#Bartolomeo Vanzetti

[movie-gate]

La Morte Legale (2018) Silvia Giulietti, Giotto Barbieri

[kiki-de-la-petite-flaque]

Los anarquistas creemos en un mundo sin fronteras. Yo creo en la anarquía. Anarquía significa libertad. Abolición de la sociedad dividida en clases, respeto general. Para mí, esas son las cosas que importan en la vida. Intento vivir mi vida siguiendo estos ideales.

Bartolomeo Vanzetti

[rebel-girl-queen-of-my-world]

Was just minding my business listening to assorted Wes Anderson soundtracks, now I’m crying bc of Joan Baez’s beautiful song for Sacco and Vanzetti:

Here’s to you, Nicola and Bart

Rest forever here in our hearts

The last and final moment is yours

That agony is your triumph.

For more on the tragedy of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti:

[rotenotes]

Sacco & Vanzetti

Bartolomeo Vanzetti – Ιστορία μιας προλεταριακής ζωής Η ιστορία μου δεν αξιώνει ολόκληρη αυτοβιογραφία. Ανώνυμος σ’ ένα πλήθος ανωνύμων, μου έλαχε να ελκύσω και να καθρεφτίσω λίγο από το φως της δυναμικής σκέψης που οδηγεί την ανθρωπότητα σε καλύτερη μοίρα. Γεννήθηκα στις 11 Ιουνίου 1888 από τον Tζιοβάνι Mπατί-στα Bαντσέτι και την Tζοβάνα Bαντσέτι στο Bιλαφαλέτο, στην επαρχία του Kούνεο στο…

[opstandelse]

Sacco & Vanzetti

Bartolomeo Vanzetti – Ιστορία μιας προλεταριακής ζωής Η ιστορία μου δεν αξιώνει ολόκληρη αυτοβιογραφία. Ανώνυμος σ’ ένα πλήθος ανωνύμων, μου έλαχε να ελκύσω και να καθρεφτίσω λίγο από το φως της δυναμικής σκέψης που οδηγεί την ανθρωπότητα σε καλύτερη μοίρα. Γεννήθηκα στις 11 Ιουνίου 1888 από τον Tζιοβάνι Mπατί-στα Bαντσέτι και την Tζοβάνα Bαντσέτι στο Bιλαφαλέτο, στην επαρχία του Kούνεο στο…

[ronnydeschepper]

De peperbus van nonkel Miele (61): Trump en fascisme

In november e.k. zijn er verkiezingen in de VS. Sommigen zien in de kansen van Donald Trump het gevaar van fascisme in de Verenigde Staten. Een bloedige dictatuur is misschien overdreven. Maar sommige fascistische ingrediënten zijn wel aanwezig in de VS. Tegelijk hebben de VS een ander gezicht: de sociale, ecologische en anti-raciale strijd. Ook is een socialistisch geïnspireerd senator en…

[foolbo]

i love you italian characters that arent associated with the mafia i love you italian characters who arent gangsters i love you female italian characters who arent housewives i love you male italian characters who arent violent i love you italian characters with realistic accents

[dw-flagler]

i know it's bad form to laugh at your own jokes but i do think it's really funny to imagine swedish-american labor activist Joe Hill, writer of songs such as There is Power in a Union or The Tramp, who was very famously killed in 1915, is actually still alive and just fucking around on tumblr.

[radicalgraff]

"Free the Prisoners"

Train graffiti in Vienna for the Week of Solidarity with Anarchist Prisoners.

Every year since 2013, the International Solidarity Week for Anarchist Prisoners has taken place from August 23 - 30. We have chosen August 23rd as the beginning because on this day in 1927, the Italian-American anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were executed in prison. Convicted on suspicion of murdering two men during an armed robbery at a shoe factory in Massachusetts. Their arrest was part of a campaign waged by the American government against anarchists. There was no evidence from the state and so the two were executed for their strong anarchist beliefs.

We call on everyone to organize actions in solidarity with anarchist prisoners.

Do what you think is necessary.

Until all are free.

- Text by Anarchist Black Cross Vienna -

[newyorkthegoldenage]

Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti died in the electric chair on August 23, 1927. They were accused of killing two men during an armed robbery.

The trial and subsequent appeals attracted enormous interest internationally, and generated vehement protests. Sacco and Vanzetti were considered to be victims of prejudice against immigrants, Italians, Catholics, and anarchists. John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker, Edna St. Vincent Millay, George Bernard Shaw, and Albert Einstein were among those who wrote about the case or signed petitions.

The photo above shows a demonstration in Union Square on the day of the men's execution.

