On December 4 we held a rally with hundreds of leaflets, banners and slogans in the central points of Komotini and in the central square in solidarity with the Italian anarcho-nihilist Alfredo Cospito, who is on hunger strike since October 20, against the special regime of imprisonment 41bis in which he is being held in revenge by the Italian state because of his unrepentant attitude.
Five years later, we publish – taken from the website anarhija.info (DN: English translation from Insurrection News) – the claim text of the explosive attack against the Carabinieri barracks in the San Giovanni district of Rome. Consistent with the need for support for the practices of attack and international revolutionary solidarity, we consider it equally important and necessary to find, and therefore disseminate, the documents and claim texts.
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Claim of the explosive attack against the carabinieri barracks in the San Giovanni neighbourhood by the Santiago Maldonado Cell / FAI-FRI (Rome, 7 December 2017)
In times of social peace and compliance there is no better reply than action. A stimulus, a continuity and a jolt to wake up those who sleep.
Acting on one’s own initiative breaks the compliance and inaction and ignites those whose blood boils.
The anarchic praxis of attack must be the basic stimulus of anarchy, otherwise it is a walking dead. Action is necessary to make us alive in the ways we consider opportune, removed from every program, hierarchical and vertical structure. Many revolutionary practices are part of an anarchism in its bowels.
We have decided to take our lives into our own hands by breaking the oppressive peace that surrounds us.
On the night of the 6th to the 7th of December we placed a steel thermos containing 1.6kg of explosives outside the carabinieri barracks in the San Giovanni district in Rome.
Capitalism is voracious, our rage ferocious. Claim of the incendiary attack against four CAT machines, by the Informal Anarchist Conspiracy (Fivizzano, November 2022)
The Informal Anarchist Conspiracy is anarchist and informal, therefore without organisational programmes or leaders, the result of the free union of individuals moved by their own will and reciprocal felt need to strike at those responsible for the misery.
In November, one year after the burning of two vehicles at the Boccanaglia Alta quarry, the Informal Anarchist Conspiracy celebrated its birthday by doubling down on the avenging fire. Four CATs from the Walton quarry in Castelbaita (Fivizzano – MS) were completely burnt.
Unfortunately, apart from the birthday, there is little to celebrate. Tons of mountain pieces are taken away every year, with terrible consequences for nature in all its complexity. Also paying the price are the inhabitants who find themselves without drinking water or with floods that will continue to hit the area.
Marble mining is part of the capitalist system of exploitation, to the point of depletion of every cm of soil, water, subsoil and so-called resources. The extractive economy is directly linked to the wars that from Yemen to Ukraine fatten the bosses. Every single industrialist is responsible for climate change, as well as for the existence of borders and the thousands of people slaughtered in the Mediterranean and in lagers defending borders.
It is known that the bosses are hypocrites and fill their mouths with deceitful words. Big speeches about energy transition, emission reduction and other green masks are on the lips of politicians, bosses and phoney environmentalists. They propose and promise reconversion. They practice the destruction of this planet, the moon, the universe and everything. They talk a lot about alternative energies but never about alternatives to capitalism. Because according to them, this is the best of all possible worlds. We remind ourselves that exploitation and devastation is done on the skin of the many for the profit of a cowardly few. Continue reading “Fivizzano, Italy: ‘Capitalism is voracious, our rage ferocious.’ Claim of the incendiary attack against four CAT machines, by the Informal Anarchist Conspiracy”→
This conversation between Paul Cudenec and the Italian group Resistenze al nanomondo was first published in the July 2022 issue of the printed journal L’urlo della Terra and has recently also been made available online, again in Italian.
1. Resistenze al nanomondo: Can you can tell us about your story, your path, when you started developing a critique of techno-scientific developments and what thinkers you learned from?
