We learn from the media that at least seven electric vehicle chargers, located in various places in Lecce, have been sabotaged and rendered unusable by foam. On some of the columns were found the inscription “For Alfredo, Anna, Juan,” in reference to the imprisoned anarchists on hunger strike against the 41 bis prison regime and the hostile life sentence (Alfredo Cospito, imprisoned under 41 bis in Bancali Prison in Sassari, has been on hunger strike to the bitter end since Oct. 20, Anna Beniamino has been on hunger strike in solidarity since Nov. 7, while Juan Sorroche has been on strike for a month, from Oct. 25 to Nov. 24). According to local media reports, the sabotage took place “starting from at least last Friday [Dec. 2].”
The next racist murder attempt of the Greek cops, but also the ongoing hunger strike of the anarchists in Italy have motivated us to attack HERTZ as a supporter of the Greek cops and thus of the racist and neoliberal Nea-Demokratia regime.At the branch in Hamburg Wandsbek we set fire to the building.
Not only in Greece HERTZ offers favorable conditions for the uniformed executioners, but also for example in the USA.
Not only the shot in the back of the head of Costas Fragoulis in Thessaloniki is an expression of the racist violence that is the order of the day in Greece. There are daily pushbacks and assaults against people fleeing at the borders. In the camps and deportation jails, it becomes clear again and again what Europe’s closure against refugees means: brutal, inhuman violence that the Greek state and other European security agencies use without scruples.
At the same time, places of rebellion and migrant self-organization are repeatedly attacked in Greece: recently the Prosfygika Squat in Athens, but also many other squats and projects face constant attacks.
Solidarity with those detained in defense of Prosfygika!
Strength to the revolt of Roma and others who are rising up as a result of the shooting of Costas!
Combatative greetings to the hunger strikers in Italian prisons who fight against the solitary confinement system 41bis – freedom for Alfredo and all others!
On October 20, anarchist prisoner Alfredo Cospito began a hunger strike against the 41a prison regime, a struggle he intends to carry on until the end. Anarchist prisoners Ivan Alocco [the comrade ended the strike on Dec. 1, ed] and Anna Beniamino joined the strike, as did Juan Sorroche, who ended it after a month
The 41bis is the harshest prison regime in Europe. Created in principle to prevent members of the mafia from continuing their activities from prison, it was soon extended to revolutionary prisoners to prevent them from interacting with the outside world. Three prisoners of the Brigate Rosse-PCC, Nadia Lioce, Roberto Morandi and Marco Mezzasalma, have been subjected to this system for 17 years. The value of their resistance must be measured by the understanding that it would be enough for them to make an act of political surrender to get out of this regime.
At the preliminary hearing held at the Genoa Court on Dec. 7, both defendants were remanded for trial in relation to the crimes charged against them, excluding the aggravating circumstance charged under Art. 270 bis 1 c. p.
The trial will therefore begin with the filter hearing on March 7, and under the ordinary procedure remands both on charges of possession and carrying explosive material, attempted manufacture of explosive/explosive devices. Technically resuming the legal motivation, with regard to the disqualification of the purpose of terrorism, reference is made to the most recent case law on the matter, particularly Supreme Court ruling no. 36816/2020, according to which “it is not sufficient to carry out any violent political action, as it is necessary that the conduct is potentially capable of creating panic, terror and widespread sense of insecurity in the community and is aimed at organs of institutional leadership or constitutional importance, as a function of the attempt to overthrow the constitutional order or overthrow the democratic system.”
In the present case, the judiciary ruled, in line with the preliminary investigation judge’s previous assessment, that there could be no connection between the seized material and the violent actions induced by the prosecution, so the defendants are remanded for trial on the charges outlined above, subject to appeal by the prosecutor.
In addition to this small technical account of the hearing, below are some reflections on repression as a general and continuous activity of the state against the exploited.
Behind every legal choice, college or individual judge, there is a political choice that characterizes sentencing. Repressive activity is not always related in a directly proportional and linear way to the intensity of conflict that social and militant classes pose. The activity of preventing the conflict hypothesis and that of annihilating the internal enemy is continuous on the part of the state, and is aimed at maintaining order and class privilege. There are no happy islands or terms of action and thought within which the repressive response can be avoided, although the absence of radicality in the struggle, by taking away strength from the revolutionary possibility, determines in the social sphere and in the power relations only points in favor of the other side.
