WHY THAT JULY RETURNS TO BE A THREAT

Twenty years have passed since that July 2001. In those days a tide of
people of different age, origin and political backgrounds invaded the streets of
Genoa.
They were the years of the Social Forum,  the No Global, the movement of
Seattle, of the widespread feeling of being citizens of the world, and of the desire of freedom as a birthright and not as a nationality.

In that July of 2001, it became evident what millions of women,
men and children of those countries invisible to us, had experienced in their own life with centuries of colonialism, exploitation and slavery, that is the non-existence (and not the suspension) of a basic and inalienable
and  principle of safeguarding human dignity.
The capitalist and neoliberal rationality advances and imposes itself by following the only principle of profit and maximum satisfaction of
selfish self-interest. On this principle everything
on its way, human beings, animals, plants, nature in general, will be solely and exclusively a resource to be exploited and every
act of rebellion, a sacrosanct reason for punishment and annihilation.
And this many of us knew. Others, having hided for years  behind the peaceful meshes of institutional reformism still thought that
civil rights were a tool of resistance against power and authority.
But power and authority are such because they exercise
the hegemony of violence in the face of which rights and duties and any other institutional bullshit that claims to control their ruthlessness.
Genoa has shown that the exercise of human dignity is not a
a right to be demanded, but a reality to be conquered with a
multiplicity of struggles and radical and anti-institutional existences.

Many were the tortures in the police stations, the police violence in the streets, the police brutality in the Diaz, and the murder in Piazza Alimonda of a young man: Carlo Giuliani, as a clear message
repressive affirmed once again with that bitter taste of blood…

In the following years there have been so many splits and fragmentations
within the movements.
To have influenced certainly, the violence of those days and the
media strategy used by the power of the division between demonstrators
„good“ and „bad“  with the aim of isolating and condemning the most radical part of the movement, the „Black Block“.

Although there have been so many wounds and traumas that we still carry within
and that the only shared memory seems to be the one of the
violence, it is important to go beyond this narrative and remember that
those days were arrived at by building common ground that, although
landslides, managed to involve, in different forms, tens of thousands of people.

To follow the path of those days, the support to the militants
and militants who ended up on trial (also through the search for evidence that would try to exonerate them from the charges), the problems
related to the preservation and retrieval of the material produced by
by the movements, the production of memoirs and documentaries
related to those days.

Today, 20 years after the G8 in Genoa, we are paying for the effects of a
global pandemic: from not being able to have access to things like health care, to the wicked policies of governments and the capitalist system, from the consequences of extractivist and colonial policies, to the increase of poverty and the strong gap between classes.

As twenty years ago, the dominants have no intention of reducing their profits and their wealth by filling their pockets more and more
while poverty and the worsening of the working and living conditions  of the majority of the population, is growing and growing.
In order to maintain this objective of continuous increase in their wealth, governments and capitalists are ready to use any police and military brutality
police and military brutality against those who revolt against this
domination.

Just as it was 20 years ago, once again there is a tightening of the
emergency legislation and instruments to prevent the spread
of social conflict with the aim of repressing and breaking up movements
and disconnect them from the rest of the population annihilated by the
by the strategies of racism and war between the poors.

About those days for those who have lived and those who have not, are still alive the memories and wounds, as well as the anger and the common feeling of revolution  and the desire to change the world.
Of those days is still alive the memory of Carlo on the ground and the bloodstained asphalt, the Diaz victims, and those who are paying the price of those days with prison.

Because a different world is possible!
Because the revolutionary sentiment lives from generation to
generation, it has no barriers or borders, but above all it lives, resists and develops in the common imagination!

We do not forget the spilled blood!
We do not forget our comrades still behind bars!

Genoa 2001: we will never forgive!

send by: Anti Knast Anarchist*innen Berlin (AKAB)