Archivio mensile:Gennaio 2025

Volantino al presidio alla Fieragricola TECH 2025

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NO AI NUOVI OGM – TEA NO ALL’AGRICOLTURA DIGITALE
CONTRO LA SMART CAMPAGNA E OGNI MANIPOLAZIONE GENETICA

Fieragricola TECH 2025 non è una fiera qualsiasi, è un connubio tra politica, startup, centri di ricerca, associazioni di categoria per demolire un’agricoltura a misura di comunità umana trasformandola in un processo biotecnologico a guida algoritmica.

A giugno dell’anno scorso utilizzando il Decreto siccità sono stati sdoganati in Italia i nuovi OGM – TEA e la Commissione Agricoltura del Senato ha approvato un emendamento al Decreto che proroga di un anno, fino al 31 dicembre 2025, le sperimentazioni in campo aperto dei TEA. Sono quindi iniziate le prime sperimentazioni: la prima, a maggio, di un riso OGM – TEA Mezzana Bigli in provincia di Pavia nell’Azienda Agricola Radice Fossati da un progetto di ricerca dell’università di Milano a cui sono seguite quelle di vitigni Chardonnay – TEA in Trentino da parte della Fondazione Edmund Mach di Trento, altre due sempre di vitigni Chardonnay a Verona e Padova portate avanti da Edivite, società spin-off dell’Università di Verona del Dipartimento di Biotecnologie, e infine una sperimentazione di un pomodoro TEA a Parma, da parte del CREA di Pontecagnano presso l’Azienda Agraria Sperimentale Stuard.
Sperimentazioni simboliche a cui ne seguiranno altre al fine di sdoganare gli OGM nei campi, dare avvio alla loro regolamentazione che equivarrà a contaminazione, diffusione e normalizzazione.

TEA: TECNICHE DI EVOLUZIONE ASSISTITA CLASSIFICATE COME NUOVE TECNICHE GENOMICHE (NGT). Non vengono inseriti dei geni di un’altra specie – ci ricordiamo il così detto “cibo frankenstein” dei precedenti OGM come le fragole con geni di pesce per aumentarne la conservazione – ma vengono inseriti dei geni di una stessa specie o strettamente correlata o vengono effettuate modificazioni genetiche per cercare di indurre nuove proprietà. In ogni caso sono MODIFICAZIONI DEL GENOMA DELLA PIANTA anche con la TECNOLOGIA DI INGEGNERIA GENETICA CRISPR/CAS9. Ricordiamo che è la stessa tecnologia con cui in Cina sono state editate geneticamente due bambine. E sono collegamenti che vanno fatti per comprendere l’entità dell’attacco al vivente da parte delle biotecnologie.
Stiamo parlando di organismi geneticamente manipolati con tutto quello che ne deriva: alterazioni non volute come mutazioni fuori bersaglio e mutazioni impreviste causate dalla tecnica CRISPR/Cas9, sviluppo di tossine dannose per la salute, riduzione della biodiversità, contaminazione genetica attraverso il vento e gli impollinatori.
Ricordiamo quello che accadde in Brasile e Argentina con la soia OGM: tutti i campi furono contaminati che a quel punto non rimaneva altro che regolamentarla.
I promotori dell’ingegneria genetica sostenevano che gli OGM avrebbero salvato dalla fame i paesi del sud del mondo, ma abbiamo visto com’è andata a finire. Oggi la nuova propaganda afferma che i nuovi OGM potranno ridurre l’uso di pesticidi, ma questo non è assolutamente vero, veniva dichiarato anche con i vecchi OGM e abbiamo visto come le piante infestanti diventarono resistenti con la conseguente necessità di aumentare l’irrorazione. E ovviamente i nuovi OGM sono pronti anche per i tempi di emergenza permanente, sdoganati per resistere ai cambiamenti climatici. Propaganda portata avanti dalle multinazionali agroalimentari Bayer – Monsanto, Syngenta e in Italia anche dalle lobby Coldiretti e Confagricoltura.
Con queste sperimentazioni l’Italia fa ancora da apripista. A Febbraio dell’anno scorso il Parlamento Europeo ha approvato il Regolamento sulle NGT per deregolamentare i nuovi OGM. La categoria NGT1 da considerare equivalente alle normali varietà e quindi deregolamentata e NGT2 da considerare OGM. La differenza? Da 20 modificazioni OGM, sotto le 20 non lo sono…
Nel nostro occidente sono sempre più rari i contadini, li si vuole convertire in agro-industriali che con monocolture intensive e pesticidi impoveriscono e avvelenano i terreni e con gli OGM nelle farine per nutrire gli animali nelle fabbriche zootecniche di smontaggio di corpi.
Dalla smart city alla smart campagna in arrivo un’agricoltura 4.0 con campi disseminati da sensori, sorvolati da droni e coltivazioni gestite da remoto. Il comparto agricolo resta un settore fondamentale che non può certo mancare all’appuntamento con la grande trasformazione.
“Tecnologie di evoluzione assistita” rimanda alla procreazione medicalmente assistita, l’ingegneria genetica si deve estendere in ogni dimensione dell’esistenza: alimentazione, medicina, procreazione. Vecchi e nuovi OGM, carne sviluppata in vitro, microchip sotto pelle, terapie geniche a mRNA, riproduzione artificiale: l’essere umano deve essere pronto a un mondo laboratorio.
Per questo oggi diciamo no a qualsiasi forma di ingegneria genetica nei campi e nei corpi tutti.
Per l’indisponibilità del vivente al mondo laboratorio.
Mobilitiamoci per impedire che gli OGM diventino il nuovo modo di pensare alla natura.


In ricordo dei contadini e contadine indiani che lottarono contro Monsanto perdendo la vita, avendo ben chiaro che la posta in gioco era la loro stessa sopravvivenza e la sopravvivenza di un intero mondo.


Resistenze al nanomondo – Bergamo, 30 gennaio, 2025
www.resistenzealnanomondo.org

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PRESIDIO CHE AVEVAMO ORGANIZZATO IL 6 LUGLIO 2024

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Amnesie nucleocratiche. Piccoli promemoria per la nuova età nucleare – Dario Stefanoni

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Amnesie nucleocratiche. Piccoli promemoria per la nuova età nucleare
 
Le centrali nucleari sono state costruite su profondi vuoti di memoria.
Jean-Marc Royer

Da quando il parlamento europeo ha inserito l’energia nucleare nella “tassonomia verde” delle fonti sostenibili da stimolare e finanziare, il 6 luglio 2022, dietro plausibile spinta della Francia, ecco tornare a farsi gradualmente largo – anche tra i social network e giovani, rampanti giornalisti scientifici – una rinnovata propaganda nuclearista, adatta a tutti i palati e a tutte le età: smart e à la page, cinico-ironica e accuratamente “de-ideologizzata”. Alla maniera dei rapporti del Club di Roma, s’intende, il che equivale a dire più ideologica che mai, ossia nominalmente né di destra né di sinistra così che possa fagocitarle entrambe in un sol boccone, secondo i dettami di una tecnocrazia scientista, neofeudale e organicamente capitalista, anfibia tra pubblico e privato, conservativa delle disuguaglianze economiche e sociali, progressista quanto a tutto ciò che equivalga a informatizzare, manipolare e artificializzare il vivente. Alla bisogna, con originali coloriture di apparente sovranismo energetico e quel giusto tocco di politicamente scorretto, così da raccogliere – chissà – qualche anticonformistico placet dal sedicente fronte del dissenso, e dall’altra sdoganando pure tra i benpensanti della neosinistra e tra gli antifa della domenica un tabù, quello atomico, se non proprio caldo ancora tiepido, via.
Portato a distinguersi giusto nella real politik dall’ecologismo unicornista e turbodigitale di Greta Thunberg e dei Friday for Future, stemperandone l’escatologia climatica dai buoni sentimenti ecoansiogeni – da istericamente messianica a virilmente realista – all’occorrenza potrà vantare più apertamente nuance criptomilitariste e antidemocratiche, così da esplicitare l’ovvio come dono di schiettezza scientifica, di obiettivissimo business plan del pianeta e dell’umanità tutta, per rispondere a quegli straccioni minimalisti della decrescita felice o del razionamento green con il luculliano massimalismo energivoro di un parco nucleare sperimentale e nuovo di pacca, a base di minireattori che più “puliti” e “sicuri” non si può, portentosi autofertilizzanti dispensatori di energia gratuita e illimitata per tutti, e chissà quant’altro. Chiamalo, se vuoi, ambientalismo razionale. Pro-nucleare, pro-biotech, pro-5g, pro-vax, pro-tutto, purché non si parli mai, chiaro, di “correlazioni” e “effetti collaterali”. E che termini quali “radioattività” e “scorie” spariscano possibilmente dalla circolazione, a meno di possedere un dottorato in Ingegneria Nucleare che dia il diritto di parlarne, così da lasciar presto sgombra la strada alle nuove centrali prossime venture – ché le emorragie di Co2 incalzano, gli eventi climatici estremi incombono, e insomma c’è fretta.
Perché la Santissima Tecno-Inquisizione 2.0 dell’Antropocene termocapitalista e transumanista non ammette obiettori, disertori e imboscati, e se non ti rimetti immediatamente alla superiorità morale del clero tecnico di esperti, accademici e analisti, la condanna di “antiscientifico”, ossia di irriformabile paria del proprio tempo, non te la leva nessuno. E se rimanesse qualche dubbio, un monito apparso sul quotidiano francese L’opinion nel settembre 2021, basterà a dissiparlo: “Essere contro il nucleare è l’equivalente climatico dell’essere no vax: il rifiuto della ragione”. Sembra poco, ma vi è presente tutto lo spirito di un’epoca: piuttosto sorprendentemente per chi riteneva che l’uscita dal nucleare fosse tra i pochi approdi etici largamente condivisi, almeno in Italia, alla cui necessità il XX secolo ci aveva traumaticamente aperto gli occhi, ci si trova d’improvviso a ritrovare intatti, nel segno di un grottesco revisionismo post-storico in grado ormai di sminuire e negare qualsiasi cosa, quelle stesse inossidate bugie propagandistiche di un’epoca remota, precedenti perfino alle prime proteste di Three Mile Island nel 1979. 
Svecchiati appena nelle strategie di comunicazione e con agili ritocchi metodologici – decentralizzando di qua e rinverdendo di là, simulando trasparenza informativa e vive apprensioni di sostenibilità ambientale – la riscossa dei nuovi nuclearisti procede quieta ma inesorabile, forte anche di quanto è stato possibile imporre e tollerare negli anni della deriva autoritaria biomedicalizzata da Covid. L’industria nucleare, del resto, avrà storicamente e tecnicamente ben qualcosa da dire quanto alla gestione di stati d’eccezione e di disastri sanitari e ambientali, nonché quanto a medicina sperimentale e cavie umane – e anche comprensibilmente, visto il clima politico, sociale e culturale nuovamente favorevole, ritorna in scena per far presente il discreto primato maturato, in altri anni, in questi stessi campi.  Così, nel crescente e inostacolato processo recente di militarizzazione coatta e di rinnovata corsa agli armamenti, anche le risorse dialettiche dell’Internazionale Nuclearista possono di conseguenza affilarsi, e con le giuste tempistiche, il nuovo corso di “no nuke” –  già rietichettati in questi termini – potrà forse candidarsi come la prossima classe di “scimpanzé del futuro” da porre alla pubblica gogna, ossia di nuovi bifolchi complottisti da discriminare, emarginare e reprimere (tornando  indistinguibili dalla vecchia nomea di “pacifisti”, altra vetusta specie di dissidenti per costituzione ostili alle magnifiche sorti progressive del nucleare).
A permettere l’inattesa rimonta del nuclearismo vi è, ovviamente, anche l’Apocalisse secondo Co2, con la democratica, egualitaria stratosferizzazione delle cause dell’intossicazione planetaria. Pare, infatti, che grazie all’annunciato Armageddon climatico da diossido di carbonio, la cui responsabilità si può equamente comminare a tutte le masse del pianeta dotate di un’automobile o di una mucca, si possano lecitamente e legalmente trascurare tutti gli altri tipi di inquinamento di là da quello atmosferico, nonché tutti gli altri veleni sì ugualmente e indifferentemente sparsi in aria, in acqua e nel suolo, ma in genere di giurisdizione pressoché esclusiva di determinati apparati industriali e scientifici – radionuclidi inclusi, appunto. Come i pesticidi, gli OGM, l’inquinamento elettromagnetico e molto altro, anche la radioattività di combustibili e residui fissili parrebbe usufruire dell’indulgenza generale, relativamente libera da attenzioni politiche e responsabilità economiche; sarà perciò il caso di approfittarne, tanto più che l’industria nucleare di Co2 ne produce giusto in fase di cantiere, e quindi (così dicono) dev’essere senz’altro un’energia green, di quelle capaci di salvare il pianeta dalla catastrofe imminente.
Gira poi voce che ultimamente l’epidemia mondiale di cancro e di altre malattie degenerative sia giunta a tali livelli di diffusione e varietà che l’energia nucleare potrebbe correre meno di un tempo il rischio di passare tra le loro principali responsabili (nonostante gli innumerevoli possibili indizi a carico, come gli oltre 2000 test nucleari “ufficiali” atmosferici e sotterranei condotti in nemmeno un secolo, e dalle conseguenze mai chiarite). Le tradizionali tattiche dilatorie e le altre laboriose strategie dell’industria nucleare – quella di prendere tempo e ritardare od occultare quanto possibile ogni forma di diagnosi di chi è esposto alla radioattività, di psicologizzare le patologie radioindotte come ipocondriaca “radiofobia”, di sequestrare, coprire e non tradurre gli studi epidemiologici in merito, specie giapponesi, russi e ucraini –  potrebbero perciò non essere più necessarie, dal momento che innumerevoli altre patologie verrebbero indifferentemente provocate da altre industrie, come le agroalimentari e farmaceutiche, così che le cause possano essere sempre e comunque “multifattoriali” e ambientali, mai identificabili con precisione.

