Introductory note by RadioAzione, via Actforfree:

I receive and transmit the editorial of the Anarchist Black Cross newsletter, which will be presented on 25th April at the Bencivenga Squat in Rome. Besides spreading letters from prisoners and claims of attacks, counter-information should propose analysis, be it from the internet or on paper. I’m sorry I don’t agree with some passages of this editorial, when the comrades probably talk without having a direct experience of counter-information via web. Most importantly, there exist no virtual worlds but comrades who meet in person and organize initiatives all over the world. But I’m happy about this new Anarchist Black Cross bulletin, especially as there’s always the need of analysis on paper:

Fires of revolt continue to brighten the darkness of a world otherwise destined to annihilate the individual and lead him/her to homogenized slavery: these pages aim at stoking the fire and lighting more of them.

One of the few advantages offered by the obsessive search for global information is the revelation that even on the other side of the world there are hearts beating at the same rhythm as ours, hearts which arm skilled hands skilled in doing much more than typing a keyboard. The race to the abyss carried out by technological society is getting increasingly frantic, but fighters all over the world are keeping the pace; and even if they risk of being crashed by such a gigantic monster, they are struggling against it so as to make it fall down. Now is the time to roll up our sleeves and do more.

Armed with this tension we decided to give birth to a new Anarchist Black Cross. We are setting off along this path knowing that we live in a time when the price of choosing to spread certain ideas and practices is becoming very high, but we’ve always maintained that resignation is complicity with the system; and even if we are not among those who think that ‘a pen is as good as a rifle’, it is by now obvious to us that even within the so-called anarchist movement an intolerable homogeneity in thinking has come to light, and the resulting practices seem to be the result of a downward game; and it is therefore imperative to make other voices be heard again. We want to break the deafening silence of the last years, knowing that certain voices – including ours – haven’t been heard for too long a time.

This new Black Cross has the precise goal of becoming a gym of ideas having in common the consolidation of destructive practices: the mere use of the definition ‘direct action’ is no longer sufficient, as it seems having taken the meaning of ‘everything and the opposite of everything’… Of course we are going to give more and more space to the contributions given by the comrades who ended up in the traps of repression, without reducing ourselves to a sort of repainted red cross, but rather supporting the continuation of their trajectory of struggle in all possible ways.

The aim of our project, which will never take the colours of mere aid, is to re-launch certain ideas and correlated practices.

Starting from this premise we hope a real discussion will ensue, one which is not a miserable taking of sides but one which is so alive that it becomes conflict, because we are tired of the warm and hypocritical ‘everything is fine’.

We decided to make a publication on paper, more accessible and lasting than the speedy running of the web; but we are keeping our blog as a more rapid instrument to spread news and communiqués on action and repression. We think that the choice of a paper is not a sterile and nostalgic fetish; on the contrary we are convinced that one can’t continue to complain about the destructive damage made by technological society and ignore the fact that even we anarchists let ourselves be reduced to simple ‘users’ of an increasingly virtual world where even the struggle falls into the idiotic mechanism of being ‘more successful’ according to the number of ‘likes’ it gets…

Moreover we want to recreate a physical place where we can meet new accomplices. We expect to receive many contributions, even including criticism, and we’ll do our best to create occasions for presenting the newsletter, and finally make it possible to look into each other’s eyes again while talking to each other about what is still our more ardent desire: the destruction of the existent that annihilates us and the joy of contributing to make it collapse in debris.