To depart is to die a little…

Contrary to what the old saying affirms, for many to depart more and more means to die completely…

This is obviously valid for all those who depart pushed by desperation, and attempt to reach the Salentine coasts with the most desperate and completely untrustworthy means. Paying this price, in most recent times, there were seven Albanians who never landed on the coast of the fine countries, four of whom have been fished up lifeless a few days ago in the vicinity of the WWF oases of the Cesine; of course, this being as much as we know, without counting the dozens of people swallowed up every year by the sea about which nothing is known. The reassurances furnished to all the sincere democrats by a wretched being like Alfredo Mantovano – who some insist on describing as “honorable” – about the fact that since last August there has not been one landing on the Salentine coasts, as a demonstration of how well the agreements made with the other Mediterranean countries are functioning, find in the news that a tragic confirmation has followed: no “undocumented” foreigner has effectively landed since then in Salento for a very simple reason: because in various ways he has always managed to drown himself first!

On the same days in which the sea gives back so many lifeless corpses, million of voices are raised to cry “Peace!”, almost as if the war were only that which we see today on TV. But the war that many believe to have just exploded now has in reality been going on for a long time; it is the war that Capital, the Economy, the Governments, have declared against humanity; what we see now in Iraq, yesterday in Afghanistan and tomorrow in yet another place is merely its most evident and virulent manifestation, but the bombs fall daily even in our gardens, even if we seem not to notice them there.

Italy declares itself a “non-belligerent country”, but in reality, like every other state, it participates in this perennial war, from the time territories have been delimited and borders defined, and it does so more than ever now that it most no longer merely defend its own borders, but those of the entire European Union from the “invaders”, this is the reason for the ever greater breaking out of war at the expense of all the undesirables who come to knock at its doors, and for the reflex of all those who already find themselves beyond these same doors.

For some time, the Italian state has declared war against these people through its laws, and has left them out because of the type of color that was at its head; it declared war with Turco and Napolitano, and incremented its reprisals with Bossi and Fini. It carries out its war every day through the hands of its police, through raids and deportations of hundreds of people in order to make the “Free Ways”. It is responsible for a ruthless manhunt, justified with the emptiest reasons, for example the sale of a few reproduced CDs, in accordance with a script that in recent times was seen in Lecce much too frequently, with guards and cops that rush in a true and proper chase at the expense of a few immigrants. The Italian government has instituted its concentration camps – expressions of every conflict – but in order to hide their real nature it has called them “centers of temporary residence”, and has place its servants to manage these camps, but in order not to cause them to appear to be what they are, it has thought to replace the nazi uniform in some of them, as in San Foca, with the cassock, two sides of the same coin that often in the course of history have gone arm in arm.

Now that the war has broken out in its more visible aspects as well, uniforms and cassocks have turned to scrutinize the horizon, both declaring themselves ready to manage the emergency: the first pointing their guns, waiting to see the enemy appear, the second rubbing their hands, waiting for the people to transform into cash… We also, from our side, will have to pay attention in order not to find ourselves newly unprepared. Because if some “left” figures gloat in seeing the magistrature work, hoping for the sentencing of those who made hundreds of millions in cash disappear through a conjuring trick, or of some functionary or cop responsible for violent beatings, we – who don’t want jail for anyone – must make the effort to get rid of the wars, fictitious and manifest, and of all that which turns round them: the raids, the deportations, the cops, the concentration camps, the servants that manage them, the borders, the frontiers… and we have only one way to do this: to ourselves declare war against society, against the state, against capital, against the economy; we, exploited by the Governments that have for so long fed all this, together with the exploited that attempt to reach our shores, all victims of the same war.