In questi tempi paradossali e dimentichi di tutto, può così affacciarsi persino un documentario di aperta propaganda nucleare come non si vedeva dall’epoca della Guerra Fredda, e che a un ventennio di distanza dal documentario eco-allarmista sul riscaldamento climatico Una scomoda verità di Al Gore (anch’egli pro-nucleare), pare tirarne e aggiornarne le fila catastrofiste per proporre la definitiva e perentoria panacea energetica per tutta l’umanità. È appunto Nuclear now di Oliver Stone, quasi un outsider del cinema hollywoodiano, noto in passato per posizioni politiche radicali e spesso non allineate che da cineasta e documentarista lo portano ad avvicinare personalità controverse come Snowden e Putin, Chavez e Castro, o a proporsi di mostrare il lato oscuro degli stessi Stati Uniti, ad esempio nei suoi film su JFK, Nixon o nella docu-serie USA, la storia mai raccontata. Da attivista anti-nucleare in gioventù, Stone si fa d’improvviso appassionato cantore dell’industria dell’atomo, sciorinando anche un assortimento di argomentazioni nucleariste che si credevano da tempo superate e confutate da decenni di studi, esperienze e riflessioni critiche. Anche questa stessa entusiastica e fanatica conversione, e con essa la regressione di tutta un’elaborazione collettiva della storia della scienza, è certo un segno dei tempi.
A seguire, si propongono cinque brevi visioni antipodiche e antidotiche rispetto al film di Stone, nonché alla citata propaganda nuclearista – anche cinematografica – oggi di tendenza. Sono solo alcuni documentari tra i molti possibili, tutti visibili integralmente online in lingua originale e talvolta con sottotitoli italiani, che del nucleare affrontano parte di quel che storicamente è stato da sempre segregato nel fuoricampo – i test nucleari americani delle isole Marshall, il lato oscuro e repressivo del nucleare civile francese, il destino dei liquidatori di Chernobyl – insieme alla concezione del mondo e della scienza in grado di produrre tutto ciò.
Non presentano gli asettici grafici statistici o i cataclismi naturali in computer grafica di Stone e Gore, ritoccabili all’infinito come le soglie formali di radiotossicità o i conteggi ufficiali delle vittime di qualsiasi disastro industriale. Ma testimoniano la verità incancellabile di corpi piagati dall’espropriazione di sé, dalla malattia e dalla radioattività. E di una natura ugualmente violata e ulcerata da ferite profonde, che non si risaneranno prima di migliaia e migliaia di anni.

HALF LIFE (Dennis O’Rourke, 1985)
Tra il 1946 e il 1958, il governo americano fece esplodere a titolo di test scientifico almeno 66 atomiche su alcune isole Marshall appositamente evacuate, nell’oceano Pacifico, per osservarne gli effetti. Una delle più devastanti tra queste, lanciata sull’atollo di Bikini, fu la bomba H, di una potenza distruttiva superiore di 1000 volte all’ordigno che polverizzò Hiroshima: era l’operazione “Castle Bravo”, presentata dal governo americano come “uno degli esperimenti più importanti della storia della scienza.” Quando il fallout radioattivo ricadde sugli atolli vicini, non evacuati dai militari, i bambini delle isole scambiarono la pioggia di corallo incenerito radioattivo per neve con cui giocare, e come tutti, si ammalarono di patologie radioindotte.
È questa una delle testimonianze raccolte a viva voce dal documentarista australiano O’Rourke, che – lasciando la parola a indigeni e militari sopravvissuti – riflette senza necessità di commenti né di orpelli sensazionalistici sullo scarto tra messa in scena governativa e atroce realtà, nonché sul razzismo scientifico intrinseco al “colonialismo radioattivo” (come varrà per i test atomici francesi in Polinesia e nel Sahara). Ancora decenni dopo le esplosioni, sulle isole Marshall non si contano le nascite di bambini con disabilità fisiche e psichiche; una donna, tra le altre, partorisce interiora senza corpo, e poi un neonato ricoperto di bubboni e ustioni che sopravvive appena un mese – e tutto ciò corrisponderebbe solo a un quarto degli effetti genetici complessivi, che saranno da quantificare in modo completo solo alla luce delle successive generazioni. Anche negli anni ’50 la gestione tecnoscientifica delle catastrofi era a base di “rigorosi e costanti controlli medici” e di grottesca retorica pseudo-umanitaria, a cui ricorse anche il discorso con cui infine Ronald Reagan saluterà nel 1986 l’indipendenza delle Marshall, solo minimamente risarcite, dopo aver devastato e contaminato quelle stesse terre e persone che dall’Onu erano state poste, dopo la seconda guerra mondiale successiva al dominio giapponese, sotto la protezione degli Stati Uniti (“Vi abbiamo insegnato la democrazia e la libertà, e la dignità all’autodeterminazione.”).
Nel finale, il documentario disseppellisce anche una rivelazione scioccante: i meteorologi e operatori radio dell’esercito americano intervistati – anch’essi ammalatisi delle stesse patologie degli indigeni – denunciano apertamente che gli ufficiali dovevano essere a conoscenza del fatto che i venti avrebbero portato il fallout radioattivo di “Castle Bravo” sulle isole vicine, e quindi il governo americano non evacuò deliberatamente gli atolli, già ridotti a laboratori a cielo aperto, per poter studiare gli effetti delle radiazioni anche sugli esseri umani (ai quali non prestarono in genere assistenza, come accadde a Hiroshima e Nagasaki, dove per decenni i medici americani preferirono studiarli e osservarli come cavie umane nel progredire delle malattie, senza offrir loro alcuna possibilità di cura, pur possedendo tecnologie e strumenti ematologici più avanzati di quelli a disposizione degli ospedali giapponesi). Del resto, qualcosa di simile era già accaduto agli albori dello stesso progetto Manhattan, con dinamiche vicine rispetto a quanto avvenuto anche in Italia un paio di anni fa, con l’imposizione dei sieri genici a mRna: si trattava delle iniezioni sperimentali endovena di plutonio, uranio, polonio e americio che nel 1946 il governo condusse su civili americani a loro insaputa (migliaia di persone, tra cui donne incinta, disabili, carcerati, pazienti oncologici, emarginati e poveri d’ogni risma) con lo scopo di studiarne, alla maniera dei medici nazisti, la tossicità in vivo e la soglia massima di radioattività che un essere umano poteva sostenere (con la conseguente ecatombe che si può immaginare, emersa pubblicamente solo mezzo secolo dopo). Lo stesso Robert J. Oppenheimer, mentre era al lavoro sulla bomba atomica, era tra i responsabili di questo parallelo “studio scientifico” (utile complemento del progetto Manhattan), ma, naturalmente, nel recente film biografico di Christopher Nolan – come nel profluvio di recensioni e commenti critici a corredo – difficilmente se ne troverà cenno.  

RADIO BIKINI (Robert Stone, 1988)
Ancora un documentario sui test nucleari compiuti nelle isole Marshall, ma più centrato sui primi due esperimenti dell’operazione Crossroads, inaugurata nell’estate del 1946 nell’atollo di Bikini con le detonazioni “Able” e “Baker” (la seconda delle quali – subacquea – fu considerata dallo stesso governo statunitense il primo disastro nucleare del dopoguerra, a seguito del quale non si riuscì a decontaminare nessuna delle navi bersaglio utilizzate, nonostante i successivi quattro anni di tentativi). Si fa qui più evidente la retorica scientifica “a fin di bene” con cui gli americani riescono a impadronirsi dell’atollo di Bikini, usurpandolo senza colpo ferire alle tribù indigene: ad essi annunciano solennemente, rassicurandoli, che quanto faranno sulla loro terra permetterà di trasformare, “nel nome del Signore”, una forza distruttiva in “un grande beneficio per l’umanità”. Come noto, la popolazione di Bikini accetta così di andarsene, ma per decenni, secoli e probabilmente millenni non potrà più ritornare sulla propria isola, resa inabitabile dagli esperimenti nucleari.
Impressiona, per l’epoca, anche l’arsenale cinematografico dispiegato dall’esercito americano per sfruttare le esplosioni in senso spettacolare: le truppe sono dotate di oltre 208 cineprese e 104 macchine fotografiche per immortalarle, e i primi 30 secondi impressionati della prima detonazione equivarranno a tutta la pellicola utile a realizzare a Hollywood 11 interi lungometraggi. È l’estetizzazione della morte su scala atomica, condotta con l’esaltazione dell’apprendista stregone (“i dati raccolti costituiranno i libri di testo di domani”), e il battesimo di fuoco di quella stessa incipiente, mortifera e impotente deriva voyeuristica – o “società dello spettacolo” – su cui filosofi come Guy Debord o Jean Baudrillard, dopo l’indispensabile Gunther Anders, avranno molto da dire. I primi sacrificati “per il bene dell’umanità” sono gli animali – pecore, maiali, capre, topi – nuclearizzati a centinaia sulle prime navi bersaglio. Poi, come sempre nelle sperimentali escalation della scienza moderna (curiose dapprima degli effetti sugli animali, per vedere come sarà poi sugli uomini), toccherà – con altri tempi e modalità – agli stessi umani. Non solo ai nativi del Pacifico, in questo caso, ma alle altre vittime dei test atomici sulle Marshall: i soldati americani stessi, lasciati a pascolare tra gelati a volontà e immensi “fuochi d’artificio”, di fatto ridotti come i primi a carne da radiazione, completamente ignari della portata di ciò a cui stavano partecipando (“radioattività” era concetto e termine a malapena pronunciato dagli ufficiali, certo più consapevoli). A ricordare gli eventi subiti in prima persona è proprio il reduce John Smitherman, recluta diciottenne al tempo dell’operazione Crossroads, intervistato pochi mesi prima della sua morte prematura, nel 1983, con le gambe progressivamente gonfiatesi per la radioattività a tal punto da scoppiare, letteralmente, e ridurlo a un tronco umano.


