Rome, 15:51 March 23rd 1944, a road sweeper approaches a small cart located in a street right in the center of the city, he bends over it and goes away after few moments. Fifty seconds after, the 11th company of the SS polizei Regiment Bozen 3rd battalion is blown up by the dynamite explosion placed in the garbage cart. It is one of the most important partisan guerilla action which took place in Italy against the nazi occupation.
The nazi reaction was immoderate. The next day, March 24th, 335 italians were randomly taken from streets and jails and executed in the Fosse ardeatine, all shot on the nape.
For a long time the nazi and different kinds of revisionists, have been trying to blame the partisans of being responsible of the execution of many innocents, having them refused to reply to the nazi notification which was asking for the responsible to identify themselves, in this way they did not permit the life of many innocent people to be saved. The truth is that the german authorities never emitted any notification but the announcement of the reprisal once it had already taken place: “the order has been already executed!”.
March 24th links with a bloody wake of oppression the nazi-fascist italian dictatorship with the one of Videla in Argentina. The coup by the triple A (Alianza Anticomunista Argentina) took place, in fact, the same day as well.
Among many antifascist actions organised in these days, we would like to stress on the words used by a youth Argentinean organization: “Although the dictatorship has been defeated, the ‘process’ continues”. We still face the same level of working class exploitation, repression and misery.
As we said in the previous editorial, the reactionary elements (parties, associations, newspapers, etc.) are used to divert the more and more widespread discontent on weak targets like, for instance, immigrants. It is also obvious, then, that such reactionary forces are protected by the state with particular attention, the same state that, vice versa, fights with any means whoever tries to oppose them.
This week, we would like to deal with the persecution suffered by every antifascist in Europe and also with the strategies of repression which are adopted independently of whether they actually do or not any kind of action.
A list of all the proceedings the antifascists underwent would be impossible, we will stress on some emblematic case which, we hope, will clarify the overall situation.
Starting from Majorca we can get an idea of how the dynamics keep repeating themselves. The night of new year’s eve a group of antifascists is waiting for a bus to go back home. A nazi starts insulting them and threaten them with a screwdriver. After a verbal fight, the nazi gets on them and tries to hurt one of the comrades. Immediately the antifascists, with the support of many people standing there waiting to reach their homes also, intervene against the nazi. After twenty days the police shows up at the four comrades’ houses, arresting them. The way the police, the judiciary and the press dealt with the event is shameful. After the police had looked, without any success, for weapon in the comrades’ houses, another direction was taken. Inspired by the flags and the material found by the police, they made up an accusation which the so called means of communication strived to present it as believable. The antifascists were pictured as belonging to an extreme leftist group of hooligans, addicted to premeditated random aggressions. That’s not all. It would not still be enough. In the house of one of the four comrades the police finds evidence of an epistolary correspondence among him and Eta and Grapo political prisoners. Then the Ultima Hora writes “we cannot say it is a collaboration among the four guys and the militants of the armed bands, but it is a clear evidence of the support, the solidarity and the sympathy for the same kind of radical views”. Not even the proven fact that the nazi protagonist of the aggression, Carlos Ordonez Ripoll “Charlie”, had multiple accusations of racial hate, aggressions and violence against immigrants, was able to knock down the accusation. As Gianluca Iannone, president of the fascist organization “Casa Pound Italia”, says, in fact, “in tribunals wins whoever accuses the first”. We would like also to stress the fact that Majorca is theater of so many nazi aggressions against comrades and immigrants (swastikas imprinted with knives on fifteen years old boys bodies, an aggression which cause a Colombian to enter in a coma and so forth), but none of the actors of any of them has been persecuted in any way. In the mean time, in the Balearic, nazi provocation and violence continues on the whole front. If the spanish fascism has centered its propaganda on the imposition of the Castilian over the other linguistic minorities, today itself extreme rightist groups like Espana 2000 or Democracia Nacional have still the unique language as one of the main battle to fight, supported without any hesitation by the most reactionary currents of the PPE.
But let us keep following our itinerary of persecutions.
This time we want to stop in Stuttgart where on April 19th a hearing of the trial against 7 antifascists will take place. They are charged of an aggression on five nazi belonging to the NPD during a “Carneval Concert” organized by the nazi party itself in the town of Sindelfingen near by Stuttgart. The comrades were arrested when in their own cars the night itself of the aggression.
Once again we want to make a side note. In 2009 the german nazi have committed almost twenty thousands crimes; it is the highest number since 2001. Such sad numbers clearly show the intention of the Merkel government of leaving plenty of action freedom to the far right, knocking down in a tougher and tougher way, instead, the antifascits initiatives. As shown by the attempt to prevent a mobilization against the nazi demonstration in Dresden the last 13th of February.
The german antifascists sent anyway a call for a rally on the trial day both to protest against the persecution experienced by the comrades, and to demonstrate full solidarity to them.
Finally here we come to Italy.
Once again is March 24th that comes back, it is the day in which the sentence against two antifascists from Verona, Luca and Pasquale, is emitted. They are both condemned at 8 months. Freedom for Luca, after 4 months of house arrests, because of the punishment suspension; still house arrests for Pasquale, few more months into the house resisting. To both of them goes our solidarity.
We would like to try to tell their story under another perspective, we would like to understand, through this further episode of bourgeois injustice, what are the strategic lines in matter of repression of struggles, beyond the particular tenacity against the antifascists, whose examples, as we have been describing so far, cross the whole Europe.
Luca and Pasquale are arrested on the 17th of November 2009, accused of an aggression to a notorious fascist of Verona. The same guy who first asked for a medical report and then left for a holiday trip, the same guy who stabbed both of them few years before, without obviously facing any legal consequences.
The two comrades are first put in jail, then at house arrests (Luca as we said up to the 24th of March) and that as a consequence of the imprisonment custody. We want to put the stress exactly on that, on the deliberate choice taken even before that any final sentence is emitted, this represents the most used tool to repress who stands up. It is what the comrades have been calling in years preventive counter-revolution which consists of all the decisions taken by the judiciary responsible for preliminary investigations and surveillance. In this circumstance there is no presumption of innocence and all the restrictions are applied. It is in this strategy that consists the “continuity of the process” to which we referred above.
The bourgeois refine more and more the tools in its own possession and when it is not possible to utilize what is made available by the penal code or by the OP (it enough to think about the shameful 41bis, further worsen by the recent security act), the instruments of the so-called “prevention”, which consist in prison or warning on taking part to rallies, are then used, marking as socially dangerous whoever stands up and fights. And when all that it is still not enough, it is the turn of the fascist reaction, supported by the institutions, and of the whole State machine which from the judge to the local cop criminalize whoever comrade works for a revolutionary alternative. The provocations become continuous and exhausting.
We can consider as an example just what happened in the case of Luca and Pasquale. During the time in jail they have suffered a series of provocation aimed not only to them, but also to their families and friends, provocations made up of banning their right to exit hours or denying the talking time previously conceded. Wherever the bourgeois law does not get to, its faithful executors get in help. Because, as it has always been, through the fascists the big capital shows its most violent face and it is then its first aim to hide any contradiction and repress who materially transforms into act such a process.
It is unfortunately very hard, through this every week lengthier editorial, to be comprehensive on this issue. We hope to get better in the next future; we hope, though, that our intent of catching the general strategical elements concerning the repression of struggles, choosing in fact not to deepen too much the events and the trials against the comrades, will emerge clearly.
We do not talk about the state becoming fascist, but of a dominant class strategy of preventive oppression and basically independent from whether something is actually done or not.
In this case as well, the order has been already executed.