Tag: Repression
Bristol, UK: Toby Shone speaks from the dungeons of Bristol prison, explaining his case. EN/ES/FR/DE/PO/RU/GR/IT
My name is Toby Shone, and I’m an imprisoned anarchist held in Bristol prison who was kidnapped at gunpoint by the anti-terrorist unit, as part of Operation Adream in the UK. The repression was aimed to target the anarchist group of critique and practice, 325 collective and the website 325.nostate.net. Operation Adream is an attack by the British State in conjunction with European partners against anarchist direct action groups, counter-information projects, prisoner solidarity initiatives and the new anarchist critique of the technological singularity and the fourth and fifth industrial revolution. Operation Adream is the first time that anti-terrorist legislation has been used against the anarchist movement in the UK.
I was taken hostage by the regime on the 18th of November 2020 by a team of tactical fire arms cops after a car chase through the remote Forest of Dean, which is on the border with South Wales, one hour north of Bristol. At the same time coordinated raids took place at five addresses in the Forest of Dean against collective living projects, hangouts and a storage unit. I was taken under armed guard to a nearby police station where I was held in incommunicado and interrogated many, many times. I refused to speak during the interrogations and I did not cooperate with the murderers in uniform.
I was charged with four counts of terrorism. One charge of Section 2, dissemination of terrorist publications as a suspected administrator 325.nostate.net. Two charges of section 58, possession of information useful for the purposes of terrorism. Those being two videos. One of which showed how to improvise an explosive shaped charge. And the other demonstrated how to burn down a mobile phone transmitter. I was charged with Section 15, funding terrorism, which was related to cryptocurrency wallets hosted on 325.nostate.net which were for the support of anarchist prisoners and publications. I denied all the charges.
I was also accused during the interrogations of membership of FAI/IRF, the Informal Anarchist Federation/International Revolutionary Front. I was accused of writing five documents and carrying out several actions in the Bristol area, which were claimed by cells of the FAI as well as those of the Earth- and Animal Liberation Fronts. These included an incendiary attack against the police station, the burning down of a mobile phone transmitter and liberation of animals.
Bristol is an area of the UK where there has been countless anarchist sabotages and direct actions taking place over the last two decades and which remain unsolved by police, despite multi-million pound investigations and joint media witch hunts against anarchists in the city. Continue reading “Bristol, UK: Toby Shone speaks from the dungeons of Bristol prison, explaining his case. EN/ES/FR/DE/PO/RU/GR/IT”
Italy: Annulment of the measures of Operation Sibilla + communication by Alfredo Cospito
We learn with joy of the cancellation of all precautionary measures against the anarchists and anarchists affected by “Operation Sibilla. Following the statement of the comrades from Spoleto and a text by Alfredo Cospito, escaped the meshes of prison censorship:
Operation Sibilla: all precautionary measures cancelled
Today the news arrived that all the precautionary measures for the Sibilla repressive operation of November 11, directed in particular against the anarchist newspaper “Vetriolo”, were annulled by the court of re-examination which was held on December 14. Therefore, the obligations to sign and stay for three comrades, the house arrest for Michele Fabiani and the precautionary detention in prison for Alfredo Cospito, who remains imprisoned for the sentence to 20 years in the process Scripta Manent, have been cancelled.
The motivations will be known within 45 days. Without going into the merits of the courts’ paperwork, it seems that the wording “annulment” represents the maximum possible denial on a technical level of the accusatory hypotheses. In any case, whatever would have been the response of the judges, remains our firm perseverance in revolutionary anarchist propaganda, solidarity with the imprisoned comrades and the defense of anarchist publications. The repression does not surprise us: we knew that the recent convictions in the appeal process of Scripta Manent against the last edition of “Anarchist Black Cross” would be an infamous precedent.
We reiterate our solidarity with Alfredo, who this very investigation aimed to isolate and silence. A hug to Anna, Juan, Beppe, David and all the prisoners who do not lower their heads.
See you Monday, December 20 from 18:00 at Circolaccio Anarchico in Viale della repubblica 1 / A in Spoleto to discuss the repressive operation and the reasons for our struggle.
