Tag: Repression
Surabaya, Indonesia: Riot outside East Java government building against the new Military law
A violent clash broke out Monday in the Indonesian metropolis of Surabaya between police and demonstrators protesting against the country’s newly passed military law.
Around 1,000 students and activists dressed in black participated in the protest in front of an East Java government building.
Holding posters that said “Reject the Military Law”, and “The Military Should Return to the Barracks”, protesters hurled rocks, sticks, and Molotov cocktails towards the police guarding the demonstration.
The revision to the armed forces law, pushed mainly by President Prabowo Subianto’s coalition, was aimed at expanding the military’s role beyond defence in a country long influenced by its powerful armed forces especially under the brutal military dictatorship of Suharto called the “New Order” who were avowedly anti-communist and anti-anarchist. Large-scale killings and civil unrest primarily targeting members and supposed sympathizers of the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) were carried out in Indonesia from 1965 to 1966. Other affected groups included alleged communist sympathisers, Gerwani women, trade unionists, ethnic Javanese Abangan, ethnic Chinese, atheists, so-called “unbelievers”, and alleged leftists in general. The dictatorship eventually fell in the May 1998 Indonesia riots triggered by corruption, economic problems, including food shortages, mass unemployment, increasing repression, genocide in East Timor and following the 1997 Asian financial crisis.
$hile: Update on anarchist comrades Aldo and Lucas Hernández
It has been more than two years since December 22, 2022, the day of several raids orchestrated by the South Metropolitan High Complexity Prosecutor’s Office, where six homes were raided, five of them in the Metropolitan Region and one in the Valparaiso Region, all searched by police groups OS9, GOPE and LABOCAR, resulting in six detainees, four of whom were remanded in custody. Two correspond to the brothers and comrades Aldo and Lucas Hernandez, in the course of the months the comrades will remain under investigation for the explosive attack on the National Directorate of Gendarmerie of Chile, Aldo is indicated as the alleged bomber of the device, he is also charged with crimes under the Law of Arms Control, as well as Lucas charged with various offenses under the Law of Arms and Explosives Control.
Months later, the comrades were asked for a re-formalization hearing, adding for both of them the case of manufacture of weapons and manufacture of explosive devices for various items found in the home raided in Pedro Aguirre Cerda.
In this process we have seen how the prosecution through trickery and dirty games have tried to harm and intimidate this environment with jail, seeking information and even informations in order to complete the investigation and to prove what the prosecution accuses, having a negative result to the harassment, since all the detainees after the raids have remained dignified and integrated to the mediocre attempts of the Prosecutor Claudio Orellana, demonstrating in practice complicity and loyalty to the principles of anti-authoritarian comradeship.
In the course of the months the comrades have lived diverse and different prison realities, since from the beginning the comrades have been separated trying to break their family ties without having contact and sharing the same physical space for more than two
years.
At this moment the comrades are waiting for the oral trial preparation hearing, which has already been postponed twice due to different legal situations.
While waiting for the trial, which has taken more than two years, the comrades are still unable to meet due to security issues, violating their rights to preserve the family ties that unite them.
In that trial they risk exemplary sentences, for comrade Aldo the prosecution requests a sentence of 90 years and for Lucas a sentence of 26 years, we point out that exemplary since this excessive amount of years only seeks to intimidate the environment and those who decide to return blow after blow without turning the cheek or waiting for illusory and idealized opportune moments to go after our enemies. The comrades remain intact and with the impetus intact to continue contributing to strengthen the anarchic walk outside and inside the prisons, clinging fiercely to their ideas and their values, contributing to various comrades who have been deprived of freedom like them, making their ideas a real threat to the range of harmful behaviors inside the prison and practicing prison solidarity, continuing to position themselves against the prison and their jailers inside their own homes (prisons).
