Chapter 2 : To the Immigrants

TO THE IMMIGRANTS

We asked for labor power, men came.

Max Frisch

No one emigrates from their country for pleasure – this is a simple truth that many want to hide. If someone leaves their land and loved ones peacefully, we don’t define them migrants, but simply travelers or tourists. Migration is a coercive form of moving, a roaming in search of better living conditions.

At the moment there are 150 million ‘foreigners’ around the world due to wars, ecological disasters, famine, or simply the management of industrial production (the destruction of countryside and forests, mass lay-offs, and so on). All these aspects form a mosaic of oppression and misery in which the effects of exploitation become more or less direct causes of suffering and uprooting in a never ending spiral that makes any distinction between ‘displaced’, ‘migrants’, asylum seekers, refugees, survivors, hypocritical. Just think how social so-called ecological emergencies (lack of water, growing desertification, field sterility) are: the explosion of an oil refinery, together with the destruction of every local autonomy on which it rested, can sometimes change the fate of an entire population.

Contrary to what racist propaganda would have us believe, only 17% of immigration concerns the rich North, it involves all continents (the African and Asian ones in particular); that means that for every poor country there is one that immigrants are running away from. The total mobilization imposed by the economy and States is a planetary symptom, an undeclared civil war that crosses every national border: millions of exploited people roam through the hell of the commercial heaven, jolted from border to border, forced into refugee camps, surrounded by police and army, handled by so-called charity organizations – partners in tragedies whose causes they don’t denounce for the mere purpose of exploiting the consequences – piled up in ‘waiting zones’ in airports or stadiums (macabre circenses for those who don’t even have bread), locked up in concentration camps called ‘detention centers’ and, finally, packaged and expelled in the most total indifference. For many reasons we could say that the face of these unwelcome people is the face of our time – and that’s also why we’re so afraid of them. Immigrants scare us because in their misery we can see the reflection of our own, because in their wanderings we recognize our daily condition: the condition of persons who feel more and more like strangers both to this world and to themselves.

Uprooting is the most widespread condition in our present society – we might call it its center – not a threat coming from a terrifying and mysterious elsewhere. Only by directing our gaze at our daily lives can we understand what gets all of us into the condition of immigrants. First though we must define a fundamental concept: that of clandestinity.

The creation of the clandestine, the creation of the enemy

[...] what are you? [...] You are not of this
castle, you are not of this village, you are
nothing. But you are something too,
unfortunately, you are a foreigner, someone
that is always inopportune and in the way,
one that brings a lot of troubles, [...] whose
intentions no one knows.

F. Kafka

An alien is simply someone who doesn’t have regular papers. And this is certainly not due to the pure pleasure of risk or illegality, but rather because in the majority of cases, in order to own such papers he or she would have to give certain guarantees the possession of which wouldn’t have made them aliens in the first place, but simply tourists or foreign students. If the same standards were forced on everybody, millions would have been thrown overboard. Which unemployed Italian, for instance, could give the guarantee of a legal wage? What about all the precarious people here who work for temporary job agencies, whose contracts are not even worth a visa for immigrants? And by the way, are there as many Italians living in a 60 squares meters flat with no more than two other people? If we read all these decrees (from both the left and the right wing) about immigration, it will be clear that clandestinization is a precise project of States. Why?

An illegal immigrant is easier to blackmail, to make accept, under the threat of expulsion, even more hateful conditions of work and existence (precariousness, endless wandering, makeshift accommodation, and so on). With the threat of the police, bosses obtain tame wage slaves, or rather real forced labor workers. Even the most reactionary and xenophobic right wing parties are perfectly aware that hermetically closed borders are not only technically impossible, but are also not profitable. According to the United Nations, in order to keep the present ‘balance between active and inactive population’, from here to 2025, Italy should ‘take’ inside its borders a quantity of immigrants five times the present yearly fixed amount. The bosses, in fact, continuously suggests doubling the quantity fixed so far.

