“So the media talked about “ecoterrorists” and not about what is being prepared in the laboratories of IBM: tomorrow’s world. A future that is already here. The artifical will take the place of the natural in a change so deep that will affect our own way of seeing, of feeling, of perceiving the world around us, ourselves, our relationships, the meaning itself of being humans and living beings.”
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SWITZERLAND – Communique of Silvia about her hunger strike from 20th to 29th of january 2012
Nanotechnologies are going to be one of the discussion points of the World Economic Forum. This is exemplary of how, along with biotechnologies, they are something more than a simple technological development. They represent a strategical and fundamental choice for the survival of this tecno-industrial system, they are the bricks with which the system will rebuild itself in every sector.
“Control the oil and you will control the nations, control the food and you will control the populations” (Kissinger, 1970).
Control on basic food supplies, on resources, on rare and raw materials, to hold entire populations in check, but mostly to expand and develop a tecno-industrial system. The project to achieve the strategic aim of control over the global food security started in the USA in the 30’s with the creation of the corporation field of agrobusiness. An empire which financed the “Green Revolution”, the oil and chemical corporations monopolized the field of the patents, of the seeds, they imposed and introduced the gmos in the southern countries. These corporations reorganized themselves as “life science” businesses, at the same time as sterile gmo seeds left their laboratories.
From the biotechnological revolution to the nanotechnological one: a continuous thread that interweave every day more, that melts in itself the schemes of converging sciences (biotechnologies, nanotechnologies, information technology, neurosciences) to expand and encompass every aspect of our lives and penetrate in the biological processes of every living being.
“The erasure of animistic and organic assumptions about cosmos meant the death of nature: the most influential effect of the scientific revolution. Since nature started to be conceived as a sum of dead and inactive cells, driven by external forces instead of internal ones, the mechanical frame itself could legitimate the manipulation of nature. Furthermore, the mechanistic order, being a conceptual frame, was associated with a system of values based on power, entirely compatible with the orientations of commercial capitalism” (C. Merchant, “The death of nature”).
In Bolivia, in a long march in defence of mother Earth the ancestral tribes together with peasants managed to stop the project of the costruction of an highway, which was supposed to tear up the Amazon forest. We cannot perceive the forest as an essential element for life on Earth if we don’t feel part of it. Until we don’t feel to be part of a whole and we don’t realize to be just one of the myriads of animal species, we will continue to be indifferent in front of the slaughter of millions of animals to become objects for experiments or pieces of meat. Until we don’t cross the gaze of an animal through the bars of a laboratory or a farm, being pierced by that gaze in an encounter which is a joining and a feeling inside our soul and body, we will avoid opening that cage, we will continue not to oppose all this. We don’t realize what we are losing, what is disappearing forever, not only biodiversity but also the most intimate significance of every living being and of ourselves.
An empathy we are not able to feel anymore, in that process of dehumanization and reification of the living that becomes objects, goods, material to shape and manipulate, sum of organs, cells, genes, atoms… A physical separation, far from our sight, but also an emotional separation. Our eyes fixed on a violent image can run over it as on an advertisement spot, get used to violence and become indifferent, or shocked, but only for the flowing moment of a reaction. A distance that brings not a real awareness on the consequences of this ecocidal system, of the origin of every harmfulness.
The gas chambers transformed the killer into the role of a “sanitary official”, to whom it was requested to introduce some “chemical disinfectants”. The killing and corpses “disposal” were defined as a “medical problem”. The most of them never shot and never introduced gas, but were bureaucrats who wrote and prepared projects, they had the ability to exterminate a population while sitting at their desk…. The causal link between their actions and the extermination of which “nobody is directly responsible” is not evident. But every pawn of the whole is fundamental to produce the final result. That’s how nowadays universities, public and private research centers, corporations, everybody makes its own part.
I was transferred to the federal prison of Hindelbank in the “high security with psychological support” section, that is in reality a psychiatric section even if not defined as such. The absurd justification for this is the “risk of escape”, the only motivation they can use for putting me in this separated and closer section, in this prison with no walls around but only a fence. Next to this section there is the high security one, built in the 70s for a comrade of the RAF, it is significant that afterward it was trasformed into the section for “dangerous” women with “serious psychiatric problems”…
To not express clear political reasons behind a “risk of escape” is to deny the presence of a radical ecologist political prisoner. All this can be resumed by the assumption “they don’t repress you for what you did or did not, but for who you are”. For who we are and what we trasmit with our path of struggle and radical critics.
Just as the uproar created around our trial, the huge deployment of security, aimed at hiding what outside of that court we wanted to transmit reading our communique, and the meaning of our trial. So the media talked about “ecoterrorists” and not about what is being prepared in the laboratories of IBM: tomorrow’s world. A future that is already here. The artifical will take the place of the natural in a change so deep that will affect our own way of seeing, of feeling, of perceiving the world around us, ourselves, our relationships, the meaning itself of being humans and living beings.
In America, but in a global context, in the name of national security there was the proposal of a new set of laws that plan a special juridical protection for the businesses involved in animal exploitation and in environmental pollution… it is defined as “terroristic organization for animal rights or for environment” any association of “two or more people which supports any political activities aimed at obstructing or preventing any activities which involve animals, or natural resources”.
I ‘m taking part in the hunger strike proposed by Marco Camenisch from the 20th to the 29th of january against the World Economic Forum in Davos. Solidarity to Andy, comrade of the Rote Hilfe International, condemned to 17 months by the federal court of Bellinzona in a political trial that wanted to be an intimidation signal for the new generations of comrades. May was the date of the possible release on parole for Marco Camenisch, but it was rejected. In all these years Marco was always active in the movement with many hunger strikes, with his translations and written contributions. He was always by our side, let’s make a strong and big mobilization for him to be liberated in may!!
Don’t leave the world, before it’s too late we have to understand the extreme necessity to oppose the advance of biotechnologies and nanotechnologies.
“Everything flows, everything moves towards some point, the living beings as well as the rocks and the so called inanimated things such as water. The snow flows, fast and slow, the air flows in majestic inundations that carry minerals and leaves, seeds and spores, streams of music and fragrances; the water flows carrying rocks, the rocks flow from the volcano’s jaws, just as the rivers’ water and the animals regroup and it’s all about flowing, a proceeding of legs, of jumping rumps, of spreading wings, on the soil, in the air, in the sea….. And at the same time the stars run in the space pushed by a never-ending throbbing, like red corpuscles in the blood of Nature” (J. Muir, “My first summer on the Sierra”).
Last minute update: I was communicated that I’m going to be transferred in the normal section.
Silvia Guerini.