The power continues to strike, reprisals are part of the daily life of our brothers. The last event was the transfer of Aldo to the maximum security module 2 in the prison of “La Gonzalina”, on December 24 last year, changing his prison regime. He is currently under a schedule of 21 hours of confinement and 3 hours of yard time, this added to restrictions such as the prohibition of electronic devices (TV, kettle and radios). This transfer was the result of a raid carried out in module 12 (module in which Aldo had been for two years) on December 18, in which the personal information of the 16 gendarmerie officers injured on the day of the attack to the national directorate on December 27 2021 was found inside Aldo’s cell. This information was contained in the respective investigative files of the case, which is why the high command of La Gonzalina decided to isolate him.
The practice of violence continues more than ever, and it is blood to pump the hearts of our brothers in prison. Each accurate action, propagandistic gesture reveals the vulnerability of a predatory system that is sustained by a false security that is nothing more than a breakable mask and within reach of our hands full of conviction and courage.
Actions such as attacks with weapons-bombs to institutions-police-apparatuses that protect the interests of power and the rich are just a sample of that, that the fear is felt by those who imprison us, that the bullets have names and surnames, that our energies are capable of creating what our imagination once thought, that every idea overflows in the minds of those who see that the violent struggle is possible.
Fire and death to the spectator, the scavenger, the martyr and the vulture.
Freedom for the convinced, certain and courageous who go against domination!
Anarchists, subversives and Mapuche prisoners to the streets!
Let’s dare to create the forbidden!
Make ideas a real threat!
Aldo and Lucas Hernandez to the streets!
February, 2025.
Source: Informativo Anarquista
Chile: Update on the isolation situation of anarchist comrade Francisco Solar
Francisco has remained in Maximum Security modules for almost 5 years, since he was arrested in 2020 accused of attacks against repressors and the powerful.
Once sentenced, the isolation regime became even harsher, remaining for more than 6 months with a regime of strict isolation, restrictions on visits, 21 hours of confinement, no TV or radio.
By March the administrative authorities will decide whether or not the comrade will remain in solitary confinement. We call to remain attentive to the next information.
Facing the hardening of the prison regime: Solidarity and action!
Source: Informativo Anarquista
“The Possibility of a Historic Moment is Now” – Burkhard Garweg
… from the German newsite “nd” …
Below we document a letter from Burkhard Garweg, which was sent exclusively to »nd«. Garweg is one of the most wanted people by German police authorities because of suspected RAF membership and several robberies in which millions of euros were stolen. His letter is a critical outline of the history of the Red Army Faction (RAF) and at the same time a response to Caroline Braunmühl, daughter of RAF victim Gerold von Braunmühl, who in January in the »nd« was critical of her brother’s »call for clarification« , but also responded to a previous letter from Burkhard Garweg. Burkhard Garweg now addresses Braunmühl’s statements in his current text. He criticizes the RAF for a phase lasting from 1977 to around 1990 in which the urban guerrillas made military confrontation with the state the focus of their politics and neglected social revolutionary struggles. The author, born in 1968, comes from the autonomous squatter movement and now lives illegally, alternates between two levels in his text: one that analyses and evaluates from today’s perspective and a second, in italics, that speaks very personally from the past and his youth. Burkhard Garweg’s contribution is fully documented below.
“The possibility of a historic moment is now”
On the history of the RAF and the question of the reconstruction of an anti-capitalist, social revolutionary, anti-patriarchal and internationalist movement in the present day.
“The possibility of a historic moment is now”
On the history of the RAF and the question of the reconstruction of an anti-capitalist, social revolutionary, anti-patriarchal and internationalist movement in the present day.
In her text in »nd.Die Woche« of January 18, 2025, Caroline Braunmühl presents an alternative position to the bourgeois attitude that attempts to depoliticize the history of militant and armed resistance by reducing its content to violence and negating a political conflict.
In my statement of December 2024, it was also important to me to present resistance to capitalism in the context of the relations of violence – exploitation, the rule of man over man, nationalism, militarism and war – and thus to conduct the debate according to historical reality and to counter the historiography of the rulers and their attempts at manipulation.