The granting or rejection of year-long or season-long permits contributes to creating a specific social hierarchy among the poor. The same distinction between immediate forced repatriation and expulsion (or the obligation, for an irregular immigrant, who shows up at the borders to be sent back home) allows them to choose who to make clandestine or to expel right away – a choice based on ethnic principles, economical-political agreement with the governments of the countries the immigrant comes from and the needs of the labor market. In fact, the authorities are perfectly aware that no one will ever spontaneously show up at the border to be expelled; surely not people who have spent all that they owned – sometimes even more – to pay for their trip here. Businessmen define the features of the goods they buy (immigrants are goods, like everything else after all), the State records data, police carry out orders.

Warnings of politicians and mass media, anti-immigration claims build up imaginary enemies to drive the local exploited to lay the growing social tension on an easy scapegoat and reassure them, letting them admire the show of poor and even more precarious and blackmailed people than themselves, and allow them to feel part of a ghost called Nation. Making ‘irregularity’ – the very irregularity that they create – synonymous with crime and danger, States justify police control and the criminalization of a class conflict that is getting more and more seditious. In this context, for instance, should be seen the manipulation of consensus after September 11, summed up in the despicable slogan ‘clandes-tine=terrorist’ which combines, if read in both senses, racist paranoia with the demand for repression against the enemy within (rebels, subversives).

They shout out, from the right as well as the left, against the Mafia that organizes the journeys for clandestine people (described by the media as an invasion, a scourge, the advance of an army), when it’s their very laws that promoted them. They shout out against ‘organized crime’ exploiting so many immigrants (which is true but only partially), when it’s they who supply it with desperate and ready-for-anything resources. In their historical symbiosis, State and Mafia stand united by the same liberal principle: business is business.

Racism, a means for economic and political necessity, finds room to spread in a context of generalized standardization and isolation, when insecurity creates fears that can be opportunely manipulated. A moral or cultural condemnation of racism is of little use, since it is not an opinion or an argument, but psychological misery, an ‘emotional plague’. It’s in the present social conditions that the reason of its spreading ought to be sought and also, at the same time, the power to fight it.

The welcome of a Lager

To call the detention camps for immigrants waiting for expulsion Lagers – centers introduced in Italy in 1998 by the left wing government by mean of the Turco-Napolitano law – is not rhetorical emphasis, as most of those who use this formula think. It is a strict definition. Nazi Lagers were concentration camps where people thought by the police to be dangerous for State security were locked up, even in the absence of criminally indictable behavior. This precautionary measure – defined as ‘protective detention’ – consisted in taking all civil and political rights away from certain citizens. Whether they were refugees, Jewish, gypsy, homosexuals or subversives, it was up to the police, after months or years, to decide what to do about them. So Lagers were not jails in which to expiate some crime, nor an extension of criminal law. They were camps where the Rule set its exception; in short terms, a legal suspension of legality. Therefore a Lager is not a consequence of the number of internees or of the number of murders (between 1935 and 1937, before the start of Jewish deportations, in Germany internees numbered 7500), but rather of its political and juridical nature.

Immigrants nowadays end up in the Centers irrespective of possible crimes, without any criminal trial whatsoever: their internment, ordered by the police superintendents, are a simple police measure. Just as happened in 1940 under the Vichy government, when prefects could lock up all the individuals considered a ‘danger for national defense and public security’ or (mind this) ‘foreigners in respect to the national economy’. We can refer to administrative detention in French Algeria, to the South Africa of apartheid or to the present ghettos for Palestinians created by the State of Israel.

It is not a coincidence that, with regard to the infamous conditions of detention centers, the good democrats don’t appeal to the respect for any law at all, but to respect for human rights – the last mask in the face of women and men to whom nothing remains but belonging to the human species. It’s not possible to integrate them as citizens, so they are falsely integrated as Human Beings. The abstract equality of principles hides real inequalities everywhere.

