked up without having committed any crime. It is exactly what happens in all CPTs. That is why I have always called them concentration camps. In these places immigrants who managed to reach Italy but do not have the right documents to stay in the country are locked up, after enduring terrible journeys during which they risked their life: The Mediterranean sea bed is now a cemetery without crosses or names. For them, guilty of being poor and foreigners on the run desperately searching for a better life, State racism has established that they be imprisoned, following what is a mere administrative question for an Italian. They are kept there until they are identified – officially 60 days – and, with the collaboration of companies such as Alitalia and Trenitalia they are eventually deported to their country of origin or, and this is what counts, somewhere else outside fortress Europe. Otherwise they are handed a deportation order compelling them to leave the country within a few days. Those who do not obey are put in prison. As they do not have any other choice in the face of misery, hunger, and war that they have escaped from, they are forced to live in hiding, constantly chased by the police, escaping raids and facing prejudice and hostility stirred up by the media propaganda that depicts illegal immigrants as criminals and possible ‘terrorists’. In order to survive they have to accept even more hideous working conditions because they can be easily blackmailed under the threat of deportation. They live constantly with the terror of being captured, thrown in CPTs and then sent back from what was their journey of hope. The condition of ‘clandestine’ hanging over immigrants, therefore, serves a precise project of exploitation: on the one hand the bosses ask the State for legal labourers, according to the established quota; on the other the latter have at their disposal a considerable number of undesirables without any rights that they can exploit to death. These 'undesirables' are used to threaten the legal immigrants so that the latter do not stand up for better working conditions (without a work contract immigrants cannot stay in the country).
Everything in this world is submitted to the rules of economy. It is such an obvious truth that power does not even try to conceal it; on the contrary it tries to make us think that it is an inevitable reality from which everybody will gain something.
When they do have to conceal reality, on the contrary, their most effective trick is to call things with names that do not match their meaning. It this way the expression ‘humanitarian war’ was introduced, concentration camps for immigrants are called ‘welcome centres’ and the prisoners inside these structures are called ‘guests’, as Cesare Lodeserto, a ‘benefactor-jailer’ ex-director of Regina Pacis did in this court. According to the stories of many prisoners, the detention centre of San Foca was a theatre of violence, beatings and abuse of all kinds, especially after revolts had broken out. But even if such atrocities had never occurred, my struggle for the closure of Regina Pacis would have been the same because the real problem is not the way a CPT is managed but its mere existence as a place where people are locked up. For a long while now these places have been called concentration camps even by the left that contributed to creating them and by a large part of civil society, without any practical consequences. The new governors, who out of pure political calculation had expressed their intention to vaguely ‘go beyond’ the CPTs, have now changed their cards: this ‘going beyond’ is nothing else but a different setting. The CPTs would be reduced in number, become more secure and serve as prisons ‘only’ for the ‘irreducible’, that is to say those who do not collaborate with the police to be identified and voluntarily deported. A real disappointment for the people who voted the new governors. The truth is, as the political class admit, that the CPTs are necessary to the current politics of immigration. The State cannot do without them, even if they represent the total demystification of the democratic lie and show how exclusion is at the base of democracy. As far as I am concerned, this does not make any difference, as I have always known that Cpts will disappear only if and when we have the social strength to impose it. This is the reason why, today like yesterday, I am continuing my struggle against detention camps and deportation, focusing my attention on the responsibility of those (managers and collaborators) who allow their existence and activity. Furthermore, I always bear well in mind that there exists a strong link between CPT, permanent war and the militarization of society.
The regime’s incessant propaganda has always used fear as a means to produce consensus. The continuous creation of a threat, highlighted according to the circumstances, justifies a more and more suffocating control over all aspects of life and allows power to introduce more and more liberticidal laws. The enemy is everywhere, it is called ‘terrorist’ and can be an immigrant or a revolutionary. Reality is turned upside down: those who massacre entire populations in order to control resources accuse those who struggle for freedom of terrorism. But if terrorism is, according to its historical definition, the indiscriminate use of violence aimed at conquering and consolidating power, then it is well clear that THE STATE IS THE TERRORIST!
LECCE, June 28 2007
Cristian Paladini
First of all I am a revolutionary and an anarchist; and if you consider how many comrades are still being held in Italian jails, that in itself seems to be reason enough. After all, what can those who want to break this damned murderous social organization based on misery and exploitation, expect from the ruling class, which does not intend to renounce its power, and the interests of which this court is bound to defend?
The second reason is closely linked to the first, or rather it is its direct and logical consequence: the struggle that, as an anarchist and revolutionary in this society, I have been carrying over the past few years.
So, after the ground had been prepared with a long period of preventive criminalization thanks to the usual journalists of the press and TV, imprisonment was not surprising. First imprisonment in a proper cell of 8 square metres, that three people shared twenty hours a day, then house arrest where the b,ars on the doors and windows cannot be seen, yet are there. House arrest, which is certainly less hard in certain respects, serves the project of total isolation carried out by the State even better: you do not have any contact with other prisoners and your only way of communicating is by mail, which, as this prosecutor well knows, is not at all reliable.
One year and ten months have passed since May 10 2005, during which my comrades and I have endured isolation, transfers, continuous intimidation and abuse of all kinds, but always cheered by practical solidarity by many other exploited like ourselves. Certainly it was not easy, as it never has been for all the men and women who have locked up throughout time all over the world, but I do not intend to complain or to present myself as a simple dissident who, by a judicial mistake or for whatever other reason, finds himself involved in a sensational judicial frame-up and is now waiting for justice.
Nothing is more extraneous to my way of thinking and living. Condemnation or absolution, justice – real justice – cannot be found in a courtroom.
It is true that this is a frame-up, quite a clumsy one, and in some aspects even a ridiculous one. The prosecutor, in fact, not having any evidence in his hands, relied on the old and always useful habit of inventing it by deforming reality, transforming conversations that he infamously listened to and omitting the context in which they occurred, so that he could make us members of a subversive association punishable by article 270bis. When you are a liar by profession, as time goes by you probably end up losing track. I think that it is how this prosecutor, trying to conciliate what cannot be conciliated, went quite further and established that anarchists, who refuse all authority, were part of a hierarchical structure composed of leaders and followers.
Apart from these dirty tricks, power was right as regards me: it has singled out an individual who refuses the State, does not care about its laws and strongly desires the subversion of this system, the destruction of all authority and the creation of a free life for everybody. This is the dangerous idea that power cannot tolerate, in spite of what they declare, and which is well beyond the worn-out old chatter about liberty and rights upon which the ideology of the regime is based.
