Smoke & Mirrors.

       As everybody who has been involved in trying to curtail the ravages of corporate capitalism knows, the judicial system is an institution to defend those plundering actions of the corporate world against any resistance from the public at large. The system always portrays these actions of protest against the corporate juggernaut's exploits, as polite lines of police officers facing baying crowds of savage destructive trouble makers, followed by the reluctant police having to use force against this dangerous baying mob. Of course on examination you find out that the baying mob are just ordinary people with a conscience, a little courage and who are prepare to make a stand to right some injustice.

      Examples abound, day and daily in the theatrical halls of this loaded judicial illusion, from country to country, it is part of the life blood of this system of capital dominance over the health and welfare of planet and people. 

The following example is from Lecce in Italy.

 

         In the bunker courtroom of the prison of Lecce in the morning of Friday, January 15, the prosecutor submitted requests for sentencing 90 No TAP accused, on trial for a number of episodes of struggle which took place between 2017 and 2018. The charges range from violence and resistance against public officials to breaching expulsion orders from Lecce and Melendugno, where the struggle against the gas multinational was most intense. In the first instance trial the sentences requested ranged from a minimum of 2 months to a maximum of 2 years and 3 months.
        During the hearing a comrade made a declaration concerning the charges against her, here is the text:
        In this trial I am accused of having repeatedly breached an order prohibiting me from being present in the territory of Lecce and Melendugno. Some policemen, in the role of witnesses, stated that I would have deliberately and in contempt of their job of observation, neglected to hide or change my appearance. The many photographs that portray me confirm this observation. In fact I always took part in the demonstrations and the various protests without caring about the prohibition and without concealing myself. And I often spoke out, as did many others, to repeat the reasons for those mobilizations, which have involved a great number of people over two years.
         I hope the gentlemen of the police station won’t mind, but I’d say the reasons that led me to the prohibited areas, risking the charges made against me here, were quite other than contempt for the digos of Lecce. I won’t expose these reasons in all their length and breadth, also because I think that a courtroom is the least suitable place for such a purpose. Suffice it to say that it is not by chance that the reasons I am referring to are all in the missing link of the statements given by the police here in the role of witnesses, statements that sketch a rather simplified, flat, let’s say bi-dimensional scenario where the police are facing a group of rioters against a backdrop of yards, gates, country roads, olive orchards. Instead, my reasons are all in the third dimension, that of the background. These are places that have suffered the indelible scar of an aberrant operation, the TAP gas pipeline. An operation imposed from above and always rejected by the inhabitants because it upturns delicate ecosystems, puts human health at risk, upsets the local economy. Ultimately, that work represents the voracity of transnational capital to which local communities are being forced to succumb. The impressive mobilization of men in uniform in defence of the TAP Consortium and against the opponents of the works showed everyone the State’s subjugation to those superior reasons. The militarization of a vast territory and the suspension of freedom of movement within it in contempt of the population, these yes, are only some of the reasons that convinced me to take part rather than desist, to go to the prohibited areas instead of complying with the prohibitions imposed on me. I thus decided to respond to my own personal ethical imperative, ignore the injunction of authority and be present in the prohibited places.
If anything, my only regret is effectively not having done enough.

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk   

In Our Times.

      What the poster says is so very true, we who make the fighter bombers and manufacture the bombs, don't get bombed. We also sell these things to others to go and bomb other places, far away from us, depravity at its deepest level.
     The following poster has started to appear on walls in the city of Lecce in Italy, below is a translation:

OUR TIMES

Infamy is the hallmark of our times
         That is not hard to see: just raise your eyes from your smartphone and look around, throwing a glance at the reality around us and which we are immersed in. Remaining indifferent to the conflicts that flare up in the world, with all their load of thousands of dead and millions of displaced people, believing that the matter does not concern us, because we live in the “non belligerent” part of the planet, for example, is a sign of infamy.
        Because the ongoing war has involved the whole planet for many years, and the part not being hit by bombs is the one in which they are they manufactured, armies train to massacre or to teach other armies the same, and they train the pilots of the bombers of those wars in the airports nearby … Not to see the suffering of the millions of refugees forced to wander around the planet in search of survival, willing to risk their lives in crossing deserts and seas, at the mercy of those who speculate on that suffering, is also a sign of infamy.
        Because the conditions of this suffering have been created in the West we are living in, and the barriers that apparently far-off States – like Libya or Turkey – have erected were financed by the rulers we elected. Rejoicing when people die in the seas or deserts, or when they arrive in Europe but are expelled for not having the right documents due to their condition of poverty -, as well as when they are locked up in Italian camps called CPR, is also a sign of infamy, infamous like all the reactionary and xenophobic speeches on the lips of many of those respectable Italians, reflecting the infamous ideas of their rulers and their policies of exclusion and discrimination towards foreigners, the poor, homosexuals, women and “different” people in general.
         That is why it is no wonder that a rat like the deceased Monsignor Ruppi, for two decades archbishop of Lecce and, through his worthy henchman don Cesare Lodeserto, manager of one of the most infamous concentration camps for poor foreigners in Italy, the CPT “Regina Pacis”, has been buried in Lecce Cathedral as he had asked before his late death in 2011, and his remains have just been transferred to Lecce cathedral.
       The unfolding of History in an increasingly Orwellian sense would like to erase the wickedness, the violence, the abuse and the beatings carried out in “Regina Pacis” for years, and transform a villain into a saint.

We, for our part, are not prepared to forget.

       But in the end his burial in the Lecce Cathedral does not even bother us. On the contrary.

        It will be easier for us to spit on his grave.

Disordine Anarchist Library
disordine@riseup.net

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk