The decision of the court regarding the appeal against the special surveillance measure against a comrade from Genoa was made in August; the request that this measure, applied with all possible restrictions, be removed from her was rejected and it was clear that, although the accusation of terrorism, the pillar of the accusatory hypothesis, was dropped, the special surveillance measure was maintained in its entirety for the same reasons, that is, her “adherence to anarchist ideology”, her “manifest expressions of solidarity with the militants of the Informal Anarchist Federation”, her “support for the detained anarchists”, her “incitement to direct action”, and her dissemination of counter-information material.
Still in August, always on the initiative of the Prosecutor’s Office of Genoa, other measures were arranged, as a corollary of the surveillance, aiming to limit even more her freedom, affecting her in the sphere of her affective relationships, since they add new constraints and new difficulties to the authorization, finally obtained after 7 months of waiting, to go and visit her family, which is domiciled outside the city of Genoa, that the companion has no right to leave. Moreover, her driving license was seized, with the absurd pretext that its possession could help her to commit crimes.
It is always the same refrain that continues to impose itself, a statement as monotonous as a broken record: the companion is an anarchist, therefore she is dangerous and this is confirmed by the fact that she is under investigation as an anarchist. In this way one could go on and on.
In this time of experimentation with instruments of social control extended to large parts of the population, anarchists have already gained a lot of experience in this matter and, for a long time, they have unmasked the lies of the narrative about the rights and freedom that one could have access to in civil and democratic society, if one gives in exchange obedience, delegation and legitimacy: it is quite obvious that the consequences of adhering to the social contract are mainly in favor of a few and to the detriment of the many.
The context may change, but the authoritarian drift of this time is not something new, it is the perfection of those instruments of social control that we already know, that is why the basic principles of the anarchist idea are still valid and they show the way: to preserve the value of the individual choice, to keep alive the spark of the criticism, to refuse the concertation with public institutions, of any level, to refuse the political representation of the movements and of the conflict, not to bend to the needs of the political realism.
We do not reaffirm them for sterile sectarianism, but because they are instruments of struggle that have supported thought and action, in the streets or elsewhere, en masse or in small numbers, facing, through theory and practice, the many, detestable scum that this dirty era throws back in our faces: the commodification of our lives, the plundering of the natural environment, the increasingly invasive authority and social control, the discriminations, the state violence, the surge of the logic of profit, which ravages humanity in a spiral of war, misery and slavery. Continue reading “Genoa, Italy: News of the special surveillance against a comrade” →
