THE CAROUSEL OF REPRESSION
Almost eight years after the arrests for Scripta Manent, for the second time the Court of Cassation, on 24th April 2024, will pronounce judgement on the crime of “political massacre”, pursuant to art. 285 c.p., against Alfredo and myself, the last remaining fragment pending in the process (i), after a whirlwind of delays, recalculations, and repressive-jurisprudential manipulations (ii).
Although the repetition of error numbs the horror, and we are living in times of multiple horrors flaunted and total anaesthetisations, I believe there are still some words to be said about the ongoing annihilation attempt, about reactions, successful and attempted. Not so much because I believe this may be useful for our personal fates, but out of a kind of stubborn “romanticism” that considers silence and resignation always and even more lethal in a political process.
Having no inclination to resign silently to the administration of “justice” (as it happens daily in the prisons) and nor to be restricted by the logic of damage limitation (another cornerstone of survival between prison and courts), but shifting the focus to the repressive policies underlying this and the actual capacity to react, to create moments of struggle and rupture, to build barriers, individual and collective, against the arrogance of repression.
Seven years ago, I thought it was possible to manage the Scripta Manent process as ordinary repression, countering from a technical perspective, point by point, both individual events and the entire associative framework, given the clear fragility of the accusatory structure. There was an excess of optimism about the ongoing political will and strategies and an unforgivable shortsightedness in not immediately highlighting with greater force what was happening. It took the threat of 41bis and life imprisonment looming to focus eyes and attention.
Far from wanting to fall back into the rhetoric of “judicial error,” of excess, because from a jurisprudential and probative standpoint, that was precisely the fact that some mainstream media had to reluctantly admit (while others held firm on their sensationalism) in order to justify the anarchist under 41bis. They had to contextualise the events and the character with a certain embarrassment, and also place the heart of the State, its security – endangered precisely what characterises political massacre – within a couple of exploded bins at 3 a.m. on the perimeter walls of a barracks, while having to awkwardly sidestep the other script holes offered by DNAA and the Turin prosecutor’s office.
Far from a “judicial error” because this is a deliberate intent, with convergences between paper castles of the police headquarters and cages of cement over cement: the episodic component (the career of individual cops or magistrates, the media always ready to hype up the new danger, the crassest propaganda) is there, but it converges into a well-oiled machine that always needs new heads to be cut off and displayed on the ramparts of law and order. Sometimes the machine stalls… and it is the duty and pride of every anti-authoritarian to make it stall.
In these years of prison time and trials, I have had the opportunity to experience firsthand a series of logical and legal manipulations that I didn’t think could be possible to concentrate in a single operation, making me equally aware that it is the modus operandi in practice between public prosecutors and courts in the extension of “special” legislation, from “emergency” to “daily”, in the fields of anti-mafia and anti-terrorism: no longer an exception, but the usual management that the National Anti-Mafia Directorate applies and has been applying to cases involving organised crime extended to anarchists, and that the justice system in general applies to those segments of social opposition and non-conforming elements that are isolated and easily attackable, which still express, albeit in a rudimentary form, the need to reclaim the streets, the word, and the dignity of a non-negotiated opposition. A synergistic attack – fuelled by a political climate not just of a simple right-wing government but equivalent in the last “political” or “technical” governments that wanted to define themselves – against the irredeemable components for electoral purposes: in a general lowering of the bar for criminally punishable acts and the parallel increase in what can be sensationalised in the media, one can discern the strategies at work and the resistance to be opposed.
In this sense, I believe Juan’s (iii) writings in capturing the positive aspects, if not the need to put a stop to them, in addition to the necessary critical and self-critical questions of the movement, are clear.
On the legal construct: houses of cards
Dehumanising the enemy is what happens, routine not exceptionality. Certainly in a more refined way in the case of political processes, where the internal enemy must be sterilised from any critical/communicative empathy, but it also happens in managing processes in the criminal underworlds where crimes and threats are exaggerated. It is the same “unfortunates” who are first used and fattened up a bit thanks to the “honours” bestowed upon them by the criminal chronicles, only to then be ground up, composted, and destroyed in the prison system: street dealers turned into mob bosses, in a farce where victims and perpetrators mingle, all subject to the god of money.
In recent years, the umbrella of the “fight against the mafia” has become the shield useful for covering a scenario in which the collusion between institutional politics and economic interests managed with illegal labour is the norm, and it is equally customary to discard the exhausted labor force. Into this comes the expansion from DNA to DNAA, with the application of similar strategies and similar prison systems. It doesn’t matter that the actual numbers of prisoners for terrorism-related offences are infinitesimal, the media hype has still pumped out the new claim “mafiosi and terrorists” to be contained in special cages.
