Almost eight years after the arrests for Scripta Manent, for the second time the Court of Cassation, on 24 April 2024, will rule on the crime of “political massacre”, pursuant to art. 285 c. p., against Alfredo and myself, the last remaining remnant of the trial (i), after a merry-go-round of postponements, recalculations and repressive-jurisprudential wizardry (ii).
Although the iteration of the error anesthetizes to horror, and we live in times of multiple ostentatious horrors and total anaesthesia, I believe there are still a few words to say about the ongoing attempt at annihilation, about the reactions, both successful and attempted. Not so much because I believe this could be useful to our personal fate but due to a form of stubborn “romanticism” that considers silence and resignation to be always lethal and even more so in a political trial.
Having no inclination to silently resign myself to the administration of “justice” (as happens every day in our country’s prisons) nor to be limited by the logic of harm reduction (another cornerstone of survival between prison and courts) but shifting attention to policies repressive mechanisms underlying this and the effective capacity to react, to create moments of struggle and rupture, to build barriers, individual and collective, to the arrogance of repression.
I spoke of error and horror because these are the repressive policies in their essence, error and horror that mix in completely distorting the theoretical and practical outcome of the enemy, burying him alive and/or forcing him to entrench himself in the preventive defense and the Indian reserves of the “counterculture” and the search for “democratic indignation” (even though this is now little more than an Indian reserve, with a threshold of sensitivity that is increasingly an unscratchable skin in most people), a strategy that in the short term weakens the reactivity of the comrades bound, more than they think, by a sense of the inevitability of events and the impossibility of building reactions.
Seven years ago I thought it was possible to manage the Scripta Manent trial as an ordinary repression, replying from a technical point of view, point by point, both on the individual events and on the entire associative construct, given the evident instability of the accusatory castle. An excess of optimism about the political will and strategies in progress and an unforgivable shortsightedness in not immediately highlighting more forcefully what was happening. There was a “need” for 41bis and life sentences hovering to attract attention and attention.
Far from wanting to fall back into the rhetoric of “judicial error”, of excess, because from a jurisprudential and evidentiary point of view that was precisely the fact that some mainstream media had to admit with gritted teeth (others kept the bar straight on monsterification) that to justify the anarchist in 41bis they had to contextualize the facts and the character with a certain embarrassment, as well as placing the heart of the State, its security – the endangerment of which is precisely what characterizes the political massacre – in a couple of bins exploded at 3 am on the walls of a barracks, and having to gloss over with equal embarrassment the other flaws in the script offered by DNAA and the Turin prosecutor’s office.
Far from the “judicial error” because this is a precise will, with convergences between police station houses of cards and concrete cages seen in concrete: the episodic component (the career of the individual cop or magistrate, the media always ready to pump up the new danger, the most vulgar propaganda) is there but it flows into a well-established machine that always needs new severed heads to be displayed on the bastions of law and order. Then sometimes the machine jams… and it is the duty and pride of every anti-authoritarian to make it jam.
In these years of prison and trials I had the opportunity to experience in person a series of logical and legal forcings that I didn’t think would be possible to concentrate in a single operation, also realizing that this is the modus operandi of practice between prosecutors and courts in the extension of “special” legislation, from “emergency” to “daily”, anti-mafia and anti-terrorism: no longer an exception, but the usual management that the DNAA applied and applies to the trials of so-called organized crime extended to anarchists and that justice in general it applies to those isolated and easily attackable segments of social opposition and non-homologation that still express, albeit in a germinal form, the need to take back the streets, the word and the dignity of a non-negotiated opposition. A synergistic attack – fueled by a political climate not of a simple right-wing government but equivalent in the last “political” or “technical” governments that wanted to define themselves – against the components that cannot be recovered for electoral purposes: in a general lowering of the bar of criminal punishable and the parallel rise of what is mediatically monsterable, we can read the strategies in place and the resistance to be opposed.
In this sense I believe Juan’s writing (iii) is clear in capturing the positive, if not the need to limit it, in addition to the necessary critical and self-critical questions of the movement.
On the legal construct: houses of cards
Monsterizing the enemy, that’s what happens, practice not exceptionality. Certainly in a more refined way in the case of political trials, where the internal enemy must be sterilized by any critical/communicative empathy, but it also happens in the management of trials in criminal worlds and sub-worlds where the crimes and the threat are magnified. In which it is the same “unfortunate people” who are first used and get a little fat thanks to the criminal “honors” paid by newspaper reports and then are shredded, composted and destroyed in the prison circuit: street drug dealers transformed into criminal bosses, in a comedy of parts in which victims and executioners mix, all prone to the god of money.
In recent years the umbrella of the “fight against the mafia” has become a useful screen to cover a context in which collusions between institutional politics and economic interests managed by illegal laborers are the norm, and it is equally common practice to throw away exhausted laborers . The expansion of DNA to DNAA was grafted onto this, with the application of similar strategies and similar prison circuits. It matters little that the actual numbers of prisoners for crimes classified as terrorism are infinitesimal, the media drumbeat has nevertheless pumped the new claim “mafiosi and terrorists” to be contained in special cages.
