Anarchist initiative against state murders

41 BIS is torture – Strength and solidarity with the unrepentant anarchist of praxis Alfredo Cospito

Anarchist prisoner Alfredo Cospito has been in Italian prisons since September 2012. He has claimed responsibility for the shooting in the legs of Ansaldo Nucleare CEO Roberto Adinolfi by the Olga Cell of the Informal Anarchist Federation (FAI-IRF).

From the very first moment of his detention, the Italian state has exercised all kinds of repressive experiments against the comrade. New prosecutions, new exhausting sentences, disciplinary sanctions, repressive operations against his political comrades. The comrade was sentenced to 9 years of imprisonment for the action against Adinolfi, while in prison he was sentenced to an additional 20 years of imprisonment (which is appreciable in total, an equivalent sentence in Greece would be 2 times life) after the prosecutions brought against him within the framework of the repressive operation Scripta Manet. In essence, the comrade was convicted as an instigator for all the actions of the FAI, since he was accused as its founder and leader, in a case that deserves special mention as it is a monument to arbitrary interpretations and vindictiveness.

The Italian state is a hybrid state when it comes to issues of anti-terrorist policy. It is a model state for its brutality and rigour in these matters, having been called upon to manage low-intensity civil war conditions during the period when armed revolutionary movements flourished in the 1960s and 1980s. The Greek state has followed the Italian example on many occasions, one need only recall the similarities between the ‘Marini case’ in Italy and the ‘Conspiracy of Cells of Fire case’ in Greece. Continue reading “Greece: 41 BIS is torture – Strength and solidarity with the unrepentant anarchist of praxis Alfredo Cospito EN/GR” →

Revolutionary memory is not an empty letter. It is not a museum affair. It is not a dry ritual that is exhausted in anniversary recurrences. Revolutionary memory is the thread that binds the past to the present and that lays the foundations for a future that will do justice to those who sacrificed for a different world. A world where no one will see the sky through barbed wire, where no one will have their bodies broken in the sweatshops of class exploitation, where no one will be murdered on land and sea borders, in police stations, in the urban ghettos of metropolises. Revolutionary memory brings together those who are missing from our side, making them complicit in our subversive projects and dreams. Revolutionary memory, if we give it the value it deserves, becomes a subversive project, a springboard for struggle, a source of inspiration and disposition in the beautiful cause of freedom. For the words that will form a conceptual framework different from the one spoken today by politicians, economists, military analysts, industrialists, the golden boys of the stock exchange, journalists. Or they will be words armed ready to become an impulsive energy. Or they will be nothing.

The metropolises are the modern steam engines, they are the universal factories of capitalism. The transparent sweatshops where capital’s domination, control and repression of the explosive contradictions it produces are absolutely institutionalized.

The crimes of the state and capitalism within the metropolises become isolated incidents. They are recorded in fragmentary narratives by the bourgeois ideology that imposes its hegemony. Our own memory, which should highlight them and transform them into social consciousness, into a perception of our role and position, is constantly absent. When it is not, it is blurred, colourless, non-existent, empty of content. Fascist censorship here has for the moment been replaced by a new form of active censorship. The production of incessant distorted knowledge, the methodical reversal of facts, their insidious substitution. It is revisionism that attacks consciences, memories, the very history of the struggles. Continue reading “Athens, Greece: 4-11 June Week of Reconstruction of the Alexandros Grigoropoulos Monument” →