Statement read by Matteo Monaco during the preliminary hearing in the Sibilla proceedings
I take the floor well pleased to be able to do so in person this time.
I would have liked to be here as early as October 10 on the occasion of the preliminary hearing that was then postponed, but unfortunately the work commitments to which I have to submit for a living and the one thousand five hundred kilometers separating my residence from this courtroom prevented me from doing so. I am not going to rage about the gross errors, certainly not mine, that led to the failures of notification against me and resulted in the postponement of the hearing. They qualify themselves. And they also qualify much more actually. I face this hearing, as well as the eventual trial that will ensue, with serenity. Aware that I have nothing to defend myself against in a political trial such as this one. Proud to be on the stand together with some of the comrades dearest to me. Happy to finally be able to greet to Alfredo and express all my closeness and solidarity with him. Determined to look those who claim the right to judge me in the face.
We are here because we have to answer, in particular, the charge of incitement to commit crimes for the purpose of terrorism and subversion of the democratic order. Good. I’m not interested in going into the merits of the charges, let alone, as already mentioned, defending myself against these crimes of opinion. What I am interested in is to make my considerations clear with respect to this charge.
In my conception of anarchism, as well as of life itself, there is no instigator-instigated binomial, there are no empty heads to be filled, there are no masses to be directed and steered, and I do not claim to instigate anything. The very term “instigation” has a negative, devious meaning, implying a kind of persuasion of the other by deception or trickery or manipulation. And that is precisely why, gentlemen, I believe that there is no better instigator of crime than the state itself. What do you think engenders feelings of revenge and revolt among the exploited and oppressed all over the world? The export of war or anarchists? Are you really convinced that if someone decides to take charge of his life and revolt, it is because the anarchists whispered it in his ear? Does it not occur to you that the systemic violence perpetrated through laws, institutions and repressive apparatuses, always directed toward the proletariat and always in defense of the bourgeoisie, may genuinely produce a backfire? What then is the question? If anarchism propagates ideas of revolt? Whether I as an anarchist point to the destruction of this miserable system? Of course I do. If I write and applaud theories and practices of subversion? That seems like an open secret to me.
The truth is that the state, capital, its apparatuses and their concrete personifications, including you, are afraid. Not afraid of anarchists let’s be clear, they are afraid that the situation will get out of hand, that the control they claim to have over the world may falter. Any sick system inevitably tends to put itself on the defensive, taking measures to try to maintain an internal balance and trying to annihilate threats, whether internal or external. The creaks of this imbalance can be felt just about everywhere, and slowly they are beginning to become more and more evident and, above all, the perpetrators increasingly clear in people’s eyes: economic disasters, environmental disasters, wars, pandemics. Crises, you know, generate discontent, discontent very easily turns into anger, anger triggers riots. And this, all of you, you certainly cannot afford. So you try to act in a preventive way, going to strike relentlessly at those who have already declared war on you for a century and a half and those who consider you enemies regardless of crisis and discontent, trying to prevent certain ideas from spreading among those who have begun to harbor a certain distrust and resentment toward you. Because they are dangerous ideas for your stability and for your comfortable places in ivory towers.
The world in which you believe and in which you force us finds its fulfillment in war, poisoning, deprivation, blackmail, extermination, repression, torture. I could go on and on but I am closing this list here, which I understand may be perceived as rhetorical and nothing more. But evidently there is still a need for some rhetoric if we persist in pretending not to understand what drives individuals to rebel and try to locate the cause in anarchists. And so. War, against the proletarians of half the world to ensure power, wealth and supremacy for the plutocrats of the planet. Poisoning, of everything around us and our bodies with the filth we are forced to breathe, eat and absorb for the profit of those you defend. Expropriation, of lands, cultures and human material for the extraction of raw materials useful to keep the capitalist machine, green or burning, ticking over. And then the blackmail of wage labor, without which it is impossible to survive in this sick and pervasive society; slaves condemned to sell out their free time to swell the pockets of unscrupulous bosses and where they often end up killed or maimed, the Eni workers in Calenzano know something about it, just to give an example. The extermination of the oppressed, such as the one underway in Palestine with which Western death factories make lavish profits and in which, personally, I consider you all accomplices. The repression and elimination of those who do not conform to your idea of normality, productivity and utility, of those who cross your imaginary lines you call borders, of those who try to escape the bombs you yourselves drop and the hunger you yourselves procure, of those who raise their heads against the master, against uniforms, against laws. And torture, that which you reserve for those who end up in your grip, but whom you fail to bend; that inherent in the annihilation regime of 41 bis under whose shroud you wanted to wall up alive, as well as so many others, our anarchist comrade Alfredo Cospito, a project of which the so-called Operation Sibilla represents a fundamental piece. For me, a part of the struggle that Alfredo undertook between October 2022 and April 2023, and which comrades followed up on through protests and direct actions internationally, making you pay the price for this despicable arrangement, continues today in this courtroom.
