Today he will probably be imprisoned in the prison of Cuneo but it is possible that he will be soon be transferred.
To write to him:
Guido Mantelli
C.C. via Roncata 75
12100 CUNEO
Italy
And so another season is drawing to a close and, as when one reluctantly leaves summer pastures, it is time to go home. Of course, it is not with a light heart that I offer my wrists to be handcuffed, but it is something that I had taken into account at the start of this period in hiding because the charges at stake and the projects that await me once this matter has been got out of the way would not have justified a prolonged period on the run.
In the meantime, I took advantage of these months to take care of some matters that are dear to me, I went through beautiful valleys and mountains, met exceptional people and generous hearts, and I was particularly warmed by the fire of a solidarity that I have never felt lacking.
I also dedicated the necessary time to fruitful discussions that commitments and habits would not have otherwise permitted. To be honest, I even had time to “find it long,” perhaps more than on other occasions. Now that the trial that I went into hiding about this time has begun, I feel the need to give you my point of view on the most striking feature that distinguishes this judicial story, namely that it is an indictment against antifascism.
For my part, without exaggerating given my family’s past, I would say that anti-fascism is a congenital tension and that necessarily accompanies the struggle for a world free from bullying and authoritarianism. The anti-fascism that I have always known is practical, it is that which has never got lost in futile pacification without any change or the hypocrisy of calls for unjustified tolerance towards those who, in one way or another, want to impose authoritarian and liberticidal choices on society.
But I don’t make antifascism the exclusive field for criticizing and fighting this existent based on discrimination and
exploitation. So let me offer you a short excerpt from some reading that I’ve done during these months and which I endorse fully.
“... Fascism is historically short-lived, because it is the form of government that the bourgeoisie chooses when its principal form of power, democracy, is unable to fulfill its function: to ensure the accumulation of capital and their power over the producing classes. Once the role of watchdog has been fulfilled, fascism is put aside and the bastard democracy comes back into fashion. The fascists may have the illusion of an epochal transformation, but they are just the shit of transition, thugs, organised cops. Democracy, with its cargo of newspaper gossip-style ethics, with its mechanisms of consensus-building by the entrapment of the petty-bourgeois and a redistribution of the crumbs, fits better into the domain of the Capital ...
Hannah Arendt is absolutely right: ‘evil is mundane’.
There has never been a fascist experience that has not fed off the oppression of the lower classes and the consensus of the small dealer, the small proprietor, that group of animals that trades freedom for order and discipline so that the working class or the immigrants, in other words the ugly, dirty and bad, do not disturb it. Fascism has always been defined by “small” men that graze on national and patriotic mysticism, performing their miserable tasks with dedication. Little clerks of terror committed to doing the accountancy of the enemies to be eliminated. But the forced deportations that capital imposes on the outcasts of the earth, first starving them then concentrating them in the urban web where it can exploit them better or transform them into beggars, whores or in the army of the banlieue, are unmatched. Not to mention their ability to build concentration camps as large as continents, to poison land and rivers...”*.
The trial that awaits us is this sense exemplary: it is not the “good boys” of Casa Pound that we will be facing, but the Police force of Cuneo who is trying to get us out of the way for the umpteenth time, and complacent judges who, in setting up a trial for clashes in the streets, (a situation that by definition requires two opposing sides) deliberately decide to indulge in the criminalization of anti-fascists and let the black-shirted thugs go ahead. Perhaps “Cuneo Gold Medal of the Resistance” hasn’t noticed, but the trial that is taking place opposite the balcony of [antifascist partisan] Galimberti is really embarrassing for History.
Not to mention that until we wipe out the detritus of fascism, another threat will weigh on the roads to individual and collective self-determination. So, I am going to see for myself the faces of the authorities that have been invited to condemn anti-fascism in this land of partisans ... but I can’t wait for the moment to meet up with you again to continue along paths that can damage such a disastrous and harmful social system.
A hug to all those accused in the trial and to those who have not been nor will they be lacking in solidarity!
Guido
*. From the appendix “Appunti sulla storia del FMRP”, in Ricardo
Palma Salamanca, “Il grande riscatto”, Edizioni Colibrì, Milano 2010
(pagg. 267-268).
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