WORLD WORLDWIDE ITALY USA News Journal Update - (en) Italy, Galatea: The urgency to abolish the police and a note on moral anti-racism - Part One by Acácio Augusto (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 With a wave of Covid-19 infections spreading across the planet, an

incident of police brutality on May 25, 2020 in the United States caused
a major shift in the fight against security measures. ---- A black man,
George Floyd, was strangled to death by a white police officer in
Minneapolis, Minnesota. As had happened in previous years, faced with
cases like this there was a strong reaction from the various sectors of
the black movement complete with demonstrations where the slogan "Black
Lives Matter" - created by the movement in 2013 - was chanted. But the
small change that emerged, in the midst of the protests, was a very
concrete, specific and immediate demand: the abolition of the police. 2

If on the one hand this had not been a majority demand within the entire
movement - to the extent that the police reform proposals were
predominant -, on the other hand, however, there was a "rebirth" and
support for the proposal of police abolition, beyond the demands for
criminal justice in the death of George Floyd. This whole situation had
sparked riots, culminating in the burning of a police station in
Minneapolis and the worldwide spread of the proposal to abolish the police.

An example, at an international level, occurred with the French magazine
"Lundi Martin" (number 248, dated 26 June 2020) where the " Manifesto
for the general suppression of the national police " was published. The
article was not only linked to the protests in the United States, but
was also a response against police violence against "Yellow Vest"
protesters 3 and racialized people - especially those living in the
suburbs of Paris.

These "8 To Abolition" debates have arrived here in Brazil, where the
proposal has already been discussed in some cycles of penal abolitionist
movements and university research groups. The campaign of the Initiative
for the Right to Memory and Racial Justice (in Portuguese "Iniciativa
Direito à Memória e Justiça Racial") 4 ), for which this short text is
intended, underlines the urgency of abolishing the police in Brazil.
This is an irrefutable urgency given that the country has one of the
most violent and deadly law enforcement agencies on the planet. The aim
of the article is to propose some ideas on how to develop an analysis of
the police without falling into the trap of reformist arguments - which
always leave the functions and existence of the police structure itself
intact.

Starting from a course held by Michel Foucault 5 ,[we define]the police
not so much as a simple institution but, rather, a government technology
whose history is linked to the formation of the modern state and to the
means of care and control of the population. We reiterate, therefore,
that it is necessary to question the institution and, above all, focus
on the figure of the average policeman (precisely in his ordinary
functions as a professional of violence and as an "armed bureaucrat" 6).
If we start from this analysis that frames the police as a technology of
government, we can broaden our scope of action to the point of calling
for its abolition. With this perspective,[the police]is perceived as an
element of the technologies of control and subjective construction of
contemporary citizenship, that is, of the ways of doing, thinking and
imagining the subject of today's security democracies 7: the
citizen-policeman. 8

The police as a technology of government

We must look at policing beyond institutions and uniforms. Firstly
because it represents an image of fear in the streets and is fed by a
voluminous media discourse and the entertainment market - the latter
portrays police officers as subjects capable of the most unlikely feats
and/or entangled in moral dramas between duty and the law. Thus, when we
criticize the police, we build a trap where we focus on their abuses, on
their exceptionality in life and in society like Captain Nascimento from
the film "Elite Squad", a character full of personal dilemmas, violent
to the point of extreme but with a conscience to heal and a sense of
justice which, even if doubtful, gives him a certain "humanity."

Thus, the abuses of some policemen or a "rotten" group are criticized
because what is sought is honest, democratic, human rights and
non-brutal policing. In this way, a discourse of reform and/or
demilitarization of the police is renewed, based on an image of the
officers and the police themselves that does not exist, is exaggerated
or, simply, projects an ideal of an unattainable reformist order. This
set of reforms and this image of the police ignore (or try to disguise)
the fact that the main activity of law enforcement is the legitimized
(asymmetric and unequal) distribution of violence throughout society -
particularly towards those who are considered dangerous.

Constructing a critique of the police that separates the good cops from
the bad ones means reproducing the approaches and functional divisions
typical of this repressive institution. These logics are spread, in
particular, by the entertainment market where crime films represent the
simplistic binary "good cop/bad cop".