A new uprooting

Immigrants that landed on Battery Park for the first time soon realized that what they had been told about the marvelous America wasn’t true at all:

Maybe the land belonged to everybody, but the first come had largely served themselves already, and to them there was nothing left but to crowd together in dozens in windowless hovels of the Lower East Side and work fifteen hours a day. Turkeys didn’t fall roasted straight into the dishes and the streets of New York weren’t paved with gold. Most of the times, they weren’t paved at all. And then they realized that it was precisely to get them to pave these streets that they had been allowed to come. And to dig tunnels and canals, to build roads, bridges, big embankments, railroads, to clear forests, to exploit mines and caves, to make cars and cigars, carabines and clothes, shoes, chewing gum, corned-beef and soap, and to build skyscrapers higher than the ones they discovered when they first arrived.

Georges Perec

If we take a few steps back, it will become clear that uprooting is a crucial moment in the expansion of the State and capitalist domination. At its dawn, industrial production drew the exploited away from the country and villages to round them up in the city. The ancient skills of farm workers and artisans were thereby substituted with the forced and repetitive activity of the factory – an activity that was impossible, in its means and its finalities, for the new proletarians to control. So the first children of industrialization lost both their ancient spaces of life and their ancient knowledge, that which had allowed them to autonomously provide for the most part of their means of subsistence. On the other hand, forcing millions of men and women to similar living conditions (same places, same problems, same knowledge), capitalism unified their struggles, got them to find new brothers and sisters to fight against that same unbearable life. The 20th century marked the apex of this productive and State gathering, whose symbols had been the factory-neighborhood and the Lager, and at the same time the apex of the more radical social struggles for its destruction. In the last twenty years, due to technological innovation, capital has substituted the old factory with new productive cores ever smaller and more widely distributed throughout the territory, also breaking up the fabric of the society within which those fights had grown, thereby creating a new uprooting.

There’s more. Technological reorganization has made trade faster and easier, opening the whole world to the most ferocious competition, overthrowing the economies and ways of life of entire Countries. So, in Africa, Asia, South America, there has been the closure of many factories and mass lay offs. Within a social context that has been destroyed by colonization, by the deportation of inhabitants from their villages to the shantytowns, from their fields to the assembly lines, all this has produced a crowd of poor people who have become useless to their masters: the unwanted children of capitalism. Add to this the fall of the self-styled communist Countries and the debt racket initiated by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank and we will get quite a faithful cartography of migration and ethnical and religious wars.

What we now call ‘flexibility’ and ‘precariousness’ is the consequence of all this: further progress in the submission to machines, fiercer competition, a worsening of material conditions (trade, health, etcetera). We’ve seen the reason why: capitalism has dismantled the community that it created. Anyway it would be partial to see precariousness in an economic sense alone, as the lack of a steady work place and the old pride for professionalism. It is isolation inside standardization, or a fanatical conformity with a lack of common spaces. In the distressing void of meaning and perspectives, the unfulfilled need of community returns, mystified, giving birth to new nationalistic, ethnical or religious counter-positions, a tragic re-proposition of collective identities exactly where any real communality among individuals has diminished. And it’s exactly within this void that the fundamentalist argument finds its place, a false promise of a redeemed community.

Civil war

All this leads to a scenario that is more and more that of an ongoing civil war, with no distinction between ‘time of peace’ and ‘time of war’. Conflicts are no longer declared – as the military intervention in the Balkans has shown –, but simply administrated to grant the establishment of the World Order. This endless fight goes through the entire society and the very individuals. Common spaces for dialogue and struggles are substituted by adherence to similar commercial models. The poor go to war against each other for a fashionable sweater or a hat, since the possession or not of particular goods creates the illusion of a social or clan-like hierarchy. Individuals feel more and more irrelevant, so ready to sacrifice themselves to the first nationalist blunderbuss or for whatever flag. Abused daily by the State, here they come zealously defending any piece of land (desolated and polluted, with factories and malls everywhere – is this the ‘land of the forefathers’?). Tied to that mirage of property that is left to them, they are scared to face themselves for what they really are: interchangeable gears of the Megamachine, in need of psychotropic drugs to get to the end of the day, always more envious towards anyone who even just looks happier than themselves. To an always colder, more abstract and more calculating rationality, correspond increasingly brutal and untold drives. So, what better than someone different by the color of the skin or religion to throw their grudge upon? As a man from Mozambique said, ‘people have taken war inside them’. A few external conditions can be enough for all this to explode, just like in Bosnia. And these conditions are being carefully prepared. Ethnic particularism opposes itself to capital-ist Universalism in a tragic game of mirrors. Under institutional order, with increasingly anonymous and controlled places, the implosion of human relationships lies concealed. It all looks like the same quicksand from whence totalitarian man arose in the 30’s.

