Repression – Page 8 – Dark Nights

Berlin, Germany: Wild demo in memory of Kyriakos Xymitiris

Posted on 2025/02/12 by darknights

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!

Source: https://de.indymedia.org/node/491644

Anna Beniamino: Pathophysiology of the prison monster: poisons and antidotes (October 2024)

Posted on 2025/02/07 - 2025/02/07 by darknights

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)” →

Athens, Greece: Arson Attacks in Memory of Anarchist Kyriakos Xymitiris

Posted on 2025/02/07 - 2025/02/07 by darknights

Forward, everyone!
Both with arms and with heart,
word and pen,
knife and gun,
irony and blasphemy,
theft, poisoning and arson,
let us wage… war on society!

~Josheph Dejacque (1821-1864), libertarian anarcho-communist

In a world of constant impoverishment, class inequalities, oppression and exploitation, social fascism advances through the dictates of the state apparatus, capital and its mouthpieces, leaving room for more and more impoverishment and repression. The reformist compromises of the once more radical sections of society, together with stupidification, selfish individualism and worship of oppressors, make it no longer able to conceive of conflict with all of the above.

Our anarchist comrade Kyriakos Xymitiris and anarchist comrade Marianna M. are an example of selflessness, revolutionary ethos and political commitment in all aspects of the struggle. From anarchist assemblies, to solidarity with prisoners, to struggles in defense of immigrants, labor gains, to the struggle against gentrification and repression, our comrades gave “body and soul” keeping the flame of the revolutionary cause always alight. The events of October 31st froze our hearts but at the same time convinced us to continue the struggle of Kyriakos and Marianna and so many other comrades over the years who gave their lives or were imprisoned in the battle for individual and social liberation, revolution and anarchy.

In the aftermath of the October 31st accident, we watched the media snitches try to portray the struggle of our comrades, to sell them as amoral bloodthirsty terrorists thirsting for the blood of innocent civilians, while at the same time selling death politics by showing videos from the destroyed apartment on Arcadia Street in order to increase viewership figures and satisfy their far-right audience. Naturally, a new cycle of persecution followed in the political and social circle of the comrades but also against people who had nothing to do with them.

In the intervening period, solidarity actions were carried out for the comrades accused of the Ampelokipoi case and for the memory of comrade Kyriakos Xymitiris worldwide. Marches, microphones, solidarity movements and direct action strikes from Greece to Chile and from Germany to Indonesia.

We know that the real terror is the constant abolition of labour gains, price increases in supermarkets and evictions of the lower social strata for the sake of the banks. Terrorism is the cover-up of state crime in Tempe, as well as trafficking rings in which a large part of the state and para-state apparatus participates (see the Greek police mafia case). Terrorism is the thousands of migrants drowned in the Mediterranean and the wars that push them to displacement, such as the genocidal war in Palestine.

For our part, we come to declare that the revolutionary-insurrectionary thread that connects generations and generations will not be broken. There will always be movements that challenge the monopoly of state and capital violence and return a percentage of it to those who carry it.

We assume responsibility for the following arson attacks between 18/12 and 28/12 on the following targets:

- - HEDNO van vehicle in Elliniko,
  - car dealership in Patisia,
  - police car in Holargos,
  - state SUV vehicle in Kypseli,
  - the study center of New Democracy MP G. Kallianos in Glyfada,
  - cop car in Zografou.

We call on comrades here and everywhere to raise the flame of direct action and insurrectionary prospects.

Kyriakos Xymitiris always present!

Solidarity with anarchist comrade Marianna M.

Immediate release of the anarchists Dimitra Z., Dimitris, Nikos Romanos and A.K.

Solidarity with comrade K.K. in pre-trial detention

Solidarity with former RAF member Daniela Klette in pre-trial detention and wanted former members Burkhard Garweg and Ernst-Volker Staub

night slalom / commando Kyriakos Xymitiris

Source: https://blessed-is-the-flame.espivblogs.net/athina-ellada-analipsi-eythynis-gia-empristikes-epitheseis-sti-mnimi-toy-anarchikoy-kyriakoy-xymitiri/

Via & translated by Abolition Media

Gathering in solidarity with the anarchists accused in Scripta Scelera operation (Massa, Italy, February 28, 2025) EN/IT

Posted on 2025/02/07 - 2025/02/07 by darknights

GATHERING IN SOLIDARITY WITH THE ANARCHISTS ACCUSED IN SCRIPTA SCELERA OPERATION – MASSA, FEBRUARY 28, 2025

poster pdf

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.

