“We’ve made too many compromises already; too many retreats. They invade our space and we fall back. They assimilate entire worlds and we fall back. Not again. The line must be drawn here! This far, no further! ” Jean-Luc Picard
Every conflict is represented by a landscape, a memory of the eyes, a vision that describes it. At any time the senses become more acute, they stir, mix with each other, sculpting vivid memories, bright images, strong odors, sweating hands. On July 3rd the highway overpass above the baita Clarea cut the horizon and vomited tear gas, the trees had soft edges from smoke and tears of sore eyes. During camp time in August there was an iron gate protecting the fake construction site of Chiomonte from the NoTav. For many days its foundations were dug up and its bars cut. In February, during the expropriations of the land and after the fall of Luca, the gazes met a free horizon, a different view. Long tongues of asphalt highway ran along the lower valley. The absence there of a construction site, its mesh and its damned gate, allowed for the organization of a plan of attack against an enemy who at that time had retreated, too busy arranging his mountain conquests. And when the police escalated its violence, using barriers, helicopters, barbed wire and walls to concentrate its strength in one place, the No Tav responded by attacking the logistics at the base of the police occupation. An attack on the enemy’s ability to move reduces their energy, money and speed. They want high speeds but instead are forced into a vacuum created by the blockades. Blocking police changing shifts. Blocking the road toll station Blocking the circulation.
Since time immemorial sabotage has caused a loss of funds and after the events of Monday morning it was immediately decided to demonstrate this mathematical operation: To occupy and block the highway at Chianocco and paralyze the valley. The occupied highway became the strategic base of the NoTav from where actions start, leafleting and other blockades which spread throughout the whole valley. But not only. The great strength of contagion of the NoTav struggle reached other cities: “We block everything everywhere.” And then railway stations and road traffic were blockaded. Demonstrations took place across Italy. Major Italian newspaper offices of La Repubblica and Il Corriere della Sera were occupied.
The dichotomy between local and national broke down, “transporting the valley to many cities”. Fixed and measurable routes, geographic borders and urban plans fail because of relationships that attempt to affect a reality that seems for most people unchangeable. But back to the highway. In contrast to the drivers passing through, the people who were living there knew how to party. The possibilities exploded, and after having carefully tampered with the surveillance cameras, actions began. Every object furnishing the highway was dragged onto the asphalt to view its possible use. Road signs were knocked down with a pickax and became shields. Barricades were built and installed as needed, using every available object; bricks, tires and garbage bins.
At one point a pipe wrench appeared. A gentleman in his fifties brought it and with all his strength began to disassemble the guardrail, and showed the curious gathering around him which bolts were better to unscrew. When sweat lined his brow he stopped, handed over the pipe wrench and, not without a hint of pride, said: “A present from my company!” At night the guardrail of Chianocco had abandoned its rigid geometry and was rolled out over the asphalt. The pipe wrench is passed around, from hand to hand, fingers blackened. Imagination transformed that boring place, where life just passes, into a giant Meccano. It is interesting to note that no one during those days of occupation hadever thought that the highway would remain intact. Indeed, its devastation seemed to be the correct answer to all financing and favors that Sitaf, the corporation managing the highway, had reserved for the Tav construction site and its guarding, which until then had been undisturbed along its arteries. But during these days there were many walls collapsing under the blows of the fight. Even language does not come out unscathed from the confrontation with life. Linguistic contamination led to the use of a warrior lexicon throughout the valley: “Being on the barricades adds joy to life” is expressed during an assembly. Blockades and encirclement become commonly used words just like the fact that every NoTav has hidden a gas mask somewhere. Some terminology became commonly used removing the barrier that normally separates those who think life is a battle from those who still live with the temptation and resignation that “there’s nothing left to do“.
The physical limits that defined the assemblies were smashed, and any decision was multiplied by people arguing in bars, parks and in the streets of the town. During that time peoples’ differences, sharp and blurred, throw old political categories into crisis. Do old distinctions still make sense? When proposals arrive from everywhere, you just have to find your own affinity. So an action organized by a few unknowns became a big party without masks. This was the case Saturday at the Avigliana highway exit. In the nearby the market square of Bussoleno, a little NoTav information was communicated. Even then, hundreds of people gathered together on time to go and open the tollbooths so drivers could pass freely without paying. One week of living together on the highway, in communication with local towns people, allowed for the development of a practice that has been mainly used by autonomous political groups. Like a contagion, these organizational skills, actions and political perspectives were combined, expanded and mutated.
But the struggle, the intensity of the battle is not just something that reduces distances or destroys, but also, and above all, something that builds. So horrified by the social fragmentation pulsing through us, it often happens that we leave the important concept of limit, boundary and division as one more arrow in the quiver of the enemy.
What about the elements that provide a barricade? And the well-educated citizen who populates today’s metropolis? His rhetoric of respect and fairness weighs more than any brick or concrete block. If it is true that the struggle joins together, it is also true that it creates an appropriate distance that takes what we can’t endure or wish into consideration. That necessary separation, the unbridgeable gap remains between those who build their lives in battle and those on the other side.
And then in the Susa valley there’s a wall between those who fight and those who invade the territory. And parents teach children that these officers dressed in blue are not monsters from a movie, but real dangers who at the earliest opportunity will lose no time exercising violence. An increasingly high wall separates those who fight from the invading cops.
And another division, perhaps one more difficult to overcome, is rising between those who fight and those who mystify the struggle. Hearing towns people scream at the journalists: “You are jackals!” shows how people living the truth of a struggle can not endure those who survive thanks to the lies. Only one border remains intact: “There is a difference between you and me!” shouted a man into the face of a policeman who claimed his neutrality as a good worker during the October 15th demonstration in Rome.
An objection may be that all this is just a drop in the bucket. We answer that one straw is enough to break a camel’s back.
Key24