Elephant Editions – Dark Nights

‘Not Just Buttons’ + ‘From Marx to the Uri’ by Alfredo M. Bonanno

Posted on 2024/02/05 - 2024/02/05 by darknights

Both texts taken from Alfredo M. Bonanno’s ‘Palestine, mon amour‘ published by Elephant Editions & translated by Jean Weir.

Not Just Buttons

A police force is always a police force for the simple reason that a State, even one in tatters such as the Palestinian one, is always a State.

Now, for whoever in his time has struggled for the ideal of the liberation of the Palestinian people (each in his own small way may have given some contribution), the thing takes on a particular significance. To think that comrades in struggle, a struggle that once spread like an epidemic more or less everywhere in Europe and beyond, are now donning the shiny buttoned uniform, a bad imitation of the English cops, is quite indigestible.

But policemen do not just wear uniforms, they don’t just polish their buttons; they control, repress, beat and on occasion shoot and kill without giving it a thought.

Gaza is not a large city, it has few tarmac roads and, as in so many other parts of the Arab world, those there are look like little village lanes. Arafat’s policemen are now present in the area where the Israeli Shin Beth were once stationed. Not just policemen, but the court, the prison, and the secret services. All small, not very efficient, but it’s the thought that counts.

What has happened to the Intifada?

It goes on, of course, against the bosses old and new. So boys and girls are arrested, taken to the multifunction building of Palestinian State repression, interrogated by condescending investigators and judged by improbable judges. They are also children, just a little more grown up, born in the concentration camps. What can they say under the illuminated strategic direction of the great Leader?

In the same way that it took us years to convince ourselves that the Israelis were torturers even though they had just come through the extermination camps, now goodness knows how long it will take to see that the Palestinians, comrades once upon a time, can become torturers today.

Reality evolves, and in evolving the masks men hide behind in order to recite their roles change. But often the role behind the mask also changes, without anyone noticing.

[‘Non solo bottoni’, published in Canenero no. 20, March 24 1995, page 2]

From Marx to the Uri

Many things are changing in Palestine. Many others have stayed as they are. Poverty and hatred are rife as always, especially hatred of the occupying forces, that is of the soldiers of Israel still present in the Territories.

What could be more natural than to hate invaders? Only politicians who have sold out to the enemy and contracted the possibility of an internal government and a puppet of a State rather than the continuation of the struggle, could think differently. Many Palestinians, are not prepared to accept cohabitation based on the defence of the interests of the strongest.

That explains the spread of resistance, which presents itself almost uniformly under the insignia of Hamas, inside the same newborn State of Palestine. This is certainly the most consistent armed group of the present time. It is doted with considerable means, as became evident in the explosion a few days ago [1995] that blew up a whole arsenal.

There’s nothing easier in that region than to find a young boy between twelve and sixteen, born and brought up in the poverty and violence of the concentration camps, who is disposed to listening to arguments against Arafat and his project of a free Palestine coexisting with a free Israel. Nothing could be easier than to push these boys to carry out a suicide bombing.

That is what those of the Izz al-din al hassam, the armed wing of God, who are not boys but religious fanatics, are preparing the former for — a holy death in the war against the infidels.

Twenty-five years ago, in conditions that were certainly not any better than those of the present time, the struggle of the Palestinians was based almost entirely upon a different kind of indoctrination, the Marxist one.

At that time intermediaries with long beards promised them help in the form of money and weapons; now Islamic priests are promising eternal life in a paradise full of Uri.

[‘Da Marx alle Uri’, published in Canenero, no. 22, April 7 1995, page 2]

UK: Letter from anarchist prisoner Toby Shone for comrade Alfredo M. Bonanno

Posted on 2023/12/17 by darknights

Farewell, Alfredo

I heard today by telephone as the morning winter sun shone through grey clouds into the confines of my cell that our comrade Alfredo Bonanno passed away during sleep surrounded by the love of his close ones. I too send my incendiary embrace to all those who feel his loss and assert that a combative memory will remain. Alfredo’s contributions to the anarchist movement are undeniable, critical, insightful, and prescient. One of Alfredo’s texts, ‘What are Anarchists?‘ had appeared in an investigation file against me for which I was accused of distributing. His booklet published under the title ‘Locked Up‘ by Elephant Editions is one of the most important documents on the topic of imprisonment in my opinion. Alfredo’s writings for which he was investigated and incarcerated are never mere collections of words but emerge directly from lived experiences, his own and that of the comrades that participate in our struggle for freedom. Affinity groups, informal organization, direct action and the critique of technology and systems: these concepts form the most potent section of today’s Anarchy, let’s put them into practice!

