Four years after the repressive operation Renata on February 19, 2019, we publish – not for an aseptic “exhumation” of recent history, but because these are texts that address the profound social and individual reasons for the anarchists’ thought and action – the statement of the seven comrades accused during the first-degree trial (“To Burning Hearts”) and a second statement distributed during the appeal trial. In addition, we believe it is important and necessary to find and disseminate the statements of comrades who, during the trials, take the floor continuing to support the ideas and practices of attack against the state and capital.
To burning hearts
Statement of the anarchists accused at the trial for Operation Renata
The anarchist does not look to success, to victory, to competition. He fights, because it is right. And in any struggle loss is part of life. He does not change his mind because he loses, much less give up the next struggle. The System is self-feeding because of the people who do not fight, not because they are invincible. The anarchist’s job is to instill in the people revolt, not in segments but continuous. Like a wave that recedes and then returns. You ask me if we will win? You ask me the wrong question. Ask me if we will fight and I will answer yes.
Luigi Galleani
Today we decided to have our say on the “Renata” operation. In other writings, the investigation has been analyzed, both in its general repressive aspects of the state and with regard to the technological, inquisitorial and legal tools used to hit those who still dare to fight for something different and still blow on the wings of freedom.
We have decided not to turn to the court that will try us nor to the diligence of our repressors. A courtroom is not the place where we choose to speak today.
We want to speak in those places where there is struggle, where there is still critical spirit, wherever there are women and men who are aware that so many things must be changed now, that this state of affairs must be revolutionized.
So we are going to talk about the actions that we are accused of or that are included in the investigation.
These actions-night or day, individual or collective-are part of a conflict that goes far beyond the specific facts or the territory in which they are located. They are the result of a broader clash, that between the exploited, the exploiters and those who defend them.
Of these actions we share the spirit, the ethics, the method, the goals, regardless of who carried them out. They speak for themselves, they are understandable to most, they point to a path – that of liberation. They point the finger at those who live by exploitation and war, hatred and violence, they wish for something more, something that will put an end to the worst atrocities and barbarities, but above all they aim to destroy the wall of resignation, in times so poor in human solidarity, rebellion, critical thinking.
Those who in recent years have said and still say that such actions serve no purpose, that the game is not worth the candle, that nothing will change, that human beings have permanently lost their wits by reducing life to a constant fratricidal war, have stopped dreaming, have stopped questioning those responsible for injustice and the causes that have brought society to a moral, environmental and material level that is disturbing to say the least.
Among the various things recounted in the folders, it emerges that in recent years we have taken to the streets many times with helmets and sticks against parties and movements such as Lega, Casapound and Sentinelle in piedi. We have criticized in dozens of leaflets, posters and initiatives of various kinds their historical responsibilities and reactionary policies: political and religious groups that promote hatred among the exploited, that defend the landlord class, that nurture a society based on privilege, racism, patriarchy and more.
In these arid times of struggle and social confrontation, we are scandalized by practices of self-defense in the streets, forgetting, along with the past when this was common heritage, the minimal common sense of distinguishing reactionary from proletarian violence. Not only are we forgetting what the police, carabinieri, church and fascists have done in this country, but the violence of the day before yesterday: of Genoa 2001, of Florence, of Macerata and many others. Since their role and task are always the same, we have always considered it important that their action should find neither silence nor tranquility in the territory in which we live.
And about the 2001 Genoa revolt, and the state vengeance that continues to be exacted on comrades for those days, it is disconcerting to read with what clarity a collective intelligence was able at the time to foreshadow a series of scenarios: globalized devastation, unbridled neoliberalism, global warming, anti-immigrant policies producing new slaves…a social order that has now reached implosion.
Another silence we do not accept is the one surrounding deaths in prisons and barracks. Since the opening of the Spini prison in Trento, many inmates have committed suicide, others have tried, and still others have died due to medical negligence or the repressive zeal of supervisory magistrates. We have known the grief and anger of family members, friends, and those who have lost their child at the hands of the state, but we have unfortunately also known the indifference and silence of most, despite the fact that such tragedies are closer than we think.
Men and women who consciously play the role of torturers decide to help defend a society based on fear, blackmail, revenge, violence and prejudice. And we will always be ready to denounce their responsibilities, to obstruct their work, to push others to take a stand against these murderers in uniforms, double-breasted bureaucrats or white coats.
Those who tried to set fire to local police cars gave a signal to that effect. Local policemen are not only those who point out the streets as needed, but also those who participate in evictions of people who fail to pay the rent to their landlord, those who shoot a young boy in the back, as happened in Trento a few years ago, those who beat up black people, as happened in Florence, who enforce Daspo, who participate in raids against the undocumented, and carry out many other nefarious deeds.