These days, with reference to comrade Alfredo Cospito’s struggle, it is pointed out that it is always ready for the annihilation of revolutionaries, through the instrument of torture, which practiced directly, more or less systematically in different historical periods, tends to control and repress every revolutionary expression and struggle, placing the monopoly of violence that characterizes its power at the center, and lashing out against anyone who dares to question this.
The vindictive tendency of the state is aimed at the annihilation of revolutionary identities and serves as a warning to the social partners struggling against the vicious conditions that capitalist exploitation imposes. Continue reading “Italy: Brief account of the preliminary hearing in the Genoa trial against Gianluca and Evelin”→
Since 20/10 Alfredo Cospito has been on hunger strike against the prison regime imposed on him by the Italian state, under the name 41 bis. Alfredo Cospito has been a prisoner since 2012, having taken responsibility for the shooting of Roberto Adinolfi, director of Ansaldo Nucleare, an action carried out by the Informal Anarchist Federation/International Revolutionary Front (FAI/IRF). Since then the comrade remains unrepentant and continues to be committed to the cause of social liberation. For this reason, the Italian state decided to impose the 41 bis regime on him from 5 May, a prison within a prison where he will be in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day, with one hour of pre-trial detention and meeting with other prisoners, who will be decided by the prison management, imposing full control over him, including which of his fellow prisoners he will associate with. Communication with friends and relatives will be limited to one hourly meeting per month, behind glass, or a 10-minute telephone call where the relative will have to make it from a police station or another prison. His right to possession of books and printed materials is also restricted, as is his correspondence. The exemption regime imposed by the Italian State on political prisoners and detainees through the 41 bis is now promoted for the entire consideration of the sentence and not the 4 years for which it was originally valid.
41 bis is a regime of political, social and sensory extermination, aimed at the complete elimination of all contact with the outside world. The aim is none other than the physical and moral extermination of those who choose the path of revolutionary vigilante justice against the tyranny of the state and capital. The extermination or the forcing of them to renounce their action is the essence of the laws of bourgeois justice, the so-called “anti-terrorist” laws, which provide for special conditions, wards and detention centres, isolation, torture and exterminating sentences, intended primarily for revolutionary organisations and their members, as many as the states label terrorists.
This is where the double contradiction of state terrorism emerges. First, it labels as terrorists those who rebel against the class-imposed terrorism of the rulers, reserving physical and moral extermination through its mechanisms, and at the same time the same mechanisms do not recognise the status of political prisoner or political opponent in those whom they try to exterminate. The State, therefore, cannot do real justice because it cannot speak the truth. Bourgeois “justice” is nothing but a mechanism for imposing and perpetuating class power over society.
Since the 1960s and its own storming of the heavens, the archipelago of the revolutionary, antagonistic movement on Italian soil, with armed guarded marches, occupations of factories and houses, self-motivations, organization of armed feminist movements and revolutionary organizations has proved that nothing is unattainable. From the actions of the BR/PCC in the 90s and 00s, to the attacks of the FAI/IRF and comrade Alfredo Cospito, the revolutionary thread continues to be woven with acts of resistance and emancipation that actively declare that nothing is over, and that revolutionary projects and visions remain relevant and alive in the ranks of the oppressed. And it is this thread, the historical continuity and memory that the fascist Meloni government, and every government before it, wants to silence and eradicate. The Italian state, faced with the archipelago of the revolutionary movement in its territories, has been forced to develop a series of repressive and counterinsurgency tools for decades, of which the 41 bis regime is an evolution. To this day, with the life-long imposition of the 41 bis torture regime, the Italian state is clearly leading its political opponents, those who try to do justice for the oppressed, into isolation and torture. Continue reading “Athens, Greece: Responsibility claim for the explosive attack on the house of the First Counsellor of the Italian Embassy – “Carlo Giuliani” Vengeance Cell”→
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”→