Two possible ways out

Why have we talked so much about immigration and racism, as we are not directly touched by problems of wandering and expulsion? Dictated by some of its peculiarities such as precariousness and the impossibility to decide for the present, this same capitalism is joining our lives more and more: that’s why we feel like brothers, in deed, with all the exploited who land on the shores of this Country.

In the face of the despoliation of millions of individuals towards a commercial imperialism that is forcing everybody to dream the same lifeless dream, there can be no appeal to dialogue or to democratic integration. Whatever the legalistic anti-racists might say, it’s too late for hypocritical civic education classes. When the fields in which misery is confined – from the shantytowns of Caracas to the suburbs of Paris, from the Palestinian territories to centers and stadia where aliens are locked up – are growing everywhere; when the state of exception – or the juridical suspension of every right – becomes the rule; when millions of human beings are literally left rotting in the reserves of the capitalist heaven; when entire neighborhoods are getting militarized and armed (Genova doesn’t tell you anything?), to merely talk about immigration becomes a despicable joke. There are only two ways out from these conditions of desperation and fear, from this planetary civil war: the fraticidal clash (religious and clannish in all its manifestations), or the social tempest of class war.

Racism is the grave of every exploited individual’s fight against the exploiters, it’s the last trick – the dirtiest – played by those who would like to see ourselves killing one another. It can only evaporate in moments of common revolt, when we recognize our real enemies – the exploiters and their servants – and we recognize ourselves as exploited individuals that no longer want to be so. The social fight that took place in Italy during the 60’s and 70’s – when young workers immigrated from the South met those in the North in the field of sabotage, wild strikes and absolute disloyalty to the firm – has shown. The disappearance of the revolutionary struggles after the 70’s (from Nicaragua to Italy, from Portugal to Germany, from Poland to Iran) has crumbled the foundation of concrete solidarity among the dis-possessed of the World. This solidarity will only be conquered again in the revolt, and not in the powerless words of the new Thirdworlders or the democratic anti-racists.

So, either religious and clannish massacre, or class war. And at the end of this we can only catch a glimpse of a world free from State and money in which there’ll be no need for money to live and no visa required to travel.

A machine that can be broken

A slogan in the 80’s said: ‘It’s not the noise of the boot that should scare us today, but the silence of the slipper’. Now they’re both coming back. With a holy war speech (the police as ‘army of good’ protecting citizens from the ‘army of evil’, as the Prime Minister said recently), day after day the State conceals its essence at the expense of immigrants. Their homes are devastated, aliens are rounded up in the streets, locked up in Lagers and expelled in total indifference. New detention camps are already under construction in many cities. The State wants to limit the number of visas according to the exact length of work contracts, blacklist all immigrants, make being clandestine a crime and re-inforce deportation. The democratic mechanism of rights and citizenship, wide as that might be, will always presuppose the existence of excluded people. To criticize and try to prevent expulsions signifies realizing a critique of racism and nationalism in act; it means creating a common space for revolt against the capitalist uprooting that affects us all; it means obstructing a hateful and essential re-pressive mechanism; it means breaking the silence and indifference of the civilized ones who stand looking on; lastly, it means confronting the very concept of law with the principle ‘we are all aliens’. Finally, it signifies an attack on one of the pillars of the State and class society: competition between the poor and the in-creasingly seditious substitution of social war with ethnic or religious wars.