On Detention Circuits: Cement Cages Facing Cement
The media context is functional in creating a mechanism of silence/consent concerning State and government scripts, until a different narrative is managed to be opposed/imposed. The tools we often have are in homeopathic doses compared to the media firepower of the enemy, but sometimes effective.
We experienced this during the fight to free Alfredo from the 41bis regime. A battle lost on the specific objective, where there was a partial “moral victory”, in the sense that the wall of silence regarding a “white” torture circuit in Italy has been broken, also exposing cracks in the enemy’s image and the repressive grip on anarchists. However, the fact remains that Alfredo is still a hostage in those cages, in Bancali. In short, it is a battle still ongoing. And it’s something to think about.
Following the hunger strike that prolonged to the brink of death, a widespread mobilisation, not only from the anarchist sphere but also preceded by a clear public stance (iv) from several lawyers, which has also provided an input to movement areas hesitant to speak out, an informative short circuit occurred that yielded some results, although crude attempts to restore the excessively humanised monster were not far behind. In the best journalistic tradition, first creating a character and then tearing it apart. Partially, not everything is salvageable no matter how exhausting it is to resist.
A few months later, there were even some journalistic/editorial attempts to historicise facts and ideas in a more honest form, albeit always working along the lines of police records (which professional historians and chroniclers tend to regard as a reliable source, when sometimes they are based on mere data about events, sometimes because these data are also biased or forced, but then delving into the abyss of the functional misrepresentation of biographies, ideas, quotes, political thought). So even in these cases, the strength of a collective and individual struggle is replaced by a character, the singular and stubborn hero, who in the end is convenient to discard his ideal and practical carrier, selling for romanticism what is a lucid, albeit bitter, uncompromising view of reality.
Between paper castles and cages of cement: variables and constants of the repressive strategy
There has been a shift with Scripta Manent both in the use of offenses and detention circuits. Rather, in recent years there have been several accelerations, with a series of proceedings against the anarchist and antagonist area, of which the draconian convictions in the Scripta Manent trials and the first-degree 28-year sentence against Juan were the most striking examples, along with the simultaneous imposition of the 41bis regime around them. The offense of “political massacre” – a monstrous offense that just mentioning it makes the interlocutor fall into a black hole of indiscriminate terror – associated with 41bis – the infernal circle of super villains – probably aimed to nullify any kind of reaction. Furthermore, the shift with the conviction for 270bis, subversive association for the FAI, opened up to anarchists the “enjoyment” of associative offense with the distorted reading of human relationships and solidarity among comrades.
Let me explain: for years I, along with many comrades, have come across the attempts of various Italian public prosecutors, alone or in communion with repressive intentions, to pin the associative offense on me along with other anarchists, starting from the Marini trial and continuing with operations that began with anarchist newspapers, used some actions as the purpose of the offense, and set up the almost seasonal operation. With Scripta Manent, the associative offense with the purpose of terrorism passed as a judicial precedent. For these purposes, it does not matter that Scripta Manent, after its mega investigation debut, managed to pin it – with a very clumsy “associative” system of associations like Russian dolls of unwitting actors and above all unexplained “structure” (v) – only on Alfredo, Nicola, and me… it still serves as a precedent for a series of subsequent operations in which there is not even the effort to construct a plausible story between facts, newspapers… as in Scripta Scelera: the mere fact of publishing a newspaper triggers the associative offense. The repressive logic on anarchist newspapers has passed without question if they give voice to comrades in prison. The lowering of the threshold of punishability is also evident in “self-training,” which, originally invented as an offense to repress activism and proselytism on the web in the Islamic area in the case of individuals, now also covers anti-authoritarian activism, despite being phenomena with antithetical purposes and means. The suggestion of the “lone wolf” is valid and useful if the defendant is alone. “Presumed danger” offenses are then widely used, preventive monsterizations, for special surveillance handed out generously.
Another shift was the attempt to apply the 41bis regime to the anarchist area. Before what happened with Alfredo, there was a preliminary attempt to create an AS2 in L’Aquila under GOM management with treatment similar to 41bis (expanding what had already been applied to detainees classified as Islamic, first in Badu ‘e Carros for women and in Rossano Calabro for men). This attempt was countered with a joint hunger strike by comrades who were prisoners at the time in various prisons and for different judicial investigations (vi). Let’s not forget that the 41bis regime was born as a special and temporary suspension, preceded by article 90 which responded to prison riots in the 1980s with similar measures, crystallized as an “antimafia” bulwark and then applied to revolutionary communist prisoners with periodic automatic renewals, remaining a deterrent and means of pressure. In short: diversified uses as needed… it happens for both articles of the penal code and cages of cement.
