Edizione Anarchismo – Dark Nights

Greece: For Comrade Alfredo Bonanno from Nikos Maziotis, Member of Revolutionary Struggle

Posted on 2023/12/17 - 2023/12/17 by darknights

Comrade Alfredo M. Bonanno has passed away at the age of 86. He lived a whole life in the world of struggle and anarchy. He was one of the main representatives of the insurrectionary tendency of the Italian anarchist movement with a great theoretical contribution and editorial work. He was editor of the magazine Anarchismo and other anarchist publications. For his activities he was repeatedly persecuted and imprisoned by the Italian state together with other comrades in the 1990s, e.g. for the O.R.A.I. case (in 1996), the armed expropriation of the Serravalle Rural Savings Bank in the Trento area in 1994 and other attacks.

He had come to Greece several times. The first time I met him was in January 1993 when he visited me in the military hospital 424 in Thessaloniki after 50 days of a hunger strike I had carried out. I had just been released from being a prisoner in the Thessaloniki military prison for refusing to serve my military service. In 1999 he had also come to Greece and had testified as a political witness for the defence in my trial for the bombing of the Ministry of Development in December 1997 as an act of solidarity with the then dynamic struggle of the villagers of the Strymonikos Gulf villages in North Greece – Halkidiki (Olympiada, Varvara, Stavros, Asprovalta) against the installation of the Canadian multinational gold company TVX GOLD, which has been succeeded today by Hellas Gold, a subsidiary of Eldorado Gold. It was a historic political trial in the then annals of the Greek anarchist movement where for the first time in Greece after the fall of the junta there was a defence of armed-dynamic forms of action. In that trial, in addition to the Greek comrades/compañeros, in addition to Alfredo Bonanno, Costantino Cavalleri, a comrade of the insurrectionary tendency of the Italian anarchist movement, and the comrade Hellyette Bess, who was a member of the French guerrilla organization Action Directe and had been imprisoned for several years for her participation in the organization, had testified after an international call for solidarity. The 3 then imprisoned members of Action Directe, Jean-Marc Rouillan, Joëlle Aubron and Nathalie Ménigon, had also sent a written message of solidarity to the court.

The last time I saw Comrade Alfredo was in 2010-’11 in Korydallos prison when we were in custody for our participation in the Revolutionary Struggle. He was also in custody on the charge of expropriating a bank in Greece. With Comrade Alfredo, despite our different approaches to struggle and mode of action, we were connected by an invisible thread, as are so many other comrades around the world who dedicate their entire lives to the struggle to free humanity from the shackles of the state and capital.

THE COMRADE WILL LIVE ON IN MEMORY AND IN OUR STRUGGLES

Nikos Maziotis, convicted for the actions of Revolutionary Struggle.

source: https://athens.indymedia.org/post/1628067/

Via & translated for Abolition Media by Nae Midion

Anarchist comrade Alfredo M. Bonanno has died on 6th December at the age of 86

Posted on 2023/12/17 by darknights

You will always be alive with us through our action and our lives. “ACTION REPLACES TEARS”

Alfredo Maria Bonanno, born in 1937 in Catania, Sicily, is one of the most prolific contemporary anarchists, responsible for Anarchismo editions and other publishing ventures. In 1977 he was sentenced to 18 months in prison for his book La Gioia Armata (Armed Joy). This book had been published at a historical moment when the Italian revolutionary movement was openly going on the offensive, while similar conditions existed in other European countries (Germany, Spain, England, Greece, Chile and more) and the question of violence was on the daily agenda. His contribution lies in a celebration of the pervasive class violence that liberates and satisfies the individual, but at the same time he sounds the alarm about the emergence of the armed party, which reduces the class conflict to a militaristic dimension, imposing the mediation of a small minority of armed men on the complexity of tens of thousands of people struggling by all means against the current reorganization of Capital, which at that moment seemed weak.

In the spirit of the book, all authentic liberating and destructive action comes from a logic of satisfaction in the struggle, not a self-sacrificing duty in accordance with the dictates of a micro-bureaucracy. The Italian Supreme Court ordered the destruction of the copies of the book that were in circulation, and sent a circular to public libraries to dispose of any copies they might have had.

Several librarians objected to this Nazi-inspired tactic. Its circulation was generally banned, and copies were confiscated from the homes of anarchist militants in the context of police raids on houses.