Expulsions, concentration camps – whether they are called CPR or Hotspots -, deaths in the middle of the sea, in the mountains or along railroad tracks are the daily scenario of this world they would like us to get used to. That is why high-speed trains have been blocked in solidarity with those who are frozen on a mountain path or those who have been sucked into a freight train a few kilometers from our home. Also for this, on May 7, 2016, we clashed with police at the Brenner Pass and blocked railways and highways. “If human beings don’t pass, neither do goods”: that was the spirit of that difficult day.
In the face of the ferocious sneer of state racism, should we be outraged because someone, in October 2018, attacked the Lega di Ala headquarters?
In November 2016, several Poste Italiane cars were set on fire in Trento and Rovereto. In the writings left at the sites of the actions and reported in the newspapers, reference was made to the responsibilities of P. I., which, through its subsidiary Mistral Air, enriched itself by deporting to the countries of origin women and men who lacked the proper documents to live in Italy. Not to mention that P. I. invests part of its income in the fruitful business of the arms industry. We wonder what difference there is between the events that occurred in the 1930s and 1940s and those of today? Why are the victims of that time remembered with hypocritical mea culpas and nothing seems to shake the hearts of most today?
Not a day goes by without newspapers, websites, and television stations reading or seeing this or that war. Wars by proxy, wars for geopolitical interests, wars for territory, of territory, for power. Wars that cause the great displacements of men and women. Promoting these wars are not only industrial groups such as FIAT (with Iveco) or the CEOs of Leonardo, Finmeccanica and Fincantieri. At their service is a host of technicians and scientists, an army in white coats, with gloves and sterilized hands, working in laboratories in our cities, in universities on our doorstep. In the name of science and progress, any “discovery” is justified, without some basic question being raised from those places: “What does this lead to?”, “what new scenarios does it open up?”, “who does it really serve?” So here it is that in democratic and peaceful Trentino, the University collaborates with the Italian military, helps Israeli institutions better plan the oppression of the Palestinian people, lets major arms companies into its councils and classrooms. In the face of this blatant connivance, are we surprised that unknown persons set fire to the Cryptolab laboratory inside the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics in Povo in April 2017? When on the same university sites, collaboration with the military is illustrated?
What about the burning of military vehicles on the night of May 27, 2018, inside the training area of the Roverè della Luna firing range? In addition to bulldozers and trucks, three Leopard tanks were set on fire. German-made, these are the same tanks that Erdogan has used and is using to crush Kurdish resistance. As anti-militarist posters that appeared in Germany years ago used to say, “A military vehicle burning here = someone who does not die in some war.” A concept of … disarming simplicity.
Still on the subject of anti-militarism and internationalism, the investigation papers mention sabotage of ATMs at Unicredit, a bank that, not counting its investments in the war industry, is the main financier of Erdogan’s fascist regime, which just these days is showing all its ferocity in Syria and against internal dissent. And then mention is made of the train sabotage at the Alpini Assembly. For those who have no heroes to honor, but carnage to curse, those gestures of hostility against the parade of nationalism and gallant machismo have reactivated a modicum of historical memory: the desertions, mutinies, bread riots, strikes in factories, shooting at officers particularly hated by the troop, riots to the cry of “war on war!”, the intransigent positioning “against war, against peace, for social revolution,” which is ever more relevant today.
We support the dockers of Genoa, Le Havre and Marseille who opposed the loading and unloading of war material destined for the Saudi army that has been slaughtering the Yemeni population for years with bombs made, until the other day, in Italy. But we are not satisfied. We would like workers to desert the arms factories, the naval factories and the chemical factories; we would like scientists to walk out of their laboratories. We would like universities to go on strike, starting with law schools, where so-called “peace-keeping missions” (Peace-keeping, they call it) are justified; we would like railroad workers to block trains as at the time of the first Gulf War.
Through wars, industrialists get rich by exploiting the laboring workforce and buying their conscience for a piece of bread. And still for less if temporary agencies buy it, exploiting old and new labor laws and sending people to work on devastating projects like the TAP in Puglia. That is why we are not surprised that someone in Rovereto damaged a Randstadt agency, reminding us that class warfare is not over.
Another action we are accused of is the burning of repeaters on Mount Finonchio, above Rovereto, in June 2017.
We have always denounced, and we are certainly not the only ones, the environmental damage caused by the tens of thousands of these towers scattered throughout the territories, whose waves cause cancers and various ailments to humans and animals (and much worse will be with 5G).