Photo: Everett via Fine Art America

[crimethinc]

Today, it has been 96 years since the execution of the anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Anti-immigrant bigotry played a significant part in determining the outcome of their trial. The court case became a rallying point for thousands around the world.

"Not only am I innocent of these two crimes, not only in all my life I have never stolen, never killed, never spilled blood, but I have struggled all my life, since I began to reason, to eliminate crime from the earth...

"I am suffering because I am a radical and indeed I am a radical; I have suffered because I was an Italian, and indeed I am an Italian; I have suffered more for my family and for my beloved than for myself; but I am so convinced to be right that you can only kill me once but if you could execute me two times, and if I could be reborn two other times, I would live again to do what I have done already."

-Bartolomeo Vanzetti, addressing the court at their sentencing

[segretecose]

Bartolomeo Vanzetti's letter to Nicola Sacco's son, Dante. Written from the Death House of Massachusetts State Prison; August 21, 1927 – two days prior to Sacco and Vanzetti's execution by electric chair, on August 23, 1927.

(I.D. under the cut)

[MY DEAR DANTE:

I still hope, and we will fight until the last moment, to [reclaim] our right to live and to be free, but all the forces of the State and of the money are deadly against us because we are libertarians or anarchists.

I write little of this because you are yet too young to understand these things and other things of which I would like to reason with you. But, if you do well, you will grow and understand your father's and my case and your father's and my principles, for which we will soon be put to death.

I tell you now that all that I know of your father, he is not a criminal, but one of the bravest men I ever knew. Some day you will understand what I am about to tell you. That your father has sacrificed everything dear and sacred to the human heart and soul for his [faith] in liberty and justice for all. That day you will be proud of your father, and if you [be]come brave enough, you will take his place in the struggle between tyranny and liberty and you will vindicate [our] names and our blood.

Even from now you shall be good, brave with your mother, with Ines, and with Susie–brave, good Susie–and do all you can to console and help them. I would like you to also remember me as a comrade and friend to your father, your mother and Ines, Susie and you, and I assure you that neither have I been a criminal, that I have committed no robbery and no murder, but only fought modestly to abolish crimes from among mankind and for the liberty of all.

Remember Dante, each one who will say otherwise of your father and I, is a liar, insulting innocent dead men who have been brave in their life. Remember and know also, Dante, that if your father and I would have been cowards and hypocrites and [renegades], we would not have been put to death. They would not even have convicted a [leper] dog; not even executed a deadly scorpion on such evidence as that they framed against us. They would have given a new trial to a matricide and [h]abitual felon on the evidence we presented for a new trial.

Remember, Dante, remember always these things; we are not criminals; they convicted us on a frame-up; they denied us a new trial; and if we will be executed after seven years, four months and seventeen days of unspeakable tortures and wrong, it is for what I have already told you; because we were for the poor and against the exploitation and oppression of the man by the man.

The day will come when you will understand the atrocious cause of the above written words, in all its fullness.

Now Dante, be brave and good always. I embrace you.

BARTOLOMEO]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

The Chronicle Herald :: Michael de Adder :: @deAdder

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

July 28, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Jul 29, 2024

Just a week ago, it seems, a new America began. I’ve struggled ever since to figure out what the apparent sudden revolution in our politics means.

I keep coming back to the Ernest Hemingway quote about how bankruptcy happens. He said it happens in two stages, first gradually and then suddenly.

That’s how scholars say fascism happens, too—first slowly and then all at once—and that’s what has been keeping us up at night.

But the more I think about it, the more I think maybe democracy happens the same way, too: slowly, and then all at once. 

At this country’s most important revolutionary moments, it has seemed as if the country turned on a dime. 

In 1763, just after the end of the French and Indian War, American colonists loved that they were part of the British empire. And yet, by 1776, just a little more than a decade later, they had declared independence from that empire and set down the principles that everyone has a right to be treated equally before the law and to have a say in their government.

The change was just as quick in the 1850s. In 1853 it sure looked as if the elite southern enslavers had taken over the country. They controlled the Senate, the White House, and the Supreme Court. They explicitly rejected the Declaration of Independence and declared that they had the right to rule over the country’s majority. They planned to take over the United States and then to take over the world, creating a global economy based on human enslavement. 

And yet, just seven years later, voters put Abraham Lincoln in the White House with a promise to stand against the Slave Power and to protect a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” He ushered in “a new birth of freedom” in what historians call the second American revolution. 

The same pattern was true in the 1920s, when it seemed as if business interests and government were so deeply entwined that it was only a question of time until the United States went down the same dark path to fascism that so many other nations did in that era. In 1927, after the execution of immigrant anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, poet John Dos Passos wrote: “they have clubbed us off the streets they are stronger they are rich they hire and fire the politicians the newspaper editors the old judges the small men with reputations….” 

