Journalists counted 72 military facilities that have been attacked by the resistance in Russia since the beginning of the war (tg channel Rospartizan), including 44 arson attacks. Military registration and enlistment offices were attacked most frequently. This figure obviously does not include attacks against conditionally civilian objects, such as local authorities, the headquarters of various parties and cars belonging to officials. Also not included are attacks on symbols of war and cars with symbols of war. It is not clear whether those cases where the authorities do not prosecute for arson, and write it off as negligence, are included.) It is also unclear whether the statistics include the actions of Ukrainian partisans on the territory of Russia and their joint actions.
Thus, it is not even possible to estimate the number of guerrilla attacks, let alone smaller acts of sabotage in the workplace. But we are not chasing statistics either. Of the trends, the following can be noted:
Guerrilla attacks are being carried out by people of all ages, from teenagers to people in their 70s and from all walks of life, from the unemployed to businessmen to scientists. Partisans include members of the anarchist movement and other forces, but many do not associate themselves with any political trend.
Many of the attacks are symbolic, they do not do much material damage to the enemy, but have value precisely as a moral gesture, a demonstration of personal choice and an appeal to others.
Here are some of the guerrilla attacks of late December:
December 22.
Arkhangelsk
Unknown assailants attacked one of the wealthiest deputies, Peter Vatutin, head of the “Just Russia” faction in the city Duma. At the intersection of Lomonosov and Serafimovich, in the center of the city, his car was shot four times, allegedly from a semi-automatic pistol. Hopefully, the next time they meet, the partisans will be better armed.
Orekhovo
Guerrillas burned a locomotive in Orekhovo near Moscow at night. Russian Railways officials reported that this was at least the fifth case of deliberate destruction of locomotives in a month, at various stations. A few hours earlier, unknown guerrillas burned a signaling unit, which led to a traffic stoppage on the Samara-Penza section. The partisans are at large. Continue reading “Russia: Radical Resistance 22.12-27.12.22”→
Rome. On New Year’s Eve we had zero desire to celebrate. We took to the streets full of rage. Supported by an unusual as well as thick fog, we attacked with fire the multinational Hertz, burning 4 vans. Those shits in Greece have made deals to supply vehicles to the cops.
We dedicate this action to Thanos, Greek comrade on hunger and thirst strike.
To Alfredo, on hunger strike for more than 70 days.
To Ivan, Anna, Juan and to all the anarchist prisoners.
Forza compas. Our hearts are with you.
Time passes but you endure and resist with your example of unwavering struggle sprouting from the earth like a native forest.
Today I write to you from prison with a bit of nostalgia since I cannot be present as I would like to be. I think that nothing is finished and in a personal way for the memories I have with you when I had no worries … I watched in wonder your punky crest while you took me in your arms you were with your jacket full of studs on your neck that I watched innocently; I can firmly say that with you I spent my best moments as a child. I remember to the surface that January 3, 2008 where as a result of the context everything was overturned in my days, with that burning that feels alone sometimes and that you try not to forget … because I would not see you anymore, however only disappears what we do not know how to look / feel and this is not the case because your flame fuels mine to feel the breeze, the rain and the smell of damp earth that like a blanket covers the roots of the great araucarias.
This is how time passes but you live in our memory and even though the road of the insurrectional struggle against capital and the miserable authoritarians who perpetuate misery may lead us to prison or death, it is still beautiful because those of us who throw ourselves with feeling and courage can say that we have been free and dignified, this is how we advance with nothing to fear.
“You accompany me in every step I take as I walk in the forest that they try to devastate and I say try because they will not be able to do it. You live in every outbreak feeding the storm waiting to lurk like a pangui to defend and attack those who want to occupy the land to exterminate.”
Matias Valentin Catrileo Quezada lives in the weichan!”
Tomás and Mawhünko (Santiago 1 Prison and San Miguel Prison)
On Tuesday, January 3, 15 years were commemorated since the murder of the weichafe Matías Catrileo in 2008 at the hands of the carabinero Walter Ramírez while armed confrontations were taking place in a territorial recovery in the former Santa Margarita estate (owned by the Luchsinger families).