Anarchists in Spoleto
December 16th, 2021
Continue reading “Italy: Annulment of the measures of Operation Sibilla + communication by Alfredo Cospito”
Bristol, UK: A letter from prison by Toby Shone
Act for free received by email 18.12.21
———————
I didn’t know I was Harry Houdini
26/11/2021
Today I was taken from the cells of G-wing, Bristol prison to the City Hospital under a security escort. This was to detect any reoccurrence of cancer in my abdomen and pelvis. In the reception area of the prison, I had the usual strip search, and I was forced to change out of my own clothes into prison-issue clothes.
This offended my dignity as even when I was being held in Wandsworth prison in London under “antiterrorist” conditions I could at least go to the hospital in my own clothes. Whilst I was waiting for the screws to finish the paperwork, I got a glance of my cover sheet at my file – “escape list” marked in red. I was shackled to a screw with an escort and another two and I was driven by four screws in an unmarked van to the radiology unit. Along the way and back, of course, I was a witness to the pathetic, belittling ,racist, misogynistic “chats” of the screws who consider themselves experts of all aspects of life. At the radiology unit there were discussions between the medical staff and screws with some referral to their superiors, as, without any foresight on the screws part, they hadn’t realised that I couldn’t be shackled inside the MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) machine. Despite the MIR machine being within a sealed room with a single door, I was forced to wear a pair of plastic zip tight cuffs which were tightened so tight they cut into my wrists.
Due to my loud protests and demands for them to be removed, the screws cut them off with difficulty and pain and placed a second pair almost no less tight on my hands. I was then bound like so inside the MRI in considerable pain and discomfort and in no point in time did the medical staff ask if I was ok or raise any issue of me being treated like this while being told to “be calm” by the screw who had put these cuffs on me and who had remained inside the procedure room. If you have ever been inside an MRI you will know that you are already confined inside an impossibly narrow tiny tube wrapped up in sensitive equipment whilst a torus of magnets whirls around you at deafening volume.
Hardly an easy place to escape from at the best of times. To add an insult to this injury the MRI technician gave the “panic button” which is a kind of pad the patient squeezes to indicate that there is an emergency, not to me who was undergoing the test, but to the disgusting screw who had remained into the room to observe me. One of the screws waited outside the room and one other, for unknown reasons, was asked by the technician to attend INSIDE the adjacent imaging room where the scans were being processed and the technician acted. This final fact is the most angering since these screws are not even medical staff nor technicians but merely
lock and unlock doors, shout and abuse the imprisoned every day. I am not writing this as a “victim of oppression” nor to “establish my
rights”. I write this to denounce the situation and to explain to others what to expect and especially for all the other prisoners who confront cancer.
It is this civilization that makes us all sick. Strength to all those
prisoners who have dreams of freedom in their hearts!
Toby Shone
HMP Bristol
Source: Act For Freedom Now!
When they come knocking…
«When they kick at your front door
How you gonna come?
With your hands on your head
Or on the trigger of your gun…»
At the beginning of December one of the most beloved tele-virologists said that freedom of choice is a problem that those in power should solve. That those who insist on not obeying voluntarily should be forced to do so by force. That the freedom not to vaccinate, for example, can exist only for a hermit who lives alone in the middle of the desert. As for the others, citizens of society, “obviously there is no alternative for these people to the obligation, but to the obligation, the serious one, that is, the obligation that sends the carabinieri to your home to get you.” The peremptory statement made the service reporter who was hosting him chuckle (and certainly not because of his stunted Italian).
A week later, the army general entrusted by the government with the task of leading the war against the dreaded virus declared that he and his troops are ready: together with Santa Claus, he will “bring vaccinations house by house”. In addition to the elderly lost in the most remote villages, the military are “ready to vaccinate the whole audience” – the audience of children…
Faced with these close statements, and the world they announce, we wonder if feeling a chill run down my spine is a sign of weakness from conspiracists, the symptom of a delirium from flat earthers, or if, on the contrary, is the seraphic calm in front of the umpteenth aberration to express a kind of mock democraticism.