Actually there is no freedom in rights. The latter are a concession given to vassals and as such they can be suspended or suppressed, and they strengthen the power of those who concede them. In other words, the State concedes and removes rights according to its needs. This said, it is not surprising that article 270bis, which we are accused of, comes from old article 270, which was first produced by the fascist dictatorship (Rocco code) in order to repress rebels, and eventually passed from the fascist regime to the Republic that boasts it was born from the Resistance. In other words, the most efficient legal weapon against dissent during the time of dictatorship is being used today; moreover it has been refined and adapted to the different social conditions, going through decades and governments of all colours, as a sign of continuity between two powers that, basically, are not so different from each other. This article, which establishes a six-month imprisonment that can be reconfirmed every six months up to two years, cost us to be locked up for quite a long time before any jury decides our sentence. In this way the principle of ‘presumed innocence’, which any good democratic subject feels he is protected by, has been clamorously denied.
Many of the specific charges against us concern the struggle for the closure of all detention centres for immigrants and in particular the infamous Regina Pacis in San Foca, which was run profitably by the homonymous Foundation Regina Pacis [a foundation of the Lecce clergy] up until March two years ago. CPTs and deportations are another thread that links past and present: fascist and nazi concentration camps, before becoming centres of systematic massacre, were places where people were locked up without having committed any crime. It is exactly what happens in all CPTs. That is why I have always called them concentration camps. In these places immigrants who managed to reach Italy but do not have the right documents to stay in the country are locked up, after enduring terrible journeys during which they risked their life: The Mediterranean sea bed is now a cemetery without crosses or names. For them, guilty of being poor and foreigners on the run desperately searching for a better life, State racism has established that they be imprisoned, following what is a mere administrative question for an Italian. They are kept there until they are identified – officially 60 days – and, with the collaboration of companies such as Alitalia and Trenitalia they are eventually deported to their country of origin or, and this is what counts, somewhere else outside fortress Europe. Otherwise they are handed a deportation order compelling them to leave the country within a few days. Those who do not obey are put in prison. As they do not have any other choice in the face of misery, hunger, and war that they have escaped from, they are forced to live in hiding, constantly chased by the police, escaping raids and facing prejudice and hostility stirred up by the media propaganda that depicts illegal immigrants as criminals and possible ‘terrorists’. In order to survive they have to accept even more hideous working conditions because they can be easily blackmailed under the threat of deportation. They live constantly with the terror of being captured, thrown in CPTs and then sent back from what was their journey of hope. The condition of ‘clandestine’ hanging over immigrants, therefore, serves a precise project of exploitation: on the one hand the bosses ask the State for legal labourers, according to the established quota; on the other the latter have at their disposal a considerable number of undesirables without any rights that they can exploit to death. These 'undesirables' are used to threaten the legal immigrants so that the latter do not stand up for better working conditions (without a work contract immigrants cannot stay in the country).
Everything in this world is submitted to the rules of economy. It is such an obvious truth that power does not even try to conceal it; on the contrary it tries to make us think that it is an inevitable reality from which everybody will gain something.
When they do have to conceal reality, on the contrary, their most effective trick is to call things with names that do not match their meaning. It this way the expression ‘humanitarian war’ was introduced, concentration camps for immigrants are called ‘welcome centres’ and the prisoners inside these structures are called ‘guests’, as Cesare Lodeserto, a ‘benefactor-jailer’ ex-director of Regina Pacis did in this court. According to the stories of many prisoners, the detention centre of San Foca was a theatre of violence, beatings and abuse of all kinds, especially after revolts had broken out. But even if such atrocities had never occurred, my struggle for the closure of Regina Pacis would have been the same because the real problem is not the way a CPT is managed but its mere existence as a place where people are locked up. For a long while now these places have been called concentration camps even by the left that contributed to creating them and by a large part of civil society, without any practical consequences. The new governors, who out of pure political calculation had expressed their intention to vaguely ‘go beyond’ the CPTs, have now changed their cards: this ‘going beyond’ is nothing else but a different setting. The CPTs would be reduced in number, become more secure and serve as prisons ‘only’ for the ‘irreducible’, that is to say those who do not collaborate with the police to be identified and voluntarily deported. A real disappointment for the people who voted the new governors. The truth is, as the political class admit, that the CPTs are necessary to the current politics of immigration. The State cannot do without them, even if they represent the total demystification of the democratic lie and show how exclusion is at the base of democracy. As far as I am concerned, this does not make any difference, as I have always known that Cpts will disappear only if and when we have the social strength to impose it. This is the reason why, today like yesterday, I am continuing my struggle against detention camps and deportation, focusing my attention on the responsibility of those (managers and collaborators) who allow their existence and activity. Furthermore, I always bear well in mind that there exists a strong link between CPT, permanent war and the militarization of society.
The regime’s incessant propaganda has always used fear as a means to produce consensus. The continuous creation of a threat, highlighted according to the circumstances, justifies a more and more suffocating control over all aspects of life and allows power to introduce more and more liberticidal laws. The enemy is everywhere, it is called ‘terrorist’ and can be an immigrant or a revolutionary. Reality is turned upside down: those who massacre entire populations in order to control resources accuse those who struggle for freedom of terrorism. But if terrorism is, according to its historical definition, the indiscriminate use of violence aimed at conquering and consolidating power, then it is well clear that THE STATE IS THE TERRORIST!
LECCE, June 28 2007
Cristian Paladini
Wednesday, 5 May 2010
The greek state murders Nigerian street vendor Tony Onuoha
On the evening of Saturday, August 18, 2007 undercover police follow 25 year old Tony Onuoha, an immigrant from Nigeria, who is selling pirate CDs in a cafe in the area of Kalamaria, Thessaloniki. According to accounts given by people close to him, Tony recognised the cops as being the same ones that had brutally beaten him a year before and attempts to escape them, resulting in him falling from the 5 meter high first floor balcony of the cafe to meet instant death on the pavement below. According to some accounts he was pushed over the 1,5 meter balcony railings by the pursuing cops. Immediately, a number of people from the Nigerian community gather on the spot to demonstrate and clash with anti-riot squads (MAT) and undercover cops that arrive in the area to stop this spontaneous demonstration. Street barricades are erected and the fight with the cops continues untill 4 in the morning, with anarchists and anti-authoritarians also taking part in the demonstration and the clash with the cops that followed, in solidarity.