As in films, these images of good and bad are complementary for the
police and serve their very existence, institutional continuity, and
predominant form of persuasion.

Policing is a set of practices and technologies for the management,
control and repression of the population;[put simply,]the most valuable
technology for modern statecraft, capable of being both individualizing
and all-encompassing, general and specific, and affecting everyone and
individual people.

If in the emergency phases[the police]were used as an instrument of
reason of state - and therefore to[defend]state sovereignty -, now, with
the dismembered state, the police are used as an internal security
device of neoliberal governmentality .[In light of this,]the function of
the police force is to promote good governance of things and people,
promoting the preservation and expansion of state government.

It is in the form of this second characteristic that police practices
emerge today as a tool for promoting security: supporting the production
of an unequal and asymmetric order in capitalist societies and
protecting private and/or state property.

It is a very complex and heterogeneous whole that combines methods of
promoting public health (social medicine), interventions in urban plans
and reforms (urban planning) and tools for regulating the workforce
(modes of control and care of workers, aimed at productivity increase).

Therefore the history of the police,[within the vast]history of
government technologies, goes far beyond its forms of recognition (such
as the repressive apparatus of the State, the figure of an armed man in
uniform, the ostentation of a team of policemen present in streets
and/or ready to repress a group of demonstrators). Throughout its
history, the police have intertwined its knowledge with sociology,
political science and political economy.

As Michel Foucault tells us in his 1977-1978 course, " from the 18th
century "police" begins to designate the set of means that serve to
increase the forces of the State , guaranteeing the good order of the
State itself. That is, the police will be the calculation and technique
that will allow the establishment of a mobile, but still stable and
controllable, relationship between the internal order of the State and
the growth of its forces. " 9 In summary: the police emerging in Europe,
linked to sovereign power, has as its primary objective the use of state
forces within its territory. The goal of all this is the realization of
state splendor.

The police is the direct device of the Reason of State and has
statistical deciphering as its instrument - that is, knowledge of the
State itself. But the emergence of the police form, or the techniques
performed by the sovereign police, has undergone mutations due to the
specificities and aggregations of knowledge of the various European
countries - which, in the end, created the forms and functions of the
police modernity or the related forms of state intervention in today's
societies. In addition to these forms, in the territories colonized by
European nation states, the specificity of the police was linked to
whippings, brutality and large-scale killing of people - for the
splendor of the colonial state!

Following Michel Foucault's genealogy of the State - where the police is
a decisive element for the functioning of modern governmental practices
-, we note how the formation of police technologies brings together
specific knowledge and different institutional practices. Foucault shows
that in not yet unified Germany, the police was a creation of the
university - where a police science was produced.

The[French]author reports, in his writings dedicated to forms of
government, the word " polizeiwissencraft, police science, which from
the middle or end of the 17th century until the end of the 18th century
will represent a specifically German phenomenon and which will spread in
Europe exercising a capital influence." 10

Parallel to this theory of the police produced by German political
science, in France, which already had a centralized administrative state
with a delimited territory, the police would have been conceived and
managed by the nascent state bureaucracy (through decrees and
regulations aimed at the control and circulation of goods in cities). If
in Germany the police were a creation of the university, in France they
would be a creation of the state bureaucracy serving the regulation of
property, people and wealth.

The important aspect of these references collected by Foucault is not
the selection of a set of facts that would constitute a sort of history
of the modern police. The use of these references serves to understand,
on a genealogical level, how the police have a history of formation
within modern power-knowledge relations. In summary: the police is
linked to the art of governing, that is, to those means of knowledge and
control, without setting limits such as the judicial instrument or a set
of state apparatuses. This genealogy highlights the positivity of the
police form in the formation of the modern state. It is a device with
its own functions, objects and well-defined objectives, producing order,
regulation of trade, administration of cities and discipline of subjects.

In short, the positivity of the police, from its origins to what it will
become, is the production of the bourgeois world - in the historical
sense of this term. This is the positivity of the nascent police:
producing the property-based bourgeois order. Parallel to these
practices, in the European colonies, this art of governing and producing
order would have had other functions such as the hunting of
non-subjects: the savages of the land and the people brought there as
slaves.