For this new day of memory and combat, there was the deployment of banners and propaganda in different parts of the local territory; a concentration in Alameda at the height of Cerro Huelen where barricades were set up and confrontations with Molotov;
After armed confrontations in Villa Francia, a policewoman was shot in her helmet and had to be taken to the hospital. In the following days, an investigation was carried out at the site to search for those responsible. Also a RED bus was stopped and completely burned by hooded comrades. Continue reading “Chile: Commemoration 15 years after the assassination of Matías Catrileo”→
Like a gale that crushes the foundations of buildings and brains.
Like a merciless and brutal volcano that with its channel burns to its wide margins that oppress.
Like a jaguar digging its fangs. Tearing skins, muscles and organs of any intruder.
Your energy floats over our aggressive steps. And your eternal escape impregnates us with the boldness in life that had your animalistic footprint.
Compañero, ancestor and guide. Wherever your enormous existence drained of corporeality roams, here we embrace it from confinement.
Caged by the same bars that imprisoned you, and pointed by the same canons of plastic and miserable understanding of life, its essence and its beauty, which judged you. We smiled at you looking at the clouds and their shapes.
Fire, roar and an exorbitant love. That only an anti-speciesist of action can understand. That is what we invoke in your memory and honor. William C. Rodgers “Avalon”.*
“I live in the pupils and quickened pulses of those who make total liberation, more than pictures of wild animals on networks, instagram stories and dusty books.”
Susaron case Prisoners
C.D.P. Santiago 1
Women’s Prison San Miguel
December 2022.
* William C. Rodgers, Bill Rodgers, ‘Avalon’, co-proprietor of the Catalyst Infoshop in Prescott, Arizona, US. He was arrested with 6 others December 7, 2005 as part of the FBI’s Operation Backfire. The FBI were working on information provided by Ferguson, an informer accused of being part of the same ELF cell as Rodgers was accused of being part of. His charge was one count of arson for a June, 1998 fire set by the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) at the National Wildlife Research Center in Olympia, Washington. He was found dead in his jail cell on December 21, 2005.
Tuesday 10th January 2023, 7pm. Animal Liberation and Insurrection – Public Discussion
This society is nothing but a row of tightly monitored cages. Non-human animals have been, and continue to be, at the sharp-end of the scientific-industrial system. Locked up, experimented on, artificialised and domesticated – and yet their revolt continues, in escapes, in violent reactions against their capture and on their jailors.
Against this daily misery, what does an insurrection which finds connection with the revolt of non-human animals look like?
What wild horizons of freedom lie at the point where smashed cages meet severed networks of social control, and sabotage and expropriation spreading through the temples of work and consumption?
Tuesday 10th January 7pm
Touchpaper Anarchist Library
385 Queens Road, New Cross
SE14 5HD
At 05:00 on December 28th, his release date, Toby Shone was woken by members of the HMP Parc security department with an early morning leaving present. Crashing in through the door and making as much noise as possible, and amid a flood of insults and threats, Toby was ordered to get dressed solely for the screw-faced screws to be able to carry out a final strip search on him. Despite the abuse and attempted imitation, our fly on the wall reporter is able to confirm that he did not rise to their bait. Instead he just laughed in their faces. Picked up by plain clothes anti-terrorism cops an hour later, Toby was subjected to one final indignity by Parc, and was not issued with his statutory £82.39 discharge grant.
In these three years I was faced with choices which led me by the hand through a path fraught with crossroads and bifurcations.
Like on a minefield, I had to decide carefully where to step, with my pride and my self-respect at stake. The first choice I had to face with was whether I should continue to contribute, or let the prison overflow me, patiently waiting to get out. As limited as my situation is, I chose to continue to contribute through the written word. Once I made this decision I faced another crossroad: whether to confine myself — ecumenically — from this “high point” of my “status” (sic.) of a “revolutionary” prisoner — to bestowing blessings in each directions, applauding to every anarchist practice, paying attention not to make any enemies; or to use the weapon of critique, ever more harshly, trying to outline some analysis, to open some discourses. I chose the easier way (at least for me): openly push my critique to the extremes, at the cost of isolation (less letters, less information, less generic solidarity).
But always aware of the abyss between the thought and the action.
Words, strong as they may be, always carry something that sounds phony, even when they pose real, concrete risks, which may effectuate in years of prison for apology or incitement.