On August 20, a 400 strong demo goes around the area of Kalamaria, with very angry members of the black community at the front. Anarchists, anti-authoritarians, leftists and the anti-racist group also take part. When the demo arrives outside the police station, stones are thrown towards the cops and the anti-riot bus and the MAT answer with a bombarment of teargas. Barricades are again erected, people fight off the cops and manage to re-join the main demo, which ends at the place where Tony was killed.
On August 21, another demo takes place in Thessaloniki. Clashes break out again, with anarchists and some members of the black community attacking the state-owned ET-3 broadcasting building and the MAT, which answer again with chemical warfare. Barricades are made on the street in front of the university, inside which people have gathered. For the next few hours the fight continues with molotov coctails and stones being thrown to the MAT from within the university grounds, with the MAT in turn throwing abundant quantities of tear gas and an arson grenade. Three cops are lightly injured and one catches on fire- but manages to escape from becoming pork flambe.
21 people from the demo where arrested. The one was released later in the night while the remaining 20 are only facing the charge of breaching the peace, as there is no evidence against them. Some of them where beaten, although not badly as at the moment of their arrest there were media present, which acted as a deterrent for the pigs.
The greek state, through the ministry of public order, maintains that the two persons that led Tony Onuoha to his death are not cops in a pathetic attempt to hide its trully brutal and deeply racist nature.Although this cover-up story might fool some people it certainly won't fool us.
WE WILL NOT FORGET-WE WILL NOT FORGIVE
SOLIDARITY TO ALL IMMIGRANTS- FREEDOM FOR ALL
On August 20, a 400 strong demo goes around the area of Kalamaria, with very angry members of the black community at the front. Anarchists, anti-authoritarians, leftists and the anti-racist group also take part. When the demo arrives outside the police station, stones are thrown towards the cops and the anti-riot bus and the MAT answer with a bombarment of teargas. Barricades are again erected, people fight off the cops and manage to re-join the main demo, which ends at the place where Tony was killed.
On August 21, another demo takes place in Thessaloniki. Clashes break out again, with anarchists and some members of the black community attacking the state-owned ET-3 broadcasting building and the MAT, which answer again with chemical warfare. Barricades are made on the street in front of the university, inside which people have gathered. For the next few hours the fight continues with molotov coctails and stones being thrown to the MAT from within the university grounds, with the MAT in turn throwing abundant quantities of tear gas and an arson grenade. Three cops are lightly injured and one catches on fire- but manages to escape from becoming pork flambe.
21 people from the demo where arrested. The one was released later in the night while the remaining 20 are only facing the charge of breaching the peace, as there is no evidence against them. Some of them where beaten, although not badly as at the moment of their arrest there were media present, which acted as a deterrent for the pigs.
The greek state, through the ministry of public order, maintains that the two persons that led Tony Onuoha to his death are not cops in a pathetic attempt to hide its trully brutal and deeply racist nature.Although this cover-up story might fool some people it certainly won't fool us.
WE WILL NOT FORGET-WE WILL NOT FORGIVE
SOLIDARITY TO ALL IMMIGRANTS- FREEDOM FOR ALL
Statement to the court in Lecce, Salvatore Signore
‘Finally there are situations when a passionate man must write. When the platform is empty and the people are crushed, when a society of slaves has a shopkeeper as king, when all those who think are condemned, it is well necessary that the latter, exiled from the present, dwell upon the future’.
Ernest Coeurderoy, Days of Exile
First of all I want to clarify that this declaration does not intend to be a justification because I have no reason to justify myself. Then, any clarification in this court is pointless because my words can hardly be understood in all their meaning in this place. Not that I think you are stupid but because we belong to opposing ‘sides’ – you represent power and I represent its enemy – and our ways of understanding and interpreting reality are absolutely different and alien to each other. This trial, however, is obviously and exclusively political, and therefore social, and I cannot help expressing what I think. I want to point out that my thoughts are addressed outside this court, to the vast mass of exploited and excluded to which I belong and to which I have always addressed myself with the means and methods that I have acquired through time.
The first thing that I want to say is that I send back to the sender the epithet of ‘terrorist’, which has been used to define me since this story begun, and also before that, aimed at producing satisfactory public opinion, which ‘is made by idiots’, as Stendhal rightly said, and the ensuing persecution and repression; I will come back to this later. For my part, as I have already done many times, I reaffirm that terrorism has always been the favourite weapon of States, be they old empires, more recent nazi-fascist or socialist dictatorships or advanced democracies. Even if those who hold power, and therefore the manipulators of History and Culture try to change its meaning, the word ‘terrorism’ means ‘use of indiscriminate violence with the aim of conquering, consolidating and defending political power’. Anarchists, on the contrary, even when they have decided to use violence, have never used it in an indiscriminate way. Then it is absolutely ridiculous to think that anarchists want to conquer power, given that their aim is to destroy it! After all, the bombs in the squares and on the trains, the massacre of entire populations and the ‘exporation of democracy’ are certainly not anarchist practises.
As far as the appellation of subversive is concerned, I candidly admit that that is what I am. What is an individual who despises all kinds of power and struggles for a completely different society and for the freedom of all living beings without distinctions, if not subversive? All this is certainly subversive in a world where social relations are based on exploitation, robbery, exclusion and abuse of the weakest. Furthermore, I could never belong to any subversive ‘association’, which would really be a very miserable thing and would not match with the fact that I am anarchist, which I assert and for which I am defendant in this trial. As an anarchist, I have two fundamental principles: the individual and anti-authoritarianism. Therefore I could never organize myself in a vertical way – even if I have been defined ‘leader’ and ‘chief’ and, according to the prosecution, I occupied a ‘leader’ s position’. I strongly refute these words. I could never organize myself in a rigid way either, because in that case the organisation itself would dominate me and I would become a mere instrument and appendix of it, and my being a unique individual among other unique individuals would disappear behind it. On the contrary I establish my relations according to the necessity of the moment, to the love, friendship and affinity that link me to others. I can agree for a moment on one question and soon after be in total disagreement on another. But this relation is always horizontal, informal and never hierarchical, according to the principle of anti-authoritarianism. In this free and temporary relation, I am free to move by myself or with whoever wants to move with me. On the contrary, in an organized structure, individuals only move inside the ‘association’, exactly like in political parties. If I acted in this way I would follow a religion, but as anarchist I am against political parties and religions, no matter what they say. I would even be against anarchism if the latter were to become a dogma and therefore religion.
