You will pay dearly, you will pay everything!
With the Feb. 24 ruling, the men and women of power made their willingness to condemn Alfredo to death definitively explicit: in fact, the ermine-clad minions supinely carried out the will of the government officials and rejected the petition for demotion. “Soon I will die, I hope someone after me will continue the struggle,” these would be Alfredo’s words, leaked from his hospital bed. Our struggle will continue. We owe it to him for the example, moral highness and ability not to bend that he expressed as a revolutionary anarchist. We owe it to the many revolutionary comrades and comrades buried in prisons in every state in the world who do not lower their heads and are punished for the consistency of their actions and convictions. We owe it to ourselves because in a confused, inconclusive, ruffled way, we were able as an anarchist movement to huddle around one of our comrades and express that range of practices that opened the glimmer of reminding us that anarchy is not a nice cultural and ethical dream but can be, become again, the action of attacking the present and the will of the oppressed that becomes practice and speech in challenging the oppressors and their arrogant wills. But in this moment we also think we owe it to someone else: we owe it to the journalists, the politicians, the magistrates who in their cynical sicumera rejoiced at the news that Alfredo will die with contemptuous and bloody exultation. For them we must continue the struggle, so that our wrath, our hatred, our contempt may be a lesson to them in humility. Deform your grit into a fierce grin that has nothing to do with the complicit smile of two anarchists meeting. Raise your shrill little voices in a satisfied chorus because you think you can kill a revolutionary and go unpunished. Sink your hands laden with the blood of the oppressed into the spoils of social wealth you have stolen from them. But keep your eyes tightly closed that I may not glimpse the rottenness of your soul. Keep your eyes well closed for you will see, shortly perhaps, our wrath mounting. Keep your eyes closed because you will be afraid of our struggle that will continue.
[Published in “Bezmotivny,” Internationalist Anarchist Fortnightly, Year III, Number 5, March 6, 2023 | Republished online at https://lanemesi.noblogs.org/post/2023/03/11/pagherete-caro-pagherete-tutto/]