Alfredo Cospito, Claudia and Stefano, Gioacchino Somma
Operation Scripta Manent – Statements to the court
Benevento 14 August 1878 – Turin 16 November 2017
Declaration To The Court
“The Union of Egoists is your instrument, it is the sword with which you increase your natural strength; the Union exists thanks to you. Society, on the other hand, demands much from you and it exists without you; in short, society is sacred, Union is yours; society uses you, the Union–you use it “ – Stirner
“Gentlemen, the time of life is short … if we live, we live to tread on kings” – Shakespeare, Henry IV
“I work for every crime I have committed in my life, I’m afraid of every desire I have not satisfied in my life” – Senna Hoy
I want to be as clear as possible, my words sound like an admission of guilt. As far as it is possible to belong to an instrument, to a technique, I claim with pride my affiliation with FAI-FRI. With pride I recognize it throughout its history. I belong in full and my contribution is signed by the “Olga Cell”. If this farce was limited to me and Nicola I would be silent today. But you have involved a significant part of all those who have shown solidarity in these years, among them my dearest friends.
At this point I cannot refrain from telling my own story, by silence I would be complicit with the attempt by you to strike at an important part of the anarchist movement. Comrades dragged behind bars and tried not for what they did but for what they are: anarchists. Processed and arrested not for having claimed, like I did, an action with the acronym FAI-FRI, but for having participated in assemblies, written in newspapers and blogs even more simply giving solidarity to their comrades during a trial.
In an era where ideas don’t matter–to be tried and arrested for an idea, it says a great deal about the disruptive force that a wartime vision of anarchy continues to have, on the empty shell that is democracy and the so-called democratic liberties. You have your reasons, do not deny it, in the end there are no good anarchists, in every anarchist the desire to flog you down from that will come down. For my part, I make no attempt to dispose of the FAI-FRI by recreational association… It is our story that teaches you, we are paying for our history, never martyrs, never giving up, with years of potential jail and isolation.
Those who are part of this are dragged in chains in front of you are silenced for solidarity, affection, for love, for friendship, these unthinkable feelings, incomprehensible to you servants of the state. Your “righteousness” is overwhelmingly the strongest over the weakest. I assure you, in this trial, that you will not find that any of the defendants are cowards or opportunists. The price of dignity is incalculable and its gifts are desperate and expensive beyond any limits and imagination and it is always worth paying that price, and I am ready to pay it at all times. For you it should not matter if I was really placing those bombs. Because I still feel complicit with all the actions claimed by FAI-FRI. All the more so because the actions that you are accusing us of are all in solidarity with migrant and anarchist prisoners and I share these sentiments in full.
How could I not feel complicit when those explosions were for me as light glows in the darkness. No matter how silly it may seem to you, for me there is a beginning and a more mature FAI.
The first time I was fanatically and stupidly convinced that only non-claimed actions had utility, reproducibility, convinced that destructive action would necessarily have to be spoken alone and that every acronym would be used as evidence. After that…I questioned these unconvincing dogmas as they came to solidify my new convictions in an action. There is little that one would say, and it would be true if behind that simple acronym there was not a method that could really make us anarchists in practice to make the difference beyond and outside of all courtrooms. Although my contribution has been limited, I feel complicit with all of the brothers and sisters who have started this journey. Whoever they are, wherever they are, I hope they will approve of my actions. It matters little if I have never looked into their eyes, I read their words of fire, I share them, I approve of their actions and this is enough for me to have a strong proud willingness to share responsibility.
Judges, I would have liked to spit in your faces (as I did in Genoa) my direct responsibility for the actions I am accused of, but I cannot approve of honours that are not mine. I will be content with what you in your language would call “political responsibility.” Do not despair, as good as you are at brainwashing and using DNA, you will not have any trouble sentencing us to years of jail. And then, if you want to know it, my condemnation is all there is, just for my adherence to FAI-FRI, joining a method not to an organization, not to mention my firm will to destroy everything you represent… Moral scruples are not your strength, you have used blackmail, threats and the removal of children from parents as tools of coercion and extortion. Comrades who have nothing to do with the FAI-FRI have been dragged in front of you with insults.