Another accusation made against me and that I want to clarify because I find it disgusting is that I would make ‘proselytism’. This practise does not belong to me; it belongs, for example, to the armed forces that go around schools in order to convince kids to enlist, and to priests and to missionaries all over the world. But I have always been extraneous to the ‘missionary logic’. I do not think that social change is a historical mission that I have to carry out nor do I think that it is an inevitable event according to some determinist dream. On the contrary I think that it is an open possibility that can become true or not, that can be fair or not. And it will not be any ‘party’ of anarchists to radically transform the world; it will be the exploited that organize themselves together with anarchists. If I were to live my life and thought according to an historical mission, this too would overcome my will and would transform it into an instrument of something that does not belong to me and that would be the opposite of individuality. I would disappear behind the historical mission, behind the ideology. On the contrary I have never had the arrogance to claim that I know the truth in the place of ignorant masses that have not understood anything and that I should ‘convert’ and ‘indoctrinate’; in this way I would be putting myself in a vanguardist position, which anarchists historically refuse; I have never wanted to be a vanguard. What I do, through articles in our papers, posters, demonstrations, meetings, distribution of books, and which is being judged in this court, is called propaganda, that is to say an instrument for expressing my thoughts and ideas. Mind you, I said Ideas, not mere and stupid opinions. Opinions only represent the empty shell of ideas, as they do not have the subversive potential of the latter. Ideas are something more, they are dangerous, especially in times of social anaesthesia as those we are living in, and it is for this reason that they scare.
This is the real point: what is on trial, exactly, in this court? Not certainly ‘crimes’, to justify most of which the investigators had to construe ‘evidence’ and interpret in their own way words, sentences, concepts, highlighting what was convenient for them and omitting all the rest. No, it is not this. Here it is the Idea that is on trial, anarchist thought and practise. Nobody can believe in the old story of the ‘State of Right’, also because, as Hobbes rightly said, ‘rights being equal, strength wins’.
It is therefore clear that courts defend class interests, the class of the included against the big majority of the excluded, which is growing. It is sufficient to observe the social provenance of prisoners in the very democratic Italian jails to find the best confirmation to my statements. So it becomes intolerable that individuals wanting freedom, the destruction of all power and a dignified life for everybody are set free. It is not by chance that there exists a continuous and constant attack against what can be defined the ‘anarchist movement’. This attack has been increasing over the last ten years, and this is also due to the politics of emergency that the State has been adopting for a long while and upon which it now bases its very existence: it is a consolidated rule to create a fictitious enemy towards which to address subjects’ fears so that they create a common front against the ‘danger’ of the moment and cannot see who are really responsible for their misery: one day it is the mafia emergency, another it is environmental emergency, then the immigration emergency comes out. Following this logic today there stands an external enemy – foreigners in general and Arabs in particular – and an internal enemy – all those who oppose the present state of things, and anarchists in particular.
Dozens of conspiracy court cases were set against anarchists, most of which have ended up in nothing. What the prosecution is trying here, therefore, is not so much to put me and some other comrades in prison, which would be too little a thing, but to obtain a final sentence that could be useful in future penal procedures and help to get rid of anarchists for a few years, while sending a warning to all the others. The thinking heads of the State have certainly realized that, for a series of reasons, Lecce is the right place where such a precedent could be created: it is a little town on the suburbs of the Empire, where in their opinion there would be little resistance, and then there are no specific precedents. The most extraordinary thing, however, is that to obtain such a sentence, instruments that have failed elsewhere are being used, i.e. the usual old joke that fills the documents of investigators and public prosecutors about anarchist organising themselves on a double level – one public and the other clandestine – and the intentionally distorted interpretation of a comrade’ s words that have been published in a number of books. There is, in fact, a repressive thread on a national level, which is put into practice on a local level only to make it easier. A few more steps in this direction and, who knows, anyone who has certain books in his house will be criminalized! After all, it is exactly books that were seized in the course of the searches carried out when we were arrested… It is perhaps useful to remind that the ‘dangerous books’ hunt was carried out during the holy Inquisition and during Nazism, and it is also useful to remember that a few days ago in Bologna searches were made and an investigation on conspiracy was opened on the pretext that comrades were distributing a book that criticized the infamous ‘Biagi law’. And it is quite bizarre that some books are being considered the source of certain theories and strategies, in spite of the fact that your own magistrates have sentenced the falseness of these constructions!
Contrary to what the prosecution is trying to establish, I am a dangerous individual not because I speak and act in a clandestine way but because of the exact opposite: because I do not need to do so. I think I am a free individual coherent with himself, at least I try, so I openly say what I think and do what I say: theory becomes practise and practise becomes theory. I understand how this can be disturbing and unpleasant to power. It must be in fact unpleasant to mayor Poli [the right-wing mayor of Lecce] that in her ‘polis’, that is to say a town ruled by a bunch of exploiters under which slaves are submitted, there is still somebody who wants to take back the ‘agora’, that is to say a free piazza where there can be free discussion and where the Idea, this thing so frightening, can be widespread. After all, as the inquisitors tried a lot of times to stop me, they know very well that I cannot stand the closeness of what they call ‘hens’ – our sites - especially as the excluded to whom I address myself are not habitual frequenters of such places.
My anarchist thoughts and practice are even more dangerous to the inquisitors when they are aimed at striking the terrorism of very important men and the violence perpetrated inside the new concentration camps of the State, the so-called CPTs. The pretext under which I was put in jail and I am under trial is exactly my radical opposition to these places.
I claim with strength my struggle against the detention centres for immigrants and against Regina Pacis in particular. It was an infamous place that was luckily closed down but whose corpse keeps on spreading an horrible smell and whose walls are still impregnated with the blood and anger of millions of individuals who were locked up there and raped of their lives. In my opinion such places should not only be closed down, but also totally razed to the ground so that there will be not even the memory of their infamy. Yes, for a few years there has been the habit to celebrate the ‘remembrance day’ [in memory of the victims who died in nazi concentration camps]: if we did not live in an upside-down world, they would probably celebrate the ‘oblivion day’, the total destruction of any concentration camps. And I want to point out that I do not use the word ‘concentration camp’ out of rhetoric or because it became fashionable among left-wing politicians who created the modern concentrations camps, I use it because it is a rigorous definition. As in the old colonial and nazi camps, in fact, people locked up in the CPTs did not commit any crime, they are only undesirables at the mercy of police and exploited by the bosses of the moment. Besides being jails for immigrants, the CPTs are places where foreign labourers, who can be blackmailed more easily, are selected. It is in fact important to remind that the exploitation of this kind of labourers is very important to capital.
