Communique of Silvia about her anti-WEF hunger strike from 20th to 29th of January 2012 (Switzerland)

Feb. 14, 2012 325 magazine

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
techno-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 agribusiness. 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
construction 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 transformed 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 transmit with
our path of struggle and radical critique.

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 “eco-terrorists” and not about what is being prepared in the
laboratories of IBM: tomorrow’s world. A future that is already here.

The artificial 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 inanimate 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 told that I’m going to be transferred to the
normal section.

Silvia Guerini