SUPERPHÉNIX: HISTOIRE FOLLE D’UN MOSTRE (Bernard Mermod, 1994)
Quando gli odierni nucleocrati d’ogni taglia vanteranno i nuovi prototipi di fantomatici reattori autofertilizzanti, capaci di riciclare prodigiosamente tutti i combustibili nucleari e i residui fissili del caso – risolvendo così ogni problema di sostenibilità ambientale, sicurezza ed efficienza energetica – difficilmente richiameranno alla memoria uno dei primi esempi storici di reattori di cosiddetta “nuova generazione”, ossia il “surgeneratur” Superphénix di Creys-Malville, la centrale elettronucleare sperimentale francese disposta poco lontano da Lyone e vicino ai confini con Svizzera e Italia, chiusa definitivamente nel 1997 a seguito di vari incidenti.
Una breve inchiesta televisiva della Radio Télévision Suisse ne ripercorre la storia fallimentare e inquietante, rievocata a seguito della decisione aziendale e governativa di riavviare la centrale dopo un ennesimo guasto. Si chiamava come il leggendario animale che rinasceva dalle proprie ceneri, perché nei chimerici piani di chi lo commissionò e progettò doveva generare da solo il proprio combustibile – producendo più plutonio di quanto ne consumasse, e in quantità illimitata. In breve, la sua efficienza: sei mesi di funzionamento in almeno sette anni di esistenza (dal 1987 al 1994, anno del reportage); la sua sicurezza: almeno tre incidenti funzionali gravi, tra cui pericolose fughe di sodie e perdite di argon; la sua sostenibilità: anche quand’era fermo, invece di produrre energia, ne consumava una quantità pari al fabbisogno di una città di 40.000 abitanti. Naturalmente, per i dirigenti industriali come per i cosiddetti esperti al loro servizio, prima dell’avvio della centrale gli incidenti erano tutti eventi matematicamente “altamente improbabili”, ognuno dei quali era possibile solo ogni 10.000 anni. Ma la concezione del tempo non è esattamente il punto forte dei nuclearisti, incuranti delle esperienze del passato come delle responsabilità del futuro – e difatti il primo incidente si presentò già nei primi mesi di funzionamento. Pur non essendo ancora tempo di propagandare gli “eventi climatici estremi” o di attribuire ogni responsabilità all’eccezionalità di uno tsunami senza precedenti, come avverrà al tempo di Fukushima, questa costosissima “speranza immensa”, avanguardistico fiore all’occhiello dell’industria nucleare approntato per produrre energia gratuita e illimitata, dovette poi nuovamente fermarsi, nel 1990, per un’intensa nevicata che ne fece crollare il tetto – un inconveniente, forse, non propriamente imprevedibile e incalcolabile. Ammantato di una propaganda scientifica che, al solito, ne presentava i promotori come pionieri solo relativamente compresi, come disinteressati ricercatori della conoscenza umana (“Abbiamo il dovere di andare in fondo  alla conoscenza nucleare”), imposto come d’abitudine quale opportunità economica da non perdere (con tanto d’inevitabile ricatto occupazionale per la popolazione locale), non fu semplicemente il fallimento tecnico e contabile di un colosso energivoro, emblematico della rapida obsolescenza con cui mirabolanti prototipi industriali possono ridursi a relitti inutilizzabili e ingestibili. Già nel decennio in cui il reattore venne costruito, a partire dal 1976, si ebbe infatti chiara l’idea di società militarizzata, autoritaria e repressiva che l’industria nucleare di per sé implica, onnipresente sin dalle sue origini storiche belliche e belliciste. Il 31 luglio 1977, dove avrebbe dovuto sorgere la centrale di Creys-Malville, una delle più partecipate manifestazioni antinucleari della storia francese fu caricata brutalmente dalla polizia, che arrivò a usare granate militari per intimidire i dimostranti, con la conseguenza di centinaia di feriti, tre mutilati e un morto – il giovane professore di fisica Vital Michalon, ucciso dall’esplosione di una granata. Neanche il suo cadavere poté fermare la costruzione di Superphénix, che venne realizzata comunque, di lì a un decennio, rivelandosi anche nei fatti come l’inutile e pericoloso mostro tecnologico già prefigurato dai manifestanti.
Perfino nell’anno di Chernobyl, pochi mesi dopo il disastro, la violenza della repressione propria dell’industria nucleare non si farà scrupoli a procedere con disinvoltura: in Italia, il 9 dicembre 1986, le proteste per impedire la centrale in costruzione da un decennio a Montalto di Castro (Viterbo) furono soffocate nel sangue (tra i molti feriti, anche un dimostrante colpito da un proiettile alla gamba, e un altro grave, con un’emorragia polmonare, per un lacrimogeno lanciatogli in pieno petto). E sarà evidente pure negli ultimissimi anni, ancora in Francia, con gli arresti di chi si oppone al deposito di rifiuti nucleari più grande d’Europa già predisposto nel bosco di Lejuc, nel dipartimento della Mosa, dove saranno interrate tonnellate di scorie che resteranno radioattive per migliaia di anni.


LE SACRIFICE (Emanuela Andreoli e Wladimir Tchertkoff, 2003)
Poco più di 20 minuti per uno dei rari documenti filmati che ci rimangano sulla vicenda dei liquidatori di Chernobyl, sacrificati con l’inganno, prontamente dimenticati dalla memoria collettiva (come accadrà anche con le migliaia di Fukushima) e condannati a una terribile morte in vita perché scongiurassero, a mani nude e con mezzi di fortuna, una catastrofe nucleare planetaria persino superiore a quella già avvenuta. Anche solo nell’incontro con un liquidatore bielorusso, si misura tutto lo sfruttamento e la devastazione inflitte a un singolo corpo, occultato come milioni d’altri dalle falsificazioni e delle reticenze della propaganda nuclearista di oggi e di ieri, che vorrebbe ridurre una tragedia incommensurabile, uno sterminio ad ampio raggio e dalle conseguenze anche genetiche e plurimillenarie, a poche centinaia di vittime e a poche migliaia di tumori alla tiroide, che oltretutto si vorrebbero quasi mai mortali. Già questo solo corpo, singolo essere umano immolato alla nuova religione dell’annientamento tecnoscientifico, paziente 0 dai sintomi inauditi, ridotto a invecchiare di decenni in un sol colpo e a decomporsi da vivo (come molti altri di cui porta testimonianze lancinanti e sconvolgenti Svetlana Aleksievic nel suo fondamentale reportage narrativo “Preghiera per Chernobyl. Cronaca del futuro”), è più che sufficiente a cogliere la vastità e l’ingiustizia dell’ecatombe universale che i nucleocrati hanno compiuto e continuano a perpetrare, parandosi dietro gli inattendibili dati istituzionali, attribuendo ogni colpa all’incompetenza tecnica dei sovietici, riducendo tutto – sempre – a bilanci economistici tra costi e benefici, e rimuovendo, semplicemente, l’umano.
Quello stesso imprevedibile “fattore umano”, incognita molesta e troppo viva, che a loro avviso sarebbe l’unica tara ammissibile dell’eccezionalmente “sicuro” sistema nucleare, quell’umano non ancora completamente sottomesso, non abbastanza resiliente, insufficientemente controllabile, non del tutto obbediente all’automazione totale che dovrà soverchiarlo e rottamarlo in via definitiva. Se non fosse che poi, non diversamente da Fukushima nel 2011, ad approntare il sarcofago per seppellire il reattore come a decontaminare quanto più possibile – foss’anche solo per pochi secondi letali – non intervenne alcuna forma d’illusoria Intelligenza Artificiale, ma sempre e comunque quello stesso umiliato, ricattato “fattore umano”. Nel disastro nucleare di Chernobyl, infatti, le componenti elettroniche interne dei robot si fondevano e gli automi si bloccavano – inservibili – per le radiazioni troppo elevate, e così ancora una volta si mandarono al macello radioattivo gli uomini, gli unici che potessero fare qualcosa. Ecco tutta la miseria dell’industria nucleare, ben nascosta dietro il gigantismo prometeico di una visione dell’uomo e del mondo che di colossale possiede solo la capacità di rendere tutto rovina.
Vale, ovviamente, lo stesso connubio di colpevolizzazione e ipocrita rimozione rispetto al’incontrollabilità della natura, imputata di aver provocato a Fukushima uno tsunami che nessun efficientissimo sistema di contenimento poteva prevedere né arginare. Eppure, al contempo, fu sempre quella stessa, acerrima nemica a portare lontano dall’entroterra abitato, verso l’oceano – grazie ad una fortuita congiuntura di venti – circa l’80% delle radiazioni, attenuando le conseguenze di un disastro nucleare comunque immane, così che i nuclearisti potessero tutt’oggi più facilmente riportarlo all’inqualificabile teoria degli “zero morti da radiazioni”. Di nuovo contabilizzando e datificando il vivente, e proprio là dove non si ha nemmeno la possibilità di misurare e stimare in modo attendibile l’entità dei danni da radioattività, per tempi e modalità di sviluppo poco calcolabili (specie nel breve termine, secondo gli usuali modelli matematici e strettamente quantitativi), quando non già mistificati e taciuti dai diretti interessati per paura dell’esclusione e della stigmatizzazione, come accadeva ai tempi degli hibakusha (gli irradiati di Hiroshima e Nagasaki, o “appestati dell’atomo”, invisibili ed emarginati come paradossali capri espiatori – non diversamente dagli stessi liquidatori di Chernobyl, o dai lavoratori precari e nomadi del nucleare francese o giapponese).

PLOGOFF, LES RÉVOLTÉS DU NUCLÉAIRE (François Reinhardt, 2021)
Anche per un’efficace ricezione “democratica” dell’energia nucleare, le consuete premesse sono quelle – sempre menzognere e interessate – degli imbonitori politici: nella campagna elettorale del 1974, quando la Francia si prepara – dopo lo choc petrolifero del ’73 – ad avviare il programma nucleare più ambizioso del mondo, il primo ministro francese Pierre Messmer assicura solennemente che non verrà imposto alcun impianto nucleare contro la volontà dei cittadini – lasciandosi tranquillamente smentire di lì a breve dalla realtà dei fatti. Sarebbe successo lo stesso diversi anni dopo, con il socialista Mitterand, asceso al potere nel 1981 anche grazie alle sue prese di distanza dagli eccessi delle politiche nucleari, per poi condiscendere, negli anni del suo governo, alla costruzione di 38 delle 56 centrali attualmente esistenti in Francia.
Ma in quel breve volgere di anni, tra Messmer e Mitterand, accadde qualcosa d’imprevisto, capace di cogliere alla sprovvista la potente lobby nuclearista e il solido complesso militare-scientifico nazionale.  Quando il governo francese, contraddicendo quanto appena promesso in campagna elettorale, individua cinque siti per la costruzione di strutture elettronucleari in Bretagna, senza alcuna forma di consultazione democratica e senza informare le popolazioni locali, procedendo direttamente a quelle che erano occupazioni militari sotto mentite spoglie progressiste (condotte nel nome di una dichiarata indipendenza energetica del Paese), ecco che uno di queste sedi preselezionate, Plogoff,  reagisce con forza straordinaria e del tutto inaspettata – qui raccontata nella più recente delle ricostruzioni documentarie. Individuandolo come sito adatto, la prefettura dava per scontato che questo piccolo villaggio prevalentemente di anziani, perlopiù pescatori e marinai che avevano obbedito tutta la loro vita, non avrebbe opposto alcuna resistenza. Né l’avrebbero fatto le donne, i giovani, i bambini. Errore.
Nei primi mesi del 1980, quando i militari arrivano in paese per preparare l’allestimento della centrale, tutti gli abitanti del piccolo paese, dai 7 ai 77 anni (sindaco incluso), danno vita ad una delle più tenaci e creative guerriglie di logoramento che siano state mai tentate contro la violenza congiunta di Stato e industrie. Consapevoli della portata distruttiva della minaccia nucleare “civile” rispetto all’integrità e alla biodiversità delle terre e delle acque di cui vivevano, ostili alle forze militari e a uno Stato incurante delle opinioni e dei saperi locali, ostruiscono i passaggi dei militari facendovi rovesciare dai netturbini tutto il pattume del paese, le fosse biologiche domestiche, badilate di letame, approntando buche e distese di cocci di bottiglia; le donne, anziane e devote cattoliche, senza lasciarsi intimorire fronteggiano tutto il giorno i soldati insultandoli e canzonandoli in tutti i modi, seguendoli e deridendoli persino quando si allontanano dagli appostamenti per urinare, logorandogli i nervi; parate farsesche e surreali si susseguono contro gli occupanti, e i più giovani s’improvvisano a costruire un grande, affollato ovile proprio nel luogo in cui dev’essere eretta la centrale, così da impedire da subito i primi lavori di scavo e costruzione; anche davanti ai fucili, molti abitanti di Plogoff rispondono con le pietre, senza mai rinunciare alla lotta. Il paesino assurse in breve a caso nazionale, e tutt’oggi è ricordato come una piccola Woodstock del movimento antinucleare, capace di richiamare sostenitori da ogni dove. La sua vicenda ispirò pure una storia a fumetti militante e apocrifa di Asterix, esemplare come quel che accadde realmente a Plogoff, un piccolo villaggio bretone capace di mettere in ginocchio il colosso elettronucleare della EDF, la politica nucleare del governo francese e le centinaia di soldati che li rappresentavano, con i propri soli mezzi e senza l’aiuto di nessun mediatore – avvocato, scienziato o politico che fosse. Probabilmente fu questo ciò che più fece paura al governo francese, che per soffocare le proteste si trovò costretto a mandarvi i soldati paracadutisti dalla guerra in Libano (i quali arrivarono a prendere a calci anche le donne anziane), ad arrestare e processare sindaco e cittadini, che compatti e solidali si presentarono tutti al processo provvisti di fionde al collo – compresi quanti  non avevano lanciato alcuna pietra – con l’offensiva nuclearista ridotta infine ad arrendersi, a desistere dalla costruzione della centrale.