The last question that I would like to express concerns the particular moment my comrades and I were arrested. It was soon after the arrest of Cesare Lodeserto, the director of Regina Pacis, and when many members of his staff, including doctors, operators, and cops were (and some still are) under investigation. It was necessary to take the public attention away from these episodes that has uncovered the real nature of that CPT and opened a crack in the wall that I had been trying for years to open myself so that everybody could look through it. It was at this point that attention had to be deviated and directed to the worst enemies of the State. This does not surprise me: it is one arm of the State that goes to secure its other arm. There is a popular saying that synthesizes the concept: ‘one hands washes the other and both wash the face’.
During the period I was detained I could personally experience the fury that the State has towards words, against which it has waged a war, as also proved by years of phone and environmental tapping against me and by the big quantity of papers that was seized in my house. It is hatred towards all the aspects of the word: the written and spoken word and therefore, basically, the thought. It is the attempt to kill Cartesio’s statement ‘I think, therefore I am’ because in a social system where ‘to have’ is much more important than ‘to be’, individuals must stop being, and it is not only a question of auxiliary verbs substituting each other.
I could realize that when censorship went for (and still does) my letters and books when I was in prison. The inner meaning of the matter can be found in one single sentence that has been repeated many times by a prison officer who, when I insisted to have books that had been kept for two months by the censors, used to say; ‘You read too much!’.
In my opinion this short sentence is quite meaningful and summarizes the sense of my incarceration and trial: ‘You read too much!’. If this is true, I am sorry, but I can’t reassure you, I will keep on thinking, reading, writing, speaking and therefore struggling. It does not matter if in the next years I will find myself on the one side or the other of the bars of this open prison that is called society, because I am convinced that in the court justice is not administrated but vengeance is executed instead.
Unless you agree with Dostoevskji, who wrote: ‘When they became criminals they invented the Justice and imposed a series of codes to preserve it, and to preserve the codes they invented the guillotine’. In this case, innocence is the worst thing ever.
I do not have anything else to tell you.
Lecce, June 28 2007
Salvatore Signore
Ernest Coeurderoy, Days of Exile
First of all I want to clarify that this declaration does not intend to be a justification because I have no reason to justify myself. Then, any clarification in this court is pointless because my words can hardly be understood in all their meaning in this place. Not that I think you are stupid but because we belong to opposing ‘sides’ – you represent power and I represent its enemy – and our ways of understanding and interpreting reality are absolutely different and alien to each other. This trial, however, is obviously and exclusively political, and therefore social, and I cannot help expressing what I think. I want to point out that my thoughts are addressed outside this court, to the vast mass of exploited and excluded to which I belong and to which I have always addressed myself with the means and methods that I have acquired through time.
The first thing that I want to say is that I send back to the sender the epithet of ‘terrorist’, which has been used to define me since this story begun, and also before that, aimed at producing satisfactory public opinion, which ‘is made by idiots’, as Stendhal rightly said, and the ensuing persecution and repression; I will come back to this later. For my part, as I have already done many times, I reaffirm that terrorism has always been the favourite weapon of States, be they old empires, more recent nazi-fascist or socialist dictatorships or advanced democracies. Even if those who hold power, and therefore the manipulators of History and Culture try to change its meaning, the word ‘terrorism’ means ‘use of indiscriminate violence with the aim of conquering, consolidating and defending political power’. Anarchists, on the contrary, even when they have decided to use violence, have never used it in an indiscriminate way. Then it is absolutely ridiculous to think that anarchists want to conquer power, given that their aim is to destroy it! After all, the bombs in the squares and on the trains, the massacre of entire populations and the ‘exporation of democracy’ are certainly not anarchist practises.
As far as the appellation of subversive is concerned, I candidly admit that that is what I am. What is an individual who despises all kinds of power and struggles for a completely different society and for the freedom of all living beings without distinctions, if not subversive? All this is certainly subversive in a world where social relations are based on exploitation, robbery, exclusion and abuse of the weakest. Furthermore, I could never belong to any subversive ‘association’, which would really be a very miserable thing and would not match with the fact that I am anarchist, which I assert and for which I am defendant in this trial. As an anarchist, I have two fundamental principles: the individual and anti-authoritarianism. Therefore I could never organize myself in a vertical way – even if I have been defined ‘leader’ and ‘chief’ and, according to the prosecution, I occupied a ‘leader’ s position’. I strongly refute these words. I could never organize myself in a rigid way either, because in that case the organisation itself would dominate me and I would become a mere instrument and appendix of it, and my being a unique individual among other unique individuals would disappear behind it. On the contrary I establish my relations according to the necessity of the moment, to the love, friendship and affinity that link me to others. I can agree for a moment on one question and soon after be in total disagreement on another. But this relation is always horizontal, informal and never hierarchical, according to the principle of anti-authoritarianism. In this free and temporary relation, I am free to move by myself or with whoever wants to move with me. On the contrary, in an organized structure, individuals only move inside the ‘association’, exactly like in political parties. If I acted in this way I would follow a religion, but as anarchist I am against political parties and religions, no matter what they say. I would even be against anarchism if the latter were to become a dogma and therefore religion.
Another accusation made against me and that I want to clarify because I find it disgusting is that I would make ‘proselytism’. This practise does not belong to me; it belongs, for example, to the armed forces that go around schools in order to convince kids to enlist, and to priests and to missionaries all over the world. But I have always been extraneous to the ‘missionary logic’. I do not think that social change is a historical mission that I have to carry out nor do I think that it is an inevitable event according to some determinist dream. On the contrary I think that it is an open possibility that can become true or not, that can be fair or not. And it will not be any ‘party’ of anarchists to radically transform the world; it will be the exploited that organize themselves together with anarchists. If I were to live my life and thought according to an historical mission, this too would overcome my will and would transform it into an instrument of something that does not belong to me and that would be the opposite of individuality. I would disappear behind the historical mission, behind the ideology. On the contrary I have never had the arrogance to claim that I know the truth in the place of ignorant masses that have not understood anything and that I should ‘convert’ and ‘indoctrinate’; in this way I would be putting myself in a vanguardist position, which anarchists historically refuse; I have never wanted to be a vanguard. What I do, through articles in our papers, posters, demonstrations, meetings, distribution of books, and which is being judged in this court, is called propaganda, that is to say an instrument for expressing my thoughts and ideas. Mind you, I said Ideas, not mere and stupid opinions. Opinions only represent the empty shell of ideas, as they do not have the subversive potential of the latter. Ideas are something more, they are dangerous, especially in times of social anaesthesia as those we are living in, and it is for this reason that they scare.