From my side you will only and always have hostility.
I would like to express my support for those who take to the streets these days and don’t care about rules and moderation, against the Zionist massacre and its financiers, against the monopoly of violence by the police and the state.
Internationalist solidarity with all comrades and comrades deprived of freedom. My memory is for Kyriakos, who died in action in Athens on Oct. 31, 2024, my affection to Marianne, wounded in the same and currently confined to a cell in Korydallos prison.
Matteo Monaco
Statement read by Sara Ardizzone during the preliminary hearing in the Sibilla proceedings
I am an anarchist. As an anarchist I am as much an enemy of this state as of any other state, since this in its essence presupposes the exercise of military and economic power of some men and women over other people and the planet in general. I am an enemy of any form of government with which it endows itself, from the moment that the choice between democracy and dictatorship is only the one most functional to maintain control over the population or to be more precise: over the oppressed class. I hate the current existing order and those who hold it therefore I believe in the rightness of the violence of the oppressed against their chains and against those who tighten them.
To sit in the dock to answer for damage against the cars of the Italian postal service, a company responsible for the forced repatriation of hundreds of migrants who have fled the wars in which Italy is a co-participant causes me neither upset nor shame.
What instead, to put it mildly, leaves me outraged is the construct you have made about anarchism. A castle of lies aimed only at increasing years of imprisonment for comrades, aimed only at justifying the implementation of special regimes where they otherwise could not go. Therefore the prosecution has created a world, an anarchist world made up of leaders, where newspaper articles become “orders” where there are those who give commands and those who receive them where there are those who instigate and those who are instigated.
The most surprising thing is that what you accuse anarchism of ,is actually your world. In front of every carabinieri barracks stands the inscription “”obey by keeping silent and be silent by dying,“” a motto that leaves ample room for individual justification for those servants who perpetrate state violence on a daily basis. A motto designed ad hoc either to ease one’s conscience from the daily barbarities or, perhaps, more likely, to extricate oneself from some trial initiated only when the actions of the so-called guardians of public order are too egregious to be silenced.
Individual responsibility is, on the other hand, a foundation of anarchism. I neither take orders nor give them: neither from anyone nor to anyone. I act responding only to my conscience, which has no parameters of interest or advantage and remains the only voice I can hear.
Seeing an anarchist, in this co-indicted trial of mine, in 41 bis is not a deterrent to conviction in my ideas in fact it is a reinforcer. It convinces me more and more of your hypocrisy, it convinces me more and more that beyond the injustice of 41 bis in its specific location, 41 bis in general is torture. Because you cannot keep human beings indefinitely without physical contact or without seeing the sky. It convinces me that there is a huge difference between the violence of the oppressed and the violence of the oppressors: the former follows an ethic, the latter none.
Always for anarchy.
Close the 41 bis.
