SENZA CENSURA n.5

Italy, June 2001

EDITORIAL

A few weeks ago the activists of the organization "Iniziativa comunista

(Communist Initiative)" were arrested by the Carabinieri. It was the last act of a long chain of repressive activities against the activists, committees and militants of the revolutionary left in the last years.

We'd like to start from this event in order to think about the so-calledstrategy of "preventive counter-revolution", considering it from a general and specific perspective.

The first consideration if almost autobiographic. When listening to the

radio and reading in the newspapers the news, full of lies and falsities, about the arrests, we have remembered the experiences we lived directly a few years ago.

In December 1991 the same protagonists (the Judge Otello Lupacchini, the ROS - task force of the Carabinieri, followed by the television and newspapers) arrested with the same charge and sensation 5 comrades from the revolutionary movement in Bologna.

However, when those comrades were acquitted a couple of months ago after ten years of vicissitudes in the Court of Assize in Rome, there wasn't the same sensation.

Actually, the sensation  isn't so far in the substance of the events, but in the special use of this farce. The last arrests have been used by all the institutional parties not only with the aim of continuing

counter-revolution, but also in order to support, all together, the new

package of laws about security, during the election campaign.

They had started all together the "new management" of prisons with the

so-called "Simeone Law" (poorly failed after "politically correct" protests and mass beating up of prisoners), experimented a lot of new measures of control (electronic bangles and identity cards) and finally fell back on the usual extension of preventive detention for "new terrorists".

After passing these measures, even the last trace of commitment to civil and judicial rights has definitely been thrown in the dustbin.

However, in spite of the fact that all that has already occurred in the

past, we find difficult to detect a general context where setting the

specific repressive events as they aren't separate from each other.

A lot of judicial inquiries in course, or reported by the newspapers but still in judicial secrecy, criminalization of political groups and

organizations, hundreds of house searches and notes of investigation, a few arrests. However, no attempt at explaining what's happening and no real mobilisation to face all that.

In the background noise of provocation, false statements, and false scoops, we can only hear the shouts of the "left counter-revolution" - denouncing the "great conspiracy" and that of the right counter-revolution exposing the "communist conspiracy" and finally the whispering of the usual opportunists who, to avoid misunderstandings, distance themselves in advance even from what they never dared to think...

We strongly believe that the real aim of the bourgeois government is to

detect (and to strike) the social and political groups "at risk", in order to prevent any possible development.

This political aim is tackled with repressive measures such as the

"political" structures of the police (preventive police and ROS), judicial measures such as the criminalization of the class struggle, and with "special" instruments such as the disinformation carried out by security police.

These measures and political initiatives aimed at "rehabilitating" and

"depoliticizing" the class struggle or even aimed at "bribing" with money some real or self-proclaimed vanguards cannot be divided. War and politics are deeply connected with each other, and this dialectical relationship between the political control and repression is called "preventive counter-revolution".

To analyse deeply these issues has always been one of the aims of Senza

Censura. Therefore we decided to begin a wider and more detailed research about  preventive counter-revolution.

Meanwhile, please read a couple of "gems" we have found during our research.

The first one dates back to May 1999. The  under-secretary for the Ministry of Interior, Giannicola Sinisi, talking about "the recent serious terrorist events and the measures of repression", told to the Commission: "(...) I think that the Italian Ministry of Interior has made a strategical choice, deciding that they would never change the bodies appointed to struggle against terrorism in our country. Although lately there was a decrease of the events in the fields of organized crime, especially the Mafia, there was the will not to change the police bodies appointed to contrast the political subversion. That's why the main bodies in this field (central direction of the preventive police and the "body against repression" of the ROS-Carabinieri) have been kept as they were. These bodies are connected with each other and have been co-operating with the intelligence service for long, exchanging information and notice."

Sinisi goes on saying: "The struggle against political subversion is mostly based on the preventive activity of analysis, which requires great abilities of elaboration, disregarding whether the crime is active or not. The work of analysis plays a major role, when not a prevalent one, in the struggle against terrorism, which is obviously carried out by the security service and preventive police as a support".

On the 19th of December 1999, the Prefect  Ansolino Andreassi, the director of the Police of Prevention in the Department of Public Security, described to the above-mentioned Commission the operational methods of the preventive activity under his responsibility: "Once, when terrorism was raging, our guide-line wasn't much to show the individual and direct responsibility of a person involved in it. On the contrary, in order to issue a warrant of arrest you only should prove his/her participation in the "armed band", which had claimed criminal activities. In my opinion, it was a very effective method".