This is the real point: what is on trial, exactly, in this court? Not certainly ‘crimes’, to justify most of which the investigators had to construe ‘evidence’ and interpret in their own way words, sentences, concepts, highlighting what was convenient for them and omitting all the rest. No, it is not this. Here it is the Idea that is on trial, anarchist thought and practise. Nobody can believe in the old story of the ‘State of Right’, also because, as Hobbes rightly said, ‘rights being equal, strength wins’.
It is therefore clear that courts defend class interests, the class of the included against the big majority of the excluded, which is growing. It is sufficient to observe the social provenance of prisoners in the very democratic Italian jails to find the best confirmation to my statements. So it becomes intolerable that individuals wanting freedom, the destruction of all power and a dignified life for everybody are set free. It is not by chance that there exists a continuous and constant attack against what can be defined the ‘anarchist movement’. This attack has been increasing over the last ten years, and this is also due to the politics of emergency that the State has been adopting for a long while and upon which it now bases its very existence: it is a consolidated rule to create a fictitious enemy towards which to address subjects’ fears so that they create a common front against the ‘danger’ of the moment and cannot see who are really responsible for their misery: one day it is the mafia emergency, another it is environmental emergency, then the immigration emergency comes out. Following this logic today there stands an external enemy – foreigners in general and Arabs in particular – and an internal enemy – all those who oppose the present state of things, and anarchists in particular.
Dozens of conspiracy court cases were set against anarchists, most of which have ended up in nothing. What the prosecution is trying here, therefore, is not so much to put me and some other comrades in prison, which would be too little a thing, but to obtain a final sentence that could be useful in future penal procedures and help to get rid of anarchists for a few years, while sending a warning to all the others. The thinking heads of the State have certainly realized that, for a series of reasons, Lecce is the right place where such a precedent could be created: it is a little town on the suburbs of the Empire, where in their opinion there would be little resistance, and then there are no specific precedents. The most extraordinary thing, however, is that to obtain such a sentence, instruments that have failed elsewhere are being used, i.e. the usual old joke that fills the documents of investigators and public prosecutors about anarchist organising themselves on a double level – one public and the other clandestine – and the intentionally distorted interpretation of a comrade’ s words that have been published in a number of books. There is, in fact, a repressive thread on a national level, which is put into practice on a local level only to make it easier. A few more steps in this direction and, who knows, anyone who has certain books in his house will be criminalized! After all, it is exactly books that were seized in the course of the searches carried out when we were arrested… It is perhaps useful to remind that the ‘dangerous books’ hunt was carried out during the holy Inquisition and during Nazism, and it is also useful to remember that a few days ago in Bologna searches were made and an investigation on conspiracy was opened on the pretext that comrades were distributing a book that criticized the infamous ‘Biagi law’. And it is quite bizarre that some books are being considered the source of certain theories and strategies, in spite of the fact that your own magistrates have sentenced the falseness of these constructions!
Contrary to what the prosecution is trying to establish, I am a dangerous individual not because I speak and act in a clandestine way but because of the exact opposite: because I do not need to do so. I think I am a free individual coherent with himself, at least I try, so I openly say what I think and do what I say: theory becomes practise and practise becomes theory. I understand how this can be disturbing and unpleasant to power. It must be in fact unpleasant to mayor Poli [the right-wing mayor of Lecce] that in her ‘polis’, that is to say a town ruled by a bunch of exploiters under which slaves are submitted, there is still somebody who wants to take back the ‘agora’, that is to say a free piazza where there can be free discussion and where the Idea, this thing so frightening, can be widespread. After all, as the inquisitors tried a lot of times to stop me, they know very well that I cannot stand the closeness of what they call ‘hens’ – our sites - especially as the excluded to whom I address myself are not habitual frequenters of such places.
My anarchist thoughts and practice are even more dangerous to the inquisitors when they are aimed at striking the terrorism of very important men and the violence perpetrated inside the new concentration camps of the State, the so-called CPTs. The pretext under which I was put in jail and I am under trial is exactly my radical opposition to these places.
I claim with strength my struggle against the detention centres for immigrants and against Regina Pacis in particular. It was an infamous place that was luckily closed down but whose corpse keeps on spreading an horrible smell and whose walls are still impregnated with the blood and anger of millions of individuals who were locked up there and raped of their lives. In my opinion such places should not only be closed down, but also totally razed to the ground so that there will be not even the memory of their infamy. Yes, for a few years there has been the habit to celebrate the ‘remembrance day’ [in memory of the victims who died in nazi concentration camps]: if we did not live in an upside-down world, they would probably celebrate the ‘oblivion day’, the total destruction of any concentration camps. And I want to point out that I do not use the word ‘concentration camp’ out of rhetoric or because it became fashionable among left-wing politicians who created the modern concentrations camps, I use it because it is a rigorous definition. As in the old colonial and nazi camps, in fact, people locked up in the CPTs did not commit any crime, they are only undesirables at the mercy of police and exploited by the bosses of the moment. Besides being jails for immigrants, the CPTs are places where foreign labourers, who can be blackmailed more easily, are selected. It is in fact important to remind that the exploitation of this kind of labourers is very important to capital.
The last question that I would like to express concerns the particular moment my comrades and I were arrested. It was soon after the arrest of Cesare Lodeserto, the director of Regina Pacis, and when many members of his staff, including doctors, operators, and cops were (and some still are) under investigation. It was necessary to take the public attention away from these episodes that has uncovered the real nature of that CPT and opened a crack in the wall that I had been trying for years to open myself so that everybody could look through it. It was at this point that attention had to be deviated and directed to the worst enemies of the State. This does not surprise me: it is one arm of the State that goes to secure its other arm. There is a popular saying that synthesizes the concept: ‘one hands washes the other and both wash the face’.
During the period I was detained I could personally experience the fury that the State has towards words, against which it has waged a war, as also proved by years of phone and environmental tapping against me and by the big quantity of papers that was seized in my house. It is hatred towards all the aspects of the word: the written and spoken word and therefore, basically, the thought. It is the attempt to kill Cartesio’s statement ‘I think, therefore I am’ because in a social system where ‘to have’ is much more important than ‘to be’, individuals must stop being, and it is not only a question of auxiliary verbs substituting each other.
I could realize that when censorship went for (and still does) my letters and books when I was in prison. The inner meaning of the matter can be found in one single sentence that has been repeated many times by a prison officer who, when I insisted to have books that had been kept for two months by the censors, used to say; ‘You read too much!’.
In my opinion this short sentence is quite meaningful and summarizes the sense of my incarceration and trial: ‘You read too much!’. If this is true, I am sorry, but I can’t reassure you, I will keep on thinking, reading, writing, speaking and therefore struggling. It does not matter if in the next years I will find myself on the one side or the other of the bars of this open prison that is called society, because I am convinced that in the court justice is not administrated but vengeance is executed instead.
