Posted by: John Phoenix
Moves toward silencing and criminalising effective anti-zionist, antifascist and antiwar voices are advancing in every imperialist and imperialist-aligned country.
The following information was sent to us by comrades in the Carc communist party of Italy.We note that moves toward silencing and criminalising effective anti-zionist, antifascist and antiwar voices are advancing in every imperialist and imperialist-aligned country as the drive to war accelerates and economies and societies are being transferred onto a war footing. Carc is active in helping to organise Italy’s anti-Nato and anti-zionist movements, including helping to organise Italian dockworkers who have been refusing to move arms bound for Israel or Ukraine.Following decades of anticommunist propaganda and the rewriting of history (especially regarding the Soviet and communist victory over fascism in WW2), we are now seeing moves towards the outright banning of communist organisations in every supposedly ‘democratic’ western state, with the weaponisation of ‘hate crime’ (aka thought crime) and ‘anti-terror’ legislation, the purging of antiwar activists from state institutions (eg, the attempted purging of active anti-zionists from the British health service), the criminalisation of direct action and civil disobedience, the scrapping of jury trials etc.
Our only answer to all this must be to work harder to build genuinely socialist movements in the imperialist heartlands, and to join those movements firmly to the global axis of anti-imperialist resistance!
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At dawn on 21 April, acting on orders from deputy prosecutor Maurizio De Marco, the political police in Italy searched the homes of six comrades: five in Naples and one in Florence.
Among them were three members of the national executive committee of the Carc party (Paolo Babini, Igor Papaleo and Marco Coppola), activists from the Campania Federation’s local chapters, and a young sympathizer who is a minor.
The search warrant listed the alleged offenses:
- promoting, establishing, organising, directing or financing an association that aims to commit acts of violence for the purposes of terrorism and subversion, drawing on the methods of the Red Brigades and the New Red Brigades (with the aggravating circumstance of having induced a minor to commit a crime);
- condoning acts of terrorism with explicit references to the operations of the Red Brigades and the New Red Brigades.
At the end of the searches, according to the fragmentary reports we have managed to gather, some comrades were taken to the police headquarters for the customary attempt at interrogation without a lawyer and the other typical forms of intimidation that the political police reserve for the youngest militants to scare them.
Comrades from Naples gathered outside the police headquarters on Via Medina, as did other comrades in Florence.
With this initial statement, in addition to spreading the news of the raids, we denounce the attempt to strike at the Carc party with an obvious and provocative judicial setup that combines the old tools of the bloodthirsty and anticommunist prosecutors (‘terrorism’) with modern repressive perversions such as ‘speech crimesÆ and terrorist propaganda via social media.
We call on the organisations and parties of the Italian communist movement, workers’ and popular organisations, movements and social networks to take a public stand against this dirty manoeuvre. With the ‘terrorism’ charges against the Carc party, the judicial authorities are expanding their attack against the entire front of the popular masses and the struggle against the Meloni government.
The more their attempt falls flat, the more the struggle against the Meloni government, the Italian system of the grand coalitions and the judicial authorities will develop and strengthen.