The decision of the court regarding the appeal against the special surveillance measure against a comrade from Genoa was made in August; the request that this measure, applied with all possible restrictions, be removed from her was rejected and it was clear that, although the accusation of terrorism, the pillar of the accusatory hypothesis, was dropped, the special surveillance measure was maintained in its entirety for the same reasons, that is, her “adherence to anarchist ideology”, her “manifest expressions of solidarity with the militants of the Informal Anarchist Federation”, her “support for the detained anarchists”, her “incitement to direct action”, and her dissemination of counter-information material.
Still in August, always on the initiative of the Prosecutor’s Office of Genoa, other measures were arranged, as a corollary of the surveillance, aiming to limit even more her freedom, affecting her in the sphere of her affective relationships, since they add new constraints and new difficulties to the authorization, finally obtained after 7 months of waiting, to go and visit her family, which is domiciled outside the city of Genoa, that the companion has no right to leave. Moreover, her driving license was seized, with the absurd pretext that its possession could help her to commit crimes.
It is always the same refrain that continues to impose itself, a statement as monotonous as a broken record: the companion is an anarchist, therefore she is dangerous and this is confirmed by the fact that she is under investigation as an anarchist. In this way one could go on and on.
In this time of experimentation with instruments of social control extended to large parts of the population, anarchists have already gained a lot of experience in this matter and, for a long time, they have unmasked the lies of the narrative about the rights and freedom that one could have access to in civil and democratic society, if one gives in exchange obedience, delegation and legitimacy: it is quite obvious that the consequences of adhering to the social contract are mainly in favor of a few and to the detriment of the many.
The context may change, but the authoritarian drift of this time is not something new, it is the perfection of those instruments of social control that we already know, that is why the basic principles of the anarchist idea are still valid and they show the way: to preserve the value of the individual choice, to keep alive the spark of the criticism, to refuse the concertation with public institutions, of any level, to refuse the political representation of the movements and of the conflict, not to bend to the needs of the political realism.
We do not reaffirm them for sterile sectarianism, but because they are instruments of struggle that have supported thought and action, in the streets or elsewhere, en masse or in small numbers, facing, through theory and practice, the many, detestable scum that this dirty era throws back in our faces: the commodification of our lives, the plundering of the natural environment, the increasingly invasive authority and social control, the discriminations, the state violence, the surge of the logic of profit, which ravages humanity in a spiral of war, misery and slavery.
Among the motives invoked to justify the social danger of the comrade, we notice her interest for the questions and the anti-carceral fights: it is surely not a chance.
Since always, but even more during this last year and a half, the prisons of any kind are a real time bomb that could explode: in these places, the questions that are debated today in public gatherings of any color lose all ornaments and become a real struggle for survival and when one fights for one’s life one risks to lose all scruples and all fear Fighting against prison in all its forms means fighting against the state itself, it means attacking the very foundations of institutional authority, a terrain where the practice of class solidarity in its truest and most fruitful sense could take shape.
And, among others, in the State’s cells there are also our comrades; it seems that showing solidarity with them and spreading information or texts about them means catching a virus that inevitably triggers repressive chain reactions; one might ask why the State bothers to punish and isolate some anarchists who, as is well known, have always been masters in the art of rallying crowds… It is because these anarchists, even if locked up behind walls, remain nevertheless an active source of contributions for the theoretical confrontation about the struggle inside and also outside the prisons. Because reflection and debate about goals and practices ignite the fuse of thought and open unexpected perspectives.
In this simple remark we find a key to read the measures of special surveillance, which are increasing in Genoa, and we also find an inspiration to oppose them. This measure is applied to the individual, it aims at restricting personal freedom and the margin of possibilities, it aims at isolating and hindering contacts and associations; It creeps into daily life, as does the level of control to which one is subjected, through the mechanism of self-limitation, which is actually not too “self”, and, as in the case of the companion, when one has resigned oneself to losing freedom and possibilities of action, even stronger and more stifling levels of surveillance are applied. As a result, the response may simply be action in a diametrically opposed direction.
There may be different views on whether or not a course of contraposition to special surveillance measures can take into account the contributions of companions who are already facing the effects of these measures; these different views certainly depend on the objective one gives to such a course. The fact that we do not conduct ourselves with the intention of building common fronts of struggle does not mean that we are sectarian, rather it indicates the intention of finding complicities on the basis of a principle that is not necessarily aggregative.
However, it is necessary to question and debate the meaning of what is happening and the strategies to be implemented to prevent companions from facing alone the isolation in which the State, with all its apparatus, could force them; it is a way to go a little further and make sure that solidarity is not only expressed as a testimony, but that it is concrete action.
Source: Attaque