Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, April 30 2005 @ 06:52 PM CDT

Pretty basic logic tells me that here is a prime opportunity to embarrass the fascist Italian state. After all the internet interpret's censorship as damage and routs around it doesn't it?
Beside's if we aren't busy defaming god and the state then we are falling down on the job I reckon.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, May 01 2005 @ 08:24 PM CDT

There's little doubt that ,wherever we are, we should do our little bit to oppose the Italian government's attempt to censure free speech. Nothing is given in the above article about how people might protest, but anybody can look up the address of the local Italian consulate.
But,but, but: I would feel considerably cleaner doing this if there weren't dozens and perhaps hundreds of incidents every single year where anarchists participate in attempting to deny their opponents freedom of speech in the abscence of the "clear and present danger" test that the state restricts itself to in "normal circumstances" (unlike those in this Italian case).
Consistancy is a virtue, and I'm afraid that the only "consistant" principle that I see applied in the various anarchist campaigns or participation in campaigns is that "left is good and right is bad". I have never, I repeat NEVER, seen anarchists participating in a campaign to "shut down" apologists for Stalin, who killed far more people than Hitler did.
If you care to look it up, rather than relying on emotion, you will see that the Maoist inspired events of "68" turned a centrist liberal called Ratzinger into an outright conservative. Maybe, just maybe, because he had seen Hitlerism he saw similarities that younger people could not see between fascism and the totalitarian influenced "New Left".
Maybe I can see these similarities today ijn anarchists who haven't yet absorbed the lessons of history. "Anarchists" who are willing to support anything that gives itself a "leftist tinge", and who are willing to betray the very heart of anarchism (of which "free speech" is a part) to play at militance.
I don't claim an intellectual superiority to Ratzinger, and I will go further in saying that I know that almost nobody who reads this can equal the man in pure intellect. I do,however, claim an emotional and moral superiority to both Ratzinger and those who cannot see the problem that he saw. He made a wrong choice, under the delusion of an "either-or" view of the world. I chose to remain an anarchist because I know that the word contains more "shades of meaning" than can be summed up in childish leftism.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, May 01 2005 @ 11:28 PM CDT

Anarchists are constantly combatting apologists of Stalinism. But
the story, which you repeat, about Ratzinger's alleged conversion
to church doctrine as a reaction against the militancy of the
generation of '68 is coy beyond belief. The pearl of wisdom
formed under Hitlerism allows Ratzinger to see the evil inherent
in orthodox Maoism but it does nothing to prevent him seeing
the abuses of orthodox religious doctrine which he remains
utterly blind to. Ratzinger's smooth transition from Fascism to
Roman Catholic doctrine is turned into a inspiring fairy tale of
spiritual rebirth through the crucible of political horror. A spin
worthy of the Pentagon p.r. office.

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