Indulto and indulgence
October 2015 - Spain
These last years , several repressive blows on Spanish territory struck the antagonist , antifascist , libertarian , anarchist scenes ... Police operations were launched , sometimes with great efforts of media propaganda , there were arrests , comrades have been put in jail or are still incarcerated , trails took place , sentences were pronounced ...
All of this is nothing really surprising . Police , media and court repression are part of the arsenal of the state that it uses regularly against those who question it , in its totality or in some of its aspects . For some time now , several governments have clearly stated their will to finish off any protest that doesn ’ t fit in the legal limits which they are continuously tightening . The solidarity that was expressed and developed confronting this difference blows of power was for sure heartwarming , but is not surprising neither : solidarity is , together with direct action , one of the weapons of those who wager on self-organization to engage in conflict .
No , the surprise was rather provoked by the steps , heavy in consequences and totally aberrant , made from out the ranks of the so-called “ radicals ”, and therefore supposedly wanting to attack the problems at the root : demands for pardon after convictions .
To speak very concretely : to ask pardon means to solicit the pardon of the victor ; it means therefore to call
upon the indulgence of power ( in its juridical , governmental , royal ... form ), so upon the same ones who are fighting us and to who we are , in way or another , opposing ourselves .
We are not interested here in speaking about all the administrative details of the procedure in question . To bury what is above all a matter of political choices under mountains of bureaucratic terms and forms fits only too well in the way the system wants to make us function and essentially comes down to drowning the fish .
We also gladly leave aside the fallacious argument that invokes personal decisions to make them escape all critique . Of course we do not deny the individual character of choice , contrary to the unconditional scenes of the “ everything collective ” for whom certain acts are object for suspicion and critiques just because of the fact they are carried out in an individual way . For us – and also because we take into account the individual dimension of positions and actions at any occasion and not only as an opportunity to hide behind it – we do not see why one should back up with silence the taken steps which we consider noxious for all what they suppose and mean . For the rest , the demands for pardon were followed by calls to solidarity ( generally in the shape of “ campaigns ”) launched on an antagonistic modus before , during and also after the trials , calls which were
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