Italy: Declaration of anarchist comrades Claudia and Stefano facing Trial as a result of Operation ”Scripta Manent” (16/11/2017)

We find ourselves facing you in order to be judged. Guilty or innocent? But what are we accused of? In the thousands of pages produced by the prosecutor, over twenty years’ history of anarchist struggle in Italy are covered and not only, specific facts are mentioned to back up suppositions and conjecture, but in fact what do you want to convince yourselves of with all that mountain of paper? You want to convince yourselves that we are anarchists. That we don’t passively accept the system that governs us, the inevitability of man’s domination over man and nature. They are asking you to condemn the love that unites the human beings who share the unstoppable desire for freedom bound by their common contempt for authority. If that’s why we are here let’s put an end to this farce before it begins. We are guilty.

We are guilty of being aware that the democratic regime is nothing other than the ruthless supremacy of the strongest over the weakest, which supports itself by spreading particles of power to satisfy the ego of human beings educated to seek privilege, and by flattening individual attitudes, seeking protection in the consensus of the masses.

We are guilty of not accepting these conditions, of not wanting to participate in the distribution of those driblets of power, of not wanting to live on the blood and the sweat of those who suffer a less favourable condition than our own. This does not mean that we stay stuck in a corner devoted to sacrifice to live alongside the weakest; we live for ourselves, to fully satisfy our needs without waiting or asking permission, struggling against everything that prevents us. We are not dreaming of a revolution, but we continue to fuel the revolt against all constraint, surpassing our limits and those that are imposed on us.

A few days ago our son was studying something called “civic education”, repeating aloud the principles of the constitution that guarantee freedom of speech and expression, and so on. Even though we consciously threw him into the belly of the beast by confronting him with public education, relying on his intelligence and the critical thinking that he acquire, I could not help butting in to explain to him that this is a lie, that laws are dictated by those who conceive them to maintain their own power and that it is not true that everyone can express their own opinion, because [when they do] it obstructs them, they are crushed, as is happening to his mother and father.

For this reason, in order not to perpetuate this lie, we will continue to struggle heads held high so that future generations may have a different vision of reality and won’t remain hostage to biased truth.

We have decided to read this document to face you with your responsibility in defending the hypocrisy of the constitution upon which you have sworn. We want you to see the monster’s hand stroking your head like faithful little dogs each time you look in the mirror. We don’t want to give you the chance to hide behind the rotten corrupt principle of justice that elevates you as inquisitors.

The fact that our comrades are being denied the right to physically attend the courtroom, that the principle of participation in the defence, which the law that supports the democratic lie guarantees, is thus cancelled, is yet another demonstration of how partisan the use of legality is.

Especially for this reason, we will no longer take part in this farce, deserting the hearings and entrusting technical defence to lawyers aiming to bring out as far as possible the contradictions that support this system, without justifying our being and without claiming any crumbs of democracy.

So we decided [not] to fight closed within the limits of your law. Outside these boundaries it is always we who decide how and when to fight.

The good PM Sparagna, champion of the struggle against the mafias or dog that bites the master’s hand that tosses him a piece of bread, thought he could deal with anarchists as he does with the mafiosi, without realizing that what distinguishes us is something that goes far beyond his miserable conception of existence and solidarity. In a cowardly way he might even try to use the experience of each one of us to look for flaws into which to creep, but he will never succeed.

Honour and boundless love to our sisters and brothers hostages of the state.

Paladins of justice: what is ours will never be yours, not even after years of spying on and studying our lives.

Guilty of loving without conditions

Guilty of hating with full cognition

Claudia and Stefano

(translated by Act for freedom now! )