A question whose answer will not come from any app.
Translated from Italian at Finimondo [16/12/21]
Thessloniki, Greece: STATE CAPITAL MEDIA AND SPECIALISTS, THEY HAVE FUCKED UP OUR LIVES
STATE CAPITAL MEDIA AND SPECIALISTS
THEY HAVE FUCKED UP OUR LIVES
STOPPING: house arrest, written petition to get a pre-trial hearing, curfew and assembly, certificates of sanitary legality.
“FREEDOM BUSINESS”: third dose, forced vaccination, and for non-compliant, fines, mandatory rapid tests, work suspensions, firings.
DIVIDE AND CONQUER: imposing a new social division between vaccinated and unvaccinated, between compliant citizens and unruly plebes.
ECONOMIC DIVIDE: telecommuting, working around the clock, wage cuts, unemployment, poverty, price increases in everything that concerns our living (rent, food, electricity, etc.).
WE WILL TAKE IT BACK TO THE BARRICADES
We will take them back to the streets.
– Rabid for life
Italy: Update on Maddalena Calore
Today we received news of the anarchist comrade Maddalena Calore. Last week, Madda, who was finishing a prison sentence in house arrest, was incarcerated, accused of escape: she would have returned late after some leave of absence.
It is recalled that Madda was arrested in March 2017, in Cagliari, for an accumulation of sentences of 4 years and 3 months, due to different convictions.
The address to write to her:
Maddalena Calore
C. C. di Verona Montorio
Via San Michele, 15
37141 – Verona (Italy)
Source: Inferno Urbano
The reaction in Italy: Message in the barrel about operation Sibilla and much more by Anarchist Michele Fabiani
Source: fuoridallariserva Via & Translated by Act for freedom now!
–
Message in the barrel about operation Sibilla and much more
The passion for destruction is also a creative passion
— M. Bakunin, The Reaction in Germany
The story goes that one day Alexander the Great went to the barrel in which Diogenes of Sinope lived. Diogenes was the only philosopher who had not gone to pay homage to the great king. So Alexander went to him. Alexander asked him: “Tell me what I can do for you”. And Diogenes answered: “Yes, move away, stand out of my light.”.
Reflecting on conditions of incommunicability, autonomy and refractoriness towards power is far more complicated today than it was in the 4th century BC.
Today power does not move, there is no longer a barrel inside which the shadow of the State does not reach. The only possible relationship with this global organism is violence. One hears all too often, like a plaint of bigots at evensong, that revolutionary violence is out of date. It is said that “times have changed” when, if anything, it is the possibility of escape that has changed.
The last two years have been a sad confirmation of this old story. A new era was heralded in with the massacre in the Italian prisons, the people locked in their homes while production continued to go ahead, the attacks and killings during the transport strikes, the countless repressive manoeuvres against anarchists, and finally through the green pass, the final (?) destination of the new society of control. Continue reading “The reaction in Italy: Message in the barrel about operation Sibilla and much more by Anarchist Michele Fabiani”
Italy: To those who have a bomb in their heart
In August 2018, two explosive devices, one of which will not work, are placed near the local of the Lega, in Villorba (in the suburbs of Treviso).
An action “against politicians, cops and their minions”.
Juan, our friend and companion, is accused of this attack and the Court of Treviso is trying him for “indiscriminate massacre”
The charge of indiscriminate and infamous massacre reveals the upside down world we live in. The one that has killed hundreds of people in the streets, in factories, in psychiatric hospitals and in prisons; the one that, for decades, has covered up for the bosses who have made workers die because of exposure to asbestos, or who have made entire populations fall ill because of the pollution of the air, of the fields, of the water ; the one that has prevented millions of people from leaving their homes, while forcing the elderly to die of Covid and loneliness, in RSAs; [Residenza sanitaria assistenziale, nursing homes] the one that plunders and bombs entire countries and then lets people fleeing misery and war sink into the Mediterranean or freeze in a forest; yes, specify him, His Majesty the Italian State, he accuses of indiscriminate massacre an anarchist, an enemy of all power and all oppression
Moreover, when a NATO general [Francesco Paolo Figliuolo, general of the Italian Army; since last March he is also Extraordinary Commissioner for the management of the emergency Covid-19] When a banker [Mario Draghi, current head of the Italian government, former bureaucrat at the Ministry of Economy, director of the Italian Central Bank and of the ECB, when the latter imposed “austerity” policies on Greece], already starving the Greek population, imposes passes in the name of “responsibility towards others”, we are clearly warned.
