ITALY: STATEMENT BY ANNA BENIAMINO READ DURING THE APPEAL HEARING FOR THE RECALCULATION OF SENTENCES IN THE SCRIPTA MANENT TRIAL

We receive and publish Anna Beniamino’s statement read during the appeal hearing for the recalculation of sentences in the Scripta Manent trial (Turin, Dec. 5, 2022).

This is a political trial, one that has been tense from the beginning to the administration of exemplary punishment, a trial of our identities as anarchists rather than the facts, a trial of those who do not abjure their ideas.

A massacre without massacre attributed without evidence is the culmination of a growing effort by counterterrorism and prosecutors to exorcise the specter of action anarchism.

In the same vein is the imposition of the 41 bis regime on Alfredo Cospito, guilty of maintaining relations with the anarchist movement from prison. The all-out hunger strike that the comrade has been carrying out since Oct. 20 is the last resort against isolation and sensory, physical, and mental deprivation, against a political gag. A gag that has prevented him from even reading the reasons for the strike itself.

The 41 bis is the extreme degree of fury of the differentiated regimes: prisons where continued isolation and overcrowding of the common sections are the two faces of a system aimed at nullifying the individual. Prisons where massacres, the real ones, have occurred and are occurring: in the repression of the 2020 uprisings, in the trickle of suicides, in the treatment of the poorest and most fragile among prisoners as «residual material» of the prevailing techno-capitalist society.

If anything happens to Alfredo Cospito any individual with critical thinking will understand who the principals and executors of his physical annihilation are, having failed to carry out the political and ideal one. I am aware that I am hostage to a system that hides behind the fetish of «security» and «terrorism» its political, economic, social, and environmental collapse.

Opposing this is necessary. You can destroy people’s lives, you will not succeed in extinguishing anti-authoritarian thinking and practices. You will not succeed in breaking the revolutionary tension, you will not succeed in extinguishing anarchy.

I salute Alfredo and all comrades.

Anna Beniamino

SOURCE: INFERNO URBANO
TRANSLATION: ANARQUÍA