WORLD WORLDWIDE EUROPE ITALY - news journal UPDATE - (en) Italy, Umanita Nova: Repression: When the Exception is the Rule (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 Mauro De Agostini-Franco Schirone, Il popolo tiranni più non vuole.

Leggi particolari e domicile coatto nell'Italia di fine Ottocento, ZiC,
Milano, 2024 ---- Mauro De Agostini and Franco Schirone lead us through
the history of exceptional laws and forced domicile in late
nineteenth-century Italy with a careful analysis that aims to offer
elements of historical knowledge but also tools for criticizing
contemporary political power. Beyond the specific characteristics of the
"authoritarian twist" of Italy in the 1890s, what emerges is in fact the
continuity of so-called "exceptional" means used over time by the
Italian State in the exercise of government. In other words, it resorts,
in several waves, to emergency laws, the result of a vision of law as
"criminal law of the enemy", which twist the so-called democratic
legality in an authoritarian sense: it happens at the end of the
nineteenth century, with fascism, with the Reale law of 1975, with the
Cossiga law of 1980, again with the law 401 of 1989 which introduces the
Daspo, with the Turco-Napolitano law of 1998 which establishes the
Temporary Detention Centers (now Repatriation Detention Centers), then
with the Pisanu law of 2005, with the Maroni Security Package of 2008,
with the Minniti-Orlando decree of 2017, with the two Salvini decrees of
2018 and 2019 (Urgent provisions on public order and security) and
finally, last in chronological order, with the Meloni-Salvini decree law
1660.

Of course there are different gradations, the fascist confinement,
established in 1926, is not the same thing as a Daspo of 1989, but there
are also clear factors of continuity: the same vision remains at the
core, sometimes latent, more often explicit, that is, an idea of
government as domination and of law as a tool to be used to strengthen
the privilege of a few. With the result that the so-called emergency
legislation accumulates, decade after decade, and the spaces for freedom
of expression are narrowed, to the point of making us live in a cage,
which has closed around us step by step, decree after decree, one
crackdown after another.

This sad story begins in 1862, a year after the unification of Italy,
when a state of siege was decreed to allow the army to intervene and
stop Garibaldi's expedition that intended to free Rome from the papal
yoke. The state of siege was then extended in order to repress, by one
hundred thousand soldiers, that popular uprising in southern Italy that
went down in history with the term brigandage and in 1863 the Pica law
established forced residence, the use of which then grew exponentially
until the end of the century. It was the government of Francesco Crispi,
a former Mazzinian and subversive, that sanctioned a leap in quality in
the repression of dissent, with the renewed use of the state of siege to
crush the movement of the Fasci dei lavoratori in Sicily and Lunigiana,
with the three anti-anarchist laws of 1894 and with the public safety
law of 1899, which provided for a series of preventive measures such as
warnings, compulsory repatriation, special surveillance and, indeed,
forced residence - some of which have survived to this day.

The text then analyses the historical context in which the exceptional
laws and forced residence were established and describes the conditions
of imprisonment, but also the struggles, on the islands of Ustica,
Lipari, Pantelleria, Ponza, Favignana, Lampedusa, Tremiti (where in
1896, during a revolt, the anarchist Argante Salucci was killed),
Ventotene and the Rocca di Port'Ercole, presenting various documents and
testimonies, including those of Roberto D'Angiò, Niccolò Converti,
Errico Malatesta, Oreste Ristori, Ettore Croce, Adamo Mancini, Luigi
Fabbri, Ugo Lambertini, Pietro Calcagno, as well as a historical study
by Olindo De Napoli on the forced residence established in Assab, in
African territory.

In the afterword Natale Musarra highlights further interesting aspects.
First of all, the fact that forced domicile first and then confinement
constituted two phases in which the subversives found cohesion and
harmony beyond the division into schools or tendencies, strengthening
bonds of solidarity. Secondly, the Sicilian historian underlines that
these institutions did not extinguish the will of the anarchists, but
strengthened their spirit of revolt and that it is precisely in both
these phases that the libertarians elaborated new ideas for political
reflection, capable of restarting their militant activity on a renewed
basis, once they had obtained freedom. For example, it is precisely on
the basis of the debate between those detained at forced domicile,
organizers and anti-organizers, that the program of the Anarchist
Socialist Federation of Lazio developed at the beginning of the
twentieth century, a reference also for subsequent organizations such as
the Italian Anarchist Union itself first and then the Italian Anarchist
Federation, which "while advocating organization contains important
openings to pluralism and the autonomy of groups and individuals",
recognizing "the freedom of initiative of each individual member" (p. 205).

A. Soto

The text (17 euros) can be requested at zic@zeroincondotta.org

zeroincondotta.org

https://umanitanova.org/repressione-quando-leccezione-e-regola/
_________________________________________
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