(en) Italy, FAI, Umanita Nova #8-26 - When cure is resistance. Ravenna - certifying unfitness for CPRs prohibited (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]---- In Italy, eight doctors are under investigation for certifying the unfitness of some migrants to enter Italian concentration camps known as CPRs. The investigations-begun in 2024 and culminating in searches in February 2026-are formally still in the preliminary phase. Initially, six people were thought to be under investigation, but the latest news reports eight doctors. Investigators are calling for the doctors to be suspended from their practice for a year. The facts will follow the long and ridiculous course of state justice, but the political point is different: when medicine, always a tool subjected to power structures, occasionally hinders the workings of the state, the state reacts with every weapon at its disposal, reminding itself who's in charge.
The League's riotous leader, "X," writes on social media that the crimes the doctors are accused of, if confirmed, would "deserve dismissal, disbarment, and arrest." The bourgeois tormentors of the faux-left, within the Democratic Party, on the other hand, show their own solidarity and say, "It is unacceptable that, even before any definitive investigation, narratives are being constructed that portray doctors as responsible for alleged irregularities, calling into question the entire public healthcare system." What a shame! They can't even defend humane care. Let's remember that these PD figures would be, for a large portion of the population, the lesser evil!
As comrade Malatesta taught, authority naturally tends to expand; freedom, on the contrary, arises from the conscious initiative of individuals. And medicine, far from being neutral, is one of the fields where this tension explodes most clearly.
In 1943, under Nazi-Fascist occupation, Italian doctors falsified diagnoses to save Jews and anti-fascists. In that context, the choice was clear: obey the law or obey their conscience. Those who certified a nonexistent illness to avoid deportation or conscription were committing political acts in the highest sense: they were not only removing bodies from the state apparatus, but were also using the power of medicine and the regulated profession against the very oppressor who had granted them that privilege. This was not "scientific neutrality," it was ethical disobedience. Treatment became an instrument of liberation. And the state-then openly totalitarian-responded with threats and arrests.
Treatment is also resistance, and we have countless examples of functioning grassroots clinics, today as in the past: the grassroots clinic in Naples, Je so' pazzo, established in the former psychiatric hospital in the Materdei neighborhood, which offers free medical visits and ultrasound services; the Naga grassroots clinic in Milan, open since 1987, which provides healthcare to migrants and the homeless. In history: the grassroots clinic in Paris (1890-1914); the anarchist clinic "La Fraternelle" (Lyon, 1900-1914); the grassroots clinic in Berlin (1900-1933); the anarchist clinic "L'Internazionale" (Brussels, 1900-1914); the grassroots clinic in London (1890-1914); the anarchist clinic "La Colmena" (Madrid, 1931-1936).
But it would be naive to portray medicine only as an emancipatory force. History shows us its other side: servile, collusive, and violent. During the Fascist era, disturbing figures like Giorgio Alberto Chiurco (an Italian doctor, pathologist, politician, and member of the fascist squad, and a member of the National Fascist Party) worked to promote a particular use of medicine, for example through his book "La sanità delle razza," a text that interpreted medicine as a tool for protecting and strengthening the Italian "race." To borrow from Michel Foucault, when medicine transformed into a biopolitical device, it ceased to cure and began to surveil, normalize, and repress, legitimizing policies of social control under the guise of "public health."
Psychiatry was used to justify colonialism and scientific racism for decades; entire populations, in clinical language, were defined as "inferior," "degenerate," and "incapable of self-government." Slaves who attempted to escape from plantations in America were classified with ingenious psychiatric diagnoses, such as drapetomania, a strange and inexplicable urge to escape! The asylum became an instrument of social discipline: locking up the different, the rebel, the poor, and the "hysterical" woman. Medical knowledge offered those in power a seemingly neutral and even almost humanitarian legitimacy in saving the "savages" in Africa.