“Hurry Comrade”

Toby Shone

12-12-2023 HMP Garth

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” →

‘Revolutionary Solidarity’ – Pierleone Porcu

Posted on 2021/10/10 - 2021/10/10 by darknights

There are many ways to demonstrate solidarity to comrades who are being criminalised by the State, each one of which is a direct expression of the way one intervenes in the social clash in general.

There are those who see solidarity as lending a social service to this or that arrested comrade, and that is the way they carry out their activity: looking for lawyers, sending money and clothes to prison, visiting and so on. This purely humanitarian solidarity also translates itself into the constitution of defence committees and relative campaigns aimed at influencing public opinion.

Then there are those who see solidarity in a strictly political key and play at making a heap of “distinctions” aimed at not compromising the image of their own activity. So for reasons of opportunity they defend and show solidarity to those who declare themselves innocent, not to those who Claim responsibility for their actions.

Others still, if they see there is something to be gained in terms of political propaganda, immediately bring out flyers and leaflets in formal solidarity with the comrade or comrades arrested, i.e. they declare solidarity in words, while in practice there is no trace of it.

Then there is solidarity in an ideological context. This is the case of the marxist-leninists in the revolutionary combatant party version. They show solidarity with those with positions similar to their own, and are in contrast with those who do not share or recognise their political line or strategy, often using censorship and ostracism against those they consider inconvenient.

What do we think we should mean by revolutionary solidarity then? The first aspect is that of seeing solidarity as the extension of the insurrectional social practice one is already carrying out within the class clash, i.e. as a direct demonstration of actions of attack against all the structures of power, large and small that are present in one’s own territory. And that is because these should to all effects be considered responsible for everything that happens in social reality, including therefore the criminalisation and arrest of comrades wherever they are. It would be short-sighted to reduce the question of repression against comrades to something strictly linked to the legal and police apparatus. The criminalisation and arrest of comrades should be seen in the context of the social struggle as a whole, precisely because these are always the hasty material means used by the State to discourage radicalisation everywhere. No matter how great or insignificant it might be, every act of repression belongs to the relations of the social struggle in course against the structures of dominion.

The second aspect is that each revolutionary comrade should be defended on principle, irrespective of the accusations made against them by the State’s legal and police apparatus, in the first place because it is a question of snatching them from its clutches i.e. from the conditions of “hostage” they have been reduced to. Moreover, it is also a question of not losing the occasion to intensify the attack against the “law” intended as the regulating expression of all the relationships of power present in constituted society.

The third aspect concerns the refusal to accept the logic of defence that is inherent in constitutional law, such as for example the problem of the “innocence” or “guilt” of the comrades involved, and that is because we have many good reasons for defending them and no one can justify the political opportunism of not doing so. We cannot and must not consider ourselves lawyers, but revolutionary anarchists at war against constituted social order an all fronts. We aim at radically destroying the latter from top to bottom, we are not interested in judging it as it does us. For this reason we consider any sentence made by the State vultures against proletarians in revolt, and all the more so if they are comrades, to be a sentence against ourselves and as such to be avenged with all the means we consider opportune, according to our disposition and personal inclinations.

The fourth and final aspect concerns our attitude towards the arrested comrades, whom we continue to behave towards in the same way as those not in prison. That means that to revolutionary solidarity we always and in any case unite a radical critique. We can and do show solidarity with imprisoned comrades without for this espousing their ideas. Those who show solidarity to imprisoned comrades are not necessarily involved in their opinions and points of view, and the same thing goes for us as far as they are concerned. We actively support all imprisoned comrades in all and for all, but only up to the point where what we do for them does not come into contrast with or contradict our revolutionary insurrectionalist way of being. Ours is exclusively a relationship between social revolutionaries in revolt, not that of bartering positions. We do not sacrifice any part of ourselves, just as we do not expect others to do the same.

We think of solidarity as a way of being accomplices, of taking reciprocal pleasure and in no way consider it a duty, a sacrifice for the “good and sacred cause”, because it is our own cause, i.e. ourselves.

Starting from these premises, of primary importance in the development of one’s anarchist insurrectionalist action, revolutionary solidarity takes on meaning as such, because we would show simple material support to any friend who ends up in prison.

Revolutionary solidarity is an integral part of our very being as insurrectional anarchists. It is in this dimension that it should be demonstrated incessantly, precisely because it contributes to widening what we are already doing.

Pierleone Porcu

Source: ‘Revolutionary Solidarity’ – Aldo Perego, Alfredo M. Bonanno, Daniela Carmignani, Massimo Passamani, Pierleone Porcu, Elephant Editions