Title: Considerations #5 (Making excuses and covering one’s arse: How not to be committed to anarchy)
Date: August 11, 2013
Source: Retrieved on 6th March 2021 from actforfree.nostate.net
Notes: Translated by act for freedom now/B.pd

Still today in the Italian anarchist movement some say that times are not mature for the beginning of an even more intense attack on the State-Capital because people are scared and not yet ready to accept violent revolutionary practices. People scared, people not accepting, people not yet ready… These are the consequences of the last 15 years when anarchists have decided to join forces with other components of non libertarian movements, which only try to rebuild the existent with them occupying the seats of the current rulers. These are the consequences of the work of those who, at the time, thought it right to be present within promiscuous movements so as to spread their ideas among a deaf herd. These are the usual excuses of those who don’t want to risk or get directly involved for anarchist ideas. But times are right, even if we wanted to accept these pretexts: an economic crisis that has gripped an entire country, or almost all of it, into misery; people who live on a thin thread between life and suicide because they can’t even find some food to put on their table; people strangled by taxes and Equitalia, Gerit and many other debt collection agencies; people strangled by banks…

Do you need more? These are just a few reasons that should make you think that times are right for an uprising. But anarchists just wait for a spark to be released by itself, while they sit comfortably, leaf through some books of Bakunin or Stirner, read some counter-information news in papers or internet sites and take part in some solidarity gatherings or protests (which are sometimes vulgarly called ‘direct actions’).

There are also those who exult and rejoice in the face of a direct action, as if they were at the stadium, and write pages and pages of jubilation about the attack, and try to appropriate the adrenaline that can only belong to those who did carry out the action. The adrenaline of walking in the darkness of the night, of the preparation of what is needed, of running away without being noticed before the arson or the explosion occur; the adrenaline of those who have armed their hands with solidarity by giving it back under the form of bullets shot at some real eco-terrorist. Adrenaline can never belong to those who limit themselves in reading the piece of news… the fact. But adrenaline could belong to anyone when anyone decides to take a path in the wood where a sheep can become wolf.

In 2013 anarchists are still trying to understand the ‘method’ to destroy the existent. Fat too often ‘trying to understand’ simply means to encircle those very few joys left, those ‘private properties’ belonging to the individual, within an armoured gate.

Not to risk getting directly involved for anarchy is the worst form of covering one’s ass that exists on the face of earth. It is like thinking to feed oneself with one’s mind without put anything in one’s stomach. Not to get involved and not to risk is not only referred to almost all the anarchists who prefer good reading, debate, critique, morals and in many cases authoritarianism to direct action. Even those who have instruments to discuss, make critiques and future debates always try to put one hand forward and one behind, and avoid talking about what exists outside the door of their houses.

In this case the critique is addressed to papers, blogs and sites that often avoid publishing the content of an action or news on some prisoners. The answer to the question of why they don’t publish the text of claim along with the news of the action is always the usual covering of one’s ass: ‘I/we like the action but not its content’. In this case they are practically empting the action of any meaning.

So why don’t you also publish the attacks made by Al Quada… the goals could be the same even if the reasons and purposes are totally different. It would be more just not to publish anything if one doesn’t agree with the reasons behind an action.

There are also those who avoid spreading the information that there are anarchists in jail in Italy, and talk about prison only with reference to struggles inside the prisons carried out by common prisoners.

There are those who don’t publish things or make it clear that what they don’t publish is not completely agreed with or doesn’t have affinity with them. So why to publish those things? Just to fill the pages of your papers, sites and blogs? To improve google research as the more you publish the more your blog or site comes out in researches? Or is it that some blogs, sites and papers are trying to transform themselves into alternative ‘national’ press?

Certainly some sites or blogs have the blood of servant journalist in their veins. They fill pages and pages with news without even reading them, and look for the translators of the web who often not only translate badly but very badly; and as a consequence they make the very serious mistake of attributing words to individuals who never pronounced them. What’s the purpose of all this?

There are also those who don’t realize that they are not really committed to liberation or anarchy. These are those who think that they are doing something really constructive, and that their chatter will succeed in overthrowing governments and States.

But these people exist because someone else from above, with their political language, the charm of their words, their experience, their authoritarian arrogance, tend to dampen all enthusiasm, divert discourses and put a piece of paper in front of what really happens to anarchists. This is a form of ‘mind’ manipulation and authoritarianism that should be destroyed in the first place…even before destroying the forms already acknowledged as ‘authority’.

People who make the simple handing out leaflets to sheep pass off as direct action. People who intentionally keep the repression hitting anarchists in Italy hidden. They say these things to the anarchists who are there with them, who worship them because these anarchists don’t have more dignity than any citizen going to the polls in order to elect their henchman. They are sheep too. And this is what they want! Make you look like sheep attached to their grazing land. They avoid talking about repression against anarchists so that the sheep don’t begin to see beyond the enclosures of their grazing land, so that they don’t set an example for other sheep to follow and then the shepherd doesn’t end up without herd.

Those who pass off handing out leaflets in town as direct action are people who intentionally want to take all meanings away from real direct actions. It is as if one added so much sugar to a cup of coffee that the real flavour of the coffee would be lost.

On the other hand, on the opposite side of the philosophy where practice and thought walk hand in hand, far too often (but this happens abroad) one verges on vanguardism through words that remind of old red brigades proclamations. Individualists who say ‘we are’, ‘we want’, ‘it must be this way’ and ‘it must be done this way’ have forgotten that individualism is fundamental to the liberation of the individual himself.

But the worst kind of anarchists that exists in Italy are the ‘savants’ of the revolution, the anarchist moralists, the small ‘anarchist sects’; those who don’t move their arse even if they are kicked from behind, but continuously criticize everything that other anarchists say or do, because only they know the ‘truth’. But their only truth is to think that the anarchist movement, which is not a movement itself because it is motionless and doesn’t move, is a sort of a condominium.

The conditions exist and are visible even for those who have a wait-and-see attitude. Now it must only be seen who wants to commit oneself and who wants to continue to cover one’s arse for ever.

And those who still pretend they don’t understand the best way to overthrow the State should know that the fire of revolt can be set only by multiple direct actions and not by rivers of words. Insurrections have never been made by thoughts or books, but by those who have realized them with all themselves, and have taken prison into account… and even played with their lives!

To live dreams means to die painfully!