As Foucault summarizes, the police will have a specificity of functions
detached from the law: it deals with the ordinary and small things,
while the law must deal with the important things of the State. " In
other words, policing is the direct governmentality of the sovereign qua
sovereign. In this sense, the police is the permanent coup d'état, which
will be exercised in the name and function of the principles of its own
rationality, without having to conform or model itself on the rules of
justice established elsewhere. " 11

Today this definition is important in order to analyze the police as a
technology of government. Although this sovereign form of policing has
changed over the centuries - to become what we now know as repressive
policing - this independence or autonomy from the law endures. This
resistance is justified because the police act as a form of immediate
intervention and address a number of urgent issues that the law cannot
foresee. The consequence is that police officers consider themselves
citizens of another category, free from respect for the law and subject
to special rules and regulations. Faced with the rigidity of the law,
police control remains elastic.

However, this form of sovereign policing had been criticized since the
late 18th century; this has produced mutations in its form and
dismantled its functions in other fields of action. This critique was
brought forward by an emerging knowledge that opposed the artificiality
of sovereign intervention - the police device - and supported a "natural
environment" susceptible to regulation - thus opposing a police state
(Polizeistaat).

A group connected to this emerging field of knowledge would articulate
this critique - a group that, according to Foucault, was almost a sect:
the economists. This knowledge, i.e. Political Economy, was aimed at an
object of government that was no longer a group of heterogeneous
subjects but a common field, almost a natural environment: society - or
what we today call "civil society" -, in opposition to political society
(the State). This division was made possible thanks to a measurable
field of intervention, produced by the statistical knowledge of the
State. This field of intervention would have been the population itself;
this was made possible thanks to statistical knowledge and political
economy which dealt with society as a population,

Thus, the articulation between political economy knowledge and
population management practices created a dynamic relationship in
security and protection mechanisms, producing what was understood as
modern (liberal) freedom. This would mark, within the genealogy of
policing, the transition from sovereign governmentality (through
sovereign policing) to liberal governmentality - which will shape modern
policing.

Continue in Part Two

Note

1 Professor of the Department of International Relations of UNIFESP. He
coordinates the LASInTec (Laboratório de Análise em Segurança
Interacional de Tecnologias de Monitoramento), and the Programa de Pós
Graduação em Psicologia Institucional of the UFES. Contact
acacio.augusto@unifesp.br

2 Above this, see the Eight Points for Police Abolition. Link:
https://www.8toabolition.com/

3 LASInTec has translated and published, with an introductory note from
Brazil, this manifesto:
https://lasintec.milharal.org/files/2020/08/Boletim-AntiSeguran%C3%A7a-n1-1.pdf

4 See https://dmjracial.com/

5 Note from the Galatea Anarchist Group: in Italian it is known as
"Security, territory, population. Course at the Collège de France
(1977-1978)"

6 "Armed bureaucrat" is a term coined by anarchist anthropologist David
Graerber; indicates the ordinary function of a police officer. See David
Graeber, "The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret
Joys of Bureaucracy," New York, Melville House, 2015.

7 On the notion of security democracy, see Acácio Augusto and Helena
Wilke. "Neoliberal rationality and security: links between democracy,
security and anarchy", in Margareth Rago and Mauricio Pelegrini.
"Neoliberalism, feminismos and contracondutas. Perspectivas
fouacultianas," São Paulo, Intermeios, 2019, pp. 225-245. Available at:
https://www.academia.edu/42444431/Racionalidade_neoliberal_e_seguran%C3%A7a_embates_entre_democracia_securit%C3%A1ria_e_anarquia

8 On the police associated with monitoring technologies and the
constitution of the citizen-policeman, see Acácio Augusto, "Política e
polícia: cuidados, controles e penalizações de jovens", Rio de Janeiro,
Lamparina, 2013 and Edson Passetti et. ali, "Ecopolítica", São Paulo,
Hedra, 2019.

