Stefano Cobelli | Port of Ravenna worker/Observatory Against Arms Trafficking (Italy)
Hi everyone, thanks for receiving and screening this video. My name is Stefano and I work in the harbor of Ravenna, Italy, which is deeply involved in a fundamental corridor of military supplies that feeds the global war machine from north to south and from west to east; in the last years in particular ages it has been consistently helps putting on the ground backing up the genocide of the Palestinian people perpetrated by the Zionist entity and its accomplices in EU and US.
Obviously one of the main actors here is NATO, which should be—but in fact is not—a defensive alliance: it is instead the most dangerous military organization in the world because it combines nuclear weapons, global military reach, political pressure on member states, and the militarization of civilian infrastructure: it presents itself as a shield, but it acts as an engine of escalation.
Nor does NATO protect democracy: it disciplines it! NATO’s decisions are often presented as technical necessities. But decisions about military spending, bases, infrastructure, arms transfers, and nuclear strategy are deeply political. Citizens rarely get any real say over these decisions. Democracy cannot stop at the gates of a military base.
Moreover real security means housing, healthcare, climate justice, workers’ rights, diplomacy, disarmament, and international cooperation; on the diametrically opposite the GDP’s 5% spending on defense and security by 2035 means more money for arms, military industry, surveillance, logistics, and military infrastructure, and the political message is clear: schools, hospitals, housing, climate protection, social welfare, migration rights are asked have to wait; war preparation is treated as the absolute priority, worth of circumventing democracy rules, laws, fundamental citizens’ rights and needs: they call it security but we call it the organized transfer of public wealth into the machinery of war.
At one of the main focuses of this nihilistic and deeply unjust design, port workers and communities stand as political actors: they are asked to move goods and bear their transit, but in growing patterns those goods are weapons or dual use items. We should defend the right of workers to know what they are handling and to refuse complicity in war: workers should not be left to fend for themselves and forced to become the silent hands of militarism, with false blackmails to work for war or lose the job.
This struggle, our struggle, our fight and resistance, is not only against one fucking summit, but against the normalization of permanent war. It’s about what we have to start again to perceive for what it really is: a class fight, against capitalism and imperialism, and their cyclic urge and existential need to breed hate and war to accumulate wealth and power at the expense of every single people, more so on those who do not comply. The united front of workers must face the political and military drives toward permawar if we want to stand a chance at pulling the brakes and bring back at the helm of our lives solidarity, dignity, civil and climate justice at the helm of our lives.
So, the need to reach out to workers—and particularly to all logistics workers—is a priority: we need boots on the ground, as those idiots use to would say; however since social breakdown have has been systematically and successfully applied in every nation, city and community, the means are difficult and require patience and perseverance, urging the movement to try to and get in touch on the workplace itself, or refectories or any place where workers meet.
The key then is visibility, to build interest and then trust: distributing fliers, spreading counter information, in a face to face dialogue about their thoughts, fears and needs, and posing utter importance informing workers about their rights and the need to form a web of workers solidarity both national and international. I’ve been reached myself in such a manner! In order to achieve all this, paramount is the successful developing of the self-organization of the workers is paramount: it must be promoted at the same pace as Unions must do their job at supporting, informing and protecting the very same workers.
On the civic side, there are legal instruments (national, European and international) that must be enforced by the movement, and put to good use in order to put under constant and building pressure those who are to be held responsible for the current situation and have the political power to put a stop to it; in unison with this activity, local people’s councils need to be created and got to work to systematically monitor transfers and shippings, firmly claiming the right of any and all citizens to know what they consist of and who are they shipped to.
In Ravenna, as in many of the other communities involved, the movement’s activists are working towards all these ends, constantly trying reach out to all workers, all civil society realities, all organizations who share the urge and the immediate and concrete intention to divert the system from its predatory course; at any crackdown, activists are trying to weaponize repression itself against the system through political or legal ways and the media—at least through what part of them we can yet call impartial and not drowned in propaganda or smokescreens; but the real challenge right now is trying to help logistic workers become part of the movement, helping them realize that there is only one fight, how much of their doubts and fears are created by the same very hands that poison and destroy the environment, exploit trillions, strangle Cuba, kills millions in Ukraine and thousands in migrations, or in Gaza and the West Bank, Lebanon, Iran, Darfur just to name a few… All those fights, are linked and intertwined, and so the global movement should face them, as one.
To close my words As a closing statement, change must be grassroots organized as seriously as war is organized: if NATO and its cronies plan war through summits, budgets, corridors, then we must organize peace through workers, communities, and an international web of solidarity.
Thank you, now and forever: resistance!
