WORLD WORLDWIDE EUROPE ITALY - news journal UPDATE - (en) Italy, Motions approved at the XXXII Congress of the FAI. Let's abolish armies. Let's stop wars. Let's unmask nationalisms(ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 The Italian Anarchist Federation reaffirms its support for the

Antimilitarist Assembly with a view to building a vast movement against
war, united and independent of parties, against the warmongering
policies of the governments that have succeeded each other up to this
point. Hence the importance of supporting the struggles against the
militarization of schools and universities, the struggles against
installations, war production and military bases from Friuli to Sicily,
from Piedmont to Tuscany, the initiatives of workers against the
production and trafficking of weapons, solidarity with deserters from
all wars.

The world is once again approaching nuclear catastrophe, a risk that has
returned to the forefront, anticipated by so many conflicts and
massacres that, if they take place on a smaller scale, never cease to
shock with their tragedy. Among the many factors that have led to this
dramatic situation, the growing warmongering madness of the 'Western'
and 'Eastern' ruling classes stands out, made up of increasingly
wretched and unlikely characters whose charlatanism equals and sometimes
surpasses their lust for power and profit, the latter increasingly based
on the war industry.

On the one hand, in the so-called West, we are witnessing increasingly
explicit elaborations by politicians and intellectuals from the liberal
area and beyond who are drawing the potential scenarios of a new world
war. For them, the so-called 'free world', an expression already in use
in the decades that saw the world divided into two Blocs, would be
fighting an existential battle against the autocracies of the rest of
the planet, identified with new orientalist stereotypes as the place of
origin of the threats that would loom over our 'civilization'. In this
narrative, as toxic as it is Manichean, allied nations that share the
values of liberal democracy such as Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, or even
the so-called democratic opposition in countries such as Myanmar, would
be fighting the same global battle of the 'good' against the 'bad'. With
the same logic, even the HTS fundamentalists in Syria have been enlisted
on the side of the 'good'.

The current Italian government is fully part of this race to disaster,
characterizing its foreign policy in an aggressive sense. This discourse
serves first of all as a pretext to pass off the increase in military
spending and the production of death as something even virtuous in the
name of the alleged need for 'defense', and to liquidate pacifism and
antimilitarism as obsolete and inadequate tools to resolve the new
'practical' emergencies, it goes without saying according to a single
narrative. At all latitudes, nationalist propaganda fuels conflicts and
poisons public debate by erecting walls between the oppressed classes.

In the case of Palestine this implies a constant minimization of Israeli
war crimes and the genocide underway in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon
to the point that even European governments have relativized the arrest
warrant of the International Criminal Court against the criminal
Netanyahu after applauding the one against the criminal Putin.

As far as Ukraine is concerned, there is an evident international plan
aimed at enlisting the world of the left and movements, including
libertarian or self-styled ones, in the war front against the 'tyrant'.
This narrative is based on the rhetoric of national resistance to the
invasion, in which the end justifies every means (including in the most
extreme cases nuclear war), with the aim of splitting the pacifist and
antimilitarist forces by defusing one of the instruments of struggle
that in Western countries have historically been more effective:
opposition to wars and military spending accompanied by objection,
refusal to fight and desertion in connection with broader social struggles.

Combative rhetoric has been abundantly deployed in the last three years
by self-styled anti-fascist and anti-authoritarian sectors whose
slogans, analyses and public documents do not differ in any way from
Western and liberal war propaganda and local nationalist narratives, in
the complete absence of any qualifying point in terms of class or
libertarian readings of the situation. Without claiming, as per our
founding principles, any monopoly of anarchism, it is clear to us that
nationalist, militarist and liberal drifts of that kind do not and
cannot have anything to do with our idea of anarchism and must therefore
be faced like those of any other political force opposed to us: in the
acknowledgement of the different positions, without any confusion or
formal association between programs and political projects that are
irreconcilable with each other.

On the other side of this front line, the project of a 'multipolar'
world promoted by some governments within the BRICS+, which is nothing
but a different imperialist program, has fatally seduced remnants of
Bolshevism and sectors of the left who have gone so far as to consider
bloodthirsty dictators like Putin in Russia, Maduro in Venezuela and
various associates as 'comrades' or almost. According to the same logic,
there are those who legitimize religious fanatics, misogynists,
homophobes and murderers of groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, or the
bureaucrats of corrupt authorities more or less 'national', as the
protagonists of an alleged resistance to Israel. While the misery and
contradictions of these latest speeches are evident, we cannot but
strongly reaffirm the founding principle of the coherence of means and
ends, for which our antimilitarism can in no case be separated from our
anti-authoritarian, anti-clerical, anti-patriarchal and anti-capitalist
inspiration.

In future international scenarios, it will certainly not be the
installation of old reactionary tools like Donald Trump that will bring
an alternative to the progressive warmongering madness of his
predecessor Joe Biden and the majority of the Western ruling class, nor
even a possible military success (or non-failure) of the 'non-Western'
world that will bring more justice or question capitalism, coloniality
of power and imperialism.

We must not forget the other hundred conflicts still ongoing at a global
level, especially in the South of the World, including, as our comrades
from Brazil and Latin America remind us, the genocidal war that has been
going on for over 500 years in their parts against women, against the
poor and against indigenous and Afro-descendant communities. If we
recognize the still current need for anti-colonial and decolonial
action, it is important to specify that this must in no way lead to new
forms of nationalism, communitarianism or essentialism of civilization.
The concept of the individual remains central against any drift that
leads to ethnic, racial and cultural essentialisms, even if based on the
idea of 'peoples', entities that are always characterized internally by
dynamics of inequality and oppression in terms of class, gender and
every possible form of discrimination and marginalization.

Despite all the difficulties, there are important spaces for action and
organization from below in which our contribution can be decisive in
building a social opposition to war and militarism. A central point of
our action has been our support for the general strikes of the
conflictual and grassroots unionism that in recent years have been
characterized by having associated social struggles and for wages with
an antimilitarist approach against wars and the war economy, consistent
with our assumption that closely links an antimilitarist perspective to
a class perspective.

We then need a great cultural initiative to counter the militarist
propaganda that is daily dished out, more or less explicitly, in schools
and in public communication with increasingly pervasive methods, and
ready to exploit places of education and training to make more effective
a discourse that presents the supposedly 'good' face of the armed forces
of the State as if they were humanitarian enterprises.

In this sense, our support for refusal to fight, for conscientious
objection, for desertion, for draft evasion on all sides of the war
fronts and for revolutionary defeatism remains fundamental, especially
in a period in which, to mention only one of the most well-known fronts,
the Russian and Ukrainian military commands themselves recognize
desertion as a real problem that hinders their respective death
programs. This support develops within the framework of our
internationalist commitment, especially within the International of
Anarchist Federations, which must be developed by promoting new
initiatives to deconstruct borders and contest any idea of nationalism
and territorial sovereignty of the nation-state or any other entity that
aspires to become one, replacing it with new mechanisms of international
solidarity and universal sisterhood/brotherhood.

We need a dialogue, within the context of actions carried out
consistently from below and outside of parties and institutional
control, with all those groups and movements that share our
antimilitarist intransigence, building functional alliances on
well-defined objectives and consistent with all the assumptions we have
expressed in this document. Only by developing and generalizing actions
from below based on these assumptions will it be possible to truly renew
hope in a world of freedom and equality instead of that of death,
destruction and permanent war that capitalism and the state increasingly
shamelessly impose on us.

The XXXII Congress of the Italian Anarchist Federation -FAI, Carrara 3-6
January 2025

https://federazioneanarchica.org/archivio/archivio_2025/2025010306carrara.html
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