Sebbene il suo esempio non venne imitato allo stesso modo altrove e il programma nucleare francese andò comunque avanti, spedito e pressoché illeso, in molte altre parti della Francia (inclusa la citata Creys-Malville), la risposta anomala di Plogoff rimase un modello straordinario ed eccezionalmente riuscito di disobbedienza civile. I suoi abitanti, con un’istintiva saggezza che oggi verrebbe probabilmente derubricata a ignoranza, finanche reazionaria e contraria al progresso tecnoscientifico, non si lasciarono incantare dalle rassicurazioni di propagandisti, tecnici e scienziati, non si limitarono a una lotta regionalistica ponendo invece un rifiuto assoluto al nucleare (“né qui, né altrove”), né si lasciarono nemmeno corrompere dalla promessa della partecipazione agli utili della centrale, prorompendo tra gli altri con uno slogan esemplare e in netta controtendenza allora come oggi, espressione di un pensiero decisivo e inaccettabile soprattutto oggi, in un’epoca ben più tecnocratica e totalitaria di allora, ossia: “Siamo tutti esperti-scienziati!” Ebbero la lungimiranza, anni prima del disastro di Chernobyl, di riconoscere come fasulli gli studi d’impatto biologico approntati per accontentare e fuorviare gli ecologisti, le inchieste d’utilità pubblica dagli esiti già programmati e inconclusi anche all’avvio dei lavori (prima le centrali, poi le eventuali critiche), i dossier illeggibili e reticenti che in poche eufemistiche pagine pretendevano di liquidare la questione della radioattività. Gli abitanti di Plogoff ne bruciarono simbolicamente e pubblicamente le copie, non cascarono nel gioco co-gestionario dei controesperti e delle controperizie, non si rimisero alla docilità di cittadini obbedienti che delegano ad altri la forza e il gesto essenziale dell’opposizione. Il loro fu un rifiuto fermo, definitivo e collettivo – lezione difficile e coraggiosa, certo mitizzabile a livello pubblicistico come l’icastica lotta di un David dei nostri tempi contro il Moloch della crescita illimitata, ma nei fatti d’ogni giorno, nella concretezza anche ruvida e sgradevole, nell’imprevedibilità tutta umana e nella poetica libera e fiera, semplicemente – una lezione tuttora inascoltata, e tuttora da seguire.
Le donne e gli uomini di Plogoff, in fin dei conti, riuscirono a esprimere un tipo di rifiuto molto simile a quello auspicato da Pier Paolo Pasolini nella sua ultima intervista rilasciata a Furio Colombo, il 1 novembre 1975, poche ore prima di venire ucciso.
Quella stessa intervista, divulgata a vent’anni dalla morte, in cui sosteneva che siamo tutti in pericolo, e in cui diceva:  “Pretendo che tu ti guardi intorno e ti accorga della tragedia. Qual è la tragedia? La tragedia è che non ci sono più esseri umani, ci sono strane macchine che sbattono l’una contro l’altra”.
E aggiungeva: “Ecco io vedo così la bella truppa di intellettuali, sociologi, esperti e giornalisti delle intenzioni più nobili, le cose succedono qui e la testa guarda di là. Non dico che non c’è il fascismo. Dico: smettete di parlarmi del mare mentre siamo in montagna.”
E suggeriva: “Il rifiuto per funzionare deve essere grande, totale. Non piccolo,  non su questo o quel punto. Dev’essere «assurdo», non di buon senso.”
Oggi, adesso, ne saremo capaci?

Dario Stefanoni, pubblicato in L’Urlo della Terra, num.12, Luglio 2024,
www.resistenzealnanomondo.org

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NUOVA PUBBLICAZIONE!!!
L’ideologia del tecno-mondo. Resistere alla megamacchina.
Silvia Guerini e Costantino Ragusa
acro-pólis, 2024
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Transhumanism: the ideology of the techno-world

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Transhumanism: the ideology of the techno-world
Silvia Guerini and Costantino Ragusa – Resistenze al nanomondo


A chapter from the book: Silvia Guerini and Costantino Ragusa, The ideology of the techno-world. Resisting the megamachine, acro-pólis, 2024.
We will soon publish an English translation of the entire book on our website: Resistenze al nanomondo, www.resistenzealnanomondo.org

“The goal of transhumanism is precisely to replace the natural with the planned”1.
James Hughes

From the First Industrial Revolution, we have come to define technological developments since the 21st century as the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Developments made possible by information technology that characterised the Third Industrial Revolution. In our view, defining the developments of the converging techno-sciences as a Fourth Industrial Revolution is somewhat reductive. First of all, this definition refers to a purely industrial process when the current transformations concern life itself. We do not have a transformation of a factory system that then has consequences for society as a whole, but we have from the very beginning a process that insinuates itself into society and into people’s existence. We are not confronted with developments that simply result from previous technical innovations, but we are confronted with a precise idea of the human being that can be realised thanks to the techno-sciences that can now extend into every dimension, penetrating right into bodies and life processes. Even advances in Artificial Intelligence, for example, do not stem from some new technological innovation, but from more powerful computers, more efficient algorithms and above all more available data.

Techno-sciences become a system, they become a horizon of meaning, they become the context of people’s existence, they become inevitable. They cannot be considered as technologies that fit into every sphere of society, leaving the possibility of using them or not, allowing a dimension of autonomy with respect to them. Once inserted, they become the environment itself, merging with it, shaping and transforming it according to their characteristics and according to the transhumanist ideology they carry. In doing so they become the new normal by shaping and transforming being-in-the-world, perceiving themselves in the world, being in the world and acting in the world. Ultimately transforming the human being.

It can be understood how in itself techno-sciences are not neutral: ‘what we consider the neutrality of technology is only our neutrality with respect to it’2.

The endless debate around their neutrality and their positive or negative use could end around the simple consideration that the harmful consequences cannot be considered as side effects: as far as genetic engineering technologies and nanotechnology are concerned, these are always announced disasters that among other things serve to speed up and normalise other steps.

Just as the atomic scientists observing the results of their tests on the inhabitants of the Bikini atolls did not have before their eyes side effects, but the very manifestation of nuclear research, the researchers developing gene editing with CRISPR/Cas9 do not have before their eyes the disappearance of DNA fragments and transmissible genetic modifications as undesirable effects, but the very possibility of intervening in the evolution of living beings.

Just as a tunnel effect microscope is not a simple instrument, but presupposes a world in which matter is manipulated at the nanoscale, techno-sciences presuppose a world in which the living becomes mere matter to be engineered and redesigned, in which every phenomenon is controlled in order to direct its direction and evolution. Human beings included.

The issue is much more radical than a debate reduced and flattened to utilities, advantages, disadvantages, risks, dangers, the reflection should be taken a little further, out of their realm of quantity, out of their mechanism, out of calculations and predictions to arrive at the radical questioning of the conception that sees the living as a machine. In this conception, only what can be measured and analysed has value, and it is this that becomes the real. But what will come out of tables, diagrams, models, enclosures, laboratories, test tubes and slides will be a minced, simplified, impoverished, degraded real. Nothing compared to the love with which Alfred Russel Wallace observed the bird of paradise in the forest of New Guinea or with which Jean-Henry Fabre spied the comings and goings of a beetle in Provence. That kind of science has disappeared, precisely because a Fabre behind the flattery of the academic world and the great scientific institutions made Victor Hugo’s words his own: ”I hate the stench of death from laboratories”, referring to vivisection on animals practised as profusely in his time as still today.

If a living being is conceived as a machine, one cannot get to know it through simple observation in its environment, it becomes necessary to break it down into its parts. ”It is in this light that one can understand why scientists think it is possible to learn more about life by cutting a frog open in a laboratory than by sitting by a pond observing frogs and fish, mosquitoes and water lilies living together”3. Modern science with its quantitative and utilitarian approach already had in its assumptions the dissection and manipulation laboratory.

Ernst Jünger, with extreme lucidity, glimpsed the paradigm of the laboratory: ”the dead element implicit in our science is demonstrated in the museic impulse, that is, to arrange what is alive in the sphere of the immobile and invulnerable, and perhaps even to form an enormous material catalogue, painfully ordered, that faithfully mirrors our life”4 and continuing with his reflections: ”many more things become visible to the poet than to the scientist, […] he can grasp connections of a different order. It is he who points out to us the essential tasks” and continues: ”He who sets out to describe a forest as an artist cannot argue with those who have specialised knowledge of parasitic plants, mole nests, cockchafer fighting and so on. He would do well to recognise from the outset that they are all right in front of him. But that has nothing to do with the forest”5.

Already in this first mechanistic conception of the living, which later became genetic and computerised, a social mechanics, a genetic and social engineering, a social algorithmisation is presupposed, whose rationality is intended to be total for a systematic manipulation and redesign of every dimension. Right down to life in vitro, sterilised by itself. To scientifically organise humanity is the legitimate claim of modern science that has become techno-science, of the eugenicist and transhumanist ideology that from its beginnings sets out to generate and guide the evolution of a new humanity and the smooth running of everything.
The techno-sciences thus become the supreme instance: everything must be judged from them and, of course, without ever departing from their paradigm of progress at all costs because progress must not be halted and we must participate in it as responsible co-managers of the risks and disasters announced. The technological universe becomes the only horizon of meaning, nothing else can be conceived and the only truth is the technical one.

Already in the 1950s, Jacques Ellul and Bernard Charbonneau, having well understood the direction of the techno-scientific system, were trying to open the eyes of most people with a strong and lucid critique against the ”genetic bomb, scientific eugenics, the fabrication of man by man”, the ”man-machine: ‘a man of flesh who must be integrated into this iron mechanism”, to use Charbonneau’s words.

Ellul identified five paradigms of the advance of the technical system: ”[…] it seems to me that I detect five lines of force in this race of the technical universe towards absurdity. The first paradigm is the desire to standardise everything, an ancient tendency but one that was only a tendency […] the second is the obsession with change at all costs, it is the popular form taken by the myth of progress […] the third is growth at all costs […] the fourth is doing things faster and faster […] and finally the fifth is the rejection of any judgement on what is done by techniques”6.
”Is it necessary to consider the totality of the human being? Or should we conceive of him as a collection of separate parts, a mechanical machine composed of multiple cogs that can be detached, transferred, reassembled in another way…?’ Ellul asked himself, answering: ‘Because that is precisely what all these genetic engineering operations are about: the implicit denial of man as a person, to consider him as an automaton, a robot from which a part is taken, grafted, replaced’7.

The transhumanist movement emerged in the United States, in Silicon Valley, in the late 1980s, but let us take a few steps back in history to understand this ideology and to trace its origins. Let us go back to 1883, when Francis Galton first used the term eugenics, recommending a ”gentle form of eugenics”. Transhumanism is eugenics, the selection of the human. Eugenics over time has taken different forms and languages, but remained unchanged in its principles of selection of the human.