The violence that statesmen do to words is a reflection of the violence they do to human beings and to nature.
It seems that, for thousands of people, the bell is ringing now.
For Juan, it rang a long time ago, when he turned his heart into a time bomb, ready to explode against any injustice.
Now that the moment of his sentence is approaching, we feel even more the desire to show him our solidarity and closeness.
Because we have known his courage and his tenderness.
Because this is how it is done, between companions of an ideal.
Because the person who attacked the Lega’s office, no matter who it is, has given a contribution of humanity in a world more and more inhuman.
Because life is too short not to fill it with ardent dreams.
anarchists
Source: Inferno Urbano Via: Attaque
In Search of the Powder Keg
“Does lived experience only tell you where the slave reclines and resigns himself to the yoke, are the master’s arrogance and greed beyond all restraint?”
How long has this been going on? We have almost lost memory of it, overwhelmed as it is by nausea and disgust.
They have caused a pandemic, indirectly or directly. They have worsened its deadliness with completely senseless political-sanitary measures. They have left those affected and worn out to die deprived of the affection of their loved ones. They have banned autopsies that could have contributed to clarifying reality. They have lied about the causes and effects of what’s been happening. They’ve intentionally sowed fear and terror with both hands for the purpose of paralyzing us. They have forced us to stay closed up at home. They’ve put a gag on our mouth to prevent us from breathing and speaking. They’ve forbidden us from moving about, meeting, touching. They’ve killed the outcasts of society who were the first to protest. They created and spread a mass psychosis, putting us against each other. They have made the heart willing to be suspicious, the tongue willing to snitch, the arm willing to lynch. They have made millions of people lose their source of livelihood, throwing them into desperation. They have insulted, humiliated, slandered, sometimes arrested, those who criticized them. They have unleashed a hunt for plague-spreaders against those who have not respected their prohibitions. They have used the Constitution they swore on as toilet paper, still demanding that we respect it on command. They’ve elected a notorious loan shark as head of the government, hailing him as the supreme savior. They have blackmailed first one category, and then all workers, so that they were made unsuspecting guinea pigs of a vaccine. They have praised the virtue of the resilience that adapts, denigrating the vice of resistance that opposes. They have dramatically increased the price of raw materials now essential to survival. They have allowed those nostalgic for the Duce to attack a union’s headquarters so that they can now accuse of fascism anyone who shows opposition to their policies. They now demand that healthy people who go to work demonstrate daily, at their own expense, that they are healthy in order to go to work. Now reduced to being free only to obey, we even have to pay to be exploited…
In short, in less than two years they have trampled down every freedom, humiliated any intelligence, raped any dignity. They disguised their political urgency as a health emergency to achieve a total control of bodies and the territory. And they have done it with attentive candor, without encountering any major difficulties, brazenly, between the tremulous consent of the majority and the well-mannered dissent of the minority. Decades of social peace – occasionally annoyed by some citizenist agitation – has allowed this. Human blood, increasingly artificial, no longer flows with exciting passions, but rather with powerful anesthetics that inhibit action. And where “political responsibility”, “civic sense” or “respect for legality” are not the things crushing the human spirit, there come to be “assembly decisions”, “strategic considerations” or “respect for collective dynamics”.
Stunned and speechless, we find no more words. We don’t even want to find them, the words. Least of all some new social subject willing to repeat them in chorus. There’s something else we need to search for. With stubborness, with fury, with impatience, with ferocity.
[15 October 2021]
Source: Finimondo