We have already expressed our political considerations regarding the attacks we have received for organizing the first Italian tour in support of the Solidarity Collectives (SC), four years after the beginning of the full-scale war waged by the Russian Federation in Ukraine.
Someone, in their red-brown (a convergence of far-left and far-right ideology pretty popular in Italy) outburst poured onto the social platform of a technocrat close to Trump, wrote, “For future reference, remember this absolutely disgusting AI graphic, the anarchist hyphen flags,” etc… The absolutely disgusting AI graphic is actually the work of David Chickan’s CN (Natural Creativity), who died fighting on the Zaporizhzhia front, where Russian troops are surrounding the town of Huliaipole, home to the Nestor Makhno House Museum, which has been damaged by Russian shelling.
Here we would like to better explain and contextualize what happened in Turin, where the first of a series of national meetings was scheduled. This triggered the writing of a statement full of insinuations and unfounded accusations, and even the calling of an assembly with the declared aim of censoring the initiative.
The tour presenting Anti-authoritarians at War and meeting with an SC comrade was organized by us in full autonomy and is self-funded. We can therefore immediately put a stop to the paranoid speculation of those who suspect a covert NATO operation aimed at recruiting Italian anarchists to use them as cannon fodder on the Ukrainian front, and who evidently consider our comrades to be naive puppets to be manipulated. This is not an “SC campaign,” as has been written; we invited them, asking them to divert resources from their daily work of resistance against the Russian regime’s war, because we believe it is important to talk about the Ukrainian resistance and to listen to the stories of those who are directly experiencing the war.
In the past, some comrades have tried to propose initiatives in the spaces they have been involved in over the years, without finding a landing point: to the hostility of certain environments—mainly driven by ignorance or campist postures—was added police repression, which in recent years has wiped out numerous occupations, as well as internal issues, differing priorities (also legitimate), lack of unanimity…
We know we hold a minority position in Italy, and faithful to our principles of self-management we ultimately decided to act autonomously. For this reason, we immediately opted for a neutral space, avoiding long and exhausting discussions in which the parties remain stuck in frozen and irreconcilable positions, usually resulting in shelving the proposal.
However, the space that had been granted to us, the Cecchi Point, was later denied, even after the venue’s social media account had shared the poster. We do not know the internal dynamics of Cecchi Point, but we believe it is likely that some associations were unaware of the initiative, objected to the presence of a fundraiser—a simple contribution for a vegan salad and a low-cost distro—and from there the issue escalated to the board, which unilaterally decided to revoke the space without consulting us.
There was no subterfuge, as was hypothesized during the assembly convened with the aim of silencing us. The initiative was open to everyone, the debate was announced on the poster, and our detractors could have taken the floor, argued their position, and asked questions directly to the SC comrade. But some people, as is evident from their statement, prefer to ask themselves questions and answer them on their own rather than listen to the responses of those directly involved.
In recent days we have seen messages circulating in movement chats expressing worrying verbal violence, macho language, and in some cases racist content, as well as material traceable to supremacist and populist political areas such as Vox Italia or the pro-totalitarian website “L’Antidiplomatico.” Comrades who expressed veiled dissent, or at least some tolerance towards us, were literally silenced with insults and authoritarian behavior.
Two of our comrades from Turin therefore decided to attend the assembly, with the sincere intention of intervening and clarifying their positions and motivations. We were there not to spy, but to participate. We did not disguise ourselves and even openly displayed gadgets from Pryama Diia and Ukrainian antifascist groups.
Unfortunately, the way the assembly unfolded made intervention impossible. Let us be clear: passive-aggressive victimhood does not belong to us—no one prevented anyone from speaking; the conditions for dialogue were simply absent. The feeling was immediately that of explaining the curvature of the horizon at a flat-earth conference, so far removed from reality was the interpretation of the whole affair (as well as of the initiative at Cecchi, the situation in Ukraine, the role of the SC and of comrades from Central and Eastern Europe), and so heavily laced with false information.
This was certainly not a deliberative assembly, since the decision to prevent the meeting from taking place at all costs had already been made in advance. To ensure the audience was on their side, the person leading it single-handedly began distributing and revoking “certificates of anarchism” to half the world. Solidarity Collectives and their supporters were described as “the enemy”—their exact words—which the speaker claimed to know very well.
The first half of the assembly-monologue was thus devoted to delegitimizing the enemy, accusing them of precisely the behavior that was actually intended toward them. The SC were portrayed as authoritarian militarist fanatics who monopolize discussions, do not answer questions, prevent others from speaking, take away microphones or speaking time, and have no qualms about using physical force to impose their views, backed by “so-called anarchists” from Belarus, Russia, and Poland acting as security.