February 28th, 2025. After one 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 FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 28th, 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 Continue reading “Gathering in solidarity with the anarchists accused in Scripta Scelera operation (Massa, Italy, February 28, 2025) EN/IT” →

Strasbourg/Cherbourg, France: Two examples of the widespread use of police drones

Posted on 2025/02/03 by darknights

Drones, the new Swiss army knives of the border police
La Presse de la Manche, January 11, 2025 (excerpt)

For the past year, drones have been used at the port of Cherbourg-en-Cotentin to monitor the restricted zone. This high-tech equipment is now being used for other missions.

For just over a year, the Prefect of the Manche department has authorized the use of drones to monitor the border zone of the port of Cherbourg-en-Cotentin, the restricted access zone (ZAR) and its immediate surroundings. This is where migrants are accustomed to moving around. The drones can be adjusted to suit the weather conditions, providing high-quality images and precise positioning.

“They can fly at a maximum altitude of 120 meters, in complete silence. This means they can access places that were previously inaccessible by car, such as the rock face near the Mielles area, which is a common hiding place for migrants”, explains Chief Brigadier Anthony, a remote pilot based in Cherbourg. The thermal cameras fitted to their drones also help them to discover where migrants are hiding, particularly at night. Continue reading “Strasbourg/Cherbourg, France: Two examples of the widespread use of police drones” →

Perugia, Italy: Further statements by anarchist comrades Matteo Monaco, Sara Ardizzone & Paolo Arosio at the Sibilla proceedings

Posted on 2025/02/03 - 2025/02/03 by darknights

Statement read by Matteo Monaco during the preliminary hearing in the Sibilla proceedings

I take the floor well pleased to be able to do so in person this time.

I would have liked to be here as early as October 10 on the occasion of the preliminary hearing that was then postponed, but unfortunately the work commitments to which I have to submit for a living and the one thousand five hundred kilometers separating my residence from this courtroom prevented me from doing so. I am not going to rage about the gross errors, certainly not mine, that led to the failures of notification against me and resulted in the postponement of the hearing. They qualify themselves. And they also qualify much more actually. I face this hearing, as well as the eventual trial that will ensue, with serenity. Aware that I have nothing to defend myself against in a political trial such as this one. Proud to be on the stand together with some of the comrades dearest to me. Happy to finally be able to greet to Alfredo and express all my closeness and solidarity with him. Determined to look those who claim the right to judge me in the face.

We are here because we have to answer, in particular, the charge of incitement to commit crimes for the purpose of terrorism and subversion of the democratic order. Good. I’m not interested in going into the merits of the charges, let alone, as already mentioned, defending myself against these crimes of opinion. What I am interested in is to make my considerations clear with respect to this charge.
In my conception of anarchism, as well as of life itself, there is no instigator-instigated binomial, there are no empty heads to be filled, there are no masses to be directed and steered, and I do not claim to instigate anything. The very term “instigation” has a negative, devious meaning, implying a kind of persuasion of the other by deception or trickery or manipulation. And that is precisely why, gentlemen, I believe that there is no better instigator of crime than the state itself. What do you think engenders feelings of revenge and revolt among the exploited and oppressed all over the world? The export of war or anarchists? Are you really convinced that if someone decides to take charge of his life and revolt, it is because the anarchists whispered it in his ear? Does it not occur to you that the systemic violence perpetrated through laws, institutions and repressive apparatuses, always directed toward the proletariat and always in defense of the bourgeoisie, may genuinely produce a backfire? What then is the question? If anarchism propagates ideas of revolt? Whether I as an anarchist point to the destruction of this miserable system? Of course I do. If I write and applaud theories and practices of subversion? That seems like an open secret to me.

