Rome

Rome, Italy: For an international revolutionary solidarity

Posted on 2022/05/21 - 2022/05/21 by darknights

“…I think that the new can only come from their collision (of anarchist terrorism and creative anarchy), because life is contrast: rational and irrational, hate and love, everything but the mortal, static “balance”. Harmony is the daughter of “imbalance”, of chaos. “*

Well, what has been hovering for a while has finally manifested itself: on May 5, the anarchist comrade Alfredo Cospito, already detained in the AS2 section [High Security 2; Att.Nt) of the Terni prison, received the notification of the application of the 41 bis against him.
This detention regime, requested by the judges and approved by the Ministry of Justice, with the signature of the Minister Marta Cartabia, as we know, involves: the annihilation of the individual, an extension of the isolation, the deprivation of books, the lack of information and news from the outside world… in short, torture. Continue reading “Rome, Italy: For an international revolutionary solidarity” →

Italy: Social Credit Score – Rome & Bologna testing new app that monitors & rewards behavior

Posted on 2022/05/03 - 2022/05/03 by darknights

In line with recommendations being laid out by the World Economic Forum and the UN 2030 Agenda, Bologna, Italy, plans to launch a social credit style app that has striking similarities with Communist China’s social credit system. The app rewards or punishes its citizens for their behavior. Dubbed “Smart Citizen Wallet,” the app will track activities such as recycling, public transportation use, and energy management.

The primary argument for the program is to “save resources” and promote climate-friendly behavior. Those displaying good behavior will collect digital coins and receive discounts at local shops based on the given scores.

The app is already active and in experimental stages in Rome and is set to go live in Bologna in Autumn. Bologna Mayor Matteo Lepore and Massimo Bugani, director of the city’s “Digital Agenda,” discussed the project at a March 29 conference. Bugani indicated the app was part of a more comprehensive effort by the city to invest in digital innovation.

In 2020, Italy and six other nations signed an agreement to become “Agile Nations” in partnership with the WEF. Besides Italy, the deal—co-organized by the OECD—includes Canada, Denmark, Japan, Singapore, UAE, and the UK and sets “each country’s commitment to creating a regulatory environment in which new ideas can thrive.” Expressly—with the Fourth Industrial Revolution front and center. Continue reading “Italy: Social Credit Score – Rome & Bologna testing new app that monitors & rewards behavior” →

Italy: Update about the comrades arrested on March 16th: Evelin’s arrest order annulled and Gianluca’s confirmed

Posted on 2022/04/10 by darknights

On April 6th was held the hearing of the re-examination court on the precautionary measures for Gianluca and Evelin, anarchist comrades accused of “possession of deflagrant and explosive material, attempted manufacture of improvised explosive devices and possession of deflagrant material with the aim of attacking public safety”, arrested on March 16th on a warrant from the public prosecutor’s office of Genoa and later transferred under house arrest.

Today, April 8th, the comrades were notified of the result of the hearing: the arrest order against Evelin was “annulled for lack of serious evidence of guilt”, therefore the comrade is released from house arrest, while it is confirmed for Gianluca, who remains under house arrest, without any change in the specific restrictions (no communication with persons other than close family members, no leaving the perimeter of the house even to buy food, no receiving correspondence, etc., and periodic checks by the police).

We remind that a solidarity fund has been activated to support the expenses of the comrades (currently the fund is only active on italian territory). The coordinates for sending contributions are:

Postepay account number: 4023 6010 2286 1819
Tax code: BGNPPL79M18E472O

Solidarity with Gianluca and all imprisoned anarchists!

Italy: Update about the comrades arrested on March 16th: Evelin also transferred to house arrest and coordinates of solidarity fund

Posted on 2022/04/08 by darknights

Evelin was transferred to house arrest in Rovereto on March 26th. Both she and Gianluca are subject to all restrictions (no communication with each other, no communication with persons other than close family members, no leaving the perimeter of the house even to buy food, no receiving correspondence, etc., and periodic checks by the police).

A solidarity fund has been set up to support the expenses of the two comrades (currently the fund is only active on italian territory). The coordinates for sending contributions are:

Postepay account number: 4023 6010 2286 1819
Tax code: BGNPPL79M18E472O

[Note: The comrades were arrested in Rome on March 16th. The investigation and the repressive operation are the result of a joint work between the ROS (“Special Operational Grouping” of carabinieri) and the DIGOS (“General Investigations and Special Operations Division”, political police), coordinated by the Genoa public prosecutor’s office. The two comrades are charged with “possession of deflagrant and explosive material, attempted manufacture of improvised explosive devices, as well as possession of deflagrant material with the aim of attacking public safety”, in conspiracy with unknown persons, in relation to the discovery by the repressive forces of explosive material in June 2021 in a wood near Genoa].

