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Why Are White Overalls Slandered by People Who Call Themselves Anarchists?vieuxcmaq, Sunday, July 8, 2001 - 11:00
tute bianche (yabasta_bo@topica.com)
A busload of lies exposed, appended with a vivid depiction of the Italian scene and a lot of links and references WHO ARE THE WHITE OVERALLS? AND WHY ARE THEY SLANDERED BY PEOPLE WHO CALL THEMSELVES "ANARCHISTS"? by an informal group of people wearing the white overall, July 2001 An impressive amount of smears, distorted quotations (or quotations from people who have nothing to do wit us!) and tons of lies about the White Overalls in Italy was recently put into circulation by some people who describe themselves as "anarchists". They are erroneously perceived as a sort of Italian branch of the Black Bloc (which never existed in Italy). This happened while white overalls were suffering preventive arrests (Rome), police searches in our flats (Genoa), threats of violent evictions from our squats while we'll be demonstrating in Genoa (Vicenza) and terrible provocations from the Italian intelligence services. When you're suffering all this, and read that you "have explicitly moved away from conflictual action towards mediated, public spectacles, often arranged with the police in advance" (check at http://italy.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=2516&group=webcast)… Owing to the fact that most of our comrades are not very fluent in English, and the fact that we know who these hateful slanderers are and have long been trying to ignore them (a very easy task, indeed, for they're doing nothing at all whatsoever!), we have underestimated the impact of their "document". 1. THE ANARCHIST MOVEMENT, THE BLACK BLOC AND US As people who wear the white overall, we respect the anarchist movement, however, some idiots and saboteurs also happen to call themselves "anarchists", and this is the case. The people who wrote "Revolt's Firemen" and those who penned the pieces from "Umanità Nova" trust on other people's unawareness abroad, for in Italy they no longer have any credibility. Why do these people remain silent on their present, "unnatural" collaboration with stalinist groups and utterly authoritarian networks? For example, they publish their hateful rants on a newsgroup called "Movimento" (), which is attended by people whose only common ground is anti-White Overall envy and rancour: visitors may even bump into brazen-faced pro-Milosevic propaganda, "third-positionist" fascism, conspiracy theories about the CIA funding the Zapatistas (and the white overalls being an asset of the Italian state) and other reactionary crap, as well as endless quarrels on nothingness. That's the "laboratory" where lies about Ya Basta! and the white overalls are fabricated. That's where the degeneration of some anarchist groups is ending up to. Recently, some comrades described the "Movimento" people in a very effective way: In spite of our dis-respect for these shitheads, we never failed to denounce judiciary frames and police actions against them, nor did we ever single them out as "the villains" or "the bad ones". If some of us ever seemed to do so, it was all hack job (everybody knows that interviews are edited). Of course some of us _criticized_ such people as the so-called "anarcho-insurrectionists". Perhaps they did it in the wrong time, but we never supported their repression or made the cops' job any easier. Some of our comrades published an extensive counter-information enquiry on emergency legislation and police repression in Italy, dedicating one of the longest chapters to the way Turin's anarchists were framed in 1998 (Luther Blissett Project, *Enemies of the State*, 1999 - an English version of the intro is downloadable at ) It is false that we are hostile to affinity groups choosing straight-ahead "unpadded" direct action. We respect all tactics and approaches. We must repeat that the Black Bloc never existed in Italy, and make clear that there are very few Italian social centers run by anarchists (most of them in Turin), which means that most of the social centers whose activists despise and slander the white overalls and Ya Basta! are run by stalinists, hardcore leninists and a few die-hards from the Seventies. Believe us, these people are far from being anarchists. By the way, why are we not anarchists ourselves? There's a long tradition of anti-authoritarian communists who antagonized Stalinism, the Soviet Union and the party-form itself, even in the darkest years of the XXth century, long before 1968, guys like Anton Pannekoek in Holland and Otto Ruehle in Germany. Several decades later, in the 1970's, Italy became a social laboratory for so-called "automous marxism", a current that advocated the refusal of work and the complete political autonomy of the working class, re-defining the way the working class is perceived, cutting loose from from the 2nd, 3rd and 4th internationals at once. This heterogeneous network had a great influence on social movements, counterculture and the squatters' scene, holding a position traditionally occupied by anarchists in other countries. Even the approach to cyberpunk and net-culture in the 1980's and 1990's was heavily affected by that discourse and theory. Even the Luther Blissett Project (http://www.lutherblissett.net/primer/), which was wildly horizontal and spontaneous, was knee-deep in "autonomous marxism", however, it moved farther beyond any neat label and description, as Ya Basta! is doing now. Our theoretical approach still derives from Karl Marx's _Grundrisse_ and the texts of "autonomous" thinkers like Toni Negri (and the notion of "cultural hegemony" devised by Antonio Gramsci seventy years ago); at the same time, we are beyond all that and have a clear Zapatista influence in the way we speak, organize and take action. Our feet are in the XXIst century. Most anarchists are also our contemporaries, and yet some of them (just like die-hard communists) seem to be hopelessly entrapped in the nightmarish landscape of the Steel Age and try to blame us for what happened in Kronstadt in nineteen-fucking-twenty-two or the way Stalinists acted during the Spanish civil war. As an Italian idiom goes, these people are "slamming open doors down" [sfondano porte aperte] and don't have a clue of what's been goin' on in the left (and in the society) in the past three decades.] 