Shortly afterwards, the author was accused of being an “instigator” of the Azione Rivoluzionaria, an armed organisation of 1976-79, which operated on the basis of “affinity groups” throughout central Italy, mainly against newspapers and party offices, and similar “manipulative mechanisms of consensus-building”. In 1979 the organisation was practically dismantled with the arrest of 86 people and the arrest of Salvatore Cinieri and Gianfranco Faina. The first went on to die in prison in a scuffle with criminal inmates when he defended a prisoner suspected of submitting an escape plan, while the second was released to die of lung cancer after being diagnosed with a tumour while in custody.

With the retreat of the movement, the author’s interest turned to the critique of traditional trade union and organisational structures, as well as to the new metropolitan uprisings that have been re-emerging in the West steadily since the 1980s, without the guidance of any party, without open demands, etc. Continue reading “Anarchist comrade Alfredo M. Bonanno has died on 6th December at the age of 86” →

Émile Henry (Sept. 26, 1872 – May 21, 1894)

Posted on 2023/05/24 - 2023/05/24 by darknights

Source: La Nemesi

Émile Henry (Sept. 26, 1872 – May 21, 1894)

“Comrades, courage. Long live anarchy!” On May 21, 1894, the anarchist Émile Henry was guillotined. A few words for a comrade who dedicated his short and intense life, integrally and to the end, to anarchy. So many years have passed – well over a century of actions, dreams, revolutions – and the revolutionary will of this comrade continues to shine with the infinite wonderful facets of our ideal. Émile is immortal.

Aphorisms

Once, the cloister opened for souls weary or disgusted with the spectacles of the world, today we have no other refuge than in hospitals and prisons.

What do anarchists want? The autonomy of the individual, the development of his free initiative, which alone will be able to assure him all possible happiness. If the anarchist admits communism as a social conception, it is by simple deduction, because he understands that it is only in the happiness of all, free and autonomous as he is, that he will find his own happiness.

When a man, in today’s society, becomes a conscious rebel of his own action-and such was Ravachol-it is because he has done in his brain a painful work of analysis whose conclusions are imperative and cannot be evaded except by cowardice. He alone holds the scales, he alone is judge of the right or wrong of hating and being savage, “even fierce.”

I believe that acts of brutal revolt are right, because they wake up the masses, shake them like a violent lash, and show them the vulnerable side of the Bourgeoisie still all trembling at the moment when the Rebel goes up to the gallows.

Everyone has a special physiognomy and attitudes that differentiate him from his fellow fighters. Thus, we are not surprised to see revolutionaries so divided in the direction of their efforts. We wonder what good tactics are: they are everywhere proportional to the amount of energy brought to the action. But we recognize no one’s right to say, “Only our propaganda is the good one; outside of it there is no salvation.” It is an old residue of authoritarianism born of true or false reason that libertarians must not tolerate.

Do what you think is best and do it with love.

To those who say, “Hate does not breed love,” answer that it is love, alive, that often breeds hate.

Hate that rests not on low envy, but on a generous feeling, is a healthy and powerfully vital passion.

The more we love our dream of freedom, strength and beauty, the more we must hate that which opposes its future.

In the history of human progress there is only one party; it is the party of movement.

Socialists do not want to understand that the freedom of the individual is necessary to the true freedom of the people.

In the dedication of his book, From the Other Side, Alexandre Herzen specifies a truly revolutionary and effective attitude when he says, “We do not build, we demolish; we do not announce new revelations at all, we suppress the old lie.” This book by Herzen is full of flashes and revelations, but there is no lack of biting remarks in it either: it is a good book for the prison; and away from the street I like to take it as an echo: “The French cannot rid themselves of the idea of monarchical organization; they have a passion for police and authority; every Frenchman is in his soul a police commissioner; he loves alignment and discipline; everything that is independent, individual, irritates him; he understands equality only as leveling and willingly submits to the arbitrariness of the police as long as everyone submits to it. Put a chevron on a Frenchman’s hat and he becomes an oppressor, he begins to oppress anyone who does not wear that rank; he demands respect towards authority.”

There is one right that overrides all others; it is the right to insurrection. Continue reading “Émile Henry (Sept. 26, 1872 – May 21, 1894)” →