1st May 2015’s prisoners

Milan, 22-03-2016

LETTER TO THE GREEK COMRADES

Dear Nikos, Fivos, Kostas, Odysseas, Alexandros,

We are very glad and feel close to you after receiving your letter in complicity and solidarity. We take the chance to answer you with this letter, which we want to be public.

It’s a rare fact to dream along with people with whom we don’t have any relations, whom we don’t even know, never heard from or met with; it’s even a rarer fact to spend a day of rebellion and joy together, like that we spent side by side without even looking at one another’s faces; and it’s even rarer the deep and ‘brotherly’ feeling that unites us in spite of thousand kilometres of distance, different languages and the sea dividing us.

Through this piece we want to clarify that we take our imprisonment as a political consequence of our conscious choice, as enemies of power in the human war, of being on the side of all the exploited in this world, including animals and the planet: we don’t have the cowardice to present ourselves as victims.

We who were arrested are all part or sympathizers of the ‘pirate’ anarchist Milan movement and as such we define ourselves in the feelings of brotherhood, sisterhood, equality and solidarity that unite us to you in this big ‘family’ in the ‘struggle against the whole world’, sworn enemies of authority, the government, all forms of dominion and exploitation on our lives and those of our brothers and sisters; we are united by the desire to ‘enrich ourselves’ individually and collectively against our resignation, submission and citizen’s ‘poverty’.

We believe that Brecht’s quotation you chose as introduction to the letter you sent us, is the best picture to describe the inauguration of the Universal Expo of 1st May 2015 in Milan, during which the ‘economic and political’ élite (financiers and politicians) showed off and squawk over topics such as nutrition and food:

‘Those who steal food from the table / declare austerity
Those who grab all the gifts/ demand sacrifices
Those who are sated talk to the hungry ones/ about the great years to come.’

While the élite was celebrating with caviar and champagne on the red carpets, on the other side of the city the exploited, encircled, chained and confined in ghettoes between red zones and barriers, tried to make their voices heard, not only against Expo (the tip of the iceberg, and example of ruin and exploitation) but also against the slavery clutching us in our daily struggle made of a thousand battles and common trajectories. Work, housing, education, health, finance, war, plundering of raw materials, social inequality, racism, specism, gender inequality, repression, evictions…Too long a list to be exposed in full, a multitude of causes, a multitude of individualities and collectives that animated that explosion of protest, revolt and anger.

We want to stress that we don’t take the cold or warm stance of those who repent or forget the warmth and joy of those moments; we don’t struggle to make existence in the system more bearable; we don’t claim ourselves as students, workers or unemployed: we are ‘pirates’, we are anarchists at war against those who hold, represent and/or defend the authoritarian fascist and capitalist system.

We are really ‘indignant’ and we don’t believe it useful, quite the opposite, we believe it reactionary and counterrevolutionary, to talk about legality and illegality of the struggle, of the anger in the war and battles against servants and bosses.

Our grandfathers and grandmothers were called bandits, they had to live in illegality, they chose to be clandestine, they were persecuted by the ‘legal justice’ of the time, many were hanged or gunned down for devastation, plunder and arson, in their attempt to give us a crumb of freedom, which was soon denied and betrayed by those who betrayed that early insurrectional push in the face of power; but above all denied by those who hadn’t caught some of the highest teachings of their struggle: freedom is always to be pursued, defended, searched for; it can’t be mediated, or agreed with power, nor can it be left (and/or delegated) to the hands of someone beyond ourselves; we all have a duty to know so as to be able to make choices, be free and participate.

It’s not true that an illegal thing is also unjust; it’s not true that a legal thing is necessarily just: what is legal and illegal is not for justice to decide but for power and its servants.

We are happy your extradition to Italy was blocked. We are confident that the block will also affect our trial where we are going to be judged for a crime deriving from the Rocco’s Code, a monarchic and fascist code, a crime that would still contemplate gun execution if it weren’t for the fact that in the current penal code the word ‘death’ is put in square parenthesis and is not deleted, is left there as a reminder of its recent constitutional abrogation but it’s not deleted in case they wanted to take some more nostalgic step backwards, it’s there ready for the next regime to come, a current warning to anyone who really wants to rebel.

We stand in closeness, solidarity and complicity; we are on the same front against repression. Here solidarity, closeness is strong, present; out of the grey, cold and damp walls of this prison many are struggling with us and with you!

If the judges in this absurd political, media and fascist trial could really judge us, if they really had the instruments, culture to understand, they would certainly be with us among the defendants or behind the barricades, and not on the pulpit of a tribunal; if these judges at the service of the system that exploits us and represses us think that these ‘pirates’, gentlemen of fortune, these free human beings, are worth being guests of the State and its prisons, worth being sentenced for having struggled on the side of all the exploited of this world in defence of freedom, we have no other choice than endure our fate with calm and strength, as we are convinced that we have nothing to blame ourselves for.

We greet you and hug you tightly in the sincere hope we’ll be able to really hug you one day in freedom.

Andrea (Casper), Alessio (Molestio), Nicolò (Iddu). Hold On….