The truth is that the state, capital, its apparatuses and their concrete personifications, including you, are afraid. Not afraid of anarchists let’s be clear, they are afraid that the situation will get out of hand, that the control they claim to have over the world may falter. Any sick system inevitably tends to put itself on the defensive, taking measures to try to maintain an internal balance and trying to annihilate threats, whether internal or external. The creaks of this imbalance can be felt just about everywhere, and slowly they are beginning to become more and more evident and, above all, the perpetrators increasingly clear in people’s eyes: economic disasters, environmental disasters, wars, pandemics. Crises, you know, generate discontent, discontent very easily turns into anger, anger triggers riots. And this, all of you, you certainly cannot afford. So you try to act in a preventive way, going to strike relentlessly at those who have already declared war on you for a century and a half and those who consider you enemies regardless of crisis and discontent, trying to prevent certain ideas from spreading among those who have begun to harbor a certain distrust and resentment toward you. Because they are dangerous ideas for your stability and for your comfortable places in ivory towers. Continue reading “Perugia, Italy: Further statements by anarchist comrades Matteo Monaco, Sara Ardizzone & Paolo Arosio at the Sibilla proceedings” →

Italy: Statement read by Michele Fabiani during the preliminary hearing in the Sibilla proceedings

Posted on 2025/02/02 by darknights

Statement read by Michele Fabiani during the preliminary hearing in the Sibilla proceedings

Legalitarian rhetoric sees trials as a moment in which truths are established, in which a person endowed with willpower must willingly or unwillingly assume responsibility with respect to malicious episodes. To the point that one is in effect acquitted when it is established that the accused is not of sound mind. I have never believed anything like that in my entire life: I think it is an ideological junk typical of bourgeois liberalism to crush necessity, need, material conditions, personal formation, innate impulses within the concepts of guilt and innocence. But today I want to follow, in the economy of this speech, the commonplace. Not least because today marks the likely beginning of a particular trial, a trial against books and newspapers.

What kind of truth does Operation Sibilla conceal? And what responsibility are the protagonists taking on?

For consistency I start with my own, of responsibilities. I have written articles, I have published and disseminated anarchist press, I have published anarchist books. I published, through Monte Bove Editions, the book Which International? by Alfredo Cospito and many others. And I am so proud of having done that, that just last October-in a deliberately provocative gesture toward the previous preliminary hearing-I printed its third edition.

However, there are responsibilities that will also have to be assumed by those who support the prosecution, in a trial in which the body of the crime are books and newspapers. I say this with extreme sincerity, I just do not understand how the state cannot comprehend such elementary evidence: since the world began, he who is censored, gagged, interned, tortured for his ideas gains popularity and fame from the very action of censorship. Everyone knows who Socrates and Giordano Bruno are, I don’t think anyone in here knows the names of Meleto or Cardinal Giulio Antonio Santorio.

Which side of the story do you sit on?

When it comes to accountability there is one that is greater than all and frankly crushes jurisprudential technicalities. When it comes to truth, I cannot be silent about the most shameful truth of this trial. As we discuss criminal procedure there is an elephant in the room. Right in here.

I just cannot keep quiet about the scandal that there is a co-defendant of mine, a comrade of mine, locked up in 41 bis and connected by video conference. When we talk about truth, no one can deny that this investigation played a central role in the decision to lock Alfredo Cospito up in 41 bis. The minister of justice spoke about it in parliament, chief prosecutor Cantone himself spoke about it during a hearing.

This is a scandal not only because 41 bis is an international disgrace, a torture prison regime to which no one should be subjected. Above all, it is a scandal because we anarchists say things clearly. In this book, Which International?, you will not find a cabal of cryptic messages. The writings of anarchists are not pizzas! Nor will you find orders, because anarchists have no leaders and take orders from no one. Continue reading “Italy: Statement read by Michele Fabiani during the preliminary hearing in the Sibilla proceedings” →

Italy: Statement filed by Francesco Rota in the course of the preliminary hearing in the Sibilla case

Posted on 2025/02/02 - 2025/02/02 by darknights

Statement filed by Francesco Rota in the course of the preliminary hearing in the Sibilla case

I would never have written this statement if I had not felt that under attack was not only a path of analysis and critical insight, thus an important portion of my life, but above all a fellow anarchist whom the state in recent years has intended to bury under a blanket of isolation aimed at annihilation, because according to the anti-terrorist organs he was representative of decades of experience in revolutionary struggle. Then again, it was clear that a transfer to 41 bis and a life sentence amounted to attempted annihilation. The international solidarity movement of the years 2022-’23, however, by the force of the actions taken, first broke the silence and later spoiled the precarious political balance on which this attempt was based.

