Now that the masses all over the world have expressed their solidarity with Gaza, I’d be curious to know how social scientist Elias Canetti(1) would describe his concept of the “masses” in such a technological, warmongering and at the same time, exterminating age as ours. He says that mass society exists in the mind of human beings before it materially expresses itself. If ancient societies chose certain social and economic forms of mere subsistence, it was because they deliberately chose not to use bureaucratic or authoritarian methods: they foresaw their dangers. Our ancestors, therefore, were perfect political animals, aware and active observers of the community’s social life.
So what are these squares and streets full of people today, if in our daily lives we go back to the riverbed of a life organized and imposed by others?
Now that the “truce” in Gaza is divulged and imposed with the stamp of the army boot and the mediatic hype on the Flotilla, now that they are silencing and dampening the surge against the massacre, how to transform it into an action going beyond the manifestation and expression of opinions? Power uses human emotions as a can opener; often, the former gives its best in its “delayed reaction” empathic emotion and during “emergencies”, and it coagulates in peaks of scorn. A humanity which is nevertheless still alive despite all the efforts to atomize it. Its more progressive components are proving united in the face of the evidence of an extermination. Over the reaction timing, we should reason at length. Unfortunately, we haven’t yet understood in depth how deceitful and blackmailing the tactics of the enemies of life are, to what extent do commodities and quiet living manage to recuperate the movements, even sincere ones, at least here in Europe. In order to be more incisive and longsighted they have to doggedly overcome exactly the traps scattered over the ground of the struggle, which have the precise function of making everyone go back to the wishy-washy pen of the democratic morals, to issues such as the use of liberating violence or not, to inaction. Let’s move from emotions to self-organizing and direct action. If the roads of freedom are hindered, revolutionary movements of the past teach us opacity and going underground.
All the hypocrisy of the States and their various national authorities is before everyone’s eyes, there is no “truce” happening, there is no resolution of the conflict or peace talks. These lies told us are the same used in different historical periods, they are a support to the continuation of the Zionist, colonialist projects of Israel, of the West and of those States collaborating with them for mere geo-economical interests.
The colonial “reconstruction” market is huge and walks in parallel to the Ukraine issue. Egypt, for instance, has kept on selling food, cement, fertilizers and other raw materials to Israel throughout these years. The facade of solidarity put on by many countries is just the outcome of cynical calculations. Taiwan supports colonial settlements in the West Bank by building an hospital for them in Sha’ar – Binyamin.
In parallel, the deportations of Palestinians from Gaza, defined as “evacuations” by charter flights to South Africa, Malaysia, Indonesia, carry out another tactic of displacement, leaning on informal migratory processes now controlled by crime groups, rendering opaque the market of human beings; monetizing and brutalizing a practice used forever by humans, migration. Again, as many other times before, the push to leave is induced by an all-systemic violence.
The whole world knows the role played by the United Nations, an organization within which we note a few distinguished brave and impartial persons, who however cannot act from the inside against a mechanism created on purpose by the winners of WWII, which in decades has only showed its desire to maintain the status quo and the philanthropy of American and Western imperialism and that coming from emerging countries, also colonialist in their turn.
Another trick. Let’s remember the wars in Yugoslavia and Somalia. The policymakers dictating the military agenda on Gaza are the political grandchildren of those who, on November 2nd, 1917, concretely opened the road to the Zionist projects.
Speaking of Italy, its presence in Palestine is in the new base at Kiryat Gat, 20 kms. away from the Gaza Strip, where in a re-edition of the “coalition of the willing”, similar to that happening on the Ukraianian front, operates through the C.M.C.C. (Civil-Military Coordination Centre). Led by Gen. Sergio Cardea, commander of COVI, created in 2007 to manage crisis areas, and now – together with his cronies – is asking for some waste paper from the U.N. justifying this operation.
This institution has been created to implement the “Peace plan” by amerikan Trump. Here we find tech platforms such as Palantir, Maven, Datamiur, tasked to improve american air strikes in the Middle East. The creation of ISF (International Stabilization Force) with troops from different countries will impose terror as the life regime of the Palestinians.
This same technological system is used against migrants within 100 km radius from American borders. We now know that AI is used to create targets to hit in Gaza while at the same time operates on the deportation of undesirables from the U.S.