Unless you agree with Dostoevskji, who wrote: ‘When they became criminals they invented the Justice and imposed a series of codes to preserve it, and to preserve the codes they invented the guillotine’. In this case, innocence is the worst thing ever.
I do not have anything else to tell you.
Lecce, June 28 2007
Salvatore Signore
Statement to the court in Lecce
The arrest of five comrades in Lecce, which was carried out simultaneously with others all over Italy, has offered the occasion for a deceiving and denigrating campaign.
The accusation of having formed a subversive association aiming at subverting the democratic order of the State exists only because it has been theorized by the investigators. The media have also played an important role in this context. Having repeated statements such as ‘anarchist cell’, ‘association’, ‘violent actions’ etc, something will remain in people’s minds, no matter what the conclusion of the trial is. This terrible way of speaking is still employed today and often ends up in total invention of news.
With fury and hysteria they have tried to silence anarchists and present them as monsters, as happens with all rebels. For this reason some of us have been held under arrest for almost two years, while the appeals that the prosecution incessantly presents against our release make our freedom a kind of lottery. Rules are mere instruments of interpretation: those who decide do not care about the individuals involved, individuals who in this case are aware of what they are and what they want. In fact, in spite of everything, anarchists have kept on defending their dignity and their ideas. Hence the fact that they are considered dangerous: in an era when dissent must be erased, this trial, like many others, is more than a trial against intentions, it is a trial against our convictions, desires, ways of being, thinking and acting.
Anarchists love freedom and are against any kind of prison, but they do not only say that. They express, demonstrate and practise that with their best weapon: solidarity. And it is also for this reason that they are considered dangerous. In a society where individuals are more and more isolated and where terror is inculcated in everyone’s mind, real solidarity, that which links people who do not know each other or that is the product of their common feelings, cannot be considered anything but dangerous. For this reason, even when protests are clearly social and derive from the awareness of the people promoting them, they are labelled as terrorism. Today it is sufficient to write on a wall to be considered a terrorist. Solidarity is suspicious to the inquisitors just as love and friendships are. Glaringly clear evidence of that is given by this court, where various witnesses for the prosecution have talked about relations, meetings, links and closeness between people. It is not specific crimes, therefore, that are being persecuted, but an idea and the individuals who hold it. It could be argued that the democratic State allows everybody to express their opinion in respect of personal rights and guarantees. Well, my arrest has been justified by the fact that in 2004 I sent emails in which I communicated the arrest of my partner.
I think that these miserable manoeuvres, which aim at humiliating and frightening us and making us renounce our lives, affections, past and future, demonstrate yet again the groundlessness of this theorem and their concern to keep it alive.
Another element that I consider even more damaging for my identity is the attempt to confine me in a rigid, closed organisation. This proves the inquisitors’ inability to understand a horizontal way of life that does not know hierarchies and is based on mutual respect; on the contrary they have individuated leaders and subjects among people who, like us, refuse these concepts. Moreover, as the prosecution records state, if you are a woman you can only be the fiancée or partner of the most influential male, or, according to occasional circumstances, his manipulator. That a man and woman have a horizontal relationship cannot be understood.
It is however important to talk about what is being discussed in this trial, that is to say the existence of a terrorist organisation. If we consider the classic definition of terrorism, ‘use of indiscriminate violence aimed at conquering, consolidating and defending political power’, we can well understand who the terrorists are and where they can be found. Imposition, authority and violence inflicted on harmless people are their instruments and their weapons. They declare and wage wars that kill millions of civilians and, by deception, present them as useful and necessary; they impose by strength infrastructures that devastate nature and the life of its inhabitants and take vital resources away from them. All these considerations are linked to another element of this trial: the criminalizing of the struggle against the detention centres for immigrants. Today they are called concentration camps even by the left that introduced them to Italy and intend to keep them there, whereas many individuals have been trying for a long time to unveil their real nature and affirm that, even if the media and the investigators still call them welcome centres, CPTs are prisons for foreigners whose only guilt is that they do not have regular documents and who, almost always, have escaped from wars, misery and catastrophe or are simply looking for better living conditions, and this search often costs them their life. If on the one hand there is the attempt to present all illegal immigrants as criminals and to hide the real nature of the places where they are imprisoned (of which the CPT in San Foca was an outstanding example), on the other there is the attempt to silence and isolate with all means necessary the anarchists who consider these places an intolerable reality. This has happened in Lecce, where, also thanks to the media, anarchists were called terrorists with the aim of frightening public opinion. This was not sufficient, so repression also struck anyone who demonstrated his/her solidarity to the accused anarchists so that that would be the end of them in Lecce.
Furthermore two places open to the public, where initiatives, concerts, discussions, social dinners have been held and books were at everybody’s disposal have been labelled as criminal dens. Relations between individuals have been presented as an organized group with a leader. Any action that took place in Lecce and surroundings has been attributed to these individuals, whereas phrases, quotations and opinions, have been rigorously quoted out of context, and their superficial and false interpretation have been used to insinuate vicious activity by these individuals. This method has constantly been used in this court, where the prosecution has systematically omitted everything that could be on the defendants’ side. This grotesque picture has been completed by the exasperating attention that the men in uniform have given to books, magazines, leaflets, posters and other material that has been around for years. I think that is why the inquisitors try to get rid of anarchists and give them so many years in prison as if it were nothing, simply because anarchists think and write too much.
In conclusion, I want to say that the repression hitting us is being inflicted day after day on the rebels and excluded of this wealthy society on the edge of the abyss, and that the lack of freedom inflicted on us during these months (isolation, deprivation of affection, morbid and obsessive control of our personal life), is also experienced, sometimes quite dramatically, by the millions of prisoners in Italy and all over the world and by the foreigners locked up in the CPTs, whereas a generalized delirium points at the question of security and conceals the widespread precariousness that is affecting more and more people. And it is exactly because I am a foreigner among the foreigners that I’d like to remember Vasile Costantin, a Rumanian who remained completely paralysed on August 10 2004 while attempting to escape the detention centre in San Foca. His story, like many others, testifies where the real violence is, a violence that takes life away from millions of individuals day after day. The management of this deprivation, which is propagandised as charity, but which is so false that it has been uncovered even by the magistrates, has often been justified by those in charge (such as in the case of Regina Pacis) as a simple and necessary execution of the law. The many escapes and revolts that have occurred in the CPTs, including the Regina Pacis, demonstrate better than anything else the reality of such places and what that law was and still is: the product of racism, exploitation and repression. After all, even the nazi camps were legal and so were the Italian racial laws, but they certainly were not legitimate.
