Bologna, Italy - A few considerations from the zoo, by Martino Trevisan, one of the comrades of 'fuoriluogo'

informa-azione/bs

Dozza, 7th May 2011 - Here we are again: first our arrests in Bologna, then the same thing in Florence.
All my solidarity to the comrades hit by repression in Florence. This provokes anger and indignation in me, but it doesn’t surprise me.
It doesn’t surprise me because ‘anti-anarchist repression’ against those people and situations of struggle that set themselves in a revolutionary perspective has never stopped.
It doesn’t surprise me because those who are in power know very well they don’t have a clue to a ‘sustainable management of the crisis’ (nor do they need one), let alone to the solution of the crisis.
It is difficult to believe that everybody will passively accept a constant worsening of their living conditions and an irreversible ruin of the planet. Therefore it doesn’t surprise me that power, fearing the revolt of its subjects, represses those situations of dissent considered particularly dangerous with all possible means.
However, what power fears is not the ‘strength’ of the anarchist movement, even if this is what some comrades love to say in their communiqués or in some particularly threatening slogan. On the contrary, what disturbs politicians, bosses and cops are anarchist ideas and practices, their potentials, their spreading among the excluded and angry people: the universal language of revolt, which also spoke on 14th December 2010 in Rome, Italy.
Power fears widespread hostility, situations of permanent conflict and the refusal to acknowledge the institutions (and to be identified by them).
Power fears the self-management and horizontality of our struggles and the informality of our relations.
Power fears the news of attack against dominion, be them politically motivated or not, which many sympathize with, but which the mainstream media rarely report. Following some police alchemy, therefore, some news published by certain [anarchist] papers become ‘evidence’ of the editors’ involvement in actions, no matter if this proves totally absurd at a more careful examination.
After all the charge against us and against the Florence comrades (previously used against the Lecce and Turin comrades) is absurd in itself: organized crime based on a rigid and closed association with its leaders, vice-leaders and soldiers, where open places become clandestine hideouts ‘because only the people running the place have the keys’ (following the same reasoning, then, the keys of libraries and public schools should be distributed to everybody), places used ‘to commit crimes’.
Again, nothing to be surprised at. As I have a lot of time here, I’ve been reading some Malatesta’s articles and I found a passage where he made a few considerations on the use of the ‘organized crime charge’ to hit anarchists: clearly it is no innovative thinking.
As I’m writing these lines, I learn from the local TV news (sadly the telly is always on in prison) that a site of the Northern League in Bologna has been damaged for the nth time. Yesterday the news broke of an attack against a site of the UIL [institutional union] in the San Donato neighbourhood [Bologna]. And then they say Bologna is a pacified city where the only ‘out-of-place voice is that of the insurrectionist anarchists’!
But investigators don’t really care if investigations like this one will come to nowhere. Their real goal is to harass the comrades with imprisonment and other judicial restrictions, to scare those who come close to the anarchists, and at the same time to try to create precedents in order to crash future forms of dissent.
I think this tendency deserves particular attention because it interests anyone who wants to start a struggle. These attempts must not go on in silence.
If we are frightened and pushed back by this kind of attacks, our enemy will advance and gain ground.
I believe the best thing to do in front of the advancing repression is to re-launch the struggle and to widen solidarity.
From this point of view [solidarity], we can’t complain as regards operation ‘Outlaw’ (this name is really laughably ridiculous not to be mentioned at least once). Thank you from the bottom of my heart for the letters, love and solidarity coming from Bologna, from all over Italy and from beyond the borders of this damned country.
With my head held high in spite of everything.
For anarchy.
Martino.

Martino Trevisan, one of the comrades arrested in Bologna on 6th April (operation ‘Outlaw’) is currently detained in Vercelli (Via del Rollone 19, 13100 Vercelli, Italy).