After several years of investigations by the Milan prosecutor’s office, aimed at attempting to somehow link the defendants to actions of attack, the Perugia prosecutor’s office inherited as part of an investigation into an anarchist space those acts of investigation concerning the editing and distribution of the newspaper for which indictment is being sought today. Coming to these last years, here then appears the shameless intention to employ this proceeding as a 41 bis support function against Alfredo Cospito. This intention, together with the ongoing attack against revolutionary anarchist publications in the context of the belligerent policies of the last executives, is therefore one of the reasons why I am filing this statement today. In this sense, I again express my solidarity with Alfredo Cospito without half-measures, reconfirm what I have already stated at the review hearing on the precautionary measures on March 14, 2023, and reiterate the reasons for my visceral participation in the 2022-’23 mobilization against 41 bis and hostile life imprisonment.

How to act against the overall technological turn that has been taking place for decades by fighting it now, before it is too late? What implications in social confrontation and revolutionary struggle do the ongoing technological process and the changes that have taken place in social reality in recent decades have? And how to equip for this? What clash can take place in a society where capacities for class struggle and organization are manifesting with extreme difficulty? Who are the exploiters, the masters, today? These are some of the questions posed between the pages of the newspaper under indictment, where the prosecution instead intends to see at all costs instigation and orienting and terrorist capabilities. However, this is not what I am talking about: analyses on the terrain of revolutionary struggle are not the concern of the courts, which by their very constitution cannot comprehend the essence of anarchists’ struggles.

I have known anarchism for as long as I can remember and, amazed, without anyone having pointed me in any direction, I discovered the ideas and practice of anarchists from the words of comrades, from their example and from the writings found in that anarchist propaganda that is today being prosecuted as incitement to crime with the aggravating circumstance of the purpose of terrorism. It is therefore difficult to describe what the texts of anarchism meant to me, with their density and depth of analysis of social reality: some had the revealing ability to shed light on only apparently marginal aspects that I had never before considered, concerning the things of the world and life in their totality; others, on the other hand, shocked me in their being a slap in the face against all accommodation and compromise.

Anarchism does not only imply the existence of a movement, the anarchist movement, which only at the cost of a gross oversimplification we could call first and foremost a political movement, but it has always been something more, something profoundly different that speaks of the dream and possible realization of a different life, radically different from the one we live today. Anarchism implies the undermining of our guarantees, of many of our certainties. Fighting for anarchism therefore inevitably means entering the dimension of risk inherent in the desire for integral, authentic freedom, certainly not the artificial democratic “freedoms” of which courts, inquisitors and butlers of the state stand as champions.

This knowledge of anarchism of mine has therefore been an enormous fortune, and today I cannot help but think of the absence of an anarchist, of my father, who made this fortune possible, untying the intuitions of the heart from the strings of petty logic and bringing up that cry for freedom that cries out in our hearts.

So you will understand that I do not turn to you today to beg for something, to advance justifications, to initiate a confrontation, to deny something that for me is not only the passion of all time, but the indissoluble essence of my ideas, my very life.

Francesco Rota

Source: La Nemesi

Berlin, Germany: Freedom & Happiness – Call for a demonstration in solidarity with Daniela Klette on 22.02.25 – 18:30 – Oranienplatz

Posted on 2025/02/02 - 2025/02/02 by darknights

Stop state terrorism

Solidarity with those in hiding and prisoners

Almost a year ago, on February 26, 2024, Daniela Klette was arrested in her Kreuzberg apartment and has been in custody in Vechta Prison ever since.

She is accused of various expropriation actions, as well as the successful demolition of the prison in Weiterstadt in 1993, which was carried out by the Red Army Faction (RAF).

The first trial is about to begin in March of this year at the Verden District Court.

After Daniela’s arrest, Berlin became a scene of heavily armed uniformed men in military style trying to outdo each other in the level of escalation. Disputes over jurisdiction within the various repressive authorities at federal and state level at least provided some amusement in a week that was otherwise overshadowed by the cops’ show of force and lurid articles in the media. Houses were evacuated, various properties were searched, tanks drove through the streets and the German state showed that it does not forget.