Whereas, on Nov. 20th., the Foreign Affairs Italian minister discussed whether the CoESPU (International policing school run by Italian military police) facility, set within the “Ederle” army base in Vicenza, could be the best location for the training of 3000 future Palestinian mercenary cops, controlled by this coalition and IDF.
Civil and military industry
These last few months, several newspapers competed against each other in denouncing the connivence between military and civil industry, about how they are making profits with the wars now happening. Almost daily new ties between vested interests are exposed in the entire technowar chain, its history, its political and civil affiliations, who the responsible are, in a few words, how the world network of contracts, collaborations, experiments, scientific breakthroughs is articulated, all of which are dual use, all of which are for control and social repression.
Gaza and Ukrainian front, the favelas in Rio, the climate crisis, the Sudanese uprising are all perfect places in which to experiment and advertise their sophisticated gadgets and experiments in a social panopticon architecture, for buying and selling amongst States and firms.
All of this almost nullifies the work carried out in the last decade by the antiwar movement. Even the official propaganda itself slaps our faces with the magnitude of the techno-industrial complex.
Questions to be asked are: where is the difference? In the quantity or the quality of information? Or else: what to do with it and towards which goals and perspectives should it be used?
Seeing that Elbit Systems is at the centre of the struggle of Palestine Action, it must be said that it is news of just a few days ago that Germany – after a 100 day break of weapon transactions to Israel – has started again sending supplies. The most important thing are the spare parts by Renk for the well-known Merkava tanks. The tank engines by MTU, based in Baden-Wurttemberg, never had a problem bypassing the embargo via USA.
With this new start, Elbit Systems will sell LMS ammunitions to Berlin for 700 million euros. Gundbert Scherf, company CEO, has promised that from 2026 on, the firm will manufacture between ten thousand and twenty thousand combat drones.
This German example is emblematic because it should shake all people who believed blindly that democratic States would have any real problem interrupting the conflict and sanctioning the Israeli state. We know that every war is profitable, both in its destructive phase as in that of reconstruction.
In between, the carnage fattens the wallet of industrialists and political class alike. The struggle against militarism must continue without a pause and with a continuous critical vision, carrying the praxis of denounce and agitation towards a non-stop campaign of action and subversive social upheavals of vast proportions.
Behind the class enemy’s lines
One of the often-forgotten main characters of the critique to militarism and its industry is the worker. That mass of human beings which, in all industrialized countries, create and forge the chains and gears useful to the ruling class to bite and massacre at will their subjects. Nationalist propaganda, racist culture, drive for conquest, fictional fear of foreigners, economic-territorial hegemony does the rest.
How to break the bond between this huge workforce blackmailed with a dish of lentils and the illusion of a quiet and pacific existence? How to reduce the moral gap that should move the conscience to desertion, even before that of the soldiers, of the workers manufacturing and setting up the war machine?
The ruling class knows very well how to break up the internationalist class solidarity. In Italy we have a clear example, happening in an inland colony such as the insular region of Sardinia, where the weight of the war is heavy in that economically deprived land. On one side, for example, we have the workers of Euroalllumina in Iglesiente, where the firm Rusal, owned by a Russian oligarch, is in dire straits due to the war sanctions imposed and 300 million euros of investments slated for the upgrading of the plant and the safety of the storage depot, blocked.
On the other side, a few kilometres away, in Domusnovas, the German firm RWM is asking Region Sardinia a permit to double up the area of the facility, since its main product are bombs sold for years to Saudi Arabia in its war against Yemen.
The markets these days are thriving due to European policies (and not only) for rearming and strengthening the military forces. Contradictions are emerging clearly and once again the trade unions are wavering between a rhetoric of job protection tout court and the critique towards the war industry that in the last few months has brought to strikes for Gaza, blocking harbours or general strikes of one day, which didn’t manage to spread and invite to radical desertion of the warmongering industry, of chemical ones, labs, etc. To do so would be “to take a step in the dark” which in turn would crack their facade of responsible protectors of wage work and of the national industrial and economic division.
Also in other Italian industries these contradictions emerge in an unmistakable way, seeing the strong war rhetoric in fashion now, banged from every drum.