In order to function the expulsion framework requires the collaboration of many public and private structures (from the Red Cross which cooperates in the manage-ment of Lagers, to companies which supply services, to airline companies which deport aliens, to the airports that put up waiting zones, to self-styled charity asso-ciations that operate in collaboration with the police). All those responsible can easily be seen and attacked. From actions against detention camps (as happened a couple of years ago in Belgium and a few months ago in Australia, when demonstrations ended up with the liberation of some clandestine immigrants) to those against ‘waiting zones’ (as in France, against the Ibis hotels chain that supplies the police with rooms) or obstructing the flights of infamy (in Frankfurt, the sabotage of optic fiber cables some years ago put all the computers of an airport out of order for a couple of days), there are thousands of activities that a movement against expulsion can carry out.

Today like never before it’s in the street that it’s possible to rebuild class solidarity. Only in the complicity against police raids, in the struggle against the military occupation of neighborhoods, in the firm rejection of every division that the masters of society want to impose on us (nationals and foreigners, legal immigrants and aliens), aware that every outrage suffered by any dispossessed on Earth is an outrage to everyone, will the exploited from a thousand countries be able to recognize themselves.

The borders of democracy: immigrants murdered, rebels in jail

5 anarchists were arrested in Lecce on the 12th May [2005] following the usual investigations for ‘conspiracy’. ‘Capolinea Occupato’, the anarchist squat in Lecce, has been raided and closed down.

These comrades, well known for their continuous, strong and uncompromising struggle against the detention camp for immigrants, were becoming a real pain in the neck. Detention camps are true concentration camps, even if the language of the State calls them ‘temporary stay centers’, and the brutality of the local ‘Regina Pacis’ towards immigrants emerged so clearly that its director, priest Cesare Lodeserto, has ended up in jail. Added to this, a great number of imprisoned immigrants have started to revolt bravely and firmly, so the voice of those who have been denouncing the crimes of the whole system of immigration had to be silenced.

The comrades have been accused of attacking ‘Regina Pacis’ property and its financial supporters, of sabotaging a few Esso petrol stations and carrying out direct action against a number of Benetton shops.

We do not care if they are innocent or guilty, for us what is right cannot be found in the penal code. If they are innocent they can count on our solidarity. If they are guilty they can count on it even more. To struggle against people who lock up men and women whose only ‘crime’ is that they are poor and without the right papers; to present a small bill to those who get rich thanks to the genocide in Iraq (Esso) or by deporting Mapuche people (Benetton): these are practices we totally agree with. The attack on the exploited is always the same: bombardment, detention camps, banks, multinationals, etc. etc.

The same day as our comrades in Lecce were arrested, police in Turin raided and evicted a gypsy camp, killed a man from Senegal at a road block, caused another immigrant to die while he was attempting to escape. You think that’s enough? Well, it’s not.

Immigrants in via Corelli camp (Milan) have been on hunger strike for weeks, protesting on the roof and shouting out their desire for freedom. Meantime, hundreds of the refugees arriving in Italy are imprisoned in ‘welcome centers’ from which they soon try to escape at any cost

These are the cries from the remains of a rotten world in ruins. We can pretend not to hear them. We can hypocritically celebrate the struggle against nazi-fascism without realizing that concentration camps are part of the present, not the past. We can find shelter in respect for the law, the same law that is waved at millions of ‘undesirables’.

Alternatively, we can decide to stand up and find the sense of what is right in ourselves, using hands and hearts.

We can either hide or fight.

The best way to solidarise with the Lecce anarchists is to carry on the struggle to close the detention camps and stop the machinery of expulsion.

For a world without borders.

For those who didn’t run for cover during the tempest

On the trial of the Lecce anarchists and their struggle against the Cpt

The trial against 13 anarchists began on January 19. As well as a series of actions against some of the multinationals that get rich on war and genocide they are accused of the crime of having carried out a constant and determined struggle against the concentration camps for immigrants in San Foca. Two of them have been in prison since May 12 2005, another two are under house arrest, a fourth is on bail. Once again this trial is based on article 270bis or ‘conspiracy with terrorist aims’, with which dozens of revolutionaries, rebels or simply left-wing militants have been arrested over recent years without a trace of proof. Nowadays a slogan on the wall is enough to be accused of ‘subversive association’ (conspiracy).