In the 1920s, the term ectogenesis was coined by the geneticist and biologist J.B.S. Haldane to denote the development of a new being outside the maternal body. Haldane considered ectogenesis ”an important opportunity for social engineering” inscribed in a eugenic society where a complete separation of procreation from sex would lead to a ”liberation of humanity in a whole new sense”8. Haldane was interested in understanding the origin of life in order to direct its development. His aim, and that of the coterie of scientists he represented, was to synthesise living creatures in biochemistry laboratories, an aspiration that would take shape in synthetic biology and genetic engineering laboratories in the years to follow.

The obsession with the creation of life shines through from the very beginning of this research, in the words of the research biologist Jacques Loeb: ”I wanted to take life into my own hands and play with it. I wanted to manipulate it in my laboratory like any other chemical reaction, to initiate it, to stop it, to study it under any conditions, to direct it at will9and in his book The Mechanics of Life, whose title already represents the mechanistic conception of the living, we read: ”Our social and ethical life will have to receive a scientific basis and our rules of conduct will have to be harmonised with the results of scientific biology”.

Haldane together Julian Huxley forcefully promoted ‘positive eugenics’. The control of human reproduction, depopulation, and the control and management of peoples have always been the obsessions and aims that have united the powerful. If we think of the Fabian Society’s Webbs’ club in England, it brought together eugenicists, technocrats and transhumanists, both reform-minded socialists and right-wing conservatives, who disagreed on many political issues, but were in perfect agreement on the fundamentals.

We come to 1957 when Julian Huxley and Theilard de Chardin coined the term transhumanism to describe the belief in the possibility of transcendence of humankind. A new term to be used in place of eugenics, a term that by then had a bad reputation, but it is sufficient to read the 1946 document ”UNESCO: Purposes and Philosophy of the Organisation” drafted by Julian Huxley, the organisation’s first director-general, to realise that eugenics had never disappeared: ”With its philosophy and broad cultural and ideological baggage, the organisation wishes to assist the emergence of a general and unique world culture. […] For the time being, the indirect effects of civilisation are likely to be dysgenic rather than eugenic; and in any case it seems likely that the deadweight of genetic stupidity, physical weakness, mental instability and inclinations to disease, which are already present in the human species, will prove to be additional burdens to the real progress that is to be achieved. Therefore, even if it is entirely true that any radically eugenic policy will be politically and psychologically impossible for many years to come, it will become important for Unesco to see that the eugenics problem is considered with the greatest care, and that the thinking of the public is informed of the issues involved, so that what may now be unthinkable may at least become thinkable Eugenics is yet another and quite different kind of borderline subject, on the borderline between the scientific and the unscientific, constantly in danger of being regarded as a pseudo-science based on preconceived political ideas or assumptions of racial or class superiority and inferiority. However, it is essential that eugenics should be brought entirely within the confines of science because, as already indicated, in the not too distant future the problem of securing an average social position for human beings is likely to become urgent; and this can only be achieved by applying the findings of a certainly scientific eugenics. […] the applications of genetics in the field of eugenics immediately raise the question of values – what characteristics and qualities should we wish to foster in the human beings of the future? […] in order to carry out its work, an organisation such as Unesco needs not only a set of aims and objectives for itself, but also a working philosophy, a working hypothesis with reference to the existence of man and his aims and objectives, a hypothesis that will dictate, or at least indicate, a well-defined line to deal with these problems”.

Well before Nazi Germany, between 1905 and 1972, the USA carried out an immense programme of forced sterilisation for the disabled, psychiatric patients, the blind, the deaf, prisoners, the homeless, lepers, syphilitics, tuberculosis. Eugenics researchers, with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and other American philanthropists, promoted eugenic legislation in more than twenty-seven US states, with forced sterilisations for ”mentally deficient inferiors”, so that by the 1960s, when most of these laws were beginning to be repealed, more than 60,000 people had been sterilised for eugenic purposes.

Hitler was inspired by a famous American biologist, one of the advocates of the sterilisation campaign, for his racial extermination programmes and it was a Nazi physiologist who first came up with the idea that one could remove the nucleus from an ovum and then introduce the nucleus of another ovum into it, thus inventing the concept of the ‘mother-carrier’.

The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heritage and Eugenics – later renamed the Max Planck Institutes – was founded in Berlin in 1927 thanks in part to funding from the Rockefeller Foundation interested in the research on twins conducted by Von Verschuer, director of the Institute, eugenicist, pioneer in genetic research for the study of heredity, supporter of forced sterilisation programmes. At his side as assistant was Josef Mengele. After the war Von Verschuer taught human genetics at the University of Münster and became a member of the American Eugenetics Society. While the atrocious experiments during the Nazi period in the concentration camps are today recognised and remembered, there is a tendency to forget the role played by renowned clinics and research centres that continued to carry out the same eugenic principles even after the end of the war, often with the same scientists, the latter apparently enjoying a strange immunity that differentiated them from other war criminals. Evidently in the eyes of the scientific research world they were not so criminal.

The American Eugenics Society in the 1960s began to take an interest in developments in genetics and thus became the Society for the Study of Social Biology, stating that the change of name did not represent a change of policy, but rather a desire to place emphasis on studies of the biological, social and medical aspects that shape human evolution, conducted with a view to intervening in it.

By arriving at the cybernetic paradigm and the development of genetic engineering and synthetic biology, we can understand that transhumanism is both the culmination of techno-scientific development and the convergence of biotechnology, nanotechnology, computer science, neuroscience and the ideology behind it.

Nanotechnology that reaches the deepest levels of the world’s structure and biotechnology that reaches the deepest levels of the living bring about a substantial transformation. Whereas previously artefacts were constructed from natural elements without being able to disregard their limits, with the modification at the atomic level of matter the same natural elements are reconstructed to overcome these limits or to make them take on new characteristics. The natural world thus becomes an artificial category, and molecular fabrication brings a completely different idea of what is to be considered a material limit, and nanotechnology makes it possible to enter into the very nature of matter. At the same time, biotechnology opens up the possibility of intervening in life processes with genetic modification and genetic bricolage.

Transhumanists are proponents of what they call ‘conscious self-directed evolution’: taking the destiny of species into their own hands with the development of biotechnology, nanotechnology, cognitive science and artificial intelligence, giving a precise direction to the path of evolution of the human species and the entire living being.

“The idea of a fixed species becomes problematic and the criterion of reproduction loses its meaning. […] The more powerful and accessible our technologies become, the more our purpose will be to define ourselves. Consequently, human groups will distinguish themselves according to the values that will guide their choices in how to use these new powers to determine their morphology and destiny’10 states Nick Bostrom. The idea is that physical and cognitive characteristics and the genome itself can and should be questioned, both in philosophical and operational terms, and not just to make a few changes, but to completely and radically redefine the design of the human and the very concept of being human. An essentially anthropotechnical conception in which the human being is indeterminate and is co-constructed with technology, an indetermination that is technical hybridity, in which the very nature of man, his biological existence, is technological.

In this ideology, the body becomes a hindrance, a limitation to be overcome, optimised, implemented in a process that will never end. The body becomes a hacherable platform and the techno-sciences, which can offer multiple and recombinable possibilities, are seen as liberating, interestingly enough, we find this conception both in the world of biotechnological research and in the academic world of transfeminist cyborg theorists. A supposed liberation from natural constraints for a voluntary submission to technological constraints.

Directly from the transhumanist world comes ”morphological freedom”: the right to modify oneself in accordance with one’s wishes. Nick Bostrom defines it as ”the civil right of a person to maintain or modify one’s body according to one’s will, through informed and consensual recourse to, or rejection of, available therapeutic or enhancing medical technologies”11.

Gender ideology in its meaning-demolishing work paves the way for the normalisation of the alteration of human biology and genetic engineering12. From Martine Rothblatt we read: ”Ensuring the ethical use of biotechnology will be as great a concern for transhumanists as it is for defenders of gender freedom”. The human being is thus ready to become a permanent construction site, an endless disassembly and reassembly, a neutral human being made sterile ready for the laboratories of artificial reproduction. A permanent mutation in which everything must be interchangeable and mutable in order to become artificial.

Transhumanism is a profound attack on the sexed roots, on the dimension of procreation and on reality itself. We are born with a sex, sex is not assigned at birth, which is why it is essential to erase this link with life and reality, this our first recognition in the world, of ourselves and others. The meaning of male and female vanishes, they become mere subjective sensations, no longer the reality of bodies, and subjective desire becomes truer than objective reality. The dissociation with one’s own sexual body leads to a dissociation with reality and accustoms the mind to all kinds of lies13.

Medically assisted procreation (MAP) is one of the Trojan horses of transhumanism because it creates the context in which artificial reproduction will become the normal way of coming into the world.

It is a process that will have no limits from the moment that when the logic of artificial reproduction is accepted, the direct consequence is the continuous optimisation and implementation of the whole process: the embryo becomes a product and what is a product can be subjected to any selection, modification, experimentation. The laboratory environment transforms the process of birth into a technical operation and with artificial reproduction we are transformed as we come into the world.

Eugenics, the driving force and direction of genetic research, has also been present ever since the origin of artificial reproduction technologies, in their zootechnical development and in the transition to humans. Richard Edward, creator of the birth of Louise Brown, the first test-tube baby, stated as early as the 1980s that when it is technically possible it will be legitimate to genetically modify the human species. At the moment we still do not have genetically modified babies, but in 2018 the British Bioethics Committee stated that ”Modifying the DNA of an embryo to influence the characteristics of a future person [hereditary genetic modification, Ed. note] could be morally permissible and the threshold of the baby girls edited in China has been crossed, and it is a threshold from which no one can think of going back. Meanwhile, the thought is being instilled that it is preferable and safer to hand procreation over to technicians. Natural procreation will at first become something irresponsible, unsafe, unhygienic, not sufficiently submissible to algorithmic techno-medical controls, at a later stage it will become criminal to continue to want to procreate without selecting gametes and embryos. Artificial reproduction will become a ‘moral duty’14.

The so-called right to have a child of people with sterility or infertility from organic or mostly environmental causes, the so-called right to have a child of same-sex couples and single women, and the problem of denatality serve as a pretext for the normalisation of assisted fertilisation techniques15.
The human being of transhumanism will be a biomedicinalised human being who will have to correspond to continually updated perfectibility criteria for continuous adaptation to a machine world. A techno-scientific adaptability that will become the only possibility. The principle of the cybernetic paradigm whereby ”we have always modified our environment so radically that we are now forced to modify ourselves’16takes concrete and dramatic form.

An analysis that is the child of the myopia that generated it continues to think of the forthcoming technological developments as accessible only to the rich, where they would create a division of society between the super-rich implemented and the super-poor. Certainly, a divide will be created, indeed, it will be consolidated, but it will not be a question of class, but between those who will accept to inoculate themselves, to undergo preventive gene therapies, to use assisted reproduction clinics, to implant a microchip under the skin, and those who will not accept this. Only at first will certain technological developments come at a high cost, the aim is for everyone to have access to them and to want to have access to them, the aim is to spread these technologies that will have to universalise and become the norm. The progressive and leftist world is already ready to fight for equality in submission to techno-scientific domination and for poverty the yoke of universal income will take care of it.

It is crucial to realise that transhumanists are not a few fringe technology freaks influenced by science fiction, but are founders, funders, and executives of numerous foundations, institutes, start-ups, research projects, and companies of international importance. They advise the defence, security and biomedical sectors, they have the power to direct the cutting-edge research taking place within technopoles, the policies of governments, international bodies and organisations. They are able to bring into play very strong political pressures and considerable means to shift balances and cutting-edge research, even to the point of promoting certain paradigms, supported by themselves, reinventing even bioethics to their benefit.

Natascha and Max Moore, Nick Bostrom, David Pearce, James J. Hughes, Hans Moravec, Ray Kurzweill, to mention only the best known names, are the founders of the worldwide transhumanist association, now known as Humanity+. This ideology is not always immediately recognisable, it has the characteristic of being fluid, adapting itself to multiple contexts even apparently at odds with each other, thus we have a transhumanism with the glittering progressive face of LGBTQ+ rights and a transhumanism that penetrates conservative circles championing, for example, the fight against denatality, but obviously offering artificial reproduction techniques as a (false) solution.