A society such as ours today, strongly patriarchal and in its visions about the world, imposes on us the dichotomy cold war/hot war, in which “peace” is in reality simply the “absence of war”. This concept of society reveals itself in these “pauses” of war through treaties, “ceasefires”, memorandums etc.
If these talks can somehow interrupt a conflict, in reality they are only the demonstration of the power of some, using terms and arguments showing “weakness” in those “defeated” in the field or put with their back against the wall between the economic clamp and the miltary-strategic one.
Retreat, defeat, disarm and then again words such as trench, assault, are all terms that lead the war imaginary towards Heraclitus’ concept of war, that war is “father of all and king of all”.
Again in Germany and Italy, the automotive industry, in crisis due to international competition, will be reconverted to fit the new, giant European rearmament plan; meanwhile, from Poland to Sweden, from Croatia to France, the draft is re-instated, whether compulsory or voluntary; in Italian schools and universities militarism is ever more present. The institutional, reformist Left wavers between the façade of an anti-war position and the attempt to ride the wave of the movements against war and genocide in Gaza. The mass amnesia on what this ruling class said after the Russian attack and October 7th in Palestine, in reality should alert everybody about the double game played and the rhetoric of these gravediggers of every radical or revolutionary exuberance. For every act of liberating violence happening in society, the institutional, reformist Left immediately sides up with the moralizing choir against armed struggle, “terrorism”, “bad teachers”, against the outburst of those not caught up in the net of hypocritical moralization.
Millions of workers and students, young and old, are pushed towards a mentality of warmongering fear. Selected experts on the public square explain the truth – of the ruling class: humans are aggressive by nature, the thirst for power is innate in human beings. Avoiding in this way a mobilization of the consciences against war, society is locked up in this grip.
Historians, anthropologists etc. such as Lawrence H. Keeley(2), introduced into the public discourse arguments to consolidate the idea that, since the dawn of mankind, humans have fought an “endless war”, strengthening the ever-present and “consolatory” Hobbesian philosophy. The interpretations of moats and walls, of some hunting weapons, of symbols of villages and cities of the Palaeolithic or Neolithic, seen as tools for defence only against external enemies, always ready to assault and prey. According to these explanations, therefore, everything can be linked to a fratricidal war.
Nothing could be more false.
Today we are surrounded and addicted to images, symbols, representations, objects, philosophies, communication campaigns inducing and bringing us all back to war.
Workers, scientists, technicians are immersed in a competitive, nationalist, terrorist rhetoric, in which “progress” is the son of productivism, of power and money.
This century-long nightmare is perhaps starting to slowly crack open: we must feed the dream, the re-enchantment of a new imagination of the world.
We can discuss at length about necropolitics, ecocide, totalitarianism, and write tomes about it all, keeping our hands supple and our limbs and muscles soft. It can prove useful in order to send a message against the suffocating dome of modernity and its crimes, but if we don’t make individual choices, potentially shared by others, bringing action to the forefront of thought, nothing will ever change. We will only count our bitter tears.
It’s a time of tense nerves and subversive smiles mocking the common enemy after the effort and the risk taken.
Internationalist struggle, anti-colonialism and revolution
The Palestinian resistance and the Sumud paradigm have created a deep gash in the world. In the heads of the powerful there is envy and hatred because those who live by the tenets of the “strong man” know full well how to recognize bravery and tenacity in the adversary; this is also one reason why their answer is so merciless and total. The challenge and the zeal abash the desire of power of an entire system. Those in power know that the Resistance won’t stop and that others will imitate it, with other formulas and perspectives, but they will draw inspiration from it. Then, the fearful master will use all historical and technological tactics to unhinge it, to annihilate it from the roots up.
But the echo is now worldwide, as happened in other decades with other resistances, announcing that resisting is possible and necessary. The answer from governments will be harsh and deep, we are already witnessing its disordered reactions. In USA the antifascist movement “Redneck Revolt” in North Carolina, active in the rural areas of the South struggling together with the workers for class liberation has been criminalized. Two anarchists in Texas have been arrested for an action against ICE under the provisions of the new law against “Antifa”.
In Europe we know well the repression that is acting against movements opposing the war.
But the subterranean river of struggle for freedom brings water along lines unknown by the enemy: as an underground river, it shows up and hides, remains quiet and then strikes with a roar.