On top of that, such technologies have diminished concentration and learning abilities, conditioned the purchase of goods, created induced needs, senile brains. Not to mention the most important aspect: social control. By now, police investigations are based almost exclusively on video and audio intercepts to be edited and disassembled at will. Repression and control are enhanced with every technological breakthrough, which in turn secures business for companies that collaborate with states. This trend is not political, but structural, since the apparatus enhances itself and, under the pretext of security, justifies anything.
We are challenged about “planning the revolution” through magazines, appeals, writings. Well, yes. We do not break down in the face of the adversities of this age. Every gasp of rebellion, every uprising that tends toward freedom, every revolutionary motion that echoes more or less close to us is cause for renewal energies for propaganda and action in order to urge the society around us to radical change. That is why we have occupied various buildings over the years: not only to have spaces in which to organize and create debate, but also to try to put into practice the life we would like, with our merits and flaws. We may be dreamers, romantics, deluded, but we are also determined, supportive, internationalist, concrete.
If there is a need to raise our voices in front of the doors of a supermarket or at the gates of a factory or construction site against the nefariousness of the bosses and the state, we will be there; if there is a need to block projects such as the TAV, by climbing on a drill or damaging it, we will be there; we will be where the voice of revolt is raised.
Finally, some of us are accused of fabricating false documents. Document forgery is a tool that all movements of struggle, anarchist and others, have equipped themselves with to evade state repression, and which the exploited and the poor have resorted to and are resorting to in order to travel in search of a better place to live. Especially in a world where, if you don’t have the right piece of paper in your pocket, you die at sea or in a Libyan lager, or end up in one of the many concentration camps scattered across civilized and democratic Europe.
Investigators claim that an affinity group is difficult “to infiltrate and demoralize.” That those who aim for power cannot understand those who aim for freedom seems to us a very good thing.
It will not be convictions and jail time that will make us raise the white flag. We will continue to want that radical change glimpsed during the Paris Commune of 1871, which so rattled the state and the bosses. We know that this radical change will not come out of nowhere, by some determinism of history. It will be the fruit of the will, driven toward the highest aims of human coexistence, toward anarchy, “a way of individual and social life to be realized for the greater good of all” (Malatesta).
A concept as simple as it is far removed from the situation in which we find ourselves.
Every action today that goes to point to those directly responsible for human and environmental exploitation is useful because it makes it clear that oppression is closer than we think.
But it will be up to the will of each of us to break down the fears to which they would have us subject ourselves and wake us up from the material comforts with which they kill the spirit, thoughts, and ideas.
We will not force anyone to do what he or she does not want to do, but neither will we allow in our name or with our cooperation continued destruction and killing. We will not remain helpless and impassive. We will not be silenced or dragged into the mire of barbarism.
In recent years and months we have seen dozens of comrades go to jail, some sentenced to long terms. We call for unity and necessary responses to these attacks on our movement. Taking action will inevitably lead to mistakes. It is about tempering bodies and minds for renewed confidence in the ideas and practices of freedom.
They want us to fall into resignation and bewilderment. They have already failed.
Since inquisitors so much like to play with words (of others) no less than with deeds, “Renata” seems yet another lexical stumble, because every burning heart is ready to be “reborn” for every wrong suffered.
Trent, Oct. 18, 2019
Stecco, Agnes, Rupert, Sasha, Poza, Nico and Julius
***
Statement of the defendants distributed during the appeal trial for Operation Renata
Under what conditions, in what sense will the story unfold later? These questions are insoluble. What we know as of now is that life will be the less inhuman the greater the individual capacity to think and act.
Simone Weil
It has been two years since the operation that led to our arrests and since, months later, we put down on paper what we had to say about it. To this day, five of us find ourselves subject to precautionary measures, pending the appeal process, measures that are not even counted toward the execution of our sentences. An “obligation to stay” that in actuality looks like a kind of “confinement” by finding us divided and scattered in various parts of the peninsula. Far more noteworthy, however, is what has happened in the meantime. We can say without much ado that the world (still the world out there, for some and some of us, but apparently not only for us) has literally turned upside down. The Covid-19 epidemic has thrown in our faces not only what the consequences of capitalist social organization can be (with the devastation of nature, two centuries of industrial warfare on the planet we inhabit, scientific irresponsibilities in pursuit of solutions for ever greater profit), but also what the response of states can be to bring potential dissidents back into those same resignatory logics that have allowed us to find ourselves in this two thousand and one.