Sara Ardizzone
Statement read by Paolo Arosio during the preliminary hearing in the Sibilla proceedings
It is not my habit to speak before a court or tribunal. If today, however, I have decided to do so, it is because I see in this measure against us some specificities that should be emphasized. As a first thing, however, I would like to make it clear that these brief words of mine are certainly not spoken to provide the court in any way with additional elements of judgment or, even less, to justify in any way what you accuse me of having done. As obvious as the paradoxical and contradictory aspects of the investigation of which, together with my comrades, I have been made the subject of, on the one hand, I lack legal and judicial expertise and, on the other, I have too much respect for my intelligence and dignity to lose myself in legal quibbles and subtle discriminations. Instead, I would like to emphasize, and this is the reason I have taken the floor, that the charges and measures against us today before this court have a character that certainly goes beyond the legal justifications with which the prosecution has cloaked this affair. There are precise choices that have moved the inquisitorial bodies in their choice to conduct this operation, choices that draw on the sphere of politics and ethics far more than on that of legality. I think it is obvious to anyone that there are at least two orders of reasons that led to this investigation.
First, on the one hand, the gradual escalation of social and political tensions, in Italy and around the world, pose the state apparatuses with the real possibility of explosions of social anger and revolt against them. From the forms of popular and national resistance of Palestinian populations opposed to the genocide perpetrated by Israel to the genuine outburst of anger that is crossing the streets in Italy following yet another racist murder by law enforcement in Milan; from the hundreds of thousands of defections and sabotage that, on both sides of the frontline, have become a daily occurrence in the conflict over the partitioning of zones of influence between the Russian Federation and NATO to Luigi Mangione’s “beautiful and avenging” action in Manhattan; from the wild strikes in Iran and India to the mobilizations of the German proletariat, increasingly the tensions that capitalism and states are provoking are stirring up an upheaval of the oppressed masses that threatens to spiral out of their control. Terrified of losing the monopoly of violence and the opportunity to exploit other human beings the oppressors, and you who defend their interests along with them, must attempt to put into place ever more repressive and vicious policies. Policies of war, because the acceleration of internal contradictions within capital only war can bring, which have the specific intent to strike, both within their own borders and outside, at the enemies who have always been exploited and killed, the oppressed.
In this sense the charges of instigation and organization against us seem absurd. The dramatic emergence of social contradictions certainly does not need the instigation of a handful of anarchists to give vent to their anger nor do the struggles of the oppressed need who knows what clandestine organization to understand and act against the apparatuses of their oppressors. It is at least a fact that ever since the anarchist newspaper Vetriolo ceased publication or since your censorious work has silenced the counter-information sites Malacoda and RoundRobin the social conflict has certainly not waned but, on the contrary, has become more and more exacerbated.
The second order of reasons, which certainly does not fall outside the first but is, rather, a tragic corollary of it, draws on the “personalities” of the protagonists of this judicial affair. There has been an ongoing political clash, for decades now, over the repressive strategies that the Italian state must deploy to manage the inevitable crisis and its consequences. In this sense, the National Anti-Mafia and Counterterrorism Directorate represents a strategic public order management option that has its own power groups, propaganda organs and specific interests. It is therefore no coincidence that this operation, with its clear censorious and intimidating character, had enormous specific weight in the decisions to subject fellow anarchist Alfredo Cospito to the 41 bis detention regime. 41 bis represents, from the propaganda as well as the legal point of view, the flagship of an entire system of apparatuses aimed in fact at establishing a “police state” regime in which the repressive needs of public order are prioritized in the management of the state. Comrade anarchist Alfredo Cospito was thus subjected to this inhuman regime because of the rightness and dignity of his actions and thought.
The attempt, however, to demonize and isolate him failed first and foremost because of the fighting skills he himself was able to express and, also, because of the mobilization of hundreds of people in solidarity with his plight. A mobilization that, once again, certainly did not need instigators or instigators to express itself but had the ability, thanks to Alfredo’s strength and integrity, to open contradictions even within the state apparatuses by questioning the strengths of the political current that belongs to the DNAA [Direzione Nazionale Antimafia e Antiterrorismo]. Here, then, is where, in order to justify the repressive choices on the life and body of the comrade, this court is asked to open a new trial against him in an effort to look for legal fig leaves that can cover the vindictive and censorious will of the police apparatus to strike at the coherence and dignity of a revolutionary anarchist.
These, briefly, are the few exceptions I wanted to bring. It is now up to your false conscience to find the loopholes with which to refute the obviousness of these claims and proceed to prosecute us.
Paolo Arosio
Source: La Nemesi