In Morocco, the “Gen Z 212” movement against the government and the huge expenses slated for the construction of soccer arenas for 2030 World Cup, is claiming liberation of all detainees from the protests, also those of 2017 and are fighting poverty, environmental destruction etc.
In Tunisia the struggle against the chemical plant in Gabès producing phosphates that are carcinogenic, is mobilizing masses of youth ever angrier and more disillusioned by the ruling class.
In Madagascar, Nepal, Mongolia, mobilizations and political overthrows have happened by the strength of the struggle and its perseverance.
Europe is answering in different ways. In all of these struggles cited, the Palestinian resistance echoes strongly. In Serbia, the students against the corrupt Vucic government and Chinese multinationals destroying rivers and mountains are carrying Palestinian flags. In Poland, it is the same during demonstrations against the warmongering fascist wave.
In the European city streets youth is answering en masse.
The walls and colonial tactics, the historical-moral explanations by Zionists and capitalists are criticized in the metropolis of this old, decadent, imperial Europe; internationalist solidarity is expressing itself and reminding of past struggles.
But if all this is an indication of the current reality, if the virus of struggle is spreading in the streets, at the same time they haven’t yet managed to spill over the levees imposing their social peace, their rule of law, their prohibition on daring and dreaming something different and deeper than mere indignation.
Here then in the quiet of the anonymous night, restless hands without bonds act and strike. In France, anarchists sabotage power lines and storage facilities for raw materials in industrial areas and its war industry hotspots. In Germany, huge players such as Tesla lose millions of euros due to the electricity blackouts. On Sept.9th, 2025, an important sabotage against the military-industrial complex takes place in Berlin. In Canada, the railways have been systematically hit for years against the mining industry and its multinationals, necessary for the supply chain of raw materials needed to wage war and for the world producing and financing it.
In Greece, the comrades acting against the policies of a fascist government and mourning Kyriakos Xymitris, fallen along the road to freedom, have also relaunched the solidarity with Gaza.
Anarchists, and not only them, do not wait for a revolution to happen of its own volition, they live it ardently, studying and organizing themselves.
To sabotage and attack the system of domination certainly isn’t enough to prime a radical change, but it gets us closer to, and allows us to stare in the eyes of the life we desire, acting against an enemy that binds us to its system, from which we want to free ourselves. This free life is ever more withheld from us, we are uneducated in the capacity to choose, in pondering and activating a free will which dictates the guidelines and social rules that break the current, authoritarian ones, conscientiously choosing the routes and methods which avoid a system that is murderous, toxic, and unjust.
We need to destroy the moralistic idea of “democratic confrontation”: it moves us away from certain possibilities of struggle and I believe that the best example of insurrectionary fracture is coming in through the Indonesian riots of these last months. In response to the requests coming from the people, to their proposals for self-organization and anti-authoritarian communism, authority has manifested itself arrogant and violent. The subversive answer has been clear and precise, the democratic stunt broke down in the fires of the politicians’ houses. Their arrogance backfired on them and they became, for once, the material targets, the prey of a liberating fury.
In Europe, who keeps on producing, financing, justifying a murderous behaviour on the side of the Israeli and American State? Should an answer be given to this shamelessness and sense of omnipotence? Are the power relations within the social conflict still in their favour? And if the answer is yes, how do we turn them in our favour?
If their intent is to arm masses of youth for the future looming massacre, we know well that, historically, conscript soldiers have been the kingpin of a few revolutionary movements, at the time in which the work of rebels and subversives blended in with concrete proposals and the diffusion of revolutionary defeatism. Perhaps we won’t be able to stem the warmongering tide, but it is a duty of those fighting against the war to keep on supporting and stimulating action operating within the social fabric, with the most advanced ideas against any nationalist, racist, imperialistic mechanism.
The internal/home front must become the most alarming one for our common class enemies.
To carry forward the solidarity with Gaza and those suffering from the war of the States, we – european comrades – have the necessity to shake off some ballast.
The press campaign supporting Israel grafts itself onto a cultural hegemony of colonial and ruling forces; many of us know well the ideas of Edward Said(3) on the Orientalist thought. His articulated observation of the spiderweb limiting our view and directing it towards concepts created and stratified into historical processes of the last centuries, particularly those called “West” and “East”, advise us to tread upon uncomfortably hard paths. The role of the intellectuals, of new scientific disciplines, reinforces this historical and human division. The manacles that keep us from acting – often we don’t even feel them – separate those who, the world over, have the same need to free themselves from the common oppression, diversified as it may be, and operating differently according to the latitude in which is employed. The hybris of the scholars and that of Nations must be fought from every side.