One of the reasons, not the main one, for which I claimed the FAI-FRI was to not expose the anarchist movement to easy criminalization. Today I find myself in the courtroom to counteract your prosecution, your petty attempt to put on trial the “Black Cross”, a periodical of the anarchist movement that from it’s highs and lows in the 1960s plays a role in supporting the prisoners of anarchic warfare. In your fascist delusions you try to pass off “Black Cross” as the FAI-FRI press organ. They have not tried this hard since the full anti-anarchist campaign in 1969. At that time, your colleagues, having once had their pound of human flesh with the killing of the founder of the Italian “Black Cross”, Pinelli, confined themselves to the incrimination of individual comrades for specific actions, we all know how it ended.
Today since blood is scarce you do not limit yourself to specific actions against four comrades and you try to criminalize a whole section of the movement. All those who have been part of the Black Cross editorial team, who have written about it or who have only just attended their public presentations, are all part of the FAI-FRI in your inquisitorial view. My proud participation in the editorial office of “Black Cross” and other anarchist periodicals does not make these press releases of the FAI-FRI press organs. My participation is individual, every anarchist is a monad, an island apart, the contribution is always individual.
I’m using the FAI-FRI tool to wage war. The use of this tool, the adhesion to the method that follows, doesn’t involve all my life as an anarchist, it doesn’t involve any other newspaper editors with whom I work. One characteristic of my anarchism is the multiformity of the practices put in place, all very distinct. I answer only for me, everyone answers for themselves. I’m not interested in knowing who uses the acronym FAI-FRI, communicating with them only through our actions and the words that follow them. It feels counterproductive to know them personally and I’m not going to look for them, much less produce a newspaper together. My anarchist life, even here in prison, is far more complex and varied than an acronym and a method, and I will struggle to the point that the umbilical cord that binds me to the anarchist movement will not be cut off by the isolation of your prison cells.
Get it straight, I’m not interested in knowing who claims actions with the acronym FAI-FRI, I’m communicating with them only through the actions and the words that follow them. It would feel counterproductive to know them personally and I’m not even going to look for them, much less to make a newspaper together with them. My anarchist life, even here in prison, is far more complex and varied than an acronym and a method, and I will struggle to the point that the umbilical cord that binds me to the anarchist movement will not be cut off from your isolation and from your galleries.
Get it straight, the FAI-FRI, without taking anything away from counter-information, does not edit newspapers and blogs. No need for spectators or fans or counter-information specialists, once again, I’m not interested in knowing who claims with the acronym FAI-FRI, communicating with them only through the actions and the words that follow them. It would feel counterproductive to know them personally and I’m not even going to look for them, much less make a newspaper with them. My anarchist life, even here in prison, is far more complex and varied than an acronym and a method, and I will struggle to the point that the umbilical cord that binds me to the anarchist movement will not be cut off from your isolation and from your galleries.
Get it through your heads, the FAI-FRI, without taking anything away from counter-information, does not edit newspapers and blogs. No need for spectators or fans or counter-information specialists, do not just look to FAI-FRI with sympathy to become part of it, get your hands dirty with actions, risk your life, put it into play, really believe it.
Even authoritarians like you should understand, the FAI-FRI is solely anonymous brothers and sisters who strike using that acronym and the anarchists / prisoners who claim membership, the rest are generalizations and tools for repression.
Let me now take the opportunity to remove the stifling gag of censorship and to express the arguments that are in my heart in the hope that my words can reach beyond these walls, to my brothers and sisters. My “community of belonging” is the anarchist movement with all its facets and contradictions. That rich and varied world where I have lived the last thirty years of my life, a life that I would not exchange with anyone else.
I wrote in anarchist newspapers, I keep writing, I participated in demonstrations, clashes, occupations, actions, I practised revolutionary violence. My “reference community” is all my brothers and sisters who use the FAI-FRI method to communicate, in my case, without knowing it, without being organized, without coordination, without giving up any freedom. I have never been confused, the FAI-FRI is simply a tool, one of many available to anarchists. A tool to wage war.
The anarchist movement is my world, my “community of belonging”, the sea where I swim. My “reference community” is the individuals, affinity groups, informal organizations (coordinates of several groups) that communicate, without contamination, through the acronym FAI-FRI by means of the communiques that follow actions. This method also gives me- an anti-civilization, anti-organization, individualist, nihilist the possibility of joining forces with other anarchist individuals, informal organizations (coordinates of multiple groups), affinity groups without giving up my liberties, without giving up my personal convictions: I call it anti-civilization because I think the time available to us is very limited before technology definitively dominates the human race. I call myself anti-organization because I feel I am part of the anti-organizing tradition of the anarchist movement, I believe in fluid relations for anarchists, and I believe in free agreement of the word. I call myself individualist because by nature I could never delegate power and decisions to others, I could never be part of a formal organization. I call myself a nihilist because I gave up the dream of a future revolution in favour of insurrection here and now. I think our main task today is to destroy society.