In order to avoid the risk of transhumanism being reduced to a tendency of a few eccentric researchers, of philosophers confusing reality with their dreams, one must not focus on what is not yet there. If we are talking about nanotechnology, we should not focus on the risk of the ‘Gray goo’ catastrophe – the uncontrolled replication of nanorobots – and similarly, if we are talking about transhumanism, we should not focus on the projects of cryopreservation of the brain or the transposition of the brain into a computer, but on what is already there. Transhumanist ideology – the overcoming of limits, the implementation of the human being, the redesigning and artificialisation of the living – is not merely abstract speculation, but has already materialised in transgenic chimeras, medically assisted procreation, genetic editing, genetically modified organisms, medical genetic engineering technologies, brain implants, new smart city devices… The mass testing and dissemination of nanotechnological mRNA gene sera for Covid and the development of new self-replicating mRNA sera have exceeded all our expectations. What was needed was a network capable of marking out the new time, of connecting what was previously isolated, of bringing together and simultaneous what was not yet communicating, of putting bodies and machines in constant relation: the 5G network and the forthcoming 6G network.

1 James Hughes, Democratic transhumanism 2.0, 2002.

2 Jean Bernard-Maugiron, Bernard Charbonneau & Jacques Ellul, Deux libertaires gascons unis par une pensée commune, LesAmis de Barteby, 2017.

3 Wolfi Landstreicher, A Balanced Account of the World: A Critical Look at the Scientific World View, transl.it., A Balanced Account of the World: A Critical Look at the Scientific World View, in The Scream of the Earth, no.7, July 2019.

4 Ernst Jünger, Auf den Marmorklippen, 1939, translated in Italian, Sulle scogliere di marmo, Mondadori, 1945.

5 Ernst Jünger, An der Zeitmauer, 1959 translated in Italian, Al muro del tempo, Volpe, 1969.

6Jacques Ellul, Le Bluff technologique, Hachette, 1988.

7 Jacques Ellu, op. cit.

8 J.B.S. Haldane, Daedalus, or Science and the Future, Cambridge, 1923.

9 Jenny Kleeman, Sex Robots & Vegan Meat, 2020, translated in Italian, Sex Robots and Vegan Meat, Il Saggiatore, 2021.

10 Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence, Bollati and Boringhieri, 2018.

11 Nick Bostrom, In Defense of Posthuman Dignity, in Bioethics, XIX, 2005

12 For further study: Silvia Guerini, Dal corpo neutro al cyborg postumano. Riflessioni critiche all‘ideologia gender, Asterios Editore, second edition 2023; Il Mondo Nuovo 2.0, Elisa Boscarol’s youtube channel.

13 Silvia Guerini, Dalla negazione del trascendente all‘umanità cibernetica e transumana, in L’Urlo della Terra, no. 12, July 2024, https://www.resistenzealnanomondo.org/necrotecnologie/dalla-negazione-del-trascendente-allumanita-cibernetica-e-transumana-silvia-guerini/, accessed 24/10/2024, h. 19.47

14 For further study: A.A. V.V., Silvia Guerini, Costantino Ragusa (eds.), I figli della macchina. Biotechnology, artificial reproduction and eugenics, Asterios Editore, 2023.

15 Silvia Guerini, Verso la riproduzione artificiale per tutti. New guidelines for access to assisted reproduction techniques in Italy, in https://www.resistenzealnanomondo.org/necrotecnologie/verso-la-riproduzione-artificiale-per-tutti-nuove-linee-guida-per-laccesso-alle-tecniche-di-fecondazione-assistita-in-italia/, consulted on 24/10/2024, h. 19.23

16 Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: O Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, MIT Press, 1948.

From the denial of the transcendent to cybernetic and transhuman humanity

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From the denial of the transcendent to cybernetic and transhuman humanity
Silvia Guerini – Resistenze al nanomondo (www.resistenzealnanomondo.org)

Today we are faced with an unprecedented total war on bodies, on life, on nature, on humanity.
A war on all fronts with techno-scientific developments that open up unprecedented scenarios.
Key concepts such as freedom, truth, justice, ethics, reality crumble, or are distorted to be reformulated in a way that denies their very meaning.
We are faced with the metamorphosis of the human and of his existence, in which everything will change irreversibly and, with the advent of the transhuman, not even a trace of the human will remain.
Techno-scientific developments are embedded much deeper than we could imagine, the technocratic and transhumanist elites, thanks to the various thresholds broken down from time to time by these developments, aim to radically transform the way of thinking, of interpreting reality, to relate, they also aim to transform the so-called common feeling of people to create a precise mindset, a precise mentality that will generalize and take root, becoming the one that one will think they have always had or, in any case, the right, good, improve.
We will lose adherence to things, adherence to the real world due to a dissociation from our bodies, from reality, from nature. We will lose the sense that something clashes with the emergency narratives that we will see follow one after the other. You will lose the self-defense of your health, integrity, dignity, the self-defense of your body and your loved ones. That self-defense that was perhaps a little confused at times, without adequate tools to understand a broader plan, but which was necessary due to the opposition to the genetic serums. That deep no to experimental drugs in one’s own bodies and in the bodies of one’s children. Today, what seemed to most to be irrational fear and risky predictions unfortunately takes shape in the consequences of these serums: deaths, early cancers, infertility, new predictive model with mRNA gene therapies, changes to international health agreements, new serums and new pandemics horizon.
The great work of dissolution will have rainbow and bright colours, it will wave the banner of freedom, self-determination, equality, comfort and the saving power of techno-science. The best of all possible worlds.
Freedom is one of the most abused words today. A freedom that has become rubbish, a substitute, a fetish. A freedom for sale and object of negotiation. A freedom that has lost its meaning. A supposed freedom that killed all true freedom.
In the name of freedom today we have a perversion of freedom, the human must free himself from his identity, his biological sex, his family, his culture, ultimately he must free himself as a human being. But we cannot choose our sex, we are born with a sex, we cannot choose our family, we are born from a mother and a father – yet for now – and we cannot choose our place of origin. This supposed freedom of choice leads to the dissolution of humanity. It leads to a broken man.
Being free does not mean being without ties, constraints, roots. It is not the absence of these bonds that makes one free, but their presence.
In the progressive transhuman ideology, the rejection of reality is claimed and motivated by the fact that it was not possible to choose. A supermarket logic in which you can select, order and buy a child from a catalog and send him back if you are not satisfied, in which you can select and order gametes for infinite combinations and genetic bricolage, in which even your own sex can be choose and change as if you were wearing a dress. A metastatic logic that has already disseminated metastases in all possible dimensions.
There flows an aversion and hatred towards everything that is life, viscera, body, blood, nature that cuts off everything that preceded us and from which we come. A culture of non-life.
A permanent mutation. Changing incessantly, this is the new mantra, changing sex, body, family, relationships, places. Eternally dissatisfied, unstable, insecure, anxious. Everything must be transitory, interchangeable, mutable, protean. Everything must become artificial.
The new generations will be eternal bored young people, compulsive consumers of disposable goods and relationships who hate their father and mother, who reject everything from which they derive, everything they did not choose, everything they did not desire. Rejecting everything that life puts before them, incapable of living, of facing hardships, sacrifices, abandonments, suffering, pain. Children of the I want everything immediately, of the forbidden to forbid, of the absolute desire from which tragedies are then produced. An anesthetized and sterile existence. An empty existence. No longer believing in anything, but only in themselves, they will be ready to believe anything. This is the new humanity that can be shaped by the technocratic and transhumanist elite, adaptable to life in a test tube and to the laboratory world.
An ideological hood permeates and permeates every area, rewrites history and makes us believe that this is the best of all possible worlds. Immersed in a great deception we have grown up believing that the transhuman progressive left that claims what are considered the right ideals of freedom, justice, equality is on the right side of history against absolute evil. But this is a great deception and a great reversal. Even words are distorted from their meaning. We have seen how that freedom has become freedom of consumption, freedom without limits, surrogate freedom. We have seen how that equality has brought homologation and cancellation of differences, both those between men and women, and those between cultures and peoples. We have seen how that justice has become a victimistic whining and a creation of new pseudo rights. All of this is the advancement of that transhuman power of absolute dominion over life.
And the assumptions were very clear: “Our destiny is linked to technoscience, where nothing is so sacred that it cannot be redesigned and transformed in such a way as to broaden our perspective of freedom, extending it to gender and the human. […] There is nothing, we maintain, that cannot be studied scientifically and manipulated technologically”, we read from a trans-cyborg-feminist manifesto1. From this spoiled trans-cyborg-feminist compost and toxic queerness – as, not by chance, they like to define it – comes word that we should adapt to survive on an infected planet, become mutants in a world of infinite contamination, among hybrids, surrogates, instruments living, posthuman relatives, transspecies ectogenetic CRISP neutr* children. After all, what else to expect from a cultural and political humus that considers the body as “an invention, a hackable platform, a malleable and modifiable entity” to be reinvented and redesigned thanks to the “subversive” possibilities of techno-sciences.
“We need to put an end to this idea of family”, better comrades* alien* cyborg multispecies xenotoxic mutants, to be in tune with the latest trends. We really need to put an end to the idea that we have an origin, a history, a memory, a sexual body, with the idea that the human being is a spiritual subject, with the idea that bonds and constraints exist. With the idea that around us there is a natural world which in turn has constraints, relationships, balances, limits. With the idea that a reality exists around us that is independent of subjective desire. Ultimately we must do away with the idea of being human2.
While we denounce the contamination between GMO plants and traditional plants for the impossibility of coexistence and we are firmly in the reality of the erosion and degradation of living things, there are those who amuse themselves and play with flights of fancy hoping that “the recognition of the transfer “horizontal genetics as a widespread phenomenon overturns the traditional certainty that genes are transmitted only in a vertical line, from parents to offspring, and cannot be exchanged laterally, crossing species boundaries” is the key to dismantling the hetero-cis-normative-repressive society3. We are no longer surprised. Everything is prepared – on the part of power and on the part of its followers – for the advent of the trans man and trans existence. Trans-gender, trans-race, trans-age, trans-able, trans-place, trans-species, trans-genic.
A profound anthropological transformation is taking place in the name of freedom and self-determination. Birth and death are always linked in the multiple transformations underway.
There cannot be a free society that can admit that one can be free not to be free, it is not freedom to be able to deprive oneself of freedom. Just as it is not freedom, but the death of the State, to create the conditions that lead a depressed teenager and an elderly person tired of living to the so-called “sweet death”. Just as an existence intoxicated by poisons that can only negotiate the thresholds of its own contamination by having to accept the logic of damage reduction, the logic of compensation, the logic of compensation, the logic of the further pseudo technical solution is not freedom. Stating that a life can be killed or euthanized means that this life is worth much less if it is instead stated that it is unavailable, criteria are established by which that life can be eliminated and this actually leads to a theft of freedom and exposes everyone to risk of falling into those criteria. Criteria by their nature changeable and not based on the principle of unavailability of life. In a society that promotes the culture of non-life, waste, transhumanist performativity and the inadequacy of bodies with respect to technology, the rhetoric of being free to choose whether to resort to certain practices is a dangerous slippery slope: from law you can get to the duty to cause death and to die if one does not fall within the established criteria, in the same way from the right to the duty to be born in an assisted reproduction clinic. The aim is a rewriting of ethics and ultimately its cancellation. Today ethics is provisional and changeable, in fact, there is no longer any ethics, but only ethical pretexts in which even suffering and illness become objects of negotiation which can be leveraged not only to profit, but to redesign the human and the living.
The human being will have to be born after the Artificial Intelligence algorithms have selected the most suitable embryo4. The human being will have to die inside a spacecraft whose shape refers to the artificial womb, a return to the technical grip. The euthanasia machine introduced in Switzerland promotes self-determination with accompaniment and algorithmic evaluation. The cancellation of death, denied, dehumanized, digitalized that follows the cancellation of procreation.
Save the populations of the southern hemisphere from hunger with GMO rice enriched in vitamin A, save from malaria with the release into the environment of mosquitoes genetically modified with CRISPR/Cas9, save agriculture from climate change with plants genetically modified to be more resistant, saving us from the birth rate using assisted reproduction technologies, saving us from cancer with a new mRNA “vaccine” – to give a few examples – serve as ethical pretexts and justifications for transforming the entire world into a living laboratory. Just as the new pseudo rights serve to shape humanity according to the dictates of the masters of discourse and imagination.
Tyranny presents itself with a sweet face and a rhetoric “for good, for health, for new rights”. Under the icing a factory of unlimited desires and synthetic identities that deny reality. But freedom is not an unlimited desire that is transformed into a right. The marketing of illusions opens the doors to new consumers made patients for life, the techno-medical trans-industry mutilates bodies and sterilizes adolescents, artificial reproduction laboratories work to make test-tube babies the normal way of coming into the world.
Is it right to insert a brain implant into the skull of a Parkinson’s patient? Is it right to test the artificial womb on premature babies? Deceptive questions, functional to the “for good” rhetoric. But ethics cannot be founded on a transhuman conception of the human being as a functioning machine.
As for the first question, we are already there, developments are running faster than their understanding and we are already wondering whether a brain implant in a healthy person is right in order to improve their performance. Many will say that these devices will never be safe enough to be tested on healthy people, but the point is that by the time they are desired by healthy people the transhumanist elites will have already achieved what they wanted to achieve.
As regards the second question, the research field is already laying the foundations to create social acceptance for the first human test which will not be long in coming.
It would be enough to read the debates within the world of biotechnological research, these areas know perfectly well that society and people’s mentality must be transformed before certain techno-scientific developments can penetrate and take root.
Be careful when transhumanist technocrats show themselves worried about the risks of developments in techno-sciences and worried about the fate of humanity, the same humanity that they would like destroyed in its most intimate essence by making it cybernetic. Their cries of alarm – like the appeal of Elon Musk and other transhumanists about the dangers of Artificial Intelligence – are nothing more than cries of distraction and their pseudo technical solutions will only produce further disasters. And above all they will never be able to reject the world from which they come. For our part, we must get out of the laboratory paradigm and reject their world. It is necessary and vital to regain orientation, a horizon of spirit and life is necessary, it is necessary to give meaning back to those values and principles for which one should fight and for which one should be willing to die.
Artificial Intelligence with its algorithms creates a new order of truth that has no precedent in history, a new order that cannot be doubted. Our existences will be locked in the single algorithmically driven cyber dimension. Artificial Intelligence will make more and more decisions that will be incomprehensible and to which people will just have to adapt. Advice that will become precepts in every area: habits, behaviors, nutrition, education, health. A technique that depends only on other techniques in which the human element is superfluous and a technical imperative that has its own purpose in itself.
To function, Artificial Intelligence requires a synchronized world, real-time communication, technicalization and synchronization of the human, of life and of every phenomenon. Even our bodies will be caught in the cybernetic grip. From the iatrogenic body – which became a reflection of the fragmentation of medicine and the statistical probability of being potentially at risk of developing a pathology with early diagnosis – we arrive at the algorithmic body which becomes a reflection of algorithmic prediction.
Even reality itself will have to be adherent and aligned with what the algorithms will predict. As Bernard Charbonneau had well predicted, the technical fact will become our universe, “the very flesh of the real and the present” and “When the entire body mechanizes itself, the spirit is not far from doing so. The individual and society evolve towards the automaton”5.
Today even the reality of bodies vanishes. The meaning of man and woman evaporates, they become abstract, fluid, changing concepts, mere individual perceptions. But we don’t have a body, we are a body and many of our experiences originate precisely from that body. No one is born with a “gender identity”. We are born male or female and no one is “born in the wrong body”6. We find the concept of “gender identity” in all the various guidelines, reports of the various panels at the European Parliament, programs of the WHO, the UN and the 2030 Agenda, with strong pushes from the various power elites in this direction and also to promote “gender self-certification”. This concept allows the opening of identity markets by violating the physical boundary between male and female with immense propaganda and immense ideological indoctrination towards the youngest. Synthetic identities are multiplying and we have new trends: trans-age, trans-species, trans-race, trans-able. Those who feel of a different age, of another race, of another species or disabled. Marginal but representative cases. In Canada, a man who felt not only female, but younger, was allowed to participate in a swimming competition with teenage girls. There is also an increase in cases of pedophiles who defend themselves in court by claiming that they feel like children, obviously instrumentally, but if the law allows it we can well foresee the consequences.
It is also discussed in the medical field, for example trans-able is the identity disorder of bodily integrity. And just as from the so-called “gender identity disorder” we have arrived at “gender identity” by removing the term disorder, in the same way, from the identity disorder of bodily integrity in the name of inclusion, self-determination, of freedom and rights we will arrive at the identity of different bodily integrity, age, race, species. The principle is the same: what the individual perceives surpasses reality itself and must be recognized by the entire society. If we recognize that a man feels like a woman and that he becomes even more real than a woman born biologically a woman because he feels it and because he wants it, why shouldn’t we recognize that an adult man can feel like a child and can become one?