Italy: Update about the comrades arrested on March 16: Gianluca transferred to house arrest

Posted on 2022/03/26 by darknights

On Wednesday, March 16, two anarchist comrades, Evelin and Gianluca, were arrested in Rome. The investigation and the repressive operation are the result of a joint work between the ROS (“Special Operational Grouping” of carabinieri) and the DIGOS (“General Investigations and Special Operations Division”, political police), coordinated by the Genoa public prosecutor’s office. The two comrades are charged with “possession of deflagrant and explosive material, attempted manufacture of improvised explosive devices, as well as possession of deflagrant material with the aim of attacking public safety”, in conspiracy with unknown persons.

On March 23, Gianluca was transferred to house arrest. Currently (March 25), Evelin remains imprisoned in the women’s Rebibbia prison.

Revolutionary solidarity with Gianluca and Evelin and all imprisoned anarchists!

The address of the comrade:

Evelin Sterni
C. C. di Roma Rebibbia femminile
via Bartolo Longo 92
00156 Roma (Italy)

Rome, Italy: Paper bomb (bomba carta) against the Belarusian embassy

Posted on 2022/03/26 - 2022/03/26 by darknights

On a cold night in March we threw a paper bomb (DN: Bomba carta, like a powerful firecracker, card outer and blackpoweder inside) at the Belarusian embassy, located in Rome in the Montesacro district, in Via delle Alpi Apuane.

We know that the press agencies assumed that it was a gesture related to the involvement of the Belarusian regime with the Russian one in the ongoing war in Ukraine. It’s not just that. It is undeniable the servility of the government of Lukashenko, dictator of the country since 1994, towards his friend Putin; despite this, it is clear to us that this, as always happens when States and their respective interests clash, is a war between powers to redefine new geopolitical balances, to share new/old spheres of economic, military and political influence. This war full of blood and sowing of death is the responsibility of Belarus as well as of Europe, NATO, Russia and the Ukrainian government itself. There are no possible sides in this kind of wars, if not on the side of those who defect, those who resist and those who counterattack the real enemies.

Lukashenko’s authoritarian regime, among other things, was responsible for the brutal repression of the spontaneous and decentralized uprisings in Belarus at the dawn of his umpteenth “re-election” in August 2020. After thousands of arrests, beatings, tortures, rapes and a few murders, when many of the most active protesters were in prison or forced into exile, the regime changed its strategy, allowing large weekly demonstrations in the capital Minsk alone, while at the same time crushing self-organized realities in the provinces. The myth of peaceful protest and the recuperative sirens of nonviolence did the rest: the belief that the mass demonstrations would have led Lukashenko to abdicate the throne ended up extinguishing the spark that had ignited the anger of so many.

The anarchist realities in Belarus for several years were already under the eye of repression of the regime and many fugitive comrades abroad have decided to return to the riots and fight, forming their own groups. Among them, Igor Olinevich, Dmitry Rezanovich, Segej Romanov and Dmitry Dubovsky are four comrades who were arrested on the orders of the Belarusian KGB in the fall of 2020 near the border with Ukraine, and who were then tortured to extract confessions. At the end of a mock trial they were sentenced to between 18 and 20 years in prison, for possession of weapons and for acts of terrorism, related to arson attacks against cars and offices belonging to the organs of repression. These are the highest sentences ever imposed so far in the history of post-Soviet Belarus.

This gesture of ours is dedicated to them, and to all the comrades who continue to fight inside and outside the prisons.
For the prisoners killed during the March 2020 uprising in Italian prisons, who still cry out for revenge.

For international solidarity!
For anarchy!

Source: Inferno Urbano

Rome, Italy: Texts and materials distributed during the initiative of 26/11/21 at Bencivenga + Contributions of Alfredo Cospito and Juan Sorroche

Posted on 2022/02/20 by darknights

We receive and publish a series of texts and materials distributed during the initiative in solidarity with the Chilean prisoners, held at the Bencivenga Occupato on November 26, 2021. Two booklets: one on the hunger strike conducted by prisoners in Chile, the other is a collection of texts, many translated from the magazine Kalinov Most, which were intended to better focus the topics of the debate: the specific reality of Chilean prisons, solidarity, fight against prison. There are also two contributions of Juan and Alfredo for the initiative, which they asked to be disseminated.