Thanks to the FAI-FRI “campaign of struggle”, it gives you the opportunity to enhance your actions. “Fighting campaigns” that must necessarily come from actions calling for other actions, and not by appeals or public assemblies, thus cutting the political authority mechanisms of which the assembly movement is full of. The only word that matters is that of those who strike concretely. The assembly method, in my opinion, is not a weapon to wage war, though inevitable and fruitful in other areas. By adhering with my strength to the FAI-FRI “campaign of struggle”, in my case without being part of any formal organization, I use a collective force that is something more and different than the simple mathematical sum of individual forces emanating from individual groups, individuals and formal organizations.
This “synergy” means that “the whole”, FAI-FRI, is something more than the sum of the subjects that compose it. All while safeguarding individual autonomy thanks to the lack of direct communication and knowledge, with the informal groups and organizations and individual anarchists who claim with that acronym. An acronym is used in common to give individuals, groups, and informal organizations the ability to adhere to and recognize a method that securely safeguards their own particular projects, those who use FAI-FRI adhere to that method. Nothing ideological or political, only an instrument (claimed through the acronym) produced by a method (communication between individuals, groups, informal organizations through actions) which aims at strengthening the time of action without homogenization or flattening. The acronym ensures continuity, stability, constancy, quantitative growth, a recognizable story, but in fact real power, real change, consists of the simple, linear, horizontal, absolutely anarchistic method of direct communication through claims without intermediaries, without assemblies, without exposing itself excessively to repression, only those who act communicate. The acronym becomes counterproductive if it takes precedence over the task from which it was born. That’s all.
It is in practice that you test the effectiveness of an instrument. It should be noted that the ever-evolving FAI-FRI experience produces sudden and chaotic transformations.
Immobility and staticity represent death, our strength is exploring new ways. The future of this experience is certainly not in greater structuring, but in an attempt, burdened with perspectives at collaboration between individual anarchists, affinity groups, informal organizations, without ever contaminating each other. Coordination must remain within the individual informal organization, between individual groups that compose it, without tracing outside, without involving the other FAI-FRI informal organizations, and above all, the FAI-FRI groups and individual anarchists otherwise they would undermine their autonomy, their freedom, the very meaning of their own actions. When authoritarian dynamics are created within a group or an organization, they will remain limited and static.
There is no organization called FAI-FRI, there are individuals, affinity groups, informal organizations that are all distinct and communicate through the FAI-FRI acronym, without ever coming into contact with each other. Much has been written and said about the internal dynamics of affinity groups, informal organization and individual action. Communication between these practices, on the contrary, has never been explored, never taken into account. FAI-FRI is an attempt to put this communication into practice. Individual actions, affinity groups and organizations are all part of the same tools that anarchists have historically always used. Each of these tools has advantages and disadvantages. The affinity group combines operational speed with a certain power due to the union of individuals. It’s great advantages: freedom of the individual guaranteed and considerable resistance to repression. Beloved due to the small number of affinities and the great affection and friendship that necessarily links them. The organization, in our informal case (coordination of several groups), guarantees a strong availability of resources and strength, but high vulnerability due to the necessary coordination (knowledge) between the groups or cells, one strike and there is a “domino” effect, all fall.
From my point of view, individual freedom will clash with force through collective decision-making mechanisms (“operating rules” of the organization). This aspect represents a drastic reduction of freedom and autonomy for an individualist anarchist.
Individual action produces high operational speed, high unpredictability, a strong resistance to repression and, above all, total freedom, the individual must not be accountable to anything or anyone except their own conscience. A big defect: low operational potential, there are certainly fewer means and possibilities to carry out complex operations (which, conversely, an informal organization, if it has will and firmness, can carry out with some ease). Repeated experimentation with ways of operating is radically different, this is innovation, a new paradigm that can mislead the state and make us dangerous. No ambiguous mixing; groups, individuals, informal organizations should ever come in direct contact. To each one of us, hybrids would weaken us. More than an acronym, a method.