The aim of bourgeois historiography is to delegitimize and criminalize anti-capitalist resistance and its history. Its elites have a fundamental interest in maintaining the conditions of exploitation and oppression and in being able to continue to make profits. This is what the proclamation from the ranks of its elites in the 1990s, which has gone down in history, stands for: “there is no alternative.”
Caroline Braunmühl associates the RAF and other militant groups, such as the Rote Zora, with radical resistance against the “violence of socially dominant groups and individuals against socially subordinates – such as class justice, patriarchal violence or transnational relationships of exploitation, oppression and war, from which the economic elites in the Federal Republic of Germany have profited and continue to profit today.” She identifies the justification for militant resistance against violent relations and at the same time denies the legitimacy of targeted assassinations by the RAF in its history.
She criticizes my statement from a feminist perspective and for lacking criticism of the RAF.
I agree with her that a reflective picture of the history of the struggles with the ability to see their weaknesses is necessary. The main thing is to be able to draw conclusions for the struggles of the future.
The world of the dominant capitalist system is moving at an increasing pace towards social and global erosion: war, poverty, displacement and the destruction of the planet’s ecological basis for life. The bourgeois state – and this affects the entire capitalist center of Europe and the USA – is increasingly using right-wing and authoritarian means. It uses the construction of a “national community” to differentiate itself from migrants, Muslims, refugees and the poor. It uses racism, nationalism and rapid militarization both internally and externally. This has repercussions – some of which are also intended – on bourgeois society.
This is becoming radicalized by the deeply rooted racist, patriarchal and social forms of differentiation, exclusion and oppression within society. The world is unmistakably moving towards an infernal tipping point of social, ecological and military erosion.
Capitalism offers no solution to this. It would also be a contradiction in terms. The elites’ solutions to the crisis are now authoritarianism, fascism, war and the process of unifying bourgeois and fascist politics. This is nothing other than a journey into the possible abyss with clear parallels to the historical crises that culminated in the world wars of 1914 and 1939 – albeit with an extremely increased global destructive potential in modern times.
Anyone who wants to prevent this should focus less on the hopeless rescue of bourgeois democracy as a facet of capitalism and the associated retention of the fundamental relations of violence, but rather on social revolutionary alternatives that can only be achieved as a result of social revolutionary and emancipatory struggles.
Existential questions arise: In which steps, initiatives and processes can the reconstruction of an anti-capitalist, social revolutionary and internationalist left be achieved?
But also: What do we take with us into the future from the struggles and concepts of history, from the attempts to overcome the thoroughly violent capitalism and imperialism? How do we as revolutionary leftists discuss and write history from below and appropriate it for the struggles of today and tomorrow and against the propagandistic, depoliticizing and criminalizing historiography from above? Continue reading ““The Possibility of a Historic Moment is Now” – Burkhard Garweg”
Bremen, Germany: Switch off the security state! Four unmarked police vehicles set on fire at Doventor police station
Switch off the security state! Four unmarked police vehicles set on fire at Doventor police station
On the night of 9 to 10 March, with several incendiary devices, we disturbed the mortuary peace of the police station in Doventor, on Daniel-von Büren Street, which was open. In good conscience, we set fire behind the station, in front of and in the parking lot.
To the cops:
That night, you arrested the wrong people. Again, you’re fumbling in the dark. You made the press, and therefore all of us, believe that you had everything under control. It’s more than embarrassing. This shows once again how arbitrary and racist your actions are, when we learn who you have arrested. Be ashamed and deal with your over-inflated authoritarian ego. Instead, recognize that it is possible to sneak into your police station and place incendiary devices under your vehicles.
Shame and fear must change sides. For more imitators.
To people aged 15 to 27:
We are really sorry that the cops harassed you because of our action and that you were held until Monday afternoon. We know what it’s like to be taken to a police station. It’s annoying. We hope you are doing well and that your friends are taking good care of you.