9 Foucault Michel, "Security, territory, population. Course at the
Collège de France (1977-1978)", Feltrinelli, Milan, 2005, pag. 226

10 Ibidem, page. 230

11 Ibidem, page. 246

Translation from the original " The urgency of the abolition of the
police and a note on moral anti-rracism "
https://dmjracial.com/2021/04/03/a-urgencia-da-abolicao-da-policia-e-uma-nota-sobre-antirracismo-moral/
https://gruppoanarchicogalatea.noblogs.org/post/2023/09/18/lurgenza-di-abolire-la-polizia-e-una-nota-sullantirazzismo-morale-prima-parte/
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WORLD WORLDWIDE SPAIN News Journal Update - (en) Spaine, LutaFob: (CNT) A Class Program in the Face of Collapse (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 We need to empower ourselves as a class and build our own institutions,

"our" proletarian, functional and efficient institutions. ---- Written
by Genís Ferrero, Secretary of Union Action at CNT Vallès Oriental. ----
Originally published on the El Salto Blog on 09/11/2023
https://www.elsaltodiario.com/el-blog-de-el-salto/programa-clase-social-colapso-capitalista
---- Translated by a FOBCE activist ---- Recently, several studies,
essays and articles have been published that address the issue of the
future of our societies in the face of the current economic cycle and
the various coinciding crises that we have been experiencing. Without a
doubt, these contributions must be received with total interest and
critical spirit, since the diversity of contexts today must make us see
the need for their study and, above all, their critical opposition from
the perspective of the emancipation of humanity.

Thus, from heterodox economic literature to scientific analyzes on the
biophysical limits of the economy should serve us to better understand
the possibilities, but also the limitations that our societies face in
the current phase of capitalism. The horizons that point to the
incapacities of current State models must help us to understand that the
possibility of human emancipation cannot occur under them.

However, far from determinisms that lead us to understand a collapse of
capitalism on its own in the face of these scenarios of war, economic
crisis, climate emergency, scarcity of raw materials, etc.; We
understand that this system based on the exploitation of man by man will
not disappear. Denying the political capacity of human beings to make
decisions that allow them to transform their present would lead us to
fall into a defeatist nihilism or to abandon ourselves to a destiny
predetermined by historical or divine laws.

Providing ourselves with the ethical and political determination to act
in favor of emancipation will inevitably imply analyzing our context and
reality beyond any idealistic proclamation. From this perspective, the
National Confederation of Labor (CNT) analyzed these issues in December
2022 at its XII Confederal Congress held in Canovelles (Barcelona).

The first of these contexts is one in which revolutionary organizations
have such a correlation of forces that they have the possibility of
"assaulting" political power, but not without facing all the
difficulties and complexities that this implies. The second scenario we
understand arises when revolutionary organizations respond to an attack
by the dominant classes and, in the course of this struggle, are
overcome with the implementation of their program.

We are aware that no analysis involves a foolproof recipe, nor can the
scenarios listed above be given perfectly or independently of some
elements of other scenarios. Thus, for example, no assault on power can
have signs of success against a State that is not in crisis that
originated previously.

The third scenario we believe to be the most plausible in the current
context and, given the correlation of forces in our society, we will try
to explain it briefly.

The current economic situation, which we pointed out at the beginning of
this text, is accelerating the limits of state institutions to guarantee
certain standards of living for the population. These limits that
already existed, and whose analysis questioned the very definition of
"welfare state", are being expanded in the current phase of capital
accumulation. This situation, we understand, will worsen and gradually
the State will no longer assume part of its functions, provide part of
its services to the population or will no longer be present in the
territory as we have come to understand. This situation of collapse that
has been warned from several areas has its most recent precedent in
2021, in the middle of the pandemic.

We understand that this "abandonment" occurs when, deliberately or due
to incapacity, the State fails to provide or assume certain services or
infrastructures that are not essential for maintaining the economy in
each context. In this way, a growing portion of the population is
progressively excluded from the basic elements for their survival and
reproduction, such as housing, health, employment, etc.

In these contexts, far from assuming that worse is better, potential
also opens up for revolutionary organizations, occupying this sphere of
action and implementing structures of mutual support and
self-management. This type of direct action that historically developed
movements like the Black Panthers in the USA in the late 1960s, to give
an example far from anarcho-syndicalism, or from the labor and
libertarian movement itself that in our country implemented a network of
class institutions during the first third of the 20th century.

Implementing this response capacity, and replacing it with institutions
independent of the State, based on solidarity and mutual support, will
logically depend on having reached a sufficient level of training and
performance. If we do not want this type of response to be spontaneous,
disappearing as soon as the most difficult moments of each crisis pass,
we must be able to create organization in capital letters by linking it
to an ideology and general program that visualizes a global alternative
in this society.

