“Not only against prison, but also against the detention of every living being”
Contribution to the Croce Nera Anarchica bulletin # 1 – September 2014
I would like to begin with a quick analysis of repression, its functions and its application, and then talk in an effective way about my vision of things. I very often prefer to go to the root of the discussion or in any other situation.
In this case I want with premeditation to completely skip the political-social debate – even if radical – about jail, and focus directly on the rationality of the detention of living beings – of any form they may be -, and focus on the eradication of the logic of the ‘right’ and of its formality.
For what concerns my position about the context and the case for which I am imprisoned, it all has already been said in my second contribution published in the January issue of “La Miccia”, and I guess also on the counter-info websites.
I will restrain myself from expanding this written dialogue so to avoid repetitions. You can already read – if you want – a partial vision and pragmatism of struggle and resistance in my first published writing “War to the Machines”, so I would like to temporarily restrict the dialogue, in a specific way, to the detention originated by speciesism, civilization and normalization of the struggles, keeping in great consideration the uniqueness of the contexts in the conflict against the existent.
Lately the repressive waves – generally against the anarchists – often happen in the sleeping periods of the strategies of the so-called anti-terrorism apparatuses of the political police. These operative tactics are used, in addition to their repressive aim, to build up media events – that include false accusations – and to spread an impression of a permanent terrorist danger, echoing the evergreen “anni di piombo” [“Years of Lead”: Italian period of political turmoil and armed struggle from the 1970s to early 1980s – trans.], infiltrators, extreme fringes and jumps in quality.
What they want to blur is a real level of conflict and of harsh resistance to the State, to its noxious monsters and to its authoritarian underpinnings. An attack in many contexts of struggle, also individual, for a real and physical contribution of elements outside of the formal and static control that on the contrary is present in the majority of social-political movements, especially of the past, and who are for this reason heavily hit by old accusations, which has no rhyme or reason, that are not sentenced only for bureaucratic cavils of inapplicability.
I’m talking about associative charges like the 270bis, which entails up to twenty years and more of jail, which is applied in the case of arrests for general political reasons – regardless of the specific circumstances for which you’re accused, becoming just another aggravating mediatic factor useful for the lengthening of a preventive detention (see “Ardire” case, for example).
Whenever this kind of accusatory circus falls apart, Mr & Mrs Prosecutor simply wash their hands, probably after a year of “preventive” jail has taken away a piece of your life that nobody will ever give you back again. As additional repressive weapons of the State, we have the charges of “devastation and looting”, for too long a time applied in almost any situation of street-clashes, and the aggravating use of terrorism charge – this one is always in vogue in every occasion.
I want to open an important parenthesis on the case of the four comrades arrested with the accusation of having taken part in a night-sabotage in Clarea of the TAV[high-speed train – trans.] construction site and – as I happened to hear – supposedly guilty of the immolation of a compressor that let itself die in the flames.
In this case the 270sexes was applied, a code approved after the attacks in the London subway and other similar events. So much heavier quandaries than the events in Val Susa, but since they are not able to crush and hit in a heavy way who is resisting their big and small noxious activities, they brush up and use any kind of stratagem to justify those charges with the ridiculous “damaging the image of Italy and Europe” simply because they don’t want to admit that also in Italy some people resist with the use of sabotage.
I close rapidly this parenthesis about the ridiculousness of the legalism in the civilization of democratic order, as otherwise it would lead me to write extra pages of vileness.
For what concerns jail in itself and specifically the High Surveillance units, I want to say that in the end you realize yourself to be in the putrid belly of a beast, which is certainly bigger but still possible to tear down. It is the same scholastic model that indoctrinates children as future slaves into submission, made by a thousand rules, formal behaviours and ridiculous and paradoxical situations.
Sometimes you even forget where you are, it’s like being in a sort of surreal bubble, collegial and farcical, but the daily moments of gloomy thoughts when you’re alone, watching a piece of sky and horizon beyond the bars and the gates, make you go back to the rough reality.
