The acquittal of the accused neofascists for the Bologna station massacre is the confirmation, if there ever was any need for it, that the State is the real terrorist.
The apparently inexplicable massacres that have taken place, beginning from piazza Fontana*, and which have deeply marked the development of social struggles in our country, bear all the unmistakable signs of power system.
Past and present history has demonstrated without a shadow of doubt that the State apparatus is behind the fascist puppets and all the sections of the secret services, ready to give orders, to provide means and coverups.
We are not particularly interested in finding out the names of those materially responsible for the massa-cres; nor do we intend to waste our time with the ritual antifascism that buds from every massacre. That only helps power, which in this way manages to deviate revolutionary antagonism from against itself, by deviating it on to the fascists, in this case, used to draw it into a trap.
It is important instead to be conscious of the fact that the massacres, like terrorism on a large scale, i.e. war, or large scale sackings and so on, serve to give States a stable solution to their crises, to their police order disturbed by the social struggles in course.
Moreover, thanks to indiscriminate terror, States manage not only to hide their true nature, attributing it to their most intransigent enemies, that is to say those who want to destroy them, but also present themselves to public opinion in the role of the victim: "Terrorism, by striking institutions and their men, want to force us to come into the same field, that of violence, to then demonstrate to us our presumed authoritarian and antidemocratic nature. But, as you can see, we are not capitulating in the face of this blackmail, we are combating terrorism keeping ourselves within the ambit of democratic legality". In this way States manage to render credible even their democratic mask.
There remains the fact that terrorism is a phenomenon that is natural to the State as such, therefore not attributable as it is claimed only to declaredly authoritarian, dictatorial States. The only difference consists in the fact that in dictatorial States terrorism is normal administration, it is the rule; while in the "democratic" States it is an episodic phenomenon.
All the same, looking into it, this difference turns out to be fictitious, being based on a reductive interpretation of the phenomenon, in the sense that it does not take into account the other aspect of terrorism: the less noticeable one as such in the ambit of sensitive experience and if we like which is conceptually more difficult to define, but not for this less ferocious and inhuman in its effects.
Because this other aspect of State terrorism, which we shall now speak of, manages to make itself "invi-sible", not have itself identified, so one is led to think that in the formally democratic States they do not constitute the rule. Because in its manifestation it does it not present the traits that immediately make one think of terrorism as it is commonly known.
In other words, because in people's imagination terrorism is only that which causes death and loss of blood.
It happens thus that this identification of terrorism in death and blood, i.e. in its outcomes that are available to the "naked eye", leads one not to qualify as terrorist the outcomes through which the other aspect of terror carried out by States, i.e. oppression and exploitation in general, daily phenomena, certainly not episodic.
Oppression and exploitation therefore: this is the true face of terrorism. And it is infinitely more cruel and devastating than any massacre, because it is unceasing, it acts constantly in time and space, sadistically scientific, causing individuals unspeakable physical and psychological suffering, because it obliges them to live in the terror of a precarious, injust, existence, dominated by the non values of the State and capital subtracted from individual and collective control. Terrorism therefore essentially consists in the exercising of dominion.
That is why those who make a distinction between a dictatorial State and a democratic one seem incongruous. These distinctions are extremely dangerous when made by anarchists, because they induce one to seeing violence a useful and legitimate means only if used against openly authoritarian regimes.
But we have seen that in democratic regimes people are also governed by terror. Consequently, it is really difficult for us to understand, for what obscure reason one should use two scales: yes to violence against the dictators, no to violence against the terrorism of the democrats.
The terrorism remains such no matter what form-State expresses it. And violence is not a choice that we have made, it is the terrorist State that obliges us to respond with revolutionary violence, an eminently defensive violence, even if that does not mean that we must stay with our hands folded waiting for aggression.
We can and we must attack too, in our own time and in our own way, in the perspective of the violent destruction of the State.
By definition revolutionaries are against any reformist logic, against any negotiation with the bosses, against any compromise with the institutions. They do not disdain the arm of critique but also want to go beyond that, struggling against all those who work in order to guarantee oppression and exploitation, under whatever form and whatever flag.
Antonio Gizzo