We believe that capitalism will not disappear in the face of this
collapse by itself, history shows us the adaptability that Capital has
to develop in absolutely changing contexts, even in the absence of the
State as we know it today in our country. Despite this, as
anarcho-syndicalists, we do not accept that it is possible to "wait" for
the creation of "suitable" opportunities to start acting, but that we
must anticipate and build organization.

This task has two dimensions, on the one hand the strengthening of our
union model through strategic resources that were approved in Congress
such as the Confederal Resistance Fund, the consolidation of the
Confederative Technical Cabinet, the creation and strengthening of
Employment Exchanges and Control Employment Union with the reinforcement
and support of company-to-company Collective Negotiation, social action
among the most precarious sections of the working class, as well as the
study and promotion of alternative forms of economy.

The other dimension lies in militancy, commitment and the ability to
"infect" the rest as much as possible that not only does the union help
to alleviate their material situation, but that there is a global
alternative and that everyone is needed to develop it. Pretending to
develop self-management structures like the ones we mentioned, they need
material resources, but also the help of many people who contribute
their support, but also their knowledge.

We need to empower ourselves as a class and build our own institutions,
"our" proletarian, functional and efficient institutions, putting our
experience and knowledge as workers to build everything that allows us
to live, reproduce and socialize as human beings, creating alternatives
that overcome the state of things.

We value more than they want us to believe, but it is urgent to move
forward.

https://lutafob.org/cnt-um-programa-de-classe-diante-do-colapso/
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WORLD WORLDWIDE UK News Journal Update - (en) UK, ACG: Don't Expect Any Change with a Labour government (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 It's normal for a political party to promise a number of reforms in its

political programme and then to renege on them when elected.  ----
However, Keir Starmer and the Labour leadership have made it clear that
they are promising no change whatsoever if elected at the next election.
In fact, Starmer has embraced the outlook of Tony Blair and is an
advocate of capitalist growth in the UK, using the mantra "growth,
growth, growth". ---- Labour's shadow health secretary, Wes Streeting,
has emphasised that private partnerships would be used more and more in
the National Health Service if Labour is elected, and promises "reform",
that is, further privatisation of the NHS.

Starmer is also reneging on his previous promises on workers' rights. He
has now delayed the introduction of a drastic overhaul of how different
types of workforce should be treated by their employers. This means that
gig economy workers would not receive protection under an incoming
Labour government, and any legislation for workers with employers like
Deliveroo and Uber would be "delayed", translation, kicked into the long
grass. The National Policy Forum (NPF) of the Labour Party decided on
these delays at a meeting in July.

The original promises were meant to do away with the fake
self-employment that casual workers in this sector have to put up with,
and to implement a single status of employment. At least 3.7 million
workers are facing precarity and poverty because of the gig economy. The
original promises would have meant that workers in this sector were in
line with workers in other industries. For example, these rights would
have been assured from day one of starting a job, with parental leave,
ability to claim unfair dismissal, and a guaranteed wage. Currently this
only happens after two years continuous employment.

Elsewhere, the Labour government in Wales is threatening to cut public
services including in the NHS, using the excuse of a £900 million
budgetary deficit. Mark Drakeford, First Minister in the Welsh
government, has called for all ministers to look for 5% cuts in their
departments.

Similarly, the bankrupt Labour council in Birmingham, is using a deficit
of £870 million to freeze what they call 'non-essential' payments.
Children with Special Needs and Disabilities have now had their school
transport cancelled. The council frittered away £100 million on a shoddy
IT system and splurged another £250 million on last year's Commonwealth
Games. It is now blaming council workers for demanding pay rises.
Birmingham Council has been complicit with the Tory government in
implementing austerity over more than ten years.