But that is not what we really want to say here. We know that the laws of the State are spiders’ webs for the rich and steel chains for the poor, just as we have never looked for any sense of justice in the articles of the law books. We want to point out what makes these anarchists dangerous and what there is that is universal in their struggle. There has been a lot of talk about CPT [Centri di Permanenza Temporanea , i.e. Detention Centers] over the past months. Since some investigative journalism has reported on the inhuman conditions that women and men are surviving under in these structures, the various political forces have come to blows over who is responsible for such ‘management’. But the point is not how the CPT are being managed, so much as the very nature of these institutions. Introduced in Italy in 1998 by the center-left government with the Turco-Napolitano law (approved also with votes from the Greens and Rifondazione Comunista), the CPT are to all effects concentration camps. Exactly like the fascist and nazi concentration camps (and before them the colonial ones, in Cuba and South Africa), these are places where people are locked up and held at the total discretion of the police, without having committed any crime. Conditions inside are desperate. The disgusting food and ill treatment are terrible consequences, but they are not the main problem. It doesn’t take much to realize that.

What for an Italian is a simple ‘administrative misdemeanor’ (not having documents), has become a crime worthy of internment for foreigners. As history teaches us – it is enough to think of the racist laws of all the States between the two world wars – in order for such concentration camps to exist it is necessary to establish the equation foreigner = delinquent. That is how the legislation on immigration – by both right and left – should be understood in Italy (but we could say in Europe and the world). If the same criteria were applied to so-called citizens as that which immigrants require in order to be conceded a stay permit, millions of us would be locked up or forced to live in clandestinity. How many Italians can demonstrate that they have work ‘according to the rules’? How many live more than three to a flat of 60 square meters? Knowing that temporary contracts are not valid for obtaining a stay permit, how many of us would turn out to be ‘regular’? It is not rhetoric to define all that State racism, it is a necessary observation.

Now, the CPT (but more generally all forms of administrative detention, including the identification centers or ‘waiting areas’ in which refugees or those seeking political asylum are held) are the realization of this racism. Barbed wire has been the symbol of concentration camps and totalitarian oppression for sixty years, and power has surrounded these new camps with the same in its involuntary coherence. Just as it is no coincidence that administrative detention, a device typical of colonial dominion, is spreading all over the world today (from the Palestinian ghettos to Guantanamo, from the secret British ones where immigrants ‘suspected of terrorism’ are locked up, to the Italian CPT). At a time when bombing and massacring is being carried out in the name of ‘human rights’, millions of undesirables are being brutally deprived of any ‘rights’ and are detained in camps surrounded by police and entrusted to the ‘care’ of some ‘humanitarian organization’.

If the CPT are concentration camps – as many now agree – it is quite logical to try to destroy them and to help the women and men interned in them to escape. And it is quite logical to strike the collaborators who build or manage them. This is what the Lecce anarchists thought. Amid widespread indifference, they publicly denounced the responsibility of the direction of the CPT of San Foca – that is the Lecce catholic church, through the foundation ‘Regina Pacis’ – and the infamous conditions the prisoners were subjected to. They gathered first hand accounts, data, and they organized themselves. They have become a thorn in the side of the church and local power. Already in the summer of 2004 one of them was arrested for trying to help some immigrants escape during a revolt that broke out inside ‘Regina Pacis’. Then they went to the village markets and made known the names and surnames of the agents responsible for the beatings inside the CPT, the doctors who covered them up, as well as the director who beat them, kidnapped and forced muslims to eat pork. Without ever losing sight of their objective: to close these concentration camps for ever, not to make them ‘more humane’.

While all this was happening, some anonymous actions struck the banks that financed the CPT, as well as church property and that of the director of ‘Regina Pacis’, Don Cesare Lodeserto. And the anarchists were quick to praise them publicly. The authorities could no longer hide the problem. So what did they do? First they arrested Lodeserto on charges of kidnapping, embezzlement, private violence and spreading tendentious and false news (the prelate sent himself threatening messages which he then attributed to ‘Albanese criminal elements’), then they had the San Foca CPT shut down. Lodeserto was put under house arrest, then released. They then arrested the anarchists with the aim of getting them out of the way for years. Important people strongly defended the priest. For the most part, those who defended the anarchists were simply honest previous offenders.

