End of Burlesque Last Saturday saw the conclusion of the second trial in the Marini investigation - named after the prosecuting magistrate in the case - that commenced with raids all over Italy in September of 1996. The trial began in October 1997 and was postulated on the existence of an imaginary anarchist organisation by the name of ORAI - the Organization of Revolutionary Insurrectionary Anarchists, ideologically guided by Alfredo Bonnano, known in english for his pamphlets published by Elephant Press.

At least 58 people initially faced charges for a wide variety of offenses, some of them on simply ideological charges, others for specific offenses, including kidnapping, armed robbery and murder. The first case ended in May 2000 with the exoneration of all the accused on the charge of armed band and the conviction of 13 (from an original 63, for individual offenses.

Beginning of Hard Time At the conclusion of the second degree trial (in Italy there can be as many as four trials before the process is exhausted) six people were sentenced to long prison sentences, including Bonanno who recieved six years.

Significantly the convictions included a charge of subversive association which had been rejected at first instance for a larger group; all those connected with a cellar raided by police in Rome, where weapons were found and which was presumed to be the headquarters, went down on this count.

Amongst those charged at first degree were Horst Fantazzini, who died of a heart attack in jail at sixty one years of age shortly after being rearrested on suspicion of intention to commit robbery, and Jean Weir, a scottish woman.

While the timing of this decision is almost certainly coincidental, it is certainly propitious from the government's point of view. Interior Minister Pisanu presented his report on terrorism, as is currently in vogue, signaling the danger constituted by a diffuse area of political illegality and alluding to similarities between the current situation and the 1970s. Pisanu's fantasies were understood generally as targeting the Disobedienti - a synthesis of former White Overalls (Tute Bianche), the youth wing of Rifondazione Communista, Francesco Carruso's Rete No Global and others - and interpreted as a preemptive strike against the anti-war movement in Italy which already demonstrated its massive scale in the demonstration of a 500,000 to a 1,000,000 that closed the European Social Forum in Florence. The Disobedienti have been an important force in those mobilizations, and government spin-doctors identifying extra-parliamentary activity with terrorism has been a hallmark of this regime's style.

Witches Brew http://www.statewatch.org/news/2003/feb/02italy.htm Thus it was that the other aspect of Pisanu's speech focussing upon 'insurrectionary anarchists' and the traditional autonomist residuum (such as social centers Askatasuna in Turin and Inmensa in Genoa). The last months has seen a veritable moral panic at the discovery of small explosive devices mailed to Spanish targets or left in bins near the public prosecutors office in Genoa. these acts were initially attributed to the 'insurrectionary milieu', or by more subtle sources 'anarchoid elements' i.e. individuals or groups practicing 'attentat' but not endorsing a traditional anarchist political philosophy. Some newspapers claim that this series of attacks has at its base the visit of young basque militants from Senedeak (a prisoner support group working with imprisoned Basque left-seperatists) to..... Turin. Investigations in the aftermath of the bin-bomb by the prosecutor's office led to a raid on an activist from Inmensa. At this point it should be clear what is going on.

To the spin-doctor's stew was then added stock elements i.e. uncorroborated ramblings about the moves of the Red Brigades (usually related to leaflets found in telephone booths!) and the potential convergence with 'Islamic terror.'

The question must still be asked, why? My view is that is a direct response to the massive problems already generated or still to emerge from the investigation into police violence during Genoa. Whilst initial coverage of the G-8 clumsily grasped for explanations based on 'infiltrators' from the police, fascist groups etc., that simple conspiracy has now faded. What is left is a story that leaves the top ranks of the Italian police with their credibility in tatters. The Anti-terrorism force looks particularly bad in all this, its one and two being on the rack for the withdrawal of the armed escort from Marco Biagi in 2002 (a killing claimed by the red brigades), and the retrospective planting of two molotov cocktails in the Diaz School respectively.

To counter the very real crisis of the police requires ever more ludicrous theories of armed groups and hysterical invocations of real and present danger. But the record speaks for itself: in five years only two killings can be imputed to groups of any 'leftist' character - D'Antona in 1998 and Biagi in 2002, both claimed by the Red Brigades and bearing claims of responsibility that make it obvious that if indeed these people do not represent an element of the state involved in old tricks, then they are fossils from the 1970s caught in a time-warp. Alas in Italy the exitence of such useful idiots is also a credible proposition, such is the high level of social inertia.

Paralysis The particular characteristics of the tendencies targeted make them susceptible to these transparent state manipulations. Whilst the Disobeddienti weigh every incident in terms of hegemony and public opinion, often in a detestably opportunistic manner, the anarchists and autonomi seem locked in a tryst with their own marginalisation. The anarchists, under the banner of a total refusal of politics and and identification only with social subversion, have effectively abandoned the field of the mass communication of ideas and everyday social struggles altogether, leaving themselves prey to the most caricatured and falsified of depictions at the ends of a state and media machine bottomless in its cynicism. The autonomi respond reactively to what they perceive as the spineless institutionalisation of the former Tute Bianche and nurture the aesthetics of the traditional confrontationalism synched to a ritual chant of no compromise. In a context of a mass movement against the Berlusconi government, and a center left in an advanced state of disintegration, this posture leads them to abandon the terrain of social revolt which is then harvested up by their arch-enemies, Casarini and his henchmen, and fed into the usual processing machinery of boring leftist representational politics, thank you very much......

You've Got Form The difficulties anarchists find themselves in when the political system comes looking for them were reflected in the inability to respond effectively the raids of September 2001 (where over a hundred houses were raided in a supposed investigation of a group called FIES, fighting against special detention units in Spanish jails) and the previous framing of Silvano Pelissero, Maria Soledad Rosa and Eduardo Massari, and the state produced suicide of the last two named, in 1998. The three had been arrested in Turin accused of being part of a terrorist group staging attacks against the construction of a new high speed train system. Maria Soledad Rosa was not even in the country at the time of the alleged acts, but at home in Argentina. Notes 1. Raids against 60 anarchists had previously occurred in November 1995 2, The Marini prosecution had no interest in the historical organ of mainstream (!) Italian Anarchism, the FAI, or their sibling the FdCA, limiting itself to the persecution of bad anarchists mostly referring to those who advocate social subversion and have been linked to journals such as Anarchismo and Cane Nero. These journals no longer exist [little surprise seeing as so many of their adherents are in the clink] and as a social milieu it has little visibility.