And yet, just five years later, voters elected Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who promised Americans a New Deal and ushered in a country that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, and protected civil rights.

Every time we expand democracy, it seems we get complacent, thinking it’s a done deal. We forget that democracy is a process and that it’s never finished.

And when we get complacent, people who want power use our system to take over the government. They get control of the Senate, the White House, and the Supreme Court, and they begin to undermine the principle that we should be treated equally before the law and to chip away at the idea that we have a right to a say in our government. And it starts to seem like we have lost our democracy. 

But all the while, there are people who keep the faith. Lawmakers, of course, but also teachers and journalists and the musicians who push back against the fear by reminding us of love and family and community. And in those communities, people begin to organize—the marginalized people who are the first to feel the bite of reaction, and grassroots groups. They keep the embers of democracy alive.

And then something fans them into flame. 

In the 1760s it was the Stamp Act, which said that men in Great Britain had the right to rule over men in the American colonies. In the 1850s it was the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which gave the elite enslavers the power to rule the United States. And in 1929 it was the Great Crash, which proved that the businessmen had no idea what they were doing and had no plan for getting the country out of the Great Depression.

The last several decades have felt like we were fighting a holding action, trying to protect democracy first from an oligarchy and then from a dictator. Many Americans saw their rights being stripped away…even as they were quietly becoming stronger. 

That strength showed in the Women’s March of January 2017, and it continued to grow—quietly under Donald Trump and more openly under the protections of the Biden administration. People began to organize in school boards and state legislatures and Congress. They also began to organize over TikTok and Instagram and Facebook and newsletters and Zoom calls. 

And then something set them ablaze. The 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision stripped away from the American people a constitutional right they had enjoyed for almost fifty years, and made it clear that a small minority intended to destroy democracy and replace it with a dictatorship based in Christian nationalism. 

When President Joe Biden announced just a week ago that he would not accept the Democratic nomination for president, he did not pass the torch to Vice President Kamala Harris.

He passed it to us. 

It is up to us to decide whether we want a country based on fear or on facts, on reaction or on reality, on hatred or on hope.

It is up to us whether it will be fascism or democracy that, in the end, moves swiftly, and up to us whether we will choose to follow in the footsteps of those Americans who came before us in our noblest moments, and launch a brand new era in American history.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[paoloxl]

23 agosto 1927: Sacco e Vanzetti giustiziati da innocenti in America

Il 23 agosto del 1927 Nicola Sacco e Bartolomeo Vanzetti furono fatti sedere sulla sedia elettrica e giustiziati per un duplice omicidio che non avevano commesso. I due italiani aderivano al movimento anarchico e sostenevano le battaglie operaie, solo dopo 50 anni fu ristabilita la verità

Il 23 agosto del 1927 la sedia elettrica poneva fine alle vite di questi emigrati italiani, un ciabattino e un pescivendolo, ingiustamente accusati di un duplice omicidio durante una rapina in un calzaturificio.

La loro tragica vicenda ha inizio nel 1920, durante una manifestazione operaia, i due venivano fermati in possesso di pistole e degli appunti. Sacco e Vanzetti per le loro idee anarchiche, il loro status di emigrati  appartenenti al movimento operaio, erano i perfetti “agnelli sacrificali” da immolare sull’altare della giustizia americana del tempo.

Inoltre con il loro arresto veniva lanciato un  monito ai movimenti popolari dell’epoca, considerati un pericolo per la stabilità degli U.S.A. A nulla valse la confessione del gangster Celestino Madeiros che scagionava Sacco e Vanzetti, così come non contribuì alla loro scarcerazione la mobilitazione popolare a loro favore. Con un processo fazioso (il giudice più volte li definì bastardi), portato avanti con metodologie gravemente erronee e ingiuste, il foggiano e il cuneese, venivano condannati alla pena capitale.

Solo nel 1977 il Governatore del Massachussetts, Michael Kukakis, ammetteva l’errore giudiziario commesso cinquantanni prima, quando venivano uccisi nella giornata d’estate del 23 Agosto del 1927 due innocenti: Nicola Sacco e Bartolomeo Vanzetti

[dailyanarchistposts]

A.1.3 Why is anarchism also called libertarian socialism?