The FAI-FRI gives you the means to combine forces without distorting each other. No moralism or dogmatism, everyone relies freely as it is likely to be the combination of all this that makes the difference. No coordination outside the single informal organization (because coordination includes physical knowledge between all groups andorganizations making them permeable to repression), no homologous superstructure, hegemonic, that crushes the individual or groups. Those who implement their actions in informal organization must not impose their way of working on others. As individual action individuals and “solitary” affinity groups do not have to shout about betraying the idea if brothers and sisters act in compact and organized ranks.
Of course this is just my point of view… No matter what you decide, my destiny remains firmly in my hands. I have big shoulders, or at least I think I do, and your jail and your isolation do not frighten me, I’m ready to face your retaliation—I will never tire, I will never surrender.
Long live FAI-FRI
Long live CCF
Death to the state!
Death to civilization!
Long live Anarchy!!
Alfredo Cospito
fonte: 325.nostate.net
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
fonte: anarhija.info
To the Court of Turin
Today, as well as for all the future hearings of this trial that sees me accused along with my brothers, sisters, but above all anarchist comrades, I will not give you the satisfaction of seeing my face in a courtroom of this tribunal.
I have never gone to the courtrooms where my funeral was being prepared in the past and I will not do so now!
I am anarchist, individualist, anti-authoritarian and above all I am for the insurrection, which has as one of its primary goals that of destroying places of death like this one and the prisons.
I will not be part of the spectacle set up by a judge who, suffering from hunger cramps, has put himself the payroll of a State that I do not recognize, being a citizen of the world in flight from its borders; I will not be there to listen to his delusions nor wait for the end to hear someone judge me “guilty or innocent.”
For any authoritarian State I will always be “guilty” because in the society I want there will be no room for you, your buildings and your institutions.
I have no desire to hear the history of anarchism by a servant of the State who has the aim of emphasizing the existence of “good” and “bad”, just because his democracy demands it.
Today he is asking for us to be condemned, tomorrow when his salary goes down he will ask for those he considers the “good” ones to be condemned.
But the truth is one: no anarchist can ever be “good” for an authoritarian State.
Otherwise, I have to think that in the years wasted for your fucking degree in law you never learned the meaning of the terms you use.
In a world where the morality of its inhabitants is formed on the one hand by religions and on the other by the “information” jackals in the pay of the judiciary, the police and the barracks, I found it opportune to carve out a space in the web for “counter-information”.
I did so fully aware that I was using your means.
RadioAzione, of which I am the sole founder and curator, threw in your face what you never wanted to hear.
It was your intention to democratically leave the space alone to use it as bait and catch the fish but I sat in that space and overturned your “nice” tables back at you.
If the RadioAzione site really annoyed you, you could have issued one of your “nice” censorships but you didn’t; perhaps because someone needed to write pages and pages of court records to earn themselves their bread and butter for a few years?
Or because for six years you’ve been there listening to or reading my thoughts through a fucking key-logger that you’ve even given a name to, “Agent Elena”, who with her inflated bills has fed some other servant of the State ?
But that’s another story … your cunning tricks don’t interest me …
To conclude, because I have already given you too much space for my liking:
I claim RadioAzione as a project that is mine, and mine alone.
A project in which, since it began until I decided to close it, I have always published my personal and individual “reflections”, or those of other comrades in the world that I felt affinity with.
I made all this readable through the site and listenable through the radio; by that I’m not saying that I did things “in the light of day” but because I was aware that, in addition to the comrades, you were also there listening and reading, and when you couldn’t take any more of it, you even got to the point of sabotaging my phone line by cutting the cables.
It is not these little games of the frustrated that annoy me but your miserable existence!
Over the years, you have tried in every way to stop me: jail, carpet controls under house arrest, threats, secret services, infiltration, etc …
I’m still here!
Not a step back!
Unlike you, I have given meaning and purpose to my existence: the total destruction of the State!
I believe that the Anarchist Black Cross project is a valid one carried out by comrades with whom I feel affinity, and I did not have any problem about organizing the presentation of their newspaper in Naples, and even less in collaborating by translating or updating the site for a while.
It won’t be the useless scarecrow of this trial to silence me, to convince me not to give Solidarity, Complicity and economic support to my comrades, brothers and sisters, who today you are depriving me of having alongside me because they are kidnapped in your lagers and in those around the world.
It won’t be the threat of your lager to make me step back one millimetre or erase the conviction that is growing in me more and more year after year, to be your total enemy, that of your fetid opulent existence and of the whole of the State – Capital!
For anarchy, for insurrection
Gioacchino Somma
fonte: actforfree.nostate.net