The little ones are pushed towards bodily dissociation which leads to dissociation with reality, ready for the Metaverse generations. Adolescents are pushed into the cult of castration. The image of a bare-chested girl with scars on her breasts after having undergone a mastectomy is symbolic of these times. Gender butcher’s shop. The human being will be ready to become decomposable, reassembled and redesignable into infinite fluid universes.
The first case in Italy. A woman, after having started the transition process with hormone therapy and breast exportation, during some medical checks necessary for the uterus exportation surgery discovers that she is five months pregnant following intercourse had before starting to take testosterone. Well, we said to ourselves, certain that this would crack the ideological narrative, but it didn’t crack even when faced with the reality of a woman’s body. The masters of speech, thought and imagination have declared: a “pregnant man”. Seahorses, as they are called abroad, in the new language which also includes “person who gives birth”, “breast-feeding” and so on, going to re-signify the dimension of procreation and the dimension of sexuality of the female body. But a man cannot give birth. Yet what was once obvious has already turned into something questionable, subjective, changeable.
In the name of freedom the worst horrors are being cleared, step by step they are being normalized. In Spain in some posters of a campaign apparently against sexual violence we find the face of a child above the phrase “if he says no, it means aggression”. We pass quickly, read and share the sentence without dwelling on the face which is that of a child and on the underlying meaning: “if he says yes, it’s not aggression”. The “sexual freedom of children and adolescents” is the new progressive conquest that opens up pedophilia. Let us ask ourselves the reason for this push to normalize pedophilia as a new sexual orientation and the push to recognize what are defined as the rights, freedom and self-determination of the little ones.
We have long stated that the dimension of procreation and our sexual roots are the last frontier of transhumanism. Today we are already beyond and have reached the closing of the circle in which they are trying to erase every value and every barrier that can resist dissolution.
But where does this rationality come from, so indisputable, which leads to the manipulation of nature, not only that understood as something that is external to us, but also to ourselves, as human beings as part of this nature?

“The inevitable siege of the human being has been ready for some time, and it is arranged by theories that tend towards a logical and complete explanation of the world, and advance hand in hand with the progress of technology”7 wrote Ernst Jünger with extreme lucidity, sensing the paradigm of the laboratory that reduces and harnesses life in the realm of quantity. He wondered the meaning of curves and tables in relation to the love with which Wallace observed the bird of paradise in the forest of New Guinea and with which Fabre spied on the comings and goings of a beetle in Provence concluding that all this cannot be replaced with a machine: “Detailed, meticulous knowledge can be harmful. A lover, a poet, a true sage must be able to see less and more at the same time, they must look with different eyes. […] There is always a difference between spiritualization and mechanization. If I slide a wooden chick under the hen and observe its behavior, I can learn much less about the mother than if I watch a child play with his doll”8.
“No harm or disappointment can come to anyone who contemplates a stretch of natural beauty. The doctrines of desperation, of tyranny, or of spiritual or political servitude, were never taught by those who shared the serenity of nature”9 we read in Henry David Thoreau.
It was the materialist vision of the world that took the first steps towards the reification of the living by making it available. The desacralization of the living, the cancellation of its inviolable dimension has made it in its entirety not only predatory, commodifiable, crushable, exploitable, but has made it at the mercy of the techno-scientific logics of optimization and implementation. He broke down every ethical limit by erasing the very meaning of the limit. The conception of limits is not foreseen in techno-scientific development, every limit will be overcome based on what developments make possible and what they make imaginable and desirable even before its full realization.
From the dissection of bodies to the dissection of the world as a paradigm of modernity: decomposition and fragmentation of the body and natural processes into measurable, quantifiable and disconnectable parts from the whole. From disassembly to reassembly and infinite remodeling as a laboratory paradigm.
And what is transhumanism if not the maximum realization of rationalization, of the cancellation of the sacred, of the limit, of the spirit? And ultimately the absolute dominion of technology. Existence itself must conform to certain standards, must follow the criterion of utility and the transhuman principle of optimization and implementation, of cancellation of suffering, pain, illness, limits. The human being, as we know them, will become an obstacle, an error, an unexpected event. And there can be no errors, unexpected events, slowdowns in the transhuman advance. “Whether he is a piece of material on the battlefield or a cog in the machine of the war economy, the modern age has a habit of reducing the human being to a functional object. Everything that is “non-essential” – everything that makes us human – is cheerfully discarded,” Jünger wrote. Life as waste and the human being, in order not to be discarded, will have to adapt to the new techno-dictates.
A common sense about the past, present and future vanishes. A different relationship with time, with the phases of life and death and also a different relationship with the truth disappears. Already today we wander among remains and ruins, tomorrow there will be no more memory, memory, trace. Once upon a time it didn’t matter if the source of a custom had been extinct for centuries, because its meaning was passed down and woven into the fabric of people’s lives and thus continued to live on. Everything that belonged to the past must be considered obsolete, as an error, as something continually to be overcome, in an overcoming that will never end.
The cancellation of the truth and of reality itself makes the brain get used to accepting any lie and, recalling the words of Hannah Arendt: “the ideal subject of the totalitarian regime is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but the individual for whom the distinction between reality and fiction, between true and false no longer exists”10. It will become impossible to grasp those ancient correspondences that emerge from the microcosm and the macrocosm. Reading Ernst Jünger: “We push forward through the visible order of things to get closer to their invisible harmony, to proceed from the incompleteness of knowledge towards that of which we can only perceive a premonition. When you manage to put the speck of dust on a butterfly wing in harmony with the universe, the goal achieved is worthless, but not the signal, the milestone that I know is placed along the path traveled. The wings themselves allude to something else” and observing the Cicindele, beetles, he writes: “We can also consider them as an example of the quantity of forces that cross our path, that cross it without us being able to perceive them”11.
An uprooted human being. “Uprootedness is by far the most dangerous disease of human societies, because it multiplies itself” states Simone Weil who continues: “It is vain to turn away from the past to think only about the future. It is a dangerous illusion to even believe that it is possible. The opposition between the future and the past is absurd. The future brings us nothing, gives us nothing; it is we who, to build it, must give it everything, even give it our life. But to give, one must possess, and we possess no other life, no other lifeblood than the treasures inherited from the past and digested, assimilated, recreated by us”12.
From Boni Castellane who takes us to the hostile land in which we find ourselves today we read: “The uprooting of everything from its transcendent perspective is configured, therefore, not only as a theoretical presupposition of all materialism but also as an objective to be imposed on those aspects of reality still spiritually and ideally linked to transcendence. This is very simply because the spiritual world, […], represents an objective obstacle to the achievement of absolute power and the definitive establishment of the materialist order”13.
In a materialist conception for which nothing exists beyond the world in its material, contingent and deterministic aspects “every ethical or religious limit is nothing more than an impediment to the achievement of the maximum possible power, here and now, without limit, without norm. Subjective desire therefore becomes the only moral norm and limit” we read from Boni Castellane who highlights how the “logic of desperate nihilism does not provide for any compassion, any limit, any harmony other than the intrinsic criterion of strategic utilitarianism”14.
One of the many deceptions of modern times is that which identifies the Enlightenment Revolution and the Industrial Revolution as an improvement in people’s lives. Very short life, death from hunger, illiteracy, these are some of the clichés about the Middle Ages. All rigorously and detailedly dismantled in Was Reason Wrong? by Massimo Fini. Here it is not a question of idealizing a phantom golden age, but of realizing that that world, despite its harshness and harshness, was much closer to the human, to nature, to life, to death, unlike the modern world .
Modernity was born under the sign of the denial of the transcendent, of the denial of the intrinsic value of life. With the awareness that “The words of all men who speak of life must sound vain to those who are not in the same order of thoughts”15 as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote.
Continuing reading Boni Castellane: “Only a life devoid of intrinsic meaning could accept the unsustainability of modernity”, “Having created the unlivable life as a prerequisite for the new modern existence, everything could be sold to those who no longer had anything beautiful in their own existence. You couldn’t sell the morning air to the farmer, you couldn’t sell the Sunday Mass to the farmer, you couldn’t sell the first ripe peach to the farmer, you couldn’t sell your child, […], to the worker yes he could sell anything”16.
It was precisely the existence and essence of the peasant world, bearer of another time linked to the cycles of nature, rites and the sacred that represented what had to be swept away both by the Industrial Revolution and by the ideologies it produced.
The child ideologies of the Enlightenment Revolution and the Industrial Revolution – capitalism and communism/Marxism – beyond an apparent superficial contrast are expressions of the same materialism, they originate from the same materialist root.
The “radical break with the cosmos” – to use Charbonneau’s words – of the worker and the citizen would become the characteristic of humanity.

