A-Infos (en) Italy, Sicilia Libertaria #469 - HISTORY. Anti-fascism in the province of Trapani through an unpublished document (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

The appeal we are publishing, a surviving relic of the clandestine 
struggle waged by anarchist groups in the Trapani area (operating 
primarily in Trapani, Marsala, Mazara del Vallo, Alcamo, and 
Castelvetrano) under fascism, never saw the light of day. Probably 
intended for distribution in western Sicily on May 1, 1936, it was 
seized by fascist police on February 4, 1936, from the home of communist 
hairdresser Pietro Moralis, following a tip-off from former anarchist 
Salvatore Renda, an OVRA representative since August 1935.

Moralis had been tasked with "delivering it to his fellow believers 
abroad for publication and distribution" by Baldassare Marino, the 
anarchist who had actually drafted the appeal, urged by the groups 
adhering to the Italian Anti-Fascist United Front (FUAI) in the Trapani 
area, which the 1935 raids had failed to disband. Baldassare Marino 
(Trapani, February 10, 1879 - February 26, 1939), owner of a small 
"ladies' fashion" shop inherited from his father, was well known to the 
police, along with his brother Cesare (a lawyer, born in Trapani on 
February 10, 1883 and struck off the register of subversives on 
September 26, 1928). He was a member of the anarchist group active in 
the city in the early 1900s, a regular contributor and foreign 
correspondent (he moved to Paris in 1911) for several anarchist 
newspapers, and in 1928, he was sentenced by the Trapani court to 40 
days in prison and a 1,200 lire fine for insulting and resisting a 
police commissioner. He was finally warned as a dangerous anarchist on 
December 22, 1930.

We publish his appeal not only to commemorate, exactly 90 years after 
From a distance, the "heroic" anti-fascism of a painful period in our 
history (such a text carried sentences of several years in prison and 
confinement), either to finally bring it to the public, or because it 
retains an unexpected relevance. It is, in fact, a direct attack on the 
Labor Charter, which Fascism introduced on April 30, 1927, promoting 
"fair work" (for the employers), conceived as a "social duty" to ensure 
the nation's power; which rejected the minimum wage for each sector, 
opposing it with mandatory contracts, to be pursued in a climate of 
collaboration and conciliation between the social classes; which 
therefore rejected class struggle by breaking up the unions and 
transforming them into public institutions under state control.

N.M.

To the Workers of Italy

It is not true that hatred always speaks the language of delirium. If 
hatred has legitimate and profoundly human causes, if the love of 
freedom makes one hate tyranny, if the love of justice makes one hate 
oppression and servitude, hatred is holy and generates a fruitful and 
free life.

Hating the fascist regime therefore means hating the Italian woman 
enslaved by an infamous, authoritarian, murderous regime; it means 
striving with all the strength of the spirit for the rebirth of freedom 
and the organization of justice. And consequently, we do not want to go 
underground without first dragging the elementary school teacher of 
Predappio  Brasil, Bento Goncalves/RS, OSL:  the exclusive man who set 
himself up as a legislator  Brasil, Bento Goncalves/RS, OSL:  through 
the mud, without first spatting on the names of his devoted lieutenants.

Reflect, O slaves of Italy, even if the political and moral brutality 
into which you have fallen has not robbed you of the sense of reflection 
and the awareness of all your rights. Reflect.

Is it possible that you don't feel your breasts burning with indignation 
and revolt against the petty, cowardly, helot-like, militaristic life 
imposed on you by the regime? You were miserable and oppressed before 
the arrival of the little man whom the kobolds of the bovofical press 
dare to call "providential." You are even more miserable and beggared 
today, as the regime, obsessed with its futile plan for Roman grandeur 
and imperial expansion, extorts from you, bestially milking even the 
last cents intended for the bread of your offspring.

But do you not have eyes to see pauperism dragging itself, numerous, 
tattered, and hungry, through the streets of a hundred cities; your 
daughters increasingly swell the number of Italy's prostitutes in a 
thousand brothels? ...Fascist immorality, cloaked in the trappings of 
coercive and forced legality, makes profound inroads into the 
instinctive moral sense of the people, constantly betrayed and mocked by 
the Duce?

Reflect, you brutes and slaves of Italy! What has the labor charter 
given you?
Has it perhaps redeemed you from the slavery of paid labor, solved the 
age-old problem of your endless suffering?

The labor charter is nothing but a gloss and a deception with which they 
attempt to further weaken you. The labor charter has only served to 
create as many unions as there are occupational categories, and in those 
unions the regime has placed an endless throng of semi-illiterate 
misfits in tight, elegant suits, vicious, degenerate, bon viveurs, who, 
well-placed in comfortable, luxurious offices, equipped with stamps, 
seals, and printed forms, spend their days producing nothing, only 
anxious for the generous salary you pay them with your annual dues, your 
work, and your poverty.
The labor charter has only served to frame you in a barracks-like 
discipline, to force you to follow the numerous processions at the 
endless fascist commemorations, to accustom you to shouting with skulls 
well-stuffed with fairy tales and chatter, to shout, like crawling 
beasts, the salute to the king and the Duce. We have spoken of the king 
to whom, despite your great poverty, you pay a hefty civil list for his 
luxuries and joys, the king who for a full 14 years has endorsed and 
validated with his signature all the regime's misdeeds.
And, therefore, why do you persist in remaining a ghetto and a slum? ...

Break, for God's sake, the chains in which Mossolini[sic]has wrapped 
your hands and ankles, and in a fit of holy revolt, from one corner of 
your impoverished, brutalized homeland to the other, proclaim, in the 
face of the blessing of the sun, the advent of a free and just Republic.
This is the only Roman Empire that you must create with your sacrifice 
and your courage.

From Italy without freedom

an old anarchist

https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/wp-content/uploads/maggio-2026_compressed.pdf
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