Paul Cudenec: I don’t think I could separate my critique of techno-scientific developments from the rest of my opinions and analysis. I have been an anarchist for 30 years now, but even before then, in my youth, I felt a strong instinctive aversion to high-tech consumer society. On the one hand it was associated with everything that I most disliked – big business, the state, the military, authority and control in general. On the other hand it stood against everything that I most appreciated – nature, freedom, community, a sense of historical and cultural continuity. The arrival of CCTV cameras in England was a wake-up moment for me. I worked at the time as a journalist with a local newspaper in one of the first towns to have cameras installed and, since I knew for a fact that there was very little crime there, it was clear to me that this project was nothing to do with fighting crime, as was claimed, but was the roll-out of something much more sinister. I wrote a punk song about this in the mid-1990s (which I put online last year), warning about “the cameras that steal our liberty” and the techno-tyrants who were going to scan our DNA, put microchips in our brains and turn us into robots. With the local anarchist group, which I subsequently helped to create, we used to hold annual protests against the cameras, marking the anniversary of their installation as “Big Brother’s Birthday”.
As you will gather from the above, George Orwell was, unsurprisingly, an influence on me. The history of the Luddites was another inspiration (via Kirkpatrick Sale among others), along with anarcho-publications like Green Anarchist, SchNEWS, Do or Die, Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed and various EF! publications. I also read David Watson’s Against the Megamachine, Fredy Perlman’s Against His-story, Against Leviathan, the Unabomber Manifesto plus a lot by John Zerzan and Derrick Jensen. I have more recently been influenced by reading the likes of Miguel Amorós, Jacques Ellul, Theodore Roszak, Charlene Spretnak, Renaud Garcia… But intertwined with that thread of my self-education have been other inspirations. The English nature mystic Richard Jefferies has been very important to me, as has René Guénon, who combined his metaphysics with a strong critique of modernity. I have also read elsewhere about sufism, Taoism, comparative mythology, English folklore, Indian philosophy, German idealism, Jewish anti-capitalist romanticism, Jungian psychology… What interests me, above all, are the connections between these accounts and traditions, or rather, perhaps, the new space that is opened up for our reflection when we consider them together, in the same conceptual context. Continue reading “Resisting Techno-Tyranny: A Dialogue”→
Update on the December 5 hearing on the recalculation of sentences against anarchists Alfredo Cospito and Anna Beniamino as part of the Scripta Manent trial
On December 5, the second appeal hearing of the Scripta Manent trial against comrades Alfredo Cospito and Anna Beniamino was held. The general prosecutor asked for 27 years and one month for Anna and life imprisonment without parole with 12 months of daytime solitary confinement for Alfredo, going even further than prosecutor Sparagna’s previous requests, which were 30 years for Alfredo.
The Turin appeals court failed to pronounce the sentence and turned to the Constitutional Court: the Turin judges are asking whether it is legitimate to be forced to disallow mitigating circumstances for Alfredo Cospito because of his previous penal background. Indeed, this would force them to sentence Alfredo to life in prison, although for an action that caused neither deaths nor injuries.
Next December 19 there will be a new hearing in Turin, a formal hearing aimed at working out the question to submit to the Constitutional Court.
Alfredo and Anna intervened with spontaneous statements. Alfredo reiterated that he will continue his hunger strike until his last breath against 41 bis and life imprisonment without possibility of parole, Anna remarked that anyone with a modicum of critical thinking will know how to identify the principals and perpetrators of his comrade’s annihilation. The people in solidarity in the courtroom greeted the accused comrades with slogans and applause.
Shortly afterwards, a demonstration set off through the streets of Turin that, despite the massive deployment of repressive forces, managed to approach the city center, passing through some of the city’s neighborhoods.
Get Alfredo out of 41 bis.
To end 41 bis and life imprisonment without possibility of parole.
Free them all!
Anna Beniamino’s declaration read out at the appeal trial for the recalculation of the sentences related to the Scripta Manent trial (Turin, Italy, December 5, 2022)
This is a political trial, which has aimed from the outset at the administration of exemplary punishment, a trial of our anarchist identities rather than deeds, a trial of those who do not renounce their ideas.
A massacre without a massacre attributed without evidence is the culmination of a growing commitment of Antiterrorism and Prosecution to exorcise the spectre of anarchism of action.
The imposition of the 41 bis regime to Alfredo Cospito, guilty of engaging in relations with the anarchist movement from the prison, is in the same vein. The hunger strike to the end that the comrade has been conducting since October 20th is the last resort against isolation and sensory, physical, psychic deprivation, against a political gag. A gag that even prevented him from reading the reasons for the strike itself.
