The appeal we are publishing, a surviving relic of the clandestine struggle waged by anarchist groups in the Trapani area (operating primarily in Trapani, Marsala, Mazara del Vallo, Alcamo, and Castelvetrano) under fascism, never saw the light of day. Probably intended for distribution in western Sicily on May 1, 1936, it was seized by fascist police on February 4, 1936, from the home of communist hairdresser Pietro Moralis, following a tip-off from former anarchist Salvatore Renda, an OVRA representative since August 1935.
Moralis had been tasked with "delivering it to his fellow believers abroad for publication and distribution" by Baldassare Marino, the anarchist who had actually drafted the appeal, urged by the groups adhering to the Italian Anti-Fascist United Front (FUAI) in the Trapani area, which the 1935 raids had failed to disband. Baldassare Marino (Trapani, February 10, 1879 - February 26, 1939), owner of a small "ladies' fashion" shop inherited from his father, was well known to the police, along with his brother Cesare (a lawyer, born in Trapani on February 10, 1883 and struck off the register of subversives on September 26, 1928). He was a member of the anarchist group active in the city in the early 1900s, a regular contributor and foreign correspondent (he moved to Paris in 1911) for several anarchist newspapers, and in 1928, he was sentenced by the Trapani court to 40 days in prison and a 1,200 lire fine for insulting and resisting a police commissioner. He was finally warned as a dangerous anarchist on December 22, 1930.
We publish his appeal not only to commemorate, exactly 90 years after From a distance, the "heroic" anti-fascism of a painful period in our history (such a text carried sentences of several years in prison and confinement), either to finally bring it to the public, or because it retains an unexpected relevance. It is, in fact, a direct attack on the Labor Charter, which Fascism introduced on April 30, 1927, promoting "fair work" (for the employers), conceived as a "social duty" to ensure the nation's power; which rejected the minimum wage for each sector, opposing it with mandatory contracts, to be pursued in a climate of collaboration and conciliation between the social classes; which therefore rejected class struggle by breaking up the unions and transforming them into public institutions under state control.
N.M.
To the Workers of Italy
It is not true that hatred always speaks the language of delirium. If hatred has legitimate and profoundly human causes, if the love of freedom makes one hate tyranny, if the love of justice makes one hate oppression and servitude, hatred is holy and generates a fruitful and free life.
Hating the fascist regime therefore means hating the Italian woman enslaved by an infamous, authoritarian, murderous regime; it means striving with all the strength of the spirit for the rebirth of freedom and the organization of justice. And consequently, we do not want to go underground without first dragging the elementary school teacher of Predappio Brasil, Bento Goncalves/RS, OSL: the exclusive man who set himself up as a legislator Brasil, Bento Goncalves/RS, OSL: through the mud, without first spatting on the names of his devoted lieutenants.
Reflect, O slaves of Italy, even if the political and moral brutality into which you have fallen has not robbed you of the sense of reflection and the awareness of all your rights. Reflect.
Is it possible that you don't feel your breasts burning with indignation and revolt against the petty, cowardly, helot-like, militaristic life imposed on you by the regime? You were miserable and oppressed before the arrival of the little man whom the kobolds of the bovofical press dare to call "providential." You are even more miserable and beggared today, as the regime, obsessed with its futile plan for Roman grandeur and imperial expansion, extorts from you, bestially milking even the last cents intended for the bread of your offspring.
But do you not have eyes to see pauperism dragging itself, numerous, tattered, and hungry, through the streets of a hundred cities; your daughters increasingly swell the number of Italy's prostitutes in a thousand brothels? ...Fascist immorality, cloaked in the trappings of coercive and forced legality, makes profound inroads into the instinctive moral sense of the people, constantly betrayed and mocked by the Duce?
Reflect, you brutes and slaves of Italy! What has the labor charter given you?
Has it perhaps redeemed you from the slavery of paid labor, solved the age-old problem of your endless suffering?
The labor charter is nothing but a gloss and a deception with which they attempt to further weaken you. The labor charter has only served to create as many unions as there are occupational categories, and in those unions the regime has placed an endless throng of semi-illiterate misfits in tight, elegant suits, vicious, degenerate, bon viveurs, who, well-placed in comfortable, luxurious offices, equipped with stamps, seals, and printed forms, spend their days producing nothing, only anxious for the generous salary you pay them with your annual dues, your work, and your poverty.
The labor charter has only served to frame you in a barracks-like discipline, to force you to follow the numerous processions at the endless fascist commemorations, to accustom you to shouting with skulls well-stuffed with fairy tales and chatter, to shout, like crawling beasts, the salute to the king and the Duce. We have spoken of the king to whom, despite your great poverty, you pay a hefty civil list for his luxuries and joys, the king who for a full 14 years has endorsed and validated with his signature all the regime's misdeeds.
And, therefore, why do you persist in remaining a ghetto and a slum? ...
Break, for God's sake, the chains in which Mossolini[sic]has wrapped your hands and ankles, and in a fit of holy revolt, from one corner of your impoverished, brutalized homeland to the other, proclaim, in the face of the blessing of the sun, the advent of a free and just Republic.
This is the only Roman Empire that you must create with your sacrifice and your courage.
From Italy without freedom
an old anarchist
https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/wp-content/uploads/maggio-2026_compressed.pdf
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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