This escalation by the repressive authorities was followed by further measures that illustrate their determination to persecute. For example, an extensive public search was carried out for the other two accused – Burkhard Garweg and Ernst-Volker Staub. The treacherous face of parts of German society has been shown above all in the fact that time and again, most recently at the counter-protests against a Nazi march in Berlin Friedrichshain, cops arrest people who are named by denunciators who see the manhunt as an event, incited by the smear campaigns of Springer and Co.

Calls for denunciation and manhunts as happenings do not appear to be a remnant of the RAF era, nor is it just a matter of “settling old scores”. Since the G20 summit in Hamburg, public calls for manhunts have once again become a widespread method used by the cops in cooperation with the relevant media and, in addition to the persecution of our companions in various investigations throughout Germany, we have to observe how even banal offenses lead to pictures of the suspects in the press and on billboards. Continue reading “Berlin, Germany: Freedom & Happiness – Call for a demonstration in solidarity with Daniela Klette on 22.02.25 – 18:30 – Oranienplatz” →

Italy: Statement of Alfredo Cospito during the preliminary hearing for the “Sibilla Trial”

Posted on 2025/01/29 by darknights

We publish the statements read by some of the anarchist comrades accused in the Sibilla trial in the preliminary hearing held on the 15^th of January in Perugia. Amongst the defendants, is also Alfredo Cospito, who attended by videoconference from Bancali prison in (Sardinia) where he is locked up in the 41bis regime, who read a statement. The hearing ended with a dismissal of all charges against all defendants, bringing to a conclusion an infamous case, which apart from aiming at the silencing of anarchist revolutionary publications, had a central role in Alfredo’s transfer to the 41bis regime. For a few hours Alfredo was able to hear the voices of his comrades, to see their faces, to speak, breaking the wall of silence in which they are trying to bury him. And this is certainly more stirring than any decision made by any state bureaucrat. In particular, Alfredo’s own words resonate as a powerful denunciation against the totalitarian horror of the 41bis regime. Those children’s handprints on the dividing glass in the visiting room should shake the consciences, of those who still have a conscience.

We do not know to what extent the intervention of the comrades in the courtroom somehow influenced the court’s decision not to venture into a shaky trial in itself. However, on January 15, it became clear that subsequent potential hearings would also undoubtedly provide an opportunity to intervene, breaking the wall of isolation of the 41bis, on behalf of Alfredo and the other accused comrades. Certainly, it should not take a trial like this one to initiate moments of mobilization against the international shame of 41 bis, and in Alfredo’s specific case, as of today the justifications for confinement in this special regime have one important piece missing. To make them pay the price for this contradiction, it is more urgent than ever to undertake other paths and revitalize initiatives against 41 bis and the warmongering and repressive policies of States.

Statement of Alfredo Cospito during the preliminary hearing for the “Sibilla Trial”

Today, you the representatives of the judiciary branch of this republic are putting us on trial for writing on the walls, for our words, for our books and magazines, forcing, as a matter of fact, anarchy into clandestinity. We are in good company, with this post-fascist government, censorship and repression are expanding to the entire social body, accelerating the transition from totalitarian democracy to a tragicomic opera regime. Saying this, I must thank you: after a year of silence, thanks to your embarrassing and anachronistic prosecution, I am allowed to express my thought publicly. Even if remotely, even if for the brief time of a blink of an eye, today I can tear off the gag, the medieval bridle of a 41bis that a moderate left-wing government applied to me years ago to silence an uncomfortable voice, for however minor and irrelevant, however surely an enemy of your democracy. These two years of special regime have most definitely opened my eyes to the true face of your law, of your constitutional rights, revealing to me a criminogenic system composed of an obscene, crude and murderous totalitarianism.

Today in this courtroom we are undergoing an inquisitorial trial based on an interview given through regular prison mail and not through a conversation with my sister in a prison visit as the prosecution wants us to believe, dragging her to the courthouse only for the mere fact of continuing undeterred to attend prison visits with her brother. It is a classic strategy of all authoritarian regimes, used regularly in the 41 bis regime, to burn all bridges with all emotional bonds at the exterior of the prison.

It is indicative, with every visit I attend, to see children’s handprints on the security glass that separates them from their fathers or mothers. But after all, what to expect from a democracy that puts children in prison? Continue reading “Italy: Statement of Alfredo Cospito during the preliminary hearing for the “Sibilla Trial”” →