Workers need to be aware that they should be prepared to struggle and
fight as much under a probable incoming Labour government as they are
under the Sunak regime.

https://www.anarchistcommunism.org/2023/09/22/dont-expect-any-change-with-a-labour-government/
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WORLD WORLDWIDE FRANCE News Journal Update - (en) France, UCL AL #341 - Culture, Read R. Mencherini, "Cold War, Red Strikes. The insurrectional strikes of 1947,[...]in France» (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 Robert Mencherini has devoted a copious volume to the insurrectional

strikes of 1947. In the first part, entitled "Autopsy of a cold
insurrection", he summarizes these four weeks of November-December which
shook France. ---- The movement broke out in Marseille on November 12,
over a protest against the increase in the price of trams. Four CGT
activists were arrested. What followed was a series of incidents that
set the city ablaze. ---- Following the continued detention of the four
accused, the courthouse was stormed and at the end of the day, "thugs"
shot at the demonstrators who were attacking the nightclubs in the red
light district . Vincent Voulant, a young worker, was killed. The strike
then spread very quickly in the region.

The CGT then took the initiative of extending the conflict to the
national level. The strike spreads across the entire metropolis, with
the creation of a national strike committee. The following days, out of
solidarity, the miners of Nord and Pas-de-Calais stopped work. Quickly
many other industrial regions joined them.

At the end of November, the situation was uncertain. These social
conflicts at the end of 1947 had important political implications
leading to a shift and debates within the PCF. This struggle was
punctuated by numerous clashes, sometimes violent, and ended on December 10.

The second part of the book deals with the discord and fractures within
the CGT which led to a split and the creation of Force Ouvrière.

This work provides many lessons on these worker strikes led by the CGT,
in which some wanted to see an insurrectional attempt as the Cold War began.

Dominique Sureau (UCL Angers)

https://www.unioncommunistelibertaire.org/?Lire-R-Mencherini-Guerre-froide-greves-rouges-Les-greves-insurrectionnelles-de
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WORLD WORLDWIDE ITALY SICILIA PALERMO News Journal Update - (en) Italy, Sicilia Libertaria: Palermo, FIRE BLACKMAIL (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 Finally it is as if the circle had been squared. Only he was missing: on

August 15th the southern slope of Monte Pellegrino caught fire, having
already escaped, thanks also to the commitment of the Nature Reserve,
the disasters of July 24th and 25th which involved the outskirts of the
city. They will remain memorable days, or rather almost memorable
because if on the one hand what happened is serious, on the other there
is some doubt about an effective collective awareness based on the
analysis of the exceptional nature. It almost seems that a cloak of
modesty, of stale respectability has remained over Palermo which in this
case could be useful to those interested in making people forget the
more direct effects of the fire. ---- Misled by climate change which
dangerously deviates from the meteorological average, we no longer seem
to want to listen to people, to experts, to interpret satellite maps of
the fires: fires so vast in north-western Sicily, they affected Palermo
and little else.

Of course, last July there were fires in Monte Bonifato in Alcamo, in
Capaci (extended from Palermo) and in the countryside of Cinisi (where
two people died), the latter arriving straight at Falcone Borsellino
airport, closed for several hours to amplify the inconveniences of the
Fontanarossa in Catania, closed by the fire that broke out in the
structure in mid-July. We forgot Bellolampo, a current and future
problem created by the respectable company that once decided to start
throwing mountains of waste onto the city's heads in the land of
bandits, wolves (the last one, entirely Sicilian, was killed a century
ago precisely in those hills ), where the Celona stream flowed, a cool
game played by the boys of Passo di Rigano who had more than one stream
and who today all end up buried, like memory.

The fires in Palermo so maliciously (we hope there is no doubt about
this term, except for the "shards of glass" reported by Bellolampo ...)
set, have demonstrated a formidable, yet unprecedented, capacity to
penetrate the urban fabric. Yet even in the most elaborate comments that
followed the desperation of those who lost everything (even the ancient
church of Santa Maria di Gesù) the thought that someone may have wanted
to scare the city barely transpires. In the newspapers and among the
frightened victims, terrorism has been shouted at, but it almost seems
like an indefinable, negligent terrorism, without will; we forget that
if this were the case it would no longer be terrorism, lacking a
premeditated genesis. So, let's try to reflect on this point.