It's no coincidence that the break was radical when, in the eighteenth century, psychiatrist Philippe Pinel symbolically broke the chains of the insane, and then later, in Italy, Franco Basaglia demolished the mental institution, with interventions that culminated in Law 180 of 1978. Basaglia and Ongaro demonstrated that mental illness was not simply a clinical phenomenon, but a construct influenced by power. The mental institution did not cure: it guarded, hid, and punished. These episodes of resistance to totalitarian power both arose during moments of historical revolution: Pinel with the French Revolution and Basaglia with the libertarian movements of the 1970s. It's worth remembering that Franco Basaglia, in his youth, accused of participating in the resistance in Italy, was released from fascist prison thanks to a false certificate for inoperable brain cancer (which unfortunately, many years later, was revealed to be true: a cruel irony of fate). Medicine, therefore, can be both a chain and a file that breaks it. It depends on who decides whom to obey.
In July 2001, during the G8 summit in Genoa, doctors and volunteers treated protesters who had been hit by extremely violent attacks by state police. Treating them on the streets, in crowded emergency rooms, in corridors stained with blood and smelling of tear gas, was not a neutral gesture. It meant affirming that the injured person-even if they were "black bloc," even if they were dissidents-was still a person. Suspicion crept in there too: does the one who treats the subversive protect him?
The scene repeats itself: when state control becomes absolute, even medicine must remember to obey. Today, the scene is that of our Italian concentration camps, the CPRs. Recent publications by the World Health Organization (WHO), particularly the 2022 reports from the European Office and subsequent updates on the health of migrants in administrative detention in 2026, speak clearly: prolonged detention is a risk factor for depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and self-harm; closed and overcrowded environments foster infectious diseases; Legal uncertainty aggravates psychological suffering. We have repeatedly addressed the issue of state violence, suicides in prisons and CPRs, and the medical weapon of pharmacological and mechanical restraints (sometimes lasting up to 60 hours) that can lead to death (Antonia Bernardini, tied up for 43 days, died in 1974, and Elena Casetto, burned to death in 2018 while tied up).
If a place is structurally pathogenic, certifying its unsuitability for detention is not ideology, but prevention, care, and humanity. Yet, when eight doctors deemed certain people unfit for confinement in Melonian concentration camps, the clinical practice became the subject of investigation. In the last month, these "dissident" doctors from Ravenna dared to highlight the fragility of two young men from Senegal and Gambia, both deemed unsuitable for detention and repatriation.
This is the state that, even disguised as constitutional democracy and embellished with false humanitarian rights (for some only), does not tolerate technical knowledge limiting its sovereignty over the bodies of which it should be the sole master. Medicine, like all sciences, must obey the logic of capital and imperialism. Since Descartes, science must own the world.
From the doctor who helped a Jew escape the Nazis, to the psychiatrist who emptied mental hospitals, to the medic who treated protesters in Genoa, to those who today dare sign a declaration of unfitness for the CPR: treatment is always a political act because it affects power relations.
Medicine is never neutral. It can be a servant of domination-when it certified racial inferiority, when it quelled dissent in mental hospitals as it now does in prisons, when it justifies colonial experiments-or it can rebel against its master. It can choose to stand on the side of order or dignity. It could be folk medicine, it could be a group of beautiful souls militant in psychosocial health like the Basaglia Brigade, it could be liberation medicine.
In the case of Ravenna, the issue is clear: if the doctor must become the guarantor of the efficiency of expulsions, then he is a functionary of the apparatus. If he remains faithful to the real person before him, if he remains human and not a cog, if he shows empathy and not state bureaucratic technique, then he is a potential obstacle.
An anarchist doesn't demand corporate privileges for doctors. He demands consistency: that those sworn to cure not be forced to obey the logic of containment and deterrence. Freedom is not measured at the ballot box, but in the ability to say "no" when human conscience dictates. From 1943 to today, the face of power has changed. But the question remains the same: is the doctor a servant of the state or of treatment? If the answer is the former, medicine will continue to be an instrument of domination. If the latter, then even within a CPR, even under investigation, even in the folds of a judicial file, a space for human insubordination called solidarity can still exist. And perhaps this is precisely what is frightening.
Long live militant care, free from any logic of power!
Gabriel Cammarata
https://umanitanova.org/un-dibattito-natoblindato-la-guerra-il-parlamento-e-il-silenzio-sulle-basi-usa/
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Link: (en) Italy, FAI, Umanita Nova #8-26 - When cure is resistance. Ravenna - certifying unfitness for CPRs prohibited (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]
Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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