On the prison circuits: concrete cages with a view of concrete
The media context is functional in creating a mechanism of silence/assent with respect to state and government veils, until it is possible to oppose/impose a different narrative. The means we have are often in homeopathic doses compared to the enemy’s media firepower, but sometimes effective.
We experienced this during the fight to free Alfredo from 41bis. Lost fight on the specific objective, where there was indeed a partial “moral victory”, in the sense that the wall of silence was broken with respect to a circuit of “white” torture in Italy, also opening cracks on the monsterification of the enemy and on the repressive crackdown on anarchists, but the fact is that Alfredo is still hostage in those cages, in Bancali. In short, it is still an open fight. And there’s something to think about.
Following the hunger strike which prolonged to the threshold of death, a vast mobilisation, not only in the anarchist area and preceded by a clear public stance by several lawyers (iv) which also provided input to the areas of the movement most intimidated by exposing himself, an information short circuit occurred which produced some results, although the most vulgar attempts to restore the overly humanized monster were not long in coming. In the best journalistic tradition, first the creation of the character and then his stripping and dismemberment. Partial, not everything is recoverable even though it is a tiring process to oppose it.
After a few months there were also some journalistic/editorial attempts to historicize facts and ideas in a more honest way although always working along the lines of police documents (which professional historians and chroniclers have the habit of considering a certain source, when sometimes these are based on mere data on events, sometimes because these too are partialized or forced, but then one sinks into the abyss of the functional misrepresentation of biographies, ideas, quotes, political thought). So even in these cases the force of an instance of collective and individual struggle is replaced by a character, the single and stubborn hero, who in the end is convenient for liquidating his ideal and practical achievement, selling for romanticism what is a lucid, albeit bitter, uncompromising reading of reality.
Between houses of cards and concrete cages: variables and constants of the repressive strategy
There has been a change of pace with Scripta Manent both in the use of crimes and prison circuits. Or rather, there have been several accelerations in recent years, with a series of proceedings against the anarchist and antagonistic area, of which the draconian sentences in the Scripta Manent trials and against Juan in first instance at the age of 28 were the example more striking, with the concomitant cloak of 41bis dropped astride these. The crime of “political massacre” – a monstrous crime that just by uttering it makes the interlocutor fall into a cesspool of indiscriminate terror – associated with 41bis – the infernal circle of supervillains – probably had to serve to nullify any type of reaction. Furthermore, the change of pace with the conviction for 270bis, a subversive association for the FAI, opened up to anarchists the “enjoyment” of the associative crime with the related distorted interpretation of human relations and solidarity between comrades and comrades.
Let me explain: for years I have come up against, together with many comrades and comrades, the attempt of various Italian prosecutors, alone or with a common repressive intent, to saddle me with the crime of association together with other anarchists, for starting from the Marini trial and gradually with operations that started from anarchist newspapers, used some action as a crime and set up the almost seasonal operation. With Scripta Manent, the crime of association with the aim of terrorism became a judicial precedent. For these purposes, it matters little that Scripta Manent, after its debut as a mega-investigation, managed to foist it – with a very botched “set-theoretic” system of Chinese box associations of unaware actors and above all unexplained “structure” (v) – only on Alfredo, Nicola and me… it still serves as a precedent for a series of subsequent operations in which there is no longer even the effort to construct a plausible story between facts, newspapers… as in Scripta Scelera: the fact of making a newspaper is enough to start the associative crime. The repressive logic in anarchist newspapers has passed tout court if they give the floor to comrades in prison. The lowering of the bar of punishment can also be seen in “self-training”, which from a crime invented to repress activism and proselytism on the web in the Islamic area in the case of individuals, now also covers anti-authoritarian activism, for how much they are phenomena with antithetical ends and means. The “lone wolf” suggestion is valid and useful if the accused is alone. Crimes of “presumed danger”, preventive monsters, are then used in abundance for special surveillance distributed liberally.
Another change of pace was the attempt to apply 41bis to the anarchist area. Before what happened with Alfredo there had been a preliminary attempt to create an AS2 in L’Aquila under GOM management with treatment comparable to 41bis (in an expansion of what had already been applied to prisoners classified as Islamic, first in Badu ‘e Carros for women and in Rossano Calabro for men). An attempt stopped with a joint hunger strike of comrades who were prisoners at the time in various prisons and for different judicial investigations (vi). Without forgetting that the 41bis regime was born as a special and temporary suspension, preceded by article 90 which with similar measures in the 1980s responded to prison revolts, crystallized as an anti-mafia “bulwark” to then be applied to communist revolutionary prisoners with periodic automatic renewals, and still remains a deterrent and means of pressure. In short: diversified uses as needed… this happens both for the articles of the penal code and for concrete cages.