In “my” cell, the words I listen to most carefully are those that follow the actions, those which become flash and blood. They are alive, real, there’s no mistaking. They differ from the continuous blabbering in the background of an anarchist movement withdrawn in itself, affected by an embarrassing lack of courage and fantasy. A movement that feeds on appearance, on rhetoric and sometimes on demagogy, with its demonstrations, assemblies, communicative marches, campaigns of information and on rooting in a territory, a continuous blah blah. You don’t have to support claims of responsibility, but you know for sure they are honest because they are products of an action, because they’re written by really taking part in the game, putting one’s life in danger. In these times of virtual reality it is no small thing, and when then these claims talk to each other becoming campaigns of action, the background noise, the blabbering, definitely disappears, and everything gets more serious, more dangerous, more real. Continue reading “‘Ready or Not’ – Alfredo Cospito”→
Update about the health condition of Alfredo Cospito on the 71st day of hunger strike (Italy, December 29, 2022)
On December 29th, 71st day of the hunger strike to the bitter end against 41 bis and life imprisonment without possibility of parole, the antagonist radio station Radio Onda d’Urto broadcast a speech by the doctor who is regularly visiting anarchist comrade Alfredo Cospito, imprisoned in the Bancali prison in Sassari. We report a partial transcript of the speech and, at the end of the update, the recording of the broadcast (in italian language).
“[…] So, let’s consider that Alfredo is now 70 days into his hunger strike. He started from a weight of 115 kg and today he is at 84 kg. Surely he has a strong physique, he started from a fairly high weight so he has a better chance than others of being able to sustain this hunger strike. It is clear, however, that everything has an end at some point; in the sense that currently his haemato-chemical parameters are quite good, except for the fact that it is going down a bit with the electrolytes. Today he spoke to me about reducing his agony, in the sense that he wants to make it precipitate a little in order to shift the ground a little, a little more, so that he might eventually be transferred from 41 bis. I told him, however, that as far as potassium is concerned, which is part of the electrolytes, like sodium and chlorine, it is indispensable for contraction, especially for cardiac contraction – I am a cardiologist –, in fact, with the electrocardiogram that we did today there are alterations that are found in the ventricular recovery phase, and which show particular waves that result from potassium deficiency. Obviously I got a bit angry because, a few days ago, he stopped taking the supplements [extremely mild, light, which he has been taking for some time], so this is also the cause of the lowered potassium […]. He is a little convinced [to keep taking them, for a few more days] so he promised me that today and tomorrow, while waiting for the results of the tests [which are done about every four days], he will take the supplements. Then, as for the rest, psychologically he is in high spirits, smiling; a couple of days ago they moved him from his cell to another one, so he has air time with three other inmates, and this pleases him very much, because he talks to these other three inmates during air time. As a complexion then, in fact, he is a little better because he was very, very pale, but not pale because he was deficient in red blood cells; pale precisely because he was not taking light. And obviously the calcemia that he still has good is crumbling a little bit from the bones; somewhere, if you don’t take in food, the body subtracts and tries to help in some way. Let’s say that also as reasoning, as lucidity, he is fine; nothing to say about the answers he gives, they are not at all confused. He is reading, now and then he has a bit of blurred vision, he told me a bit of visual impairment, and that goes with the vitamin deficiency, of course. Every now and then, also because he wants to be conscious, he takes a little honey, which is a bit better than sugar […], when he was hypoglycaemic, they used to give him some sugar, but now he takes honey, so he doesn’t have these glycaemic drops any more. Then, for the rest, he is quite well; obviously he has lost a lot, a lot, a lot of weight, even since the first time I saw him, but nothing disastrous from the haemato-chemical analyses […]”.
In the face of the attempted annihilation of Alfredo, it is of the utmost importance that the ideas, deeds, and contribution of the comrade not be forgotten, condemned to oblivion as desired by the repressive apparatus of the state with the Scripta Manent trial, the Sibilla operation, and the transfer to the 41 bis regime.
The recent decree of the Court of Surveillance of Rome that confirms the detention in 41 bis is placed in the same perspective – the annihilation of the comrade – and is indicative of the reprisal that the state intends to give to the anarchist movement. Repression, convictions, decades of imprisonment, however, will not be enough nor can they ever lead to surrender: inevitably, our passion for freedom is stronger than any authority.
We continue the struggle with determination, we support all anarchist and revolutionary initiatives in solidarity with Alfredo Cospito who has been on hunger strike for over 70 days, with Ivan Alocco since December 22nd again on hunger strike alongside Alfredo, and with all imprisoned anarchists and revolutionaries.
The recording of the Radio Onda d’Urto broadcast (in italian language):