1991 - GLAD TO SEE YOU

Alfredo Bonanno and Pippo Stasi were released following two years in prison. A return to the struggle. A weighing up and a taking of distance from all the hypocrisy and all the talk.

Glad to see you..Against all those who in one way or another dribbled their uncontainable bile upon our arrest, against the hopes of others who finally breathed a sigh of relief when they knew we were in prison for who knows how long, and against the traffics concealed behind a hypocritical, gossipy and ambiguous solidarity - suddenly, like a jack-in-the-box in a nightmare, we are out.The reason for this was the reduction of all sentences approved recently by the government to level the differences in judicial treatment resulting from the application of the new procedural penal code. But we like to think that basically the true reason for it was our personal and incredible good luck.This is not the best place to salute all those who abstained, kept out of they way, or wove embroilment and calumny against us from the shadows. Against all of them, and there were certainly legions of them, went our contempt right from the moment we went into prison. Now, from our newly acquired freedom, we cannot but address them a subtle and hazy thought, like the blade of a knife.Some might say, nothing else was to be expected from the mephitic sectors of an unfortunately not small part of the anarchist movement. We knew this, and had no intention of picking up the gossip, or, worse still, begging the solidarity of those who could not give it if for no other reason than that it would have been against their social democratic and possibilistic positions. But there are limits. There are words and words, silences and silences.Some attitudes turned out to be even worse than seemed possible, precisely because of the limpidity and simplicity of the situation. What can anyone say about a robbery carried out for personal reasons, as we dclared right from the start? Absolutely nothing. Yet the rubbish dump that infects the anarchist movement found a way to talk about it in every possible way, not only violently, to our faces while we were not in a position to defend ourselves as we would have liked to and as we would have known how to had we been free to move around, but also behind our backs, with the technique of slander and infestation of corridors to which some old hags of the Italian (and not only Italian) movement have resorted for decades.Basically, to see so much squalor from inside prison, if at first it amazed us, later led us to reflect on the real condition our movement finds itself in. It gave us a better idea of the availability in the field. It enabled us to see the subtle distinction between true and false solidarity, pacifist and religious opportunism, to distinguish those who see themselves committed in words to declarations that are far from the way they really behave - from the revolutionary solidarity that expresses itself in continuous, spread out, capillary action within the often insurmountable limitations of their own possibilities.And it has been a great lesson for both of us, as we think it has been for many other comrades spread around more or less everywhere, comrades not yet affected by the stinking air that hangs around us, but who instead are more free to reason with their own heads and feel themselves ideally engaged in a project of a revolutionary transformation of the reality that surrounds us.Much has changed from the moment when, two years ago, we were arrested in Bergamo during an attempted robbery in a jeweller's shop. Much has changed in reality as a whole. World upheavals have taken place, lived by us through the filter of the prison bars, and perhaps the world that we have found outside is different. But of one thing we are sure. One thing that has not changed - if anything it has been strengthened - is our revolutionary consciousness, our way of seeing the distribution of the forces available for the struggle and, principally, our even more acute desire to go to the search of the enemy, the class enemy, obviously, but also, and why not!, of our own personal enemies!
Glad to see you, and till we meet again.
Alfredo BonannoPippo Stasi