To our enemies:
The new German government wants more military weaponry. Everyone agrees to give even more money and murderous orders to the arms industries. Fascism is getting closer and closer. Everywhere we look in the world, we see crazy people, usually men, who are turning their inhumane, patriarchal, right-wing fantasies into reality. This diligently pushes to a new, lower level. We must not believe that this simply fell from the sky. In many countries of the European Union, it is rather an insidious process and thus everything that has to do with self-determination and solidarity is gradually being stifled. History repeats itself. Democracy, with its cowardly attitude, opens wide the doors to fascists. Hate campaigns are still trending in Germany, and remigration is on everyone’s lips.
As a result of these debates, the cops are also rearmed and they have more leeway and better weapons. We will not accept the violent and threatening behavior of the cops and the state. Four cars, with which the shitty cops spy on us, denounce us, threaten us, observe us, less…
Attacking the cops is an act of resistance and disarmament!
To our comrades in combat who are in prison and to all the comrades who are affected by the repression:
Rest assured: we will continue our common struggles against exploitation and oppression. Freedom and happiness for Maja, Hanna, Nanuk, Gino, Nele, Paul, Luca, Zaid, Paula, Tobi, Clara, Moritz, Marianna, Dimitra, Sarah… Fiery greetings to the anarchists of Munich, who were attacked during the night by 140 heavily armed policemen, and to the anarchists M. and N., incarcerated in Stadelhem.
To Burkhard*:
We read your discussion invitation text, “The Possibility of a Historic Moment is Now.” We too believe that in the coming years the situation will worsen so much that we may no longer be able to avoid an armed struggle. We will continue to discuss these options in our circles. Until then, we will attack the cruel authoritarian world with the current means, such as fire.
We also greet you and send you a lot of strength, wherever you are.
Until everyone is free!
(A)
* Note of Attaque: Burkhard Garweg, former member of the RAF, still in hiding after the dissolution of the organization in the 90s and the arrest of Daniela Klette in February 2024. He recently sent an open letter to the daily Neues Deutschland. It is available here. (DN: In German)
Source: de.indymedia.org / Friday, March 14, 2025
Via: Attaque
Translated by and via: Abolition Media
Athens, Greece: ‘Direct Action Cells’ – Responsibility claim for the incendiary attack on the house of MEP Eliza Wozemberg
“Dead children don’t go away. They stay at home
and have a separate preference for playing in the closed hallway
and every day they grow in our hearts, so
that the pain under our ribs is no longer from deprivation
but from growth.”
Giannis Ritsos
The Direct Action Cells take responsibility for the placing of an incendiary device at the entrance of the house of Eliza Wozemberg in the Varkiza area in the early morning hours of 26 February. We visited this piece of trash to place our small piece in the mosaic of acts of revenge against those who have cynically stained their hands with blood in the murder of 57 people in Tempe and have tried to cover each other’s asses in a coordinated manner. The chronicle of the crime and its cover-up is pretty much known. The vanguard to save the shattered government’s reputation is made up of some shit-sucking mouthpieces of the right-wing bloc, whether they are MPs and ministers or journalists (like an old acquaintance of ours, Portosalte, who doesn’t seem to have a brain) or even “simple and humble” executives and party members who in the social media also reproduce the party’s main line of laundering the money of those directly involved and attacking the victims’ relatives. Wozenberg could not stand back and keep a low profile. She stood out from this shitty crowd and attacked Karystianou, the mother of one of the victims and president of the Association of Relatives of the Tempi victims, accusing her of deceit, of slandering the country internationally and of having no right to accuse Kostas Karamanlis. For our part, we responded to Wozenberg as she deserves. We answered her because the dead in Tempi could have been us, our brothers and sisters, our mothers and fathers, our friends and comrades. We ask no one for an account to avenge our dead. This is our answer to Wozemberg. With fire, as she deserves.