In “The Holocaust and the Nakba”, Amos Goldberg and Bashir Bashir tell us that these two historical events are juxtaposed. In the West, though, just so we understand, a regime of memory has been built prohibiting comparisons and similitudes, which leads to think that a genocide, to be mentioned, must assume the radical form of the Holocaust. The authors suggest the way of the empathic perturbation, meaning confronting the trauma of the other to generate a new moral grammar.
The geopolitical engineering, the variable borders of which today analysts and experts, generals and racist opinion-makers are blabbing about in the news-media are numbing us using complex analysis that sometimes obscure the solidarity impetus. Freed from this ballast, what could we see?
If we observe microhistory, censored and forgotten on purpose, the events of which are almost unpronounceable, we know that the Zionist movement several times carried out tactics against subversive peasant Jews in Eastern Europe (especially Poland, Ukraine and Russia), using reactionary ideas and praxis. In Bialystok, organized anarchists, together with other supporters, defended the Jewish peasant and proletarian communities from the pogroms. After that, it was the Ukrainian Machnovist movement, between 1919 and 1921, defending the communities, and many comrades of Jewish background denounced and criticised Zionism which contains in its philosophical and cultural base also an anti-proletarian and anti-socialist reaction in the widest meaning of the term.
Today, Zionism attacks those in Israel who do not want to suffer the cultural brutalization and are forced to flee, creating a new sort of diaspora: 130,000 people already left the country between 2022 and 2024. An exodus marching in lockstep with a genocidal massacre. The reckless violence of the colonists is flooding the West Bank inside and out; Zionism works in many directions.
In Ukraine and Russia, the anonymous mass of deserters, wanted by the respective armies, is crossing paths with the partisans that are contributing to the hindering of the war machine on both fronts, carrying with them a gust of fresh air in this fratricidal war.
The anti-colonial struggle at the end of 19th century against the Spanish empire lead to the deportation of Filipino revolutionaries to the Montjuic prison of Barcelona, Spain. Spanish prisoners – many of whom jailed due to the long running struggle against bloody dictator Canovas – saw these men in the yard, covered with the light attire typical of their land. Within the prison solidarity mobilized immediately, because the groups acknowledged each other as comrades in the same struggle against an oppressive regime. From the windows of the cells heavy winter garment fell in the yard as a sign of closeness to the Filipino rebels, hit by one of the most ferocious and longstanding colonialist regimes.
The anti-colonialist struggles of the time, in Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Korea or China, crossed with the revolutionary movements and the anarchist and socialist ideas. European comrades would leave their countries to participate in insurrections around the world. In Egypt, Algeria and Argentina, in Japan, just about everywhere national liberation struggles were conspiring and conjugating with broader ideas of revolutionary and social emancipation.
These subversive experiments created hypothesis of communal living that put in practice “the world for which we struggle”, with genuine insurrectional plans, fruit of a conspiratory age.
Ideas circulated thanks to a brisk translation activity of books and pamphlets. This ferment joined the internationalist solidarity that led the anarchist Angiolillo to kill the dictator Canovas, torturer of Filipinos and Cubans abroad and of the revolutionaries at home. The anti-colonial struggles around the world and European insurrectional movements were talking to each other, there was no UN or Human Rights Charters to which appeal to in a macabre deceit and vain hopes. They were marching together to the conquest of a long-yearned freedom, suffocated by capitalism and by the government of the sanguinary motherland.
The ideology of the “endless war” insinuates minds and hearts with its barbed wire. The violence of subjugation, where life is worth nothing and there is no shame in shooting harmless women and men, where religious hate drenched in territorial promises and racist supremacies creates that soil that erases any human empathy and fans feuds and revenges that always hit towards the bottom, never towards the top of social hierarchy, can depress and create a sense of injustice reaching the point of being perceived as a physical pain.