In just over 48 hours, almost all the suburbs of Palermo were reached by
the flames, from Ciaculli to Sferracavallo except Monte Pellegrino,
which was then hit by the "luminous rocket" on 15 August. Villas of rich
people and houses with fences made of mattresses were destroyed.
Agricultural tools, machines and animals went up in smoke, businesses
were destroyed, thousands of trees were killed, motorways were engulfed,
gas cylinders exploded, even a funeral wake was quickly abandoned,
leaving loved ones at the mercy of the flames. People woke up with smoke
in their homes, reportedly due to a sudden change in the wind, but this
only happened in Palermo and its airport. The city, which has been hit
by continuous blackouts for days, reported the death of a person who was
stuck in the elevator. Even the smoke from Bellolampo which, with its
load of dioxin and who knows what other poisons, reached and passed
Monte Pellegrino, making a large part of the former Conca d'Oro covered
by a surreal and oppressive rosella gray cloud.

Finally, but only in chronological order, the death after three weeks of
agony of a forestry worker; he had been seriously burned in the fire
that affected the areas surrounding Monreale on 24 July. And what
happens? Are we angry with climate change or with the almost certain
lack of prevention? Arsonists who seem to have gone mad throughout the
Palermo area, leaving the areas east of the Eleuterio river and, west of
the city, in the Carini area virtually intact. In fact, a red-hot
pincer, or rather almost a perfect circle with Palermo at the centre, if
we consider the fire in Monte Pellegrino in August. Lastly, the fire in
the English Garden (incredible, but it happened) was blamed on
cigarettes. Will there be further developments? And of what, then?

If there was terrorism it must have a head and a motive. It can be
blackmail like a bill of exchange to be cashed or a field of action to
be claimed, but there must be something.

Reinforcements from the Forestry Carabinieri arrived from Rome were
called to operate on what happened and, with the experience gained in
the civil police of the State Forestry Corps, then tout court catapulted
into the military police of the Carabinieri, will be able to identify
the trigger points and evolution caught in the fire, trying to decipher
what may have happened. And speaking of Foresters it is worth saying a
few words. Both the Forestry Carabinieri and the regional Foresters are
characterized by a shortage of personnel which now seems destined to
last for a long time. The Sicilian ones, for example, are now just a few
hundred and mostly headed towards retirement even though two years ago
the Sicilian Region, after decades of failed competitions, announced the
procedures for the hiring of 46 Agents... It is therefore a question of
police forces are less perceived than in the past and perhaps also for
this reason forgotten in the appeals of people terrified by the fires
who now call on only one thing for help: the army.

Then there is the investigation opened by the Public Prosecutor's
Office. Okay, let's give everyone trust in the hope of understanding
more, for example if there was a head that decided to scare.

Was it the mafia? Power games? The survivors who returned? Who knows,
experience teaches us that we start from the mafia and end up who knows
where, if we get there. In this case, however, it is even more
difficult: we should start backwards because the mafiosi seem to have
disappeared again, at least from the specific topic which, however,
cannot fail to be linked to that of territorial control. Something
appears in the bowels of the well-known a-social to which we have
relegated our outbursts with harmless jolts. Among murderous arsonists
and inefficient politicians there are those who highlight the small
thefts which, judging from the city's own news, are under the control of
the mafia. Can anyone who sets a fire of such proportions be defined as
an arsonist who needs to be treated?

If we no longer have an awareness of what is around us, we also lose the
ability to make an overall assessment as in the case of the ever present
lack of prevention. Giuseppe Barbera, former full professor of Arboreal
Crops at the University of Palermo, particularly attentive to the
problems of territorial defense, comments on the forest management plan
adopted in the areas of Monte Pellegrino under municipal jurisdiction:
"But not all the woods of Monte Pellegrino are municipal property. Some
are regional: precisely those near the Utveggio castle[Editor's note.
the fire broke out on its slopes]which are not the subject of the
management plan and which perhaps, among the millions spent on the
restoration of the Castle (for unknown purposes), could have been made
safe with a few hundred thousand euros".

In summary, due to ignorance or will, not taking into consideration what
Nature is, solutions that could be simple are not considered. It thus
escapes that the fires could have created another weapon ready to
explode on the cement metastasis that has devoured the Palermo plain. A
sneaky, time-delayed weapon. These are the lands surrounding the city,
made bare by fires. They will be exposed to erosive action, primarily
from autumn rains. Let's hope for drought...

Giovanni Guadagna

https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
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