We welcome the following motion passed at the 32nd congress of the
Italian Anarchist Federation (FAI) on 3-6th January 2025. ---- 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
moment. Hence the importance of supporting the struggles against the
militarisation 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 of 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, is 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 loom over our 'civilisation'. 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, are
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,
characterising 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. In all latitudes, nationalist propaganda fuels conflicts and
poisons public debate by erecting walls between the oppressed classes.
In the case of Palestine, this involves a constant downplaying of
Israeli war crimes and the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the West Bank and
Lebanon to the point that even European governments have relativised the
arrest warrant of the International Criminal Court against the criminal
Netanyahu after having applauded 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 any 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 most effective:
opposition to wars and military spending accompanied by objection,
refusal to fight and desertion in connection with the broader social
struggles.
The combative rhetoric has been abundantly deployed in the last three
years by sectors that call themselves anti-fascist and
anti-authoritarian, 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 on 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 irreconcilable
political programmes and projects.
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 programme, 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 legitimise religious fanatics, misogynists,
homophobes and murderers of groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, or the
bureaucrats of corrupt more or less 'national' authorities, 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 of 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 call into question
capitalism, the 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
recognise 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 civilisation.
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 characterised internally by
dynamics of inequality and oppression in terms of class, gender and
every possible form of discrimination and marginalisation.
Despite all the difficulties, there are important spaces of action and
organisation 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
characterised 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 major cultural initiative to counter the militaristic
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 recognise
desertion as a real problem that hinders their respective death
programmes. 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 framework 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 generalising 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.
https://www.anarchistcommunism.org/2025/01/21/lets-abolish-armies-lets-stop-wars-lets-expose-nationalisms/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Italian Anarchist Federation (FAI) on 3-6th January 2025. ---- 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
moment. Hence the importance of supporting the struggles against the
militarisation 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 of 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, is 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 loom over our 'civilisation'. 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, are
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,
characterising 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. In all latitudes, nationalist propaganda fuels conflicts and
poisons public debate by erecting walls between the oppressed classes.
In the case of Palestine, this involves a constant downplaying of
Israeli war crimes and the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the West Bank and
Lebanon to the point that even European governments have relativised the
arrest warrant of the International Criminal Court against the criminal
Netanyahu after having applauded 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 any 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 most effective:
opposition to wars and military spending accompanied by objection,
refusal to fight and desertion in connection with the broader social
struggles.
The combative rhetoric has been abundantly deployed in the last three
years by sectors that call themselves anti-fascist and
anti-authoritarian, 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 on 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 irreconcilable
political programmes and projects.
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 programme, 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 legitimise religious fanatics, misogynists,
homophobes and murderers of groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, or the
bureaucrats of corrupt more or less 'national' authorities, 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 of 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 call into question
capitalism, the 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
recognise 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 civilisation.
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 characterised internally by
dynamics of inequality and oppression in terms of class, gender and
every possible form of discrimination and marginalisation.
Despite all the difficulties, there are important spaces of action and
organisation 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
characterised 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 major cultural initiative to counter the militaristic
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 recognise
desertion as a real problem that hinders their respective death
programmes. 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 framework 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 generalising 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.
https://www.anarchistcommunism.org/2025/01/21/lets-abolish-armies-lets-stop-wars-lets-expose-nationalisms/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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