Justice has been done... But something doesn’t tally. The tower of accusations against the rebels is clumsy and tottering, but above all, struggles against the CPT are gaining ground all over Italy.. In April the internees of the concentration camps in via Corelli in Milan climb on to the roof, they cut themselves and shout the most universal of all demands: freedom! After them, the immigrants interned in the CPT of Corso Brunelleschi in Turin, then the protest spreads to Bologna, Rome, Crotone. Dozens manage to escape, while outside practical support for the struggle begins to self-organize. Along with posters and initiatives denouncing the responsibilities of those who get rich on the deportation of immigrants (from Alitalia to the Red Cross, from the transport companies to the private firms implicated in the management of the camps), small acts of sabotage start to spread. With that spontaneous convergence that is the secret of all struggles, the crimes that the Lecce anarchists are accused of begin to multiply.

It is this movement – still weak, but it is growing – that has publicly exposed the problem of the CPT, making left wing politicians run for cover in their pathetic attempt to attribute full responsibility for the concentration camps to the right wing government. That all this annoys them is demonstrated in the declarations of home minister Pisanu concerning anarchists and antagonists who ‘incite’ the immigrants (as if the inhuman conditions they are living in was not a constant incitement) and on the need of the CPT to contrast ‘terrorism’ (it’s a well known fact that anyone wanting to pass police controls in order to carry out an attack goes around without papers).

Why?

The CPT lay bare the fact that exclusion and violence are the foundation of democracy. They also expose the profound links between a permanent state of war, racism and the militarization of society. It is no coincidence that the Red Cross is present alongside the army in war and is at the same time implicated in the numerous concentration camps in Italy. Just as it is no coincidence that it participates in the ‘antiterrorist’ exercises with which the government wants to accustom us to war and catastrophe.

The criminalization of the foreigner – scapegoat of the collective malaise – has always been a distinctive feature of dying societies and at the same time a precise project of exploitation. If they did not live in terror of being locked up and sent back home – where war, hunger, desperation often await them – immigrants without papers certainly wouldn’t work for two euros an hour on the building sites of some Great Work, or die and have some cement poured over them when they fall from the scaffolding. Progress needs them: that is why they are made clandestine but not all are expelled. They are ‘welcomed’ in the concentration camps, they are sorted, selected on the basis of agreements with their various countries of origin and according to the amount of docility they show the boss. What awaits them is the reflection of a society at war (against economic and political rivals, against populations, against one’s own natural limitations).

One of the first victims of this whole mobilization is language. The current use of expressions such as ‘humanitarian war’ – or for a concentration camp to be called a ‘welcome center’ – says a lot about the deviation between the horror that surrounds us and the words they use to describe it. And at the same time this deviation anesthetizes the conscience. We call the CPTs ‘concentration camps’ then we go and vote for those who built them, we talk about ‘massacre’ but we are content to march peacefully against war, so long as nothing happens. While the oceanic demonstration was taking place on the 25th April in Milan, the rebels of via Corelli were on the rooftops shouting that the resistance isn’t over, but the rhetoric of ‘liberation’ did not budge an inch, it carried on celebrating.

Perhaps something is changing. While State propaganda is equalizing the enemy within — the rebel, the ‘terrorist’, the Stranger, the fanatic, the kamikaze -, the resistance is arming itself and the ‘suburbs’ two steps from here, where the poor are burning the last illusions of integration in this society, are exploding. Generous young people mean concentration camps when they say it, and they organize as a result, like foreigners in a foreign world. They are disposed to conquer freedom along with the others, even at the risk of losing their own. They hate prisons, to the point that they do not even wish them on the worst swine (the many, too many, Lodesertos). These forms of active discontent are spreading at a distance, but they already bear a trace of something in common. False words are mutinying, and new behavior is unleashing new words into the reality of daily life..

We will not abandon to the revenge of the judges those who did not stay in safety when others were overcome by the tempest. In these sad and servile times, one choice contains all the others: which side are you on?