Many anarchists, seeing the negative nature of the definition of “anarchism,” have used other terms to emphasise the inherently positive and constructive aspect of their ideas. The most common terms used are “free socialism,” “free communism,” “libertarian socialism,” and “libertarian communism.” For anarchists, libertarian socialism, libertarian communism, and anarchism are virtually interchangeable. As Vanzetti put it:

“After all we are socialists as the social-democrats, the socialists, the communists, and the I.W.W. are all Socialists. The difference — the fundamental one — between us and all the other is that they are authoritarian while we are libertarian; they believe in a State or Government of their own; we believe in no State or Government.” [Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti, p. 274]

But is this correct? Considering definitions from the American Heritage Dictionary, we find:

LIBERTARIAN: one who believes in freedom of action and thought; one who believes in free will. SOCIALISM: a social system in which the producers possess both political power and the means of producing and distributing goods.

Just taking those two first definitions and fusing them yields:

LIBERTARIAN SOCIALISM: a social system which believes in freedom of action and thought and free will, in which the producers possess both political power and the means of producing and distributing goods.

(Although we must add that our usual comments on the lack of political sophistication of dictionaries still holds. We only use these definitions to show that “libertarian” does not imply “free market” capitalism nor “socialism” state ownership. Other dictionaries, obviously, will have different definitions — particularly for socialism. Those wanting to debate dictionary definitions are free to pursue this unending and politically useless hobby but we will not).

However, due to the creation of the Libertarian Party in the USA, many people now consider the idea of “libertarian socialism” to be a contradiction in terms. Indeed, many “Libertarians” think anarchists are just attempting to associate the “anti-libertarian” ideas of “socialism” (as Libertarians conceive it) with Libertarian ideology in order to make those “socialist” ideas more “acceptable” — in other words, trying to steal the “libertarian” label from its rightful possessors.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Anarchists have been using the term “libertarian” to describe themselves and their ideas since the 1850’s. According to anarchist historian Max Nettlau, the revolutionary anarchist Joseph Dejacque published Le Libertaire, Journal du Mouvement Social in New York between 1858 and 1861 while the use of the term “libertarian communism” dates from November, 1880 when a French anarchist congress adopted it. [Max Nettlau, A Short History of Anarchism, p. 75 and p. 145] The use of the term “Libertarian” by anarchists became more popular from the 1890s onward after it was used in France in an attempt to get round anti-anarchist laws and to avoid the negative associations of the word “anarchy” in the popular mind (Sebastien Faure and Louise Michel published the paper Le Libertaire — The Libertarian — in France in 1895, for example). Since then, particularly outside America, it has always been associated with anarchist ideas and movements. Taking a more recent example, in the USA, anarchists organised “The Libertarian League” in July 1954, which had staunch anarcho-syndicalist principles and lasted until 1965. The US-based “Libertarian” Party, on the other hand has only existed since the early 1970’s, well over 100 years after anarchists first used the term to describe their political ideas (and 90 years after the expression “libertarian communism” was first adopted). It is that party, not the anarchists, who have “stolen” the word. Later, in Section B, we will discuss why the idea of a “libertarian” capitalism (as desired by the Libertarian Party) is a contradiction in terms.

As we will also explain in Section I, only a libertarian-socialist system of ownership can maximise individual freedom. Needless to say, state ownership — what is commonly called “socialism” — is, for anarchists, not socialism at all. In fact, as we will elaborate in Section H, state “socialism” is just a form of capitalism, with no socialist content whatever. As Rudolf Rocker noted, for anarchists, socialism is “not a simple question of a full belly, but a question of culture that would have to enlist the sense of personality and the free initiative of the individual; without freedom it would lead only to a dismal state capitalism which would sacrifice all individual thought and feeling to a fictitious collective interest.” [quoted by Colin Ward, “Introduction”, Rudolf Rocker, The London Years, p. 1]

Given the anarchist pedigree of the word “libertarian,” few anarchists are happy to see it stolen by an ideology which shares little with our ideas. In the United States, as Murray Bookchin noted, the “term ‘libertarian’ itself, to be sure, raises a problem, notably, the specious identification of an anti-authoritarian ideology with a straggling movement for ‘pure capitalism’ and ‘free trade.’ This movement never created the word: it appropriated it from the anarchist movement of the [nineteenth] century. And it should be recovered by those anti-authoritarians … who try to speak for dominated people as a whole, not for personal egotists who identify freedom with entrepreneurship and profit.” Thus anarchists in America should “restore in practice a tradition that has been denatured by” the free-market right. [The Modern Crisis, pp. 154–5] And as we do that, we will continue to call our ideas libertarian socialism.

[aitan]

14 luglio 1921

Proclamazione della condanna a morte di Sacco e Vanzetti.

14 luglio 1896

Nascita di Buenaventura Durruti, anarchico, sindacalista e rivoluzionario spagnolo.

14 luglio 1789

"Rien" / Niente [nel senso di niente di nuovo, nessun evento da rilevare].

Luigi XVI, dal suo diario.

Scritto al rientro della sua ultima battuta di caccia.