Now, in order not to fall back into the paralyzing mystique of a repressive machine that destroys everything through exemplary punishments, desertification of the squares and total censorship, we must also take a look at the effective capacity, which has been and is, of not being put totally cornered by this. Indeed, in some cases (and with considerable costs or with the lightness of reason) it has been possible to overturn the imposed narrative and build something new. Even in an unexpected convergence of attention and intent that potentially existed and probably died out too quickly in that inconstancy that is not just the prerogative of movements but a widespread custom.
Of course, these are not times of burning prairies but not just of firefighters and resigned people either. There is a component that resists and persists, but suffers a little too frequently the constitutional tiredness of thinking of spending one’s life fighting against windmills, when the winds are also against them!
I don’t believe in heroes or supermen but in the awareness that women and men must build themselves, that the struggle is not free, it involves setbacks and falls, resistance and wavering blows to self-esteem. And that it is worth it, always and in any case, for the quality of the relationships that are built, not of ideal survival but of life that is more real than ever.
Anna Beniamino
Rebibbia, March 2024
Note:
i. See: https://ilrovescio.info/2022/11/07/scripta-manent-appunto/
ii. If you need… a brief summary:
– The 2020 appeal confirmed the sentences for 422 c. p. (“common” massacre) – although the GIP had already reclassified it in 280 c. p. – for Alfredo and me and the sentences of 270 bis, reducing the size of the subversive association and freeing 2 comrades from the accusation of participation which had been brought to first instance. Another contradiction between the two sentences is that relating to incitement to commit crimes via magazines and blogs, which was dropped in the first instance and recognized in the second instance for 13 comrades. Between the massacre and the various ongoing crimes, the second degree sentenced Alfredo to 20 years and me to 16 years and 6 months.
– The Supreme Court of July 2022 directly requalified (without referring to appeal) 422 c. p. in 285 c. p. (“political” massacre) as it is a crime, cynically leaving the appellate judges with the burden of recalculating the sentence, which, being 285 c. p. a crime with a fixed penalty, would have been life imprisonment and 30 years.
– At the second appeal hearing in December 2022 (at which we showed up, with Alfredo, on hunger strike against the 41 bis and life imprisonment sentence) some of the questions posed by the defense were accepted, in particular those on the failure to apply mitigating circumstances to Alfredo, sending the question back to the Constitutional Court which responded positively in May 2022.
– In the appeal hearing in June 2022, following the indications of the Constitutional Court, the sentences were quantified at 23 years for Alfredo and 17 years and 9 months for me.
– The Turin prosecutor’s office appealed to the Court of Cassation against the concession to both of 311 c. p. (slight entity of the fact) and against the prevalence of extenuating circumstances with respect to the recidivism granted to Alfredo. The defense appealed, again raising a constitutional issue regarding the fixed sentence.
iii. https://ilrovescio.info/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/considerations-juan.pdf
iv. https://ilrovescio.info/2022/11/17/la-parola-agli-avvocati-2-nuovo-docum…
v. The same Supreme Court ruling of July 2022, after years and years of trial, liquidates the association with a few lines that do not even attempt to justify the scheme, which becomes self-supporting, according to which Alfredo, Nicola and I would be “long-standing associates who have held top positions in the FAI”, without explaining anywhere on what this axiomatic statement is based. Clearly admitting the “immanent problems” to “identify, on the basis of evidence that has taken on the most disparate morphologies, in the different coefficients of circumstantial intensity scrutinized, a subversive cell structured around 3 subjective nuclei, united by common goals, common resources , common ideals, replicated methods, shared knowledge, demonstrated solidarity […]”. That is, put in cruder terms: they are a subversive cell because they are anarchists who have known each other for a long time. Point. The anarchist idea is the glue, the substance of the association.
you. These are the words with which the strike began in May 2019:
“We have been locked up in the AS2 women’s section of L’Aquila for almost two months, the prison conditions resulting from a softened regulation of 41bis are now known, here and abroad.
We are convinced that no improvement can or will be requested, not only for objective and structural issues of the yellow section (ex-41bis): the entire prison is destined almost exclusively for the 41bis regime, so broadening the rules of the regulation a little section seems in bad taste and impracticable to us, given the even harsher conditions suffered a few steps from here, we cannot help but think of how many have been fighting for years by accumulating reports and criminal trials. Added to this is the DAP’s clumsy attempt to make ends meet by establishing a mixed anarcho-Islamic section, which resulted in a further ban on meetings in the section itself, with a continuing isolation.
There are prison conditions, common or special, even worse than those in L’Aquila. This is not a good reason not to oppose what they impose here.
We will no longer eat this bread: on May 29th we will begin a hunger strike demanding the transfer from this prison and the closure of this infamous section. Silvia and Anna”.
source: https://anarchistnews.org/content/carousel-repression