Now, in order not to fall back into the paralyzing mystique of a repressive machine that destroys everything with exemplary punishments, desertification of the squares, and total censorship, one must also take a look at the actual capacity, which has existed and still does, not to be completely backed into a corner by this. Indeed, in some cases (at not insignificant costs or with the lightness of reason that it may be) we have managed to overturn the imposed narrative and build something new. Even in an unexpected convergence of attention and intentions that potentially existed and probably faded too quickly in that inconstancy that is not a prerogative of movements alone but a widespread custom.
Certainly these are not times of prairies on fire but neither just of firefighters and the resigned. There is a component that resists and persists, but all too often suffers from the constitutional weariness of thinking of spending life fighting against windmills, even when the winds are also contrary!
I do not believe in heroes or supermen but in the awareness that women and men must build for themselves, that the struggle is not free, it implies repercussions and falls, resistances and fluctuating blows to self-esteem. And that it is worth it, always and in any case, for the quality of relationships that are built, not of an ideal survival but of a very real life.
Anna Beniamino
Rebibbia, March 2024
Notes:
i. See: https://ilrovescio.info/2022/11/07/scripta-manent-appunto/
ii. If needed… a brief summary:
– The appeal of 2020 confirmed the convictions for Article 422 of the Criminal Code (common massacre) – although the GIP had already requalified it as Article 280 of the Criminal Code – for Alfredo and me, and the convictions for Article 270 bis, reducing the dimensions of the subversive association and releasing 2 comrades from the charge of participation that had been passed in the first instance. Another contradiction between the two sentences is related to incitement to commit crimes through magazines and blogs, dropped in the first instance and recognized in the second instance for 13 comrades. Between the massacre and the various ongoing crimes, the second instance sentenced Alfredo to 20 years and me to 16 years and 6 months.
– The Cassation in July 2022 directly requalified Article 422 of the Criminal Code as Article 285 of the Criminal Code (political massacre) as a crime, leaving to the appellate judges cinically the burden of recalculating the sentence, which, being Article 285 of the Criminal Code a fixed penalty offense, would be life imprisonment and 30 years.
– In the appellate hearing in December 2022 (at which we, together with Alfredo, appeared on a hunger strike against the 41-bis and life imprisonment) some of the issues raised by the defense were accepted, in particular those concerning the failure to apply mitigating circumstances to Alfredo, referring the matter to the Constitutional Court which in May 2022 responded positively.
– In the appellate hearing in June 2022, following the indications of the Constitutional Court, the sentences were quantified at 23 years for Alfredo and 17 years and 9 months for me.
– The Turin prosecutor’s office appealed to the Cassation against the granting of Article 311 of the Criminal Code (lightness of the fact) to both and against the prevalence of mitigating circumstances over the recidivism granted to Alfredo. The defenses appealed raising once again a constitutional issue regarding the fixed penalty.
iii. https://ilrovescio.info/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/considerazioni-juan.pdf
v. The same judgment of the Cassation in July 2022, after years and years of trial, dismisses the association with a few lines that do not even attempt to justify the scheme, which becomes self-supporting, so that Alfredo, Nicola, and I would be “long-standing associates who have held a top position in the FAI”, without explaining anywhere on what basis this axiomatic assertion is based. Manifestly admitting the “inherent problems” of “identifying, based on evidence that has taken on the most disparate morphologies, in the different coefficients of indicial intensity examined, a subversive cell structured around 3 subjective nuclei, enthralled by common purposes, common resources, common ideals, replicated methods, shared knowledge, manifested solidarity […]”. In simpler terms: we are a subversive cell because we are anarchists who have known each other for a long time. Period. The anarchist idea is the glue, the substance of the association.
vi. These are the words with which the hunger strike began in May 2019:
“We have been locked up in the female AS2 section of L’Aquila for almost two months, the detention conditions resulting from a softened 41-bis regulation are now known, here and outside. We are convinced that no improvement can or should be requested, not only due to the objective and structural issues of the yellow section (formerly 41-bis): the entire prison is almost exclusively destined for the 41-bis regime, so slightly loosening the section regulation seems in bad taste and impracticable, given the even heavier conditions suffered just steps away from here, we cannot but think of how many have been fighting for years accumulating relationships and criminal trials. In addition to this, the clumsy attempt by the DAP to square the accounts by establishing a mixed anarchist-Islamic section, which materialized in a further ban on meetings in the same section, with an isolation that persists. There are worse conditions of imprisonment, common or special, than those in L’Aquila. This is not a good reason not to oppose what they impose here. We will no longer eat this bread: on May 29th, we start a hunger strike demanding transfer from this prison and the closure of this infamous section. Silvia and Anna”.
Source: La Nemesi