Thus came the shrug of the “democratic society” in the face of state massacres in prisons, which, finding itself among the comforts of the other side of the wall, let the screams of those inmates who first raised their heads be stifled. Those cries of despair found a society capable of “accepting” the everydayness of curfew, a society capable of adapting itself to the logic of incarceration. This we must see: from here, from the habit of an increasingly frightening normality comes that indifference, gradually turning into the inability of a critical spirit for everything else as well: of a caring for one another, of a concrete solidarity, rendered “illicit” and “criminal” no doubt by repressive operations, but perhaps even more so by the resignation to seeing Truth only in state slogans (how to forget the flags on the balconies, the “distant but united,” the “we are all in the same boat,” and finally the belief in Science as the only “savior god”). Like a blow on the real and class clash, the digitization of the world, presenting itself as an escape from a reality that “it is better not to see,” can only accelerate this process of detachment from the world. These are messages of our time that we must begin to see clearly.
But in addition to trying to see clearly, we are among those trying to look far ahead to find the strength to fight here, because the internationalist terrain is what gives meaning to all struggles for freedom. And it has certainly not escaped our notice that in so many parts of the world hundreds of thousands of oppressed people are fighting against containment measures that have everything of the military and little of the sanitary, against systemic police violence, against increasingly authoritarian regimes.
This is perhaps why the slew of police operations that have come down against anarchists and anarchists in the past two years show increasingly repressive measures and strategies. Overtly preventive arrests to prevent “blowing on the fire” of social discontent, accusations of terrorism against those who resisted a prison beating, the infamous charge of massacre as a new repressive weapon to bury comrades and comrades under dozens of years in prison (such as the very heavy convictions in Operation Scripta Manent and the ongoing trial of Juan).
But this must be read in the present we are going through. If, for example, anyone who does not accept the state’s ready-made package on any front, imposing the unique path of silence-consent, is defined as a “conspiracist” (when not even, thwarting the historical meaning of the term, branded with the category of “denialist”), it is no wonder that a group of anarchists is charged with “incitement to commit crimes” or tried for “subversive association” for having, among other things, pointed out (because we are not talking about who knows what innovative theories, just open the window) how and why the responsibilities of capitalist social organization are the actual causes of the birth and spread of this as well as other epidemics, wars, exploitation.
We also read this among the papers that lead us to the appeal of Operation Renata: where an anarchist magazine becomes the space for “the declared aims of the association”-as a premise certainly useful to the accusation of “terrorism”-as there is affirmed the obviousness of the fact that a revolutionary process cannot “exclude even violent forms of struggle.” Lords, with the stubborn obstinacy of wanting to bring anarchism within the hierarchical logic of the criminal process, try to blame those who express what is obvious for the fact that… “someone will end up believing it sooner or later”: if it were not the tragic attempt to increase the years in jail would result at least grotesque.
As might have been predictable, the statement written on the occasion of the first-degree trial-“To Burning Hearts,” which follows this foreword-did not take long to arrive on the desks of several prosecutors’ offices. But we certainly do not seek justice where it cannot be found, and we are aware that it is first and foremost the disproportionate balance of power on the ground that grants ground to the repressive bravado of the state. Only when struggles manage to take space do the roles of the society in which we live become clearer, including those of legal farce, and the weapons of repression become less effective. That is why we believe that this two thousand and one is also the fruit of a revolutionary spirit that is inconsistent and rendered mute, if not completely incapable of imagining itself. But we also know that there are (im)possible ways that can change things. Wrote Bakunin at the dawn of the Paris Commune, “it is by seeking the impossible that man has always realized the possible.” We know this as do all the anarchists and anarchists in every corner of the world who now find themselves behind bars. To them we send our greetings, our complicity, the fervent solidarity that animates us in action. We do this today as we will remember it tomorrow if we find ourselves again within the narrow walls of a cell.
Yes, we will continue to be stubborn because we know that it is only with this spirit that we will be able to look forward, to continue to fight for freedom, striving by the means we deem most suitable and aware that we are facing an enemy that, spontaneously, will not take any step backward. The beat we feel can never be felt by the judgment of a social organization that is the child of profit and competition. Let us look further to see clearly. But for this it will not be enough to turn our gaze to our hands and minds.
It is necessary to turn it especially to our hearts.
Our burning hearts.
Trento, February 22, 2021
Stecco, Agnes, Rupert, Sasha, Poza, Nico and Julius
PDF: Ai cuori ardenti
PDF: L’amore, l’azione, la vita sono altrove. Note, riflessioni, scritti intorno all’operazione Renata e la repressione anti-anarchica
Source: Il Rovescio & republished at La Nemesi