We are talking about comrades who over the years have set police stations on fire and attacked checkpoints, burned barracks, carried out concrete acts of sabotage against environmental destruction, taken part in popular protests and led uprisings; during the war they have sabotaged railways and logistical nodes of the Russian war machine. Some of them are still in prison following the 2019–2020 repression; some are effectively sentenced to death without the Italian anarchist movement having issued a single statement of solidarity; others have died fighting the neo-Nazi Wagner militia. These comrades, who have fought and risked their lives to overthrow their respective regimes, are deemed by some to be unworthy of being called “anarchists,” and some were even mocked by the assembly as refugees safely sheltered in Europe.
In the audience, an experienced voice also said something we fully agree with: “What if we tried to infiltrate and ask questions?” That is exactly why we organized the screening—public, open, and free—where there is no need to “infiltrate.” The idea was quickly dismissed after the main speaker reiterated the impossibility of dialogue with the SC.
The most lively part of the assembly—the one everyone was invited to contribute to—was in fact an investigative operation aimed at discovering the perpetrators of the “misdeed.” They started from the crime scene: Cecchi Point, “in the hands of the Democratic Party, which is against Russia,” which would therefore have proposed and then sabotaged its own event. However, investigations along the “democratic trail” led to a dead end: there was no motive. Another sensible intervention pointed out that it is hard to imagine Pina Picierno organizing an event in favor of the Solidarity Collectives.
We then learned that the organizers of the assembly had worked on the dossier all night. Through a sophisticated OSINT operation, the movement’s political police discovered that the organization has an account on a Mastodon instance, whose administrators’ profiles and most active members must be examined.
In every city where the event takes place, squats are virtually searched for possible traces exposing the “traitors,” analyzing above all the composition of any group not aligned with pro-Russian positions—including those in Turin that initially dared to demonstrate against Russia or even show solidarity with Ukraine and empathize with its cause—seizing every opportunity to slander the respective collectives in a desperate search for culprits who cannot be identified but are there, like in The Purloined Letter by E. A. Poe.
While investigators groped in the dark, other infiltration strategies were devised: identifying the culprit by pressuring contacts within Cecchi Point, creating fake social profiles to make Davide Grasso—the other guest of the event, also labeled militarist and authoritarian—“talk.” Even Kurdish democratic confederalism was delegitimized.
The recent initiative by ArciGay Torino on LGBTQ Ukrainian fighters was also attacked as a “pink-washing” operation. To quote: “Because Putin is homophobic, while Ukraine is a paradise of gay rights.” Yet it is enough to read ArciGay Torino’s Instagram post to better contextualize the initiative: “Since the beginning of the large-scale invasion of Ukraine, LGBTQ+ fighters have been present in the army, fighting on two fronts: against the occupier on the front line and for civil rights within the country.”
It seems that, the Vestals of anarchism care little about the difficult living conditions of people with non-binary sexual orientations in Putin’s Russia—about arrests and internment in psychiatric institutions, about “treatment and rehabilitation programs” meant to restore them to “traditional values”—and even less about the impossible conditions in occupied territories, where, for example, homosexuality is punishable by constitutional law.
The final part of the assembly concerned operational options. Fortunately, nothing new had to be invented: just recycle banners and old leaflets with slogans good for every season—such as those from February, since given the time of year they will mention Ukraine. For the rest, it is enough to shout louder to convince others of one’s arguments, and above all to listen only to what confirms one’s own preconceptions.
We cannot ignore the glaring contradictions of those who do nothing but throw mud at comrades across half of Europe for having chosen to resist a fascist invader. This makeshift antimilitarism—which claims to defeat Russian neo-tsarism or ISIS fundamentalism through “defeatism and desertion”—has yet to explain how it intends to channel all these forces (said to be growing in number as the war goes on, so by now one would expect them to be in the millions) into some kind of social revolution. From the East, they are eagerly awaiting the signal from Italian anarchists.
These contradictions will explode on April 25 in front of the plaque of Ilio Baroni, the anarchist militarist of the Patriotic Action Squads, who fell in battle just hours before the Nazis surrendered. It was said of him that he was a fighter in the service of the state of the fascist Badoglio, a useful idiot of the Allies who armed the partisan resistance to recruit them as cannon fodder, an anarcho-statist who fought to found the bourgeois republic. He could have more wisely left the ammunition to the Nazis, saved his life, and deserted—had he listened to the Swiss echoes of defeatism. Perhaps he would have preferred that, had he known that one day those who pay him homage would, in life, have considered him a “fake anarchist.”