Avalanche - The Anarchist correspondence zine Avalanche - The Anarchist correspondence zine 6 | Page 29

Some considerations to envisage a
project of struggle against borders
September 2015 - France

Every day we witness the aggravation of the massacre
perpetuated by state borders. Thousands of men and
women fleeing war, poverty and environmental disasters as a direct result of the exploitation of raw materials, and people reduced to the status of raw materials.
We watch daily what amounts more and more to a carnage at the gates of the places where we live, and we
get used to be spectators of the horror of this normality.
Faced with this mass of people, who risked their lives
defying borders, and putting themselves at stake during
confrontations with the guard dogs of Europe, the men
at the head of states wash their mouths with democratic values and proclaim the need to regularize some of
them by establishing the necessary criteria to categorize them, select the right merchandise and drive back
the defective. They establish joint policies, build large
sorting centres, strengthen the bureaucratic and military apparatus and border surveillance. Borders that
are not only boundaries between states, but also materialize now in controls and raids in public transport and
railway stations, in the workplace and in the relations of
exploitation, at the desks of banks and administrations,
in the administrative detention centres and in the work
of the humanitarian managers.

In the streets of Paris in recent months hundreds of men
and women have experienced in their being and in their
own flesh the welcome of the French State. Driven away
from every square, every street, every park, every spot
under a bridge where they were trying to find shelter,
beaten and gassed by cops because they stayed together. Support groups of different creeds were promptly
created. Among them, some sincere individuals for
whom their assistance is an end in itself, motivated by
anger or indignation. Others, party representatives or
humanitarian organizations for which migrants are a
way to get more visibility on the streets and in the media, more political power and more public and private
funding. Overall, they tried to provide material support
and politically supported the demands voiced by the
majority of these men and women: their asylum applications and housing. Claims that invoke human rights,
that consider the state as a partner. That state that,
more or less directly, is involved in bloodthirsty deals
in the places where they come from, that kills them at
the border, that stalks them because they sleep on the
streets, and welcomes them with gas and batons, preoccupied with cleaning the tourist display that Paris is
off this vermin.

|29|