“You hit one to scare 100” Mao Tse-tung
The reason our team targeted Wozemberg is because of the dirty role she has played at the European level in covering up the Tempi crime. Mitsotakis took advantage of his lobbying support for the re-election of Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and that support was compensated for, with 2 buffers. The appointment of Wozenberg to the position of chairman of the Transport Committee in the European Parliament and the appointment of Apostolos Tzitzikostas to the position of EU Commissioner for Transport and Tourism. In this way the Mitsotakis regime has also secured European immunity for its crimes as the 2 main positions in the EU dealing with transport issues are held by New Democracy appointees. Therefore, the New Democracy ensures that there will be no unexpected consequences for the crime of Tempe and its subsequent cover-up on the part of the “European institutions”.
Besides, Wozemberg had the audacity to recognize in Karamanlis an innocent minister without responsibility and at the same time to desecrate the memory of the dead by accusing their relatives of being politically motivated. She has probably forgotten the times when her ancestors (during the monarchy of Otto, which is her lineage) would have already sent people like Karastianou and anyone who would have questioned their God-given right to rule us to the gallows. That’s why, after all, she got what she deserved. Just as we also understand that it makes sense that a proud descendant of a royal family would become a shield for a descendant of a stinking family of politicians like the Karamanlis. A family that still has some property titles in the New Democracy so that so far at least it has managed to save from criminal liability the tub of guts who was angrily protesting train safety just days before their clash. One hand washes the other and the two together attempt to push the dead of Tempi into oblivion as an accident of the rank and file.
We are outraged that all these scumbags like Wozemberg, Mitsotakis, Adonis, Karamanlis, Voridis, Markopoulos, Voultepsi and dozens of other members of the government mafia come out without fear and with enormous arrogance to attack relatives of the dead, scientists and experts who question the government’s narrative. It infuriates us that this arrogance and the tone of a thousand hearts with which they speak is also stepping on the support of a section of society. A rotten piece that only looks out for themselves, the little extra money they make and supports a government of proven mobsters and murderers. On February 28th those of us who demand street justice must do everything in our power to break this arrogance of theirs. We should cut out their tongues and send them to the dustbin of history, that is, where their natural habitat is. Continue reading “Athens, Greece: ‘Direct Action Cells’ – Responsibility claim for the incendiary attack on the house of MEP Eliza Wozemberg”
[Update] Gathering in solidarity with the anarchists accused in Scripta Scelera operation postponed to April 1, 2025 (Massa, Italy)
[UPDATE] We inform that during the hearing of February 14th, it was decided by the judge to postpone that one scheduled for the following 28th, for which a solidarity gathering had been called. The new hearing has been set for Tuesday, April 1st, the times remain unchanged.
GATHERING IN SOLIDARITY WITH THE ANARCHISTS ACCUSED IN SCRIPTA SCELERA OPERATION – MASSA, APRIL 1, 2025
August 8th, 2023. Following a request for ten arrests in prison, Scripta Scelera operation leads to nine precautionary measures against as many anarchists accused for the publication and distribution of the internationalist anarchist fortnightly ‘Bezmotivny’. A proceeding with which the State intended to ‘normalise’ the precautionary measures for charges concerning revolutionary publications. Scripta Scelera represents another ‘chapter’ in the war policies of the Italian state, in continuity among other things with recent repressive manoeuvres aimed at removing political practicability from ever wider social sectors.
April 1st, 2025. After just over a year, the trial against four accused comrades is coming to an end. Public prosecutor Manotti of the DDAA (“Anti-Mafia and Anti-Terrorism District Directorate”) of Genoa will deliver his indictment, with the requests for sentencing. Regardless of the prosecutor’s inquisitorial hypotheses on alleged instigatory and terrorist capabilities, the reasons that the State intends to strike are the ones of those who opposed the war also by denouncing the Italian industries involved in the production of armaments, as well as those who supported the 2022-’23 mobilisation against 41 bis prison regime and life imprisonment without the possibility of parole developed with Alfredo Cospito’s hunger strike.