Today we see women and men in Gaza planting olive trees amidst the rubble, showing the world the love for the land they were born in, men that keep on harvesting olives no matter what, children digging drainage to get a dry place to play in and study, young people still resisting. The Palestinian people show us every day what dignity, tenacity, infinite practical and moral ingenuity is, all of them trained during decades of life within an open air prison.
On Nov. 28th., Fadi and Jumaa’ Tamer Abu Asi have been shot to death by the IDF because they were busy collecting scrap wood to sell in the vicinity of the infamous “yellow line”. They were 8 and 10 years old. The land of Palestine is rife with stories such as this one and they are the kind that strikes the progressive public opinion, leading it to take the side of the weak ones, somehow palatable according to a colonial European view inasmuch victim and vulnerable.
Some newspapers are willing to show the eyes of suffering children. Then there is that openly racist side, rubberstamping even the vilest homicidal and repressive practice by the Israeli state.
Both sides, in the end, are parts of a social structure holding up because even if they differ in their appearance, in reality they defend the same privileges and interests.
Of course, it is important to denounce and be outraged, but this is all part of the show allowed by the masters, which works as a safety valve to blow indignation off and then go back to sleep. Never mind waking up from the slumber and understanding what makes a person go from indignation to action. Even worse if it organizes in a long-term perspective.
The Palestinian is ok if he misses a leg and has a starving body. If he dons a kefiah and totes an assault rifle, if he throws molotov cocktails or stones, the mirror of Western acceptability cracks, be it liberal or socio-democratic.
Generally, we are used to lazily accept something only if it shows weak and harmless to our eyes.
The prisoner studying their escape plan for months and then sawing off the bars one night and splitting, upsets the hypocrite, bourgeois society. The “madman” that “point blank” explodes in “unusual” acts, smashes and drools “senselessly”, shocks for his unpredictability. The child playing and screaming “inconsiderately”, creating embarrassment, nowadays risks to be filed under “hyperactive”. The Palestinian hating those that murdered his or her family and force-fed with fear and dust, are already moralized and branded by the Western white man. The caged animal that “out of the blue” bites and wounds must be killed.
Now that the media spotlight – at least here in Italy – is fading, it is time to act with greater energy, and somehow shake up that part of society which, in various ways, has already taken a stand, but has not gone too far, has not crossed the moral boundaries imposed by the laws of the state and Christianity, and has not transformed its daily life, turning it into a battleground that is unrecoverable by the state.
We know the Italian colonialist goals in Gaza. ENI (major Italian energy company) wants the natural gas off the coast of Gaza, while the Meloni government carries on its “Mattei Plan”, which is the continuation of Italian colonialism. We know that if we begin to place a stick in ENI’s wheel, we’d have to deal with the Secret Service. If in Italy we start listening to the echo from Gaza and decide to throw the yankees overboard, imposing their economic and political hegemony in Italy since the Sicily landing in 1944, we also know that times of waterboarding, political destabilization, bombs might easily come back as in decades ago. We must be aware: you don’t play with such powers. Now that we are nearing the start of phase 2, we can already say that the people in Gaza and the West Bank will only and exclusively get policies of terror and elimination.
As I am finishing these notes, on Dec. 8th, the news is out that Belgian justice has issued an international arrest warrant against an Italian consultant acting on behalf of Elbit Systems, for some contracts stipulated with a NATO agency. Magistrates and police officers of other countries are also indicted in the proceeding.
That the activity of this or other similar companies is “clean” or “dirty” matters little. Their work remains criminal and must be stopped. This struggle must not be pursued in an emergency logic, but in that of a long running and wide campaign: we need to confront and organize. In doing so we could – in several ways – aspire to an integral liberation from the state and techno-industrial system.
Stecco – Luca
Write to Stecco:
Luca Dolce
c/o Casa Circondariale Sanremo
Strada Armea, 144
18038, Sanremo (IM)
Italia
Transliterator’s notes:
1. Elias Canetti, Bulgarian, 25 July 1905 – Died in Switzerland, 14 August 1994; author of Crowds and Power. and other titles.
2. Lawrence H. Keeley, USA, 24 August 1948 – 11 October 2017) ; author of War Before Civilization – The Myth of the Peaceful Savage.
3. Edward Said, Palestinian-American, Born in Jerusalem, 1 November 1935 – Died in New York, 24 September, USA, 2003. Professor, author of Orientalism.
souce: Dark Nights