41 bis is the extreme degree of doggedness of differentiated regimes: prisons where continual solitary confinement and the overcrowding of the common sections are the two faces of a system aimed at annihilating the individual. Prisons where massacres, real ones, have occurred and continue to occur: in the suppression of the 2020 uprisings, in the incessant suicides, in the treatment of the poorest and most fragile of prisoners as ‘residual material’ of the dominant techno-capitalist society.
If anything happens to Alfredo Cospito, any individual doted with critical thought will understand who the instigators and executors of his physical annihilation are, having failed to make the political and ideal one. I am aware that I am hostage of a system that is hiding its political, economic, social and environmental collapse behind the fetish of ‘security’ and ‘terrorism’.
It is necessary to oppose this. You can destroy people’s lives, you will not succeed in extinguishing anti-authoritarian thinking and practices. You will not succeed in breaking revolutionary tension, you will not succeed in extinguishing anarchy.
Alfredo Cospito’s declaration read out at the appeal trial for the recalculation of the sentences related to the “Scripta Manent” trial (Turin, Italy, December 5, 2022)
I will only say a few lines. Before disappearing into the oblivion of the 41 bis regime for good let me say a few things and then I’ll keep quiet forever. The judiciary of the Italian republic decided that I, too subversive, should no longer have the chance to see the stars, freedom. Buried for good with life imprisonment without appeal, which I have no doubt you will give me on the absurd charge of having committed a “political massacre” for two demonstrative attacks in the middle of the night, in deserted places, that were not intended to and could not have injured or killed anyone and in fact did not injure or kill anyone.
Not satisfied, as well as a life sentence without appeal, given that I continued writing and collaborating with the anarchist press from the prison, it was decided to clamp my mouth for ever with the medieval gag 41 bis, condemning me to an endless limbo awaiting death. I will not stand for it and I will not surrender, and will continue my hunger strike for the abolition of 41 bis and life sentence without appeal until my last breath to let the world know about these two repressive abominations in this country.
There are 750 of us in this regime and I am also fighting for that. By my side my anarchist and revolutionary brothers and sisters. I am accustomed to the censorship and smoke screens of the media, whose sole aim is to monstrify any radical and revolutionary opponent.
Abolition of the 41 bis regime.
Abolition of life sentence without appeal.
Solidarity to all the anarchist, communist and revolutionary prisoners in the world.
Always for anarchy.
Claim of sabotage against the TAV railway line in the Turin – Chivasso section in solidarity with the imprisoned anarchists on hunger strike (Piedmont, Dec. 1, 2022)
On the night of 30.11 to 1.12 sabotaged the Tav line in the Turin-Chivasso section, burning some cables, in response to the international appeal for Alfredo Cospito. Alfredo out of 41 bis! Alongside Juan, Anna and Ivan. Less words more unpredictable and incisive actions, striking where it hurts most with direct actions in the darkness of the night.
This night we set fire to pigs’ cars in front of a police station in Berlin.
We dedicate our action to Alfredo, Anna, Juan and Ivan. they are all on hunger strike against the brutal repression by the Italian state.
In the night before Alfredo’s court hearing to review the 41-bis measures against him, we send a message of solidarity. We, your friends and accomplices around the world, walk next to you on the path of refusal and attack.
With the sentence, the italian state wants to silence Alfredo and prevent him from spreading the anarchist idea of total liberation, subversion and autonomy. but they forget that there are many of us and we are everywhere .
41-bis is used as an instrument of control against our comrades. the number of criminal acts punishable by imprisonment is increasing, as is the severity of the punishments. but you will not silence us, you will not suffocate our rebellion.
Our targets are all the repressive instruments of the nation states, like police, prisons, solitary confinement, §129a, 41-bis. There is no difference between Italy and Germany, there is no difference between all these so called “democracies”. Our enemy is the cruel system we live in and all those who want to maintain it.
These flames are also an expression of the flame of rage that burns under our skin after the racist murders committed by the pigs in the last months. Those who were involved in the murder of Mouhamed Lamine Dramé and defend the murderers: feel our hatred and wait for us, ready to strike in revenge, breathing down your necks.
With this action we also show our solidarity with our comrades and the Community of the Squatted Prosfygika in Athens, and we make it clear that we will not accept any attack on our structures without resistance.
LIBERTÀ PER ALFREDO, ANNA, IVAN E JUAN! LIBERTÀ PER TUTTI E TUTTE!