WE WILL MEET ON TUESDAY, APRIL 1st, IN MASSA:
12:00 h. – SOLIDARITY GATHERING IN PIAZZA FELICE PALMA
15:00 h. – PRESENCE IN FRONT OF THE COURT IN PIAZZA DE GASPERI
* * *
We remind the account details for the solidarity fund and the e-mail address for organising benefit initiatives or receiving copies of the texts about Scripta Scelera operation:
Postepay card number: 5333 1711 9250 1035 – IBAN: IT12R3608105138290233690253 – Account holder: Ilaria Ferrario – For contacts: solidaliscriptascelera[at]paranoici[dot]org
Berlin, Germany: Wild demo in memory of Kyriakos Xymitiris
On October 31 our anarchist comrade Kyriakos Xymitiris was killed and our anarchist comrade Marianna M. was severely wounded in an explosion in an apartment in Athens. She was brought to the Evangelismos Hospital, where she was treated under constant police surveillance, and later transferred to the pre-detention prison in Korydallos. In the aftermath of what happened that day also our anarchist comrade Dimitra Z, our comrades Dimitris and Nikos R. and another person have been arrested and imprisoned in the same case.
Since then sorrow and rage have been present in our lives. Sadness for losing a comrade who committed to the fight to the end and by all means; anger because it is this capitalist, racist and patriarchal system that killed him. Kyriakos did not choose to close his eyes on the economic and political interests of a few who condemn us to a life of misery through the sale of houses to vulture funds, labor precariousness, feminicides, borders and wars. In the city of Berlin Kyriakos he has been committed for years in the defense of released spaces and against gentrification, in the internationalist struggle, in the abolition of prisons, as well as in all social and class struggles.
His passion and believes for a new world free of oppression leave a huge emptiness in those who were around them, as well as in the struggle itself. However, his imprint through words and actions encourages us to keep the thread of the insurrection alive, thus continuing the vision of the social revolution present in our hearts and minds. A revolutionary action that understands the armed struggle as a decisive medium in favor of those of the bottom in the balance of power, which tries and manages to return to the state part of the violence that every day imposes us.
We understand that through the defense of his memory we also stand next to all those who gave their lives or and were imprisoned to fight against injustice, inequality and exploitation.
For all this reason and collecting the call of February 7 and 8 of the Greek comrades from Athens, we want to face those who try to pervert this memory. As well as express our solidarity to the comrades imprisoned in the same case. For this reason we decided to have a short wild demo through Friedrichshain where we had shared together many collective moments of happiness and rage. Obstacles were put on the streets, graffiti in memory of Kyriakos were sprayed. Afterwards in Rigaer Street arriving forces of the occupiers were fought with stones.
This neighborhood of Berlin, as well as other metropols in the world, has faced a huge process of gentrification. In the last years where collective spaces where evicted to be transformed in yuppi restaurants and shops, people with low sources are getting displaced to the periphery, the airbnb are rising while the rents are becoming unbearable and the policies about how to use the public space are more repressive.
We, as Kyriakos did, can’t turn our eyes away of this process that destroys the city and the different communities living there. We, the ones that believe in a better world, want to go out of this precarity where the ones not conforming the norm are condemned. For this reason, as many other protest and answers are taking place in different cities, we want to stand against it and continue the path that we already walk with our friend and comrade Kyriakos. This path that cost his life. Him in our minds, his ideas in our hearts. Together taking back the streets of Berlin and Athens again. Revolutionaries hearts burn forever!
Freedom for our comrades Marianna M., Dimitra Z, Dimitris and Nikos R.!
Kyriakos Present!
Anna Beniamino: Pathophysiology of the prison monster: poisons and antidotes (October 2024)
Anna Beniamino: Pathophysiology of the prison monster: poisons and antidotes (October 2024)
Article translated and published in Spanish in “Tinta de Fuga,” periódico anárquico contra las prisiones y la sociedad carcelaria, no. 7, segundo semestre 2024.
PHYSIOPATHOLOGY OF THE PRISON MONSTER:
POISONS AND ANTIDOTES
Stories of mice and men
In pharmacology laboratories, antidepressants are tested with an experiment of exquisitely human cruelty: a mouse, drugged or “nature,” is submerged in a glass cylinder half-filled with water and the time of desperate swimming before immobility overtakes is calculated.