2. WHAT IS A WHITE OVERALL? We're going to expose all the lies spread by people who describe themselves as "anarchists", and we'll do it while explaining what the white overall means. The white overalls are not a movement, they are a tool which was devised in the context of a broader movement (the social centers of the Charta of Milan) and made available to an even broader movement (the global one). Nowadays the white overalls exist in many countries. The white overall is not an "uniform", as written by the authors of "Revolt's Firemen". It hasn't got militaristic origins: back in Autumn 1994 the Mayor of Milan evicted the Leoncavallo squatted centre and stated: "Squatters are nothing other than ghosts now!". His description was accepted ironically, and thousands of people dressed in white stormed the streets of the city and rioted for hours. That was the real debut of the white overalls, and it wasn't a "fluffy" one. Sandra K. (the author of the slanderous pieces from Umanità Nova) purposefully lied about it when she wrote that the white overalls were born in 1998 at the meeting that approved the Charta of Milan. It's not a small detail, it makes a hell of a difference. Actually some people who wear the white overall may mistake it for an "uniform", but they're utterly wrong. The people wearing the white overall are funny and ridiculous, they look as the tire man in the Michelin logo. The people wearing the white overall burst into laughters when they see each other, and when the cops charge they can't run away, (after all, they "dress up" in order NOT to run away), and they're an easy target, like a cow in a lobby. The semi-official salute of the people who wear the white overall is ridiculous as well (a fist with the little finger raised, check a nice picture at: http://www.wumingfoundation.com/english/giap/giapdigest9.html, scroll down till you find it). We wave those fingers at the cops, which means: "Come on, break it!". 3. THE MEDIA AND US We always try to be where the media don't expect us to be. We usually _announce_ what kind of tactics we'll employ during the demo, but we employ it in such unpredictable ways that the media are taken aghast. We achieved a concrete goal in via Corelli, Milan, January 2000, when we clashed with the police and managed to enter a zone that was forbidden even to the press, i.e. the administrative detention center for "clandestine" migrants, which was a real concentration camp. We won the cops' resistance, the journalists could enter the center and describe what they saw. After that, the center was shut down. We achieved concrete goals after the Mobilitebio demonstrations in Genoa, May 24-26th 2000. We clashed with the police in such an unprecedented way that the media simply couldn't _criminalize_ us. After that, the Italian government was forced to ban GMOs. During the no-OECD demonstration in Bologna (June 14th 2000) we were attacked by the police, four of us were literally _grabbed out_ of the testudo and got their skulls smashed in. It was a hard clash, as the video footage proves: white overalls lying on the ground with packs of coppers kicking and clubbing them. The pseudo-anarchist slanderers say that it was all staged, that there was an agreement with the cops. This is bullshit, and shameful lack of respect for the injured comrades. Anyway, the TV news showed that we were just _protecting_ ourselves with shields, that violence was only on the part of the police. In the weeks before the G8 summit on environment in Trieste, april 2001, the town was sealed and invaded by thousands of cops. The local press turned things upside down and made the inhabitants expect us to be barbarians, ready to set fire on the town. The demonstration was shielded and ready to self-defense, but it was also pacific, ironic, culturally diversified. The news media were forced to admit that _nothing had happened_ , and the population questioned the authorities about the discomforts the cops' invasion had caused. In the past two months of preparation for blocking the G8 in Genoa, the white overalls have proved to be able to avoid stereotypes. They forced the media to schizoid interpretations. Hacks were totally unable to label the white overalls either as "good" or "bad". On the other hand, it is partially true that the white overalls have been "over-exposed" to the media, their spokespersons were quoted even when there was no need for it, however, this is only a side effect of a "cure" that's making the movement powerful and _credible_ with no "fluffiness". We should avoid the classic "situationist" error: as soon as many people start to understand what you're doing, it means that the message is not "radical" anymore, they're fucking us, they're "recuperating" us, we have to switch to other strategies if we don't want to become parte of the "spectacle". Useless bullshit, this is a rhetoric machine that justifies elitism. We must refuse it. 4. "REFORMISM"? WE'D BETTER LEAVE THE TWENTIETH CENTURY The slanderers wrote: "At the same time negotiations had been undertaken with