UNTIL THE DESTRUCTION OF THE PRISON-SOCIETY

(leaflet of introduction to the debate distributed during the initiative)

This initiative was born with the need to send, in our own small way, a gesture of solidarity to the comrades prisoners in Chile who in the first months of this year have undertaken two hard hunger strikes. We want to support them, also through the translations contained in the pamphlets prepared for this meeting, by spreading the determination with which they have carried out their struggle inside the prison, with the aim of feeling it closer to us who are outside those walls and far from those territories. Although at the end of their mobilization the prisoners did not get all that they demanded, it still allowed them to build and establish bonds of complicity, both inside and outside the prison. Ties that have made this struggle transcend barriers and borders and that, since it has clearly positioned itself against all forms of coercion and domination, have made it recognizable and vindicable by refractory people all over the world.

But it is not for simple voyeurism towards distant rebellions that we are here today. With this initiative we also intend to underline our complicity with our comrades who today are prisoners of the State, so that they know that they are not alone. Also in this part of the world we have anarchist prisoners who have recently conducted several struggles inside the prison. Struggles conducted individually or collectively, strikes and mass uprisings such as those of March 2020 against pandemic management inside prisons. Struggles whose quality, to take up a concept expressed with emphasis in the contribution that Juan, a prisoner in the Terni prison, wrote for this initiative, is closely related to the relationships that exist between inside and outside the prison. These relationships are the same on which prisoners and Chilean comrades have repeatedly insisted, stating that “the prison is part of the options of the struggle, it is part of it and therefore, instead of being a parenthesis or a pause, it is configured as one more scenario in which to carry out the clash” and that it is necessary to understand “the prisoner as an active comrade, in struggle, who is in this particular condition as a result of a chosen path that does not end within [those] four walls”. Relationships in which it is necessary to invest if we want to recognize a prisoner as our comrade, as a complicit in the struggle against all power, especially at this time when these relationships are under attack. The latest repressive operations in Italy have in fact, among others, the purpose of hitting the communication between the world outside and inside the prison, putting pressure on the epistolary communication through which prisoners continue to be part of the anarchist debate and struggle, providing reflections, contributions, proposals for action and stimuli for action. Now more than ever it is therefore the time to increase efforts in the direction of greater communication and complicity with the prisoners, having as its objective not mere support in the charitable way, but rather the reinforcement of our offensive capacity against this system of domination and exploitation. Continue reading “Rome, Italy: Texts and materials distributed during the initiative of 26/11/21 at Bencivenga + Contributions of Alfredo Cospito and Juan Sorroche” →

Italy: Measure and process updates for Operation Bialystok

Posted on 2022/02/03 by darknights

January 2022

As we approach the end of the trial of Operation Bialystok, it seems to us to be the right moment to spread some considerations on its progress. Although we are not interested in following the pace dictated by repression, nor in taking a victimistic or alarmist stance in the face of the activities of police institutions, we believe it is important to share information and impressions about what is happening at the court level. By conscious choice, we will summarize aspects and moments that we consider noteworthy, at the expense of a detailed and chronological description of the trial in which we are involved.

As far as the framework of the investigation is concerned, we refer to the texts “Sull’operazione Bialystok” (On the Bialystok operation) already published and circulated on the web and “Testo e contesto” (Text and context).

At the time of writing all defendants in this proceeding are at large. On January 27th a positive response was received to a request for the end of the precautionary measures to which 4 defendants were still subject (3 obligations to stay and one obligation to present themselves for weekly signatures), so that at the moment only one person remains under obligations to stay. The differences in conditions are mainly due to the different timing in the presentation of the appeals which brought the same before different courts, and to the specificity of the individual positions regarding the crimes charged.

Broadly speaking, up to now the process has been marked by hours and hours of endless hearings for the delineation of the anarchist context both nationally and internationally, hearings where we defendants have almost never been nominated. Only after many hearings did we begin to talk about the so-called specific facts. There was a certain interest and prominence in the moments in which the international relations of the defendants were exposed; this was not because the prosecution brought who knows what elements, on the contrary, we witnessed a real climbing on mirrors, but more because of the play of roles within the institution of justice. It is evident that an assize court, used to dealing with crimes of a certain gravity, sees in the international dimension of the investigation the possibility of its own raison d’être. And this, we say, on the level of the actual courtroom show; behind the scenes, that is, on the level of the investigation, and therefore of the repressive strategy, we also see something else, that is, a direction that looks like it wants to be taken in the future. These, like others in the past, are attempts, sometimes successful and sometimes less so, to structure on a concrete level the collaboration of police and prosecutors’ offices on an international level regarding investigations. Continue reading “Italy: Measure and process updates for Operation Bialystok” →

Rome, Italy: Incendiary attack on two Sirti vehicles by Some dedicated to the cult of fire

Posted on 2022/02/02 by darknights

Source: Inferno Urbano

We receive by anonymous mail and publish:

———-

Inspired by the attack of 28th August 2021, that took place in this city, we acted to set fire to two vehicles of the Sirti company during the night of December 16 .