Usually the rodent without psychotropic support tries to climb along the cylinder and jump for 5 minutes before giving up; antidepressants lengthen desperate swimming attempts by a few minutes before resignation overtakes.
Stripped of the cynicism it conveys, the Porsolt or “desperate swimming” test is a useful allegory to illustrate the current situation in Italic jails and this summer’s trickle of suicides and riots in the overcrowded, dilapidated communal sections1, a charcoal of forced cohabitation in cramped spaces, in a word humiliating human dignity: drug-induced apathy and depression, the ubiquitous “therapy,” desperate attempts at reaction that often take self-harming forms, backyard hegemonies, desolidarization, childish brawls, where there is a constant pouring of suggestions and models from TV dramas, which is then the lobotomizing diversion that overcomes “therapy” in the pervasive echoing from cell to cell.
To the pathological infantilization of the individual, the prison works methodically, depriving him not only of freedom of movement, but also of that of minimal choice in the course of the day: the idiotic and incomprehensible regulations, the extreme bureaucratization of every minutia of daily survival. Depersonalizing mechanisms that deprive one’s humanity, the application of which essentially serves to establish the pressure of the repressive structure (and the individual’s capacity for resistance or adaptation), are handled aseptically, feeding a meat grinder where reactions can cover the entire range between anesthetized apathy and revolt as an assertion of subsistence in life rather than claim.
This Dantesque bedlam is overlaid and counterbalanced by the fragmentation and consequent isolation of differentiated sections and circuits. In most compas one finds oneself as well as in small numbers, divided from the rest of humanity in chains, locked between high-security sections and, even more isolated, in 41bis2 circuits.
High-security sections have an additional internal separation to avoid contact between those accused of “terrorism,” domestic and international (AS2) and those of “mafia-style criminal conspiracy” (AS3) and related offenses, to avert, in the eyes of the legislature, monstrous criminal chimeras due to cross-species interbreeding3. Or, more prosaically, even if only to prevent the spread of a basic knowledge of one’s rights as a prisoner, a subject on which political prisoners are normally better versed, as they come from more literate backgrounds on the subject and are more prone to the consequent dialectic.
In AS, with the rubber stamp of the “mafia” or “terrorism” formula, an opposite strategy is applied to the overcrowded common sections: separation between prisoners, removal from the place of residence to make contact with family members more difficult, reduced contact with the outside world (fewer interviews, 4 hours monthly, and fewer phone calls, 2 monthly of 10 minutes each), heavier sentences, with less if any possibility of alternative sentences under the aegis of 4bis o.p. 4.
Then there is 41bis, the bottom of the well, the bottleneck of the repressive funnel where it is easier to get in than to get out, in the highest degree5, with a further exacerbation of solitary confinement, intracarceral and extracarceral: a one-hour interview per month with partitioned glass and audio-video recording; almost total postal censorship; limitation of items allowed in the cell, including books and music CDs, the purchase of which is in any case made very difficult, if not impossible; one hour of air time per day in cramped, netted yards and with socializing with up to three other prisoners (in fixed groups selected by management).
This prologue, unpleasant, is to explain a minimum the difficulties and contradictions experienced, as antiauthoritarians, in facing and fighting prison these days in these shores.
The strategy of isolation, sterilization of human contacts and rescission of solidarity networks is obviously not an Italian prerogative but, as our Chilean comrades are well understanding, a practice that is spreading and being perfected there as well, as in the aggravation of Francisco’s conditions of isolation and the restructuring of the Alta Seguridad. Just as everywhere the restructuring of detention facilities combines punitive logics toward the individual refractor with those of a “Fordist” efficiency of preventive repression aimed at creating compartmentalized and incommunicative levels to more effectively and aseptically manage control, inside as well as outside. Continue reading “Anna Beniamino: Pathophysiology of the prison monster: poisons and antidotes (October 2024)”