With these words, I return the appellation of terrorist back to the sender.
Lecce, June 28 2007
Marina Ferrari
The accusation of having formed a subversive association aiming at subverting the democratic order of the State exists only because it has been theorized by the investigators. The media have also played an important role in this context. Having repeated statements such as ‘anarchist cell’, ‘association’, ‘violent actions’ etc, something will remain in people’s minds, no matter what the conclusion of the trial is. This terrible way of speaking is still employed today and often ends up in total invention of news.
With fury and hysteria they have tried to silence anarchists and present them as monsters, as happens with all rebels. For this reason some of us have been held under arrest for almost two years, while the appeals that the prosecution incessantly presents against our release make our freedom a kind of lottery. Rules are mere instruments of interpretation: those who decide do not care about the individuals involved, individuals who in this case are aware of what they are and what they want. In fact, in spite of everything, anarchists have kept on defending their dignity and their ideas. Hence the fact that they are considered dangerous: in an era when dissent must be erased, this trial, like many others, is more than a trial against intentions, it is a trial against our convictions, desires, ways of being, thinking and acting.
Anarchists love freedom and are against any kind of prison, but they do not only say that. They express, demonstrate and practise that with their best weapon: solidarity. And it is also for this reason that they are considered dangerous. In a society where individuals are more and more isolated and where terror is inculcated in everyone’s mind, real solidarity, that which links people who do not know each other or that is the product of their common feelings, cannot be considered anything but dangerous. For this reason, even when protests are clearly social and derive from the awareness of the people promoting them, they are labelled as terrorism. Today it is sufficient to write on a wall to be considered a terrorist. Solidarity is suspicious to the inquisitors just as love and friendships are. Glaringly clear evidence of that is given by this court, where various witnesses for the prosecution have talked about relations, meetings, links and closeness between people. It is not specific crimes, therefore, that are being persecuted, but an idea and the individuals who hold it. It could be argued that the democratic State allows everybody to express their opinion in respect of personal rights and guarantees. Well, my arrest has been justified by the fact that in 2004 I sent emails in which I communicated the arrest of my partner.
I think that these miserable manoeuvres, which aim at humiliating and frightening us and making us renounce our lives, affections, past and future, demonstrate yet again the groundlessness of this theorem and their concern to keep it alive.
Another element that I consider even more damaging for my identity is the attempt to confine me in a rigid, closed organisation. This proves the inquisitors’ inability to understand a horizontal way of life that does not know hierarchies and is based on mutual respect; on the contrary they have individuated leaders and subjects among people who, like us, refuse these concepts. Moreover, as the prosecution records state, if you are a woman you can only be the fiancée or partner of the most influential male, or, according to occasional circumstances, his manipulator. That a man and woman have a horizontal relationship cannot be understood.
It is however important to talk about what is being discussed in this trial, that is to say the existence of a terrorist organisation. If we consider the classic definition of terrorism, ‘use of indiscriminate violence aimed at conquering, consolidating and defending political power’, we can well understand who the terrorists are and where they can be found. Imposition, authority and violence inflicted on harmless people are their instruments and their weapons. They declare and wage wars that kill millions of civilians and, by deception, present them as useful and necessary; they impose by strength infrastructures that devastate nature and the life of its inhabitants and take vital resources away from them. All these considerations are linked to another element of this trial: the criminalizing of the struggle against the detention centres for immigrants. Today they are called concentration camps even by the left that introduced them to Italy and intend to keep them there, whereas many individuals have been trying for a long time to unveil their real nature and affirm that, even if the media and the investigators still call them welcome centres, CPTs are prisons for foreigners whose only guilt is that they do not have regular documents and who, almost always, have escaped from wars, misery and catastrophe or are simply looking for better living conditions, and this search often costs them their life. If on the one hand there is the attempt to present all illegal immigrants as criminals and to hide the real nature of the places where they are imprisoned (of which the CPT in San Foca was an outstanding example), on the other there is the attempt to silence and isolate with all means necessary the anarchists who consider these places an intolerable reality. This has happened in Lecce, where, also thanks to the media, anarchists were called terrorists with the aim of frightening public opinion. This was not sufficient, so repression also struck anyone who demonstrated his/her solidarity to the accused anarchists so that that would be the end of them in Lecce.
Furthermore two places open to the public, where initiatives, concerts, discussions, social dinners have been held and books were at everybody’s disposal have been labelled as criminal dens. Relations between individuals have been presented as an organized group with a leader. Any action that took place in Lecce and surroundings has been attributed to these individuals, whereas phrases, quotations and opinions, have been rigorously quoted out of context, and their superficial and false interpretation have been used to insinuate vicious activity by these individuals. This method has constantly been used in this court, where the prosecution has systematically omitted everything that could be on the defendants’ side. This grotesque picture has been completed by the exasperating attention that the men in uniform have given to books, magazines, leaflets, posters and other material that has been around for years. I think that is why the inquisitors try to get rid of anarchists and give them so many years in prison as if it were nothing, simply because anarchists think and write too much.
In conclusion, I want to say that the repression hitting us is being inflicted day after day on the rebels and excluded of this wealthy society on the edge of the abyss, and that the lack of freedom inflicted on us during these months (isolation, deprivation of affection, morbid and obsessive control of our personal life), is also experienced, sometimes quite dramatically, by the millions of prisoners in Italy and all over the world and by the foreigners locked up in the CPTs, whereas a generalized delirium points at the question of security and conceals the widespread precariousness that is affecting more and more people. And it is exactly because I am a foreigner among the foreigners that I’d like to remember Vasile Costantin, a Rumanian who remained completely paralysed on August 10 2004 while attempting to escape the detention centre in San Foca. His story, like many others, testifies where the real violence is, a violence that takes life away from millions of individuals day after day. The management of this deprivation, which is propagandised as charity, but which is so false that it has been uncovered even by the magistrates, has often been justified by those in charge (such as in the case of Regina Pacis) as a simple and necessary execution of the law. The many escapes and revolts that have occurred in the CPTs, including the Regina Pacis, demonstrate better than anything else the reality of such places and what that law was and still is: the product of racism, exploitation and repression. After all, even the nazi camps were legal and so were the Italian racial laws, but they certainly were not legitimate.
With these words, I return the appellation of terrorist back to the sender.
Lecce, June 28 2007
Marina Ferrari
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