We Are Not Afraid of Their Ruins… We Carry a New Chaos in Our Hearts

[ed. – Written before the eventual passing of reforms to the Penal Code in the Spanish State, by the anti-psychiatry collective Asamblea de Majaras. In addition to its impact on those considered mentally ‘unstable’, it legalised abandoning imperiled migrants off the Mediterranean coast to their fate at sea, raised formerly-considered petty theft to a higher level of punishment, and upheld the life sentence. It passed beside the better-known ‘Gag Law’ that significantly constricts protest acts and underhandedly ‘reduces’ low-end jailable offensives to automatic crippling fines (thus increasing control while appearing less authoritarian by reducing jailings). We have nothing more to add to this text – which says nothing new, but is written with a lot of heart – except that we have taken the liberty during translation of amending the places where our social enemies are addressed as a “you”: while we empathise with the need for cathartic expression, we don’t direct dialogue towards those we aim to negate, even as a poetic exercise. The authors can contact us if they want to talk about this.]

We proclaim from our madness, rebellious and contagious, that we don’t care about the penal codes and their reforms because we do not believe in their laws or in their disorders.

Since we were born we have lived in turmoil and subjected to the rule of law, the family, religion, medicine, school, work, husband, father, state... and disobeying them all, and for that reason they have labeled us with their despicable assortment of incurable and chronic diseases.

They condemn us for life even before we are born, and we will continue shitting on their scientific, political, economic, social and religious truths, because obedience and submission are the only true diseases.

We began a long tormented journey in which we were torn from our natural environment to join the system of a world to which we do not want to adapt. We will always be uneasy, unstable, critical, irritating, miserable, emotional, passionate, restless, resistant, distracted, loving, hyperactive, overflowing... and warriors, because we will not give up germinating our madness in the face of the blackmail and emotional conflicts with which they want to domesticate us and the permanent confrontation between us and them.

We are sick with a dark bile of rage that stirs like a storm against all those who feel safe and secure in this uncertain world that, day by day, destroys us. They contaminate the air we breathe with sulfur and uranium. The waters of the rivers are increasingly toxic due to their heavy metal slag discharges. Their emissions of dioxides, methane and fluorinated polluting gases are suffocating and burning nature and putting at risk the survival of all animals, human or non-human, and plant beings. They covered the planet with a thick skin of toxic black paste and surrounded the territory with rail tracks, highways, metal fences, concrete walls, high voltage towers and barbed-wire fences... separating us from our siblings and neighbors and filling the atmosphere with electromagnetic radiation. They keep the mountains seriously ill from wounds opened by quarries, mineral extraction and deforestation. They imprison non-human animals to die in industrial farms, and they enlist us in industrial centers of penitentiary exploitation. They bomb civilian populations in the name of freedom, justice and democracy, plundering entire countries for questioning their hegemonic model of capitalist, white, patriarchal, western and Christian life, leading thousands of people into the blind alley of their misery, destruction and death.

And it is they, the self-proclaimed guardians of the freedoms of the world, of this destructive world order that is nothing new, who consider us “crazy” and “dangerous subjects” to justify our gags, the pharmacological straitjackets, the confinement to perpetuity and the death sentence. Our “madness” is not fooled by the modern designs of the democratized chemical lobotomies and shock therapies that they use as torment and torture in the most bloody of dictatorships... because they fear us.

They, those who throw us out of our houses, those who after exploiting us in their factories force us into unemployment. They, those who determine who has more “right” to live in a territory that is not theirs and in which they can only maintain their privileges by the harsh repression and by the destructive capacity of the weapons of their armies... They fear us.

They, the ones who subject human groups to a suffocating State of Exception [ed. – see Return Fire vol.3 pg5], surveilling each of their gestures and imposing the control of a police state... They fear us.

They, who deny our right as women to decide on our bodies, at the same time that they violate the bodies of the indigenous or those that they consider “less valid” with sterilization [ed. – see Return Fire vol.3 pg29]... They fear us.

They enclose us in their stale and tormented religious morals, they decide for us what our desires must be and they conceive no other reality than the model of duality. They impose their dogma that we can only experience ourselves as men or women and that only then can we love and desire ourselves, when the realities of our drives are much broader and more beautiful and are not determined by their prejudices. They have no scruples to sign treaties on the rights to sexual freedom, but then they impose their psychiatric treatments to eradicate our “transsexuality” and submit us to surgeries that shape us to the hegemonic binomial of a desire that we do not feel.

They are the same ones who sign grandiose treaties and conventions on human rights of the child, affirming the obligatory nature of schooling, then deny them food. Children can die of malnutrition and hunger but with compulsory education, because they do not care that there are no fundamental principles that guarantee the feeding of the smallest and most needy creatures, only their training and control. It is they who go with humanitarian aid to invade those countries where the infant mortality rate is alarming, and to take their wealth in exchange for leaving all their poisons.

This humanitarian aid is their alibi for the looting, the plunder, the torture, the rape of the women and the destruction that they themselves will later rebuild according to their order. As in the past, they keep leaving their trace of pain and desolation wherever they go. They are the lords of death, those who invent pathologies to prescribe harmful palliative drugs. They claim to cure more and more diseases and they chronify our agony making us dependent on their medicines, their merchandise, the compulsive and unrestrained consumption that treasures property as a privileged inalienable right and not as the theft, looting or plundering of humanity.

They condemn us to a brutalizing leisure that reproduces their miseries and estranges us. We are sick because of their constant violence in all areas of our lives. We are sickened and exhausted by exploitation and by each of their moral and heteronormative prejudices. We are sick because of the deep discomfort caused by the daily alienation of a life that estranges.

They have the world in their hands and they will have our bodies bound but they will never manage to appropriate our will. Our convictions are solid and firm, and we know that we are facing a disproportionately unequal struggle, but we will uphold our dreams and we will take not a step back. That is why they fear us. They are afraid of the overflowing wrath of the miserable. They are afraid of the implacable look of our rage. And that is why they are going to impose this new reform of the penal code behind the backs of the people and against the people, but not a thousand reforms, nor all the laws that fit in their miserable dreams, will silence our voices, nor exhaust our desire to fight against the epidemic of their culture of death.

It is we, the dispossessed, against they, the possessors. Their fear is reflected in each law; our blood is ignited and when they spill it, they will burn along with their world. We are children of a dignified revolution that germinates in memory and we will not forget, nor forgive.

We know that this autumn they will approve a new reform of the penal code. Another reform with which they want to gag and lock us up, without the ropes that bind us or the walls of the cells being seen. This reform is not just against us the crazy, the women, the transsexuals, the migrants, the resistant, the precarious... It is against all the people who defend ourselves from their greed and their unlimited abuses. It is against all the people who are aware that no government is going to bring us freedom. their laws are against all those people who recognize that only we can decide on the destiny of our lives, and not the markets, the financial entities, the economic or political interests, the reasons of State...

In front of each of their repressive measures, we will remain firm and disobedient before all eventualities. Our resistance will stop being that of survival, to become a transforming struggle that will defend its spaces of freedom side-by-side. We will feel a lot of fear in front of their armies of thugs and hired mercenaries, but our courage, our determination, our desire to live in freedom, the mutual support and solidarity of our sisters and brothers, will help us overcome all our fears.

They can start building more prisons, asylums and gas chambers right now, because the earth will be too small.