There are those who still believe that the horrors are a thing of the past, confined to history books, black-and-white photographs of Nazi camps, the barbed wire fences that cut across the sky during the Armenian genocide, or even in the distant Congo Free State during the genocide perpetrated by King Leopold II of Belgium. That "Never again" can still be heard like an echo of ghosts in the dark corridors of Europe; ironically, it is heard from people not so far removed from those who are exterminating the Palestinian population in Gaza and the West Bank. And then we move on. But horror does not love the past; it is cyclical; it lives where it is tolerated, it lives in the totalitarianism of solitude. It is tolerated in Gaza and Sudan, but even in the heart of our cities, horror wears many masks: state, genocide, fascism, armies, prisons. Or an acronym: CPR.
You no longer need to travel across Europe to see an extermination camp. Just go to Turin, on Corso Brunelleschi. There, the Repatriation Detention Center is located. It's not hidden among distant forests; it's not camouflaged in the desert like in Libya. It's among the houses, next to the ordinary lives of those who go to work, take their children to school, do the shopping, or go for a relaxing and enlightening hatha yoga session. Even the German concentration camps weren't always far away: they were often there, in the urban fabric, tolerated, normalized, invisible to the eyes of those who didn't want to see, like the Nazi concentration camp in the San Sabba rice mill in Trieste, or like the pre-Basaglia mental hospitals.
Moussa Balde, a twenty-three-year-old from Guinea, committed suicide in the Turin CPR on May 23, 2021. His name in Arabic means "saved from the waters," the Arabic form of the name Moses. His story is that of a brother who had hope. He was a young migrant, having passed through the violent desert of institutions, slave-driving torturers, and the blood-soaked sea of Europe's democratic fortresses, ending up in Italy with that crazy revolutionary idea of life. After a street attack, instead of protection, support, and love, he found imprisonment. Not a criminal conviction, but administrative detention: nine days of solitary confinement in the so-called "little hospital" of the CPR, a bare, empty cell that the prisoners' ombudsman described as an old zoo. There, he took his own life, or perhaps he reclaimed it.
On February 11, Annalisa Spataro, the then director of the center, was convicted of manslaughter by the Turin court, acknowledging individual responsibility. The sentence includes a one-year suspended prison sentence, conditional on the defendant not committing similar crimes again. Spataro and the French management company Gepsa S.p.A. They were also ordered to pay Moussa's relatives a provisional sum of EUR350,000, as an advance on compensation that will be determined definitively. Doctor Fulvio Pitanti, the facility's medical director, was acquitted.
But the State, the horror, remains out of the dock. It's always like this: at worst, an official is sacrificed, and the institution is saved. Compensation is paid, consciences are put aside, and democracy continues to be practiced with blood and inhuman oppression.
And yet, the issue isn't the fault of a single director or the colluding doctors at the CPRs. The issue is the very existence of these concentration camps, facilities where people are locked up for a bureaucratic "irregularity." Where any human being who is out of place is made illegal. Places where freedom is violated in the name of the state's administrative order and its political propaganda. In the name of a missing piece of paper, they deprive us of heaven and dreams, they deprive us of smiles and hugs, of love and life.
What substantial difference is there between a camp of yesterday and one of today, when the logic is the same? Back then, it was said that certain men were a danger to the race; today, they are said to be illegal immigrants to the state and dangerous to "public safety."
Back then, fences were built to defend purity; today, temples of the capitalist state are erected, walls of bureaucracy to defend "national security." The words change, but the violent idea remains: there are human beings who can be segregated because their mere presence is considered a problem.
Some will cry foul at the comparison. They will say that the Nazi concentration camps were industrial extermination, which cannot be compared. It's true: history is never copied identically. But what should be disturbing is not the identity of the means, but the similarity of mentality. The German camps, too, were born as administrative tools, as extraordinary measures for categories defined as "undesirable." Even then, they began with isolation, with the suspension of law, with the belief that everything was justified by the emergency.
Yet it's clear that the state perpetuates industrial-scale death every day... femicides, suicides and deaths in prison, deaths abandoned in the Mediterranean, deaths from the mafia, a structure the state has always covered up and favored, deaths at work... need I mention more? Deaths from poisoning by pollutants caused by unscrupulous factories that the state should regulate, but which it carefully refrains from doing. We're talking about over 1,500 people killed by the state every year. The state violates us, abuses us, manipulates us, kills us, and we still think it's the best structure for a society responsible for itself and for this earth?
Today, as we mourn Moussa Balde, the government, in its elegant black linen blouse, announces new restrictions: more power, less control, restrictions even on the use of telephones in CPRs. Instead of closing these places, they are being strengthened. Instead of acknowledging their moral and political failure, the system is being rigidified. It's the logic of all power: when a structure generates death, it's not dismantled; It is defended in the name of order. Death is scary, therefore it serves the regime.
The CPRs are in the middle of our cities, just as the camps were in the middle of German cities. The difference is that today you don't see the columns of smoke, but you hear a more subtle silence: that of indifference. We become accustomed to the idea that someone can be locked up without trial, without guilt, without prospects. We become accustomed to thinking that freedom is an administrative privilege granted to us only if it serves the "common good."
As an anarchist, I cannot accept this normalization. I cannot accept that freedom depends on a document. I cannot accept that the State, after having produced despair, absolves itself with a sentence and compensation. I cannot accept that under my door or 10,000 km away there exists a place where dignity is suspended and where life is worth less than a sheet of paper.
"Auschwitz on our doorstep" is not a rhetorical exaggeration: it is a refusal to look the other way, acknowledging that every time we accept a CPR, we accept the principle that freedom can be taken away from the weakest. And when such a principle takes root, no one is truly safe.
If we still feel pain at the torture in CPRs and prisons, and this pain still shakes us, then let us start here: not with reforms that soothe our conscience, but with a revolt against these open-air life sentences. Because as long as a soul is walled up alive, as long as Moussa Balde's breath is extinguished in a deaf cell, we will carry an abyss of shame within us, a horror that contaminates us with its silence, right to our very hearts. We cannot remain silent: silence is complicity, silence is death, silence is totalitarianism. So, let's bang, let's bang so hard on those doors that we can free ourselves and all the damned of the earth, so that "never again" is more than an illusion but truly gates that fall, walls that crumble, borders that dissolve, and states that disappear. Anarchy is solidarity.
Gabriele Cammarata
https://umanitanova.org/il-lager-sotto-casa-processo-per-moussa-balde-morto-suicidato-in-cpr/
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(en) Italy, FAI, Umanita Nova #5-26 - The concentration camp on our doorstep. Trial for Moussa Balde, who committed suicide in the CPR (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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