mayors--right-wing ones as well--to obtain political recognition, and legalize squatted centers with the claim that they were offering public services and entertainment, organized through social cooperatives, tied to the "non-profit" sector." (Sandra K.) Actually the local councils- were persuaded (or _forced_ by mobilizations) to seize the squatted buildings (in the case they were private property) or give them to the squatters (if they were public property) and recognize the right not to be evicted. Now Venice-based "Rivolta" can give hospitality to migrants and refugees from Eastern Europe without the cops molesting them. Bologna-based "TPO" can be converted as an anti-G8 infopoint with cops having no right to tresspass, and so on. Sandra K. regards these as defeats. On the contrary, we see them as little steps forwards on the path of social self-management, and think that Sandra K. and her buddies are deeply disturbed by victories taking place (probably because they support defeat as a way of life). "Some of their leaders like Casarini and Farina took part more than once to elections, even in the 2001 ones" (Revolt's Firemen). Farina and many other comrades simply entered (as _independent_ candidates) either neighbourhood or town councils (not the Parliament!), thousands of people elected them because it is useful to have a spokesperson for social centres in places where decisions are made. We have always rejected the party form. This is an experiment, and it's far from being the only thing we do. It is only one of the decisions our local victories required. By the way, brother Casarini NEVER took part to any election. As to "reformism", this is an interesting excerpt from a document written by two comrades after the EZLN's March of Dignity: Be open-minded, comrades! 5. EXPOSING A FEW OTHER LIES "They're going on Tv to declare war to police for the Genoa G8, but in this days they are 'contracting the demo' with the italian Foreigner Ministry Ruggiero!)" (Revolt's Firemen) Completely false. A delegation from the Genoa Social Forum (which includes more than 700 groups, of which Ya Basta! is only one) met the ministry and told him that the occupation of Genoa by military forces was a clear violation of civil rights. Thereby they asked the government to allow the demonstrations to take place (as yet the demonstrations are unathorized). The speakers' council of the white overalls publicly stated that the government was trying to "fool" the delegation and there was nothing to negotiate about. "Part three: they appear at marches with their pads, helmets and protections, display in the frontlines, take care that nobody has the insane idea to do something else (above all to smash banks' or multinationals' windows) and that the march can have place without any "problems"." False. We are not anybody's security system. We believe in the logic of "affinity groups". Anybody can choose their own tactics as long as they are not devised to sabotage our efforts. At Mobilitebio (Genoa 2000) there were two marches, one (very big) including the people wearing white overalls actually clashed with the police. The other one (very tiny) was very, very, very calm and "fluffy", despite all the people posing as macho warriors. What happened is that the ones who went "fluffy" during their own demo (the cops could butcher them in the twinkling of an eye), infiltrated _our_ demo and started to smash windows, because they felt safe, they knew that the police was after us, not after them. Their only aim was to disrupt the demonstration and make our civil disobedience uneffective. (Revolt's Firemen). "Part four: here is where they try to get revolutionary credibility... clashes with police! They use to confront police at the end of the route with plastic shields and no offensive object, pushing in order to pass the "red line". But these clashes are fake ones! They usually take place when most protesters have gone away, but tv cameras are still present, and last just a few minutes. Moreover police don't use tearing gas, which is their favourite arm during clashes or riots." ("Revolt's Firemen") Disgustingly false, stomach-turning. Hundreds of gas canesters were shot in Milan, January 2000. And the confrontation is far from being fake, this is insulting for all the people whom the cops knocked down unconscious. "Another important role they play during protests is also that of white-dressed cops. Many times t.b. tried to isolate, demask or physically attack those who passed to action." (Revolt's Firemen). It NEVER, never ever happened. In Trieste (anti-Balkan war demo, 1999) we kicked a creepy guy with a pro-Milosevic placard out of the demonstration, that's all. "More examples come from Ancona, where in May 2000 they lined between anarchists and cops, or Bologna, where a couple of months earlier at an anti-fascist demo they preferred the usual fake clashes rather than attacking fascists." (Revolt's Firemen). It is unbelievable to see truth turned upside down in such a heinous way! That day, the people wearing white overalls were the only ones who _actually_ marched towards the Nazi congress, clashed with the police, returned to the rally point and moved ahead again backed by more than 10,000 demonstrators! The self-acclaimed "bad boys" did a lot of muscle-flexing and showed off with their sticks for the photographers. As soon as the cops moved one foot, the "bad boys" ran away, hastily dropping their sticks! It was absolutely ludicrous. As is ludicrous this attempt to smear thousands of people whose only fault is trying to do something instead of spending days on a "revolutionary" arm-chair looking at their own "revolutionary" navels. |
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