Sirti S.p.A. is a company specialising in the design, implementation and maintenance of large telecommunications networks.

At the moment it is actively collaborating with Openfiber, the company set up by Enel and shared by Cassa Depositi and Prestiti whose purpose is the installation and management of the fibre optic network in Italy. This infrastructure is of fundamental importance for the technological implementation towards which society as a whole is racing under the impetus of the demands of growth of the capitalist economic system. This will affect the private lives of millions of individuals as well as public administrations, which will be ‘forced’ to adapt to the new European standards, and will also influence the competitiveness of companies as the Fourth Industrial Revolution approaches.

For us therefore attacking this company means to contrast the direct interests of capitalism at the dawn of its restructuring of production and consumption.

If we are writing these words it is to strengthen communication through anarchist action and the struggle against all power and specifically against the current phase of capitalist expansion consisting of the virtualisation of social interactions, ever more pervasive control, ever greater exploitation of workplaces and natural resources and the repression of anyone who publicly organises their opposition to all this. Continue reading “Rome, Italy: Incendiary attack on two Sirti vehicles by Some dedicated to the cult of fire” →

Italy: A text by Anna Beniamino about Marilù Maschietto

Posted on 2021/11/29 by darknights

Written by Anna from prison on the occasion of a day dedicated to Marilù

There are people who are a safe harbor to land in. Marilu had all the characteristics, although thorny and ironic in the discussion and in certain cynical anecdotes of the miseries of the movement, she knew how to be welcoming, always and in any case, without fear or difficulty. In her telling and recounting, far from the rhetoric of some of her writings that linger in a certain hagiographic complacency in painting portraits of comrades and episodes of the 80s, she gave her best in the daily concreteness, with the simplicity of those who have known and lived the most varied experiences. Thus surfaced the revolutionary wave and the times of backwash and the companions of a life of militancy (term now a bit ‘retro, but full of meaning on her lips): from the old anarchist partisans from Carrara described in an anti-rhetorical form, in the act of digging up their infracycles treasures to help the young people of AR, to the ” comrades ” of the Roman squats of the 90s to support in the occupations; from Horst Fantazzini in the few periods of freedom between one jail and another, greedy for life and adventure, to Gianfranco Faina, an intellectual in struggle and on the run; Fernando Del Grosso, a partisan from Abruzzo, who told of not giving himself peace until he reached all those responsible for the death of his brothers slaughtered by the Nazi-Fascists. All this mixed with memories of a trip to Nicaragua to support the struggle and the stories of the Bangladeshi stallholder to help with his problems of being an illegal immigrant in the metropolis, the posters of Casa Pound under the arcades of Piazza Vittorio to tear down (“and if no one helps me I’ll go”, and she really did! ) and the frequentation of the chorus of women singers of the popular tradition and struggle, the flamenco shoes shown with pride and the heart medicine “forgotten” in the drawer, her presence at any parade, making fun of the dismayed look on the guards’ faces when they saw this lady in a camel-colored coat and half-heeled shoes surrounded by young punks, the same smile with which she whispered, twenty years ago in the streets of Genoa, “we’re going together” taking under her arm the comrades she saw weighed down by “overly” loaded backpacks.
The same density of stratified experience immediately caught the attention of those who crossed the threshold of the old house in Piazza Vittorio for the first time, also of lived and crumpled nobility, between the Bangla market and the Chinese stores, open day and night for the comrades. On the walls were oil portraits of a frowning nineteenth-century ancestor (Marilu came from a noble and “fascist” family of Ferrara, of which she was the refractory daughter) and posters of the fight against special prisons; the photos of dead comrades and the lace tablecloths worn to welcome the living ones, the peach stones carved in the shape of a ring “Horst’s gift when he was in jail” and the ” diary” with the phone numbers written in pen on the wall (“so when they come for the next search, even if they take away the diary I’ll have them”), behind the heavy frame that enclosed the aforementioned noble frown.

It was clear that there were no stereotypes of movement applicable, but solidarity and indestructible bonds were always valid, despite galleys and ideal shipwrecks; pride was valid, in narrating her and her comrades’ experiences of struggle, the pride of narrating something well done, a job completed to the end.
In this sense, above all, she was enlightening and luminous in revealing, almost in a fairy-tale way, the hardness of the blows she received and the beauty of resistance, freeing those who came into contact with her from the heavy weight we carry on us, in order to travel light.
It would have made a mockery of the infamous presence of the police, up to the occasion of the last farewell to her, the last anecdote of an anarchist watched by living and dead, as if a funeral could be a seditious demonstration. Or perhaps, in these dark times, the dead are considered more alive than the living?

Anna, Rebibbia Prison

Source: Il Rovescio