Anarchy!

July 29, 1900

Italy’s King Humbert I assassinated by an anarchist, Gaetano Bresci.

Gaetano Bresci emigrated from Italy to the US, & was working & living in the large Italian-American anarchist community in Paterson, New Jersey, when demonstrations over high bread prices led to demonstrations all over Italy. In Milan, General Bava Beccaris fired cannons on a peaceful demonstration, leaving hundreds dead. “Order restored”, the King of Italy, Umberto I had the gall to decorate the butcher Beccaris, & consequently, Gaetano Bresci determined to kill the king. Bresci went to Italy & in Monza, where the King was visiting, put three bullets into him on July 29, 1900.

Anarchists propose $50 million deal on convention
Associated Press
July 29, 2008

DENVER (AP) – A group of anarchists says it will drop its plans to disrupt the Democratic National Convention if Denver invests a $50 million federal grant in the community rather than spend it on security.

The group Unconventional Denver wants the city to spend the $50 million intended for security for the convention on health care and other needs. If the city agrees, the anarchists say they’ll call off their protests.

Otherwise, Tim Simons says members of the group plan to “physically stand in the way of what’s going to happen.” He says the group is protesting what it sees as the Democratic Party’s support of big business rather than meeting people’s basic needs.

Anarchist Rosa Pazos has been murdered / La anarquista Rosa Pazos ha sido asesinada
July 23, 2008

On the eleventh of July Rosa Pazos, Sevillian anarchist and transsexual activist, died after being stabbed. The Local Federation of Unions of the CNT-AIT in Seville and her comrades want to express what follows:

Rosa always said she would be murdered one day, but nobody took her seriously. Mournfully, facts have finally shown her to be right: we know from mass media that she was found dead at home by firemen, on the eleventh of July, and only afterwards, in the autopsy practised in the Anathomic-Forensic Institute, was revealed that the cause of her death had been a stabbing on her thorax. Due to this, a prosecution has begun and secret summary has been decreed.

Very few people accepted her the way she was throughout her life, not even her family, and very few paid her attention, but far from unravelling she always faced society’s reject due to her triple condition of transsexual, anarchist and diseased.

Rosa has been a fighter all her life, she has fought for her right to be recognized as the woman she was, for her right to a proper medical treatment, for her right to be socially and professionally accepted, for her freedom of speech, for her right to intimacy, etcetera. A constant and unequal fight that she has always faced from a libertarian perspective, which has lead her to denounce systematically institutions and public powers, whose bureaucracy, as usual, has turned into nothing these rights…

Open Letter to the CNT
Alexander Schapiro
June, 1937

In June 1937, following the May Events in Spain, when anarchists battled Communist and Republican forces in the streets of Barcelona, and many prominent anarchists were arrested, murdered (Camillo Berneri) or simply disappeared, the CNT (Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo) adopted a “minimal program” to submit to the Republican government and the forces now in control of it, including the Stalinist Communist Party which was itself embarking on a concerted campaign to suppress the anarchist movement and other opposition groups, such as the dissident Marxist group, the POUM (one of whose leaders, Andres Nin, was notoriously “disappeared” and accused by the Communists of being a Francoist fifth columnist). The “minimal program” was not accepted by the government, and the anarchists continued to be marginalized and persecuted by government and Communist-backed forces. Alexander Schapiro wrote the following Open Letter to the CNT criticizing them for their continuing and disastrous policy of collaboration and accommodation with these counter-revolutionary forces. Translated by Joseph Wagner and published in the One Big Union monthly, August 1937. For a similar critique by a Swedish member of the International Workers Association (IWA), see Albert Jensen, “The CNT-FAI, the State and Government” (1938), in Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, Volume 1, Selection 127.