You think that certainly you shouldn’t be there where you are but instead where you grew up or in the places where you lived your existence at the side of those whom have always been at your side.
These high surveillance units are the zoos for humans, besides keeping you detached from everything and everyone, they aim at the annihilation of the determination of the individual. You don’t see anything but your cell, a small corridor and a concrete pool 6 x 6 meters where they bring you to walk like pets.
Think what this means in terms of years. I believe you can think about it as long as you want without even arriving close to the reality. On this occasion I want to give a further sign of direct solidarity to Nicola and Alfredo, prisoners in Ferrara. Solidarity and complicity that I have already demonstrated personally, but that maybe in a public way acquires a different meaning. The inquisition’s verdict sentenced them to spend years in the cages of an existent that they have always fought against, to which they responded with the determination and courage of the few, and they still continue to show no remorse.
I’m not here to advocate a withdrawal or to instigate any activity that would uselessly cost me further legal proceedings. What I want to stress, talking again about jail and repression, is that often there’s a problem in recognizing being at loggerheads with democracy and its mechanisms, without consideration for one’s own conditions and practices of struggle.
There’s a sort of legalitarian parasitism of civil rights, spread also among anarchist comrades. Personally I would prefer that a virus of real anti-civilization hostility spreads instead of this parasitism of ‘rights’.
In jail you can put as a dressing all the ‘rights’ and comforts that you want, but it will always be a bitter and poisonous pill to swallow.
Personally I tasted the break of the imaginary right that we think we have in our subconscious when – after having expressed with little clemency my position of hostility and aversion toward the State and its physical entities to the several psychologists-educators of the prison of Regina Coeli – I was locked up for two weeks in a smooth cell [so-called preventative isolation, ed.].
For those whom – fortunately – are not experienced with smooth cells, it’s where they lock up people who are at risk of suicide or are dangerous for themselves and for others. There are no lockers, blankets, clothes and accessories, you have a towel on which you can sleep and a small iron table. I had to refuse every day their disgusting psychiatric drugs and therapies; this was the coercive response of democracy and its officials.
To free non-human animals from every cage is the same as freeing humans from their same mental or physical cages. A jail is also society and has its mania of domestication of living beings, of every species, and this is not the same old set phrase. The practical side of this kind of concept lies in destroying and fighting constantly the rationality of the functioning logic of the cage, of containment/concentration, and of isolation. When I talk about the exact reasoning behind containment in cages, don’t think it’s so different between locking up a bird or a monkey or a human; in the logic of speciesist dominion there is no such distinction, it’s maybe the only case of paradoxical equality that we all crave.
Let’s think about how until 1840 it was normal administration to trade and sell humans for slavery, they were used for extraction mining and for the intensive farms in the colonies. Sure, things haven’t changed much now, but there’s a worse example, when around 1650 the European conquerors in the Americas established as law the on site breeding and reproduction of slaves, because it was more “advantageous” than the strenuous procedures of capture and transport.
In the end someone could think of the conquest of civil rights, about those guarantees that discourage any determination and stance on the real situation of conflict with the existent. The softening, the snitching and muffling in the guarantees of democracy often come from the stagnation emanating from the “nice walks” in demonstrations and the “distancing of one’s self” from certain actions and practical choices of brave individuals, like in the case of the laming of the nuclear scoundrel
Adinolfi.
Each one of those alternative and leftist socio-political methods and mish-mashes don’t do anything but give fuel to what is left of the rotten society-State: order, civil & penal rights, and the security – or named better, “repression” – that feeds directly that monster called jail.
For wild Anarchy
9th of March 2014
Gianluca Iacovacci
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Write to the comrade and break the isolation… Remember all letters are monitored…
Gianluca Iacovacci
CC di Alessandria
Via Casale 50/A
15122 San Michele (AL)
Italia
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