In our West, farmers are increasingly rare, over the years they have been replaced by agro-industrials who have impoverished and poisoned the land with intensive monocultures and pesticides. Agriculture 4.0 with drones, sensors and digital applications is far from putting our hands in the land, from seasonal times and cycles. Nature and the peasant struggle, symbol of the fight against the artificial, have long since been replaced by artificial rhythms and poisons and GMOs from Bayer and Monsanto. From the smart city to the smart countryside with fields dotted with sensors and flown over by drones and crops managed remotely. Plants grown high up without soil and without natural light, meat grown in vitro, new genetic manipulation techniques: nourishing humans in this way underlies a precise idea of the human being that prepares us for the laboratories where this human will be selected and reproduced in the same way that the immense zootechnical laboratory prepared him for a zootechnical existence.
Distant is the memory of the Indian farmers who revolted against biotechnological multinationals such as Monsanto who wanted to impose monocultures, pesticides, GMO Terminator seeds and erase ancient local varieties and ancient knowledge, contaminating and poisoning natural ecosystems and local populations. What context will be able to understand the meaning of those and other struggles against biotechnology? The new eco-anxious pseudo-rebels will not be able to reconnect with those struggles, they are not their children, they are the artificial fruit of a fake ecologism of the technocratic elite and only sterile fruits can come from a cybernetic tree, incapable of taking the meaning of past ecological struggles and generate new struggles. They will only be able to follow the script written by others. They are the new generations that are confused and live in real time and are perpetually interconnected, the new generations of “hurry up” with a perennial state of emergency.
In today’s times, in a world where everything is overturned, even the meaning of ecology has been overturned. An ecology promoted by various companies, by states, by large corporations, by philanthropic foundations, by the new groups of eco-anxious people produced by Davos. Underlying a neo-Malthusianism that considers us as a cancer for this planet, there are too many of us, we should go and sterilize ourselves they tell us. This is functional to shift the level of the problem, no longer an entire energy-intensive, predatory and destructive techno-industrial economic system, but the individual with his habits who is blamed and who must align with the new green dictates.
This is how we intervene on the Earth, on the sky, on the seas, on living beings and on all the processes that regulate them: a continuous manipulation.

“Nature is inhabited by an underground, dormant fire that never comes out into the open and that no frost can cool. […] This subterranean fire has its altar in the breast of every man”17, wrote Henry David Thoreau. Today we are witnessing a war against nature, against what is born and what dies. Nature is limits, it is constraints and represents everything that progressive and transhumanist ideology wants to erase. Today we must despise everything that refers to life, birth, the body, blood, viscera, flesh, procreation, childhood, old age, illness, death. The only variations allowed are artificial ones. It is no coincidence that the term nature has been replaced with the aseptic term environment which refers to something that can be built by human beings. The ideology of modernity is based on an aversion and visceral hatred towards nature, today we find the heirs of this ideology in the world of biotechnological research and in the progressive left-wing transfeminist academic world which considers nature as a cage from which to free oneself . A liberation and emancipation from the living itself – spontaneous, autonomous and unpredictable – and from the constraints of nature for a submission to the technological constraints of the machine-world.
What is at stake around nature is the sense of human finitude, the difference between human beings and living beings and functioning machines. For our part, not only do we bring a different conception of living things, but a radically different feeling, like the one that refers us to John Muir who during a windstorm in a forest wrote: “After having observed the Sierra waterways from springs to the plains, contemplating them blossoming into white waterfalls, sliding into crystalline slopes, gushing out in a gray fan of foam among the ravines full of boulders and finally crossing the woods in extensive and peaceful bends – when we have thoroughly learned their language and their shapes, then we could distinctly hear their song rising in unison in a majestic hymn that envelops the mountains like lace”18. For our part, we will always be against Promethean omnipotence and the desire for absolute manipulation of the world.
Christopher Lasch is clear about the French Revolution, highlighting how this “demonstrated that the attempt to reshape society on the basis of abstract principles of justice, eradicating now stabilized ways of life and overthrowing ancient conceptions, led more to the reign of terror than to that of brotherhood and universal love”19. The Enlightenment condemned so-called prejudice as the enemy of reason, but in doing so it sought to eradicate a source of moral control, a hidden wisdom that guided the conduct of men and women, an underground common sense that bound the Community, an antibody to everything that the Industrial Revolution and following the advance of the techno-scientific system would have produced.
After all, if we think about it, what was the Enlightenment, that blind faith in progress, in overcoming at all costs everything that was considered as past, as obsolete – and what is transhumanism today – if not a revolt against nature, life, death, a mechanization of the world which with the advance of techniques became manipulation and artificialisation, a will to direct and redesign the eternal cycle of events, including human beings, a will to absolute power which we can see taking shape in the development of genetic, climatic and reproductive engineering hand in hand with social engineering.
But as Massimo Fini intuited: “This rationality, so indisputable, so comforting, contains within itself a deadly trap. Because it inevitably and progressively touches nature, modifies it, manipulates it, violates it, concentrates in very short times and spaces what biology has regulated with slow and broad cadences. […] but technology not only breaks the balance of nature understood as something external to us, it also attacks man as an element that is part of this nature”20. Words that are well connected to the thoughts of Bernard Charbonneau: “The crisis of the traditional order favored technical progress, and technical progress ended up destroying it. This evolution became irreversible starting from the middle of the Middle Ages. […] Once dispersed techniques are starting to converge. […] After having covered the entire visible surface, the technique prepares to flow invisibly back to the depths of man”21.
Without the reduction of the living and the human to a mere material substrate, the attack of materialist ideologies, techno-science and transhumanism would not have been possible. Only an uprooted existence – consumed and consumable – devoid of meaning can accept the unliveability and inevitability of the machine world.

July 2024, Bergamo, published in the newspaper L’Urlo della Terra, n. 12, July 2024, https://www.resistenzealnanomondo.org/necrotecnologie/dalla-negazione-del-trascendente-allumanita-cibernetica-e-transumana-silvia-guerini/

1AA.VV. Smagliature digitali. Corpi, generi, tecnologie, Agenzia X, 2018.

2Silvia Guerini, Verso la riproduzione artificiale per tutti. Nuove linee guida per l’accesso alle tecniche di fecondazione assistita in Italia, Giugno 2024, https://www.resistenzealnanomondo.org/necrotecnologie/verso-la-riproduzione-artificiale-per-tutti-nuove-linee-guida-per-laccesso-alle-tecniche-di-fecondazione-assistita-in-italia/

3AA.VV, Pinguini, conchiglie e staminali. Verso futuri transpecie, Derive e Approdi, 2022.

4AA. VV. (a cura di ) Silvia Guerini e Costantino Ragusa, I figli della macchina, biotecnologie, riproduzione artificiale, eugenetica, Asterios editore, 2024.

5 Bernard Charbonneau, Il sistema e il caos, Arianna editrice, 2000.

6 Silvia Guerini, Dal corpo neutro al cyborg postumano. Riflessioni critiche all’ideologia gender, Asterios editore, 2022.

7 Ernst Jünger, Trattato del ribelle, Adelphi, 1990.

8 Ernst Jünger, Cacce sottili, Guanda, 2022.

9Henry David Thoreau, Storia naturale del Massachusetts, The Portable Thoreau.

10Hannah Arendt, Le origini del totalitarismo, Edizioni di comunità, 1967.

11Ernst Jünger, op, cit.

12Simone Weil, La prima radice, SE, 2013.

13Boni Castellane, In terra ostile, Signs Books, 2023.

14Boni Castellane, op. cit.

15Ralph Waldo Emerson, L’anima suprema, l’amore, l’amicizia, la politica, Ortica editrice, 2012.

16Boni Castellane, op.cit.

17Henry David Thoreau, Il mattino interiore, Ortica editrice, 2018.

18 John Muir, Una tempesta di vento nella foresta, La vita felice, 2019.

19 Christopher Lasch, Il paradiso in terra. Il progresso e la sua critica, Neri Pozza, 2016.

20 Massimo Fini, La Ragione aveva Torto?, Camunia, 1985.

21 Bernard Charbonneau, op.cit.

GMO-TEA: the attack on the living continues

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GMO-TEA: the attack on the living continues
Costantino Ragusa – Resistenze al nanomondo (www.resistenzealnanomondo.org)


That genetically modified organisms in agriculture were anything but stationary we have known for some time. Precisely from the language that often united the promoters of the engineering of living things and their detractors. What united them and often made them indistinguishable was, and still is, the trust in science with its research, which we know is currently almost entirely directed in a certain way, not because of a mistake in the road, but because of what is now its essence in perfect harmony with modern times that do not provide for any doubts as to the path to follow. It has been several decades that the so-called debate, let us use a word that is immediately comprehensible because it would be difficult to describe what has happened, has revolved around the method used, the possible harmfulness, sometimes on the timescales that are too fast or too long, but never that an ethical reflection has been posed, even if we reluctantly use this word in view of what has been put in place over the years with the approval of the ethics committees themselves, which have always skilfully manoeuvred between complicit silences and shameless consensus, where it was needed to preserve a relic of humanism that has now become technocratic. So addressing the issue from a point of view that starts from aspects that are not strictly technical, but rather more philosophical and social in terms of where one wants to go and whether that kind of direction is really free of irreversible consequences with regard to nature and its consequent plundering of resources, respect for other animals, and whether the much-declared freedoms of human beings are actually respected. No one is questioning the most fundamental issues, the ones that first and foremost deserve all the necessary commitment and attention. Rather, these years of no debate on genetic engineering have witnessed a preparatory soaking towards better times in which everyone has participated, technocrats and critics alike. What else is the so-called precautionary method if not waiting inside laboratories for better times? The field trial of the new GMOs – TEA answered this question. A dialogue between respectable gentlemen who do not share the same ideas, but who, coming from the same cultural environment and tradition, nurture great mutual respect and prepare a framework that can accommodate the same positions that are at first seemingly irreconcilable, but later always find themselves in the same bed because the same universe of meaning is shared.
This is what has happened between opponents and supporters of GMOs over the last twenty years. In the beginning, as we know, there were the multinationals that took the field with all their arrogance, for example Monsanto pulling the strings of all the various companies, strong in their economic power and thus in the corruption of regulatory bodies such as the American FDA to name the best known and later the EFSA in Parma for Europe. In the meantime these companies stumbled into a few small local trials where they were found guilty. Monsanto could have been called a hardened criminal for the lawsuits brought against it. The disbursement of a few pennies made it possible in the time, never too quick, of the arrival of the final judgement to make billions again with the same practice, in this sense the PCB case teaches. All this led to very important international mobilisations, such as in India where GMOs in the fields, from cotton to the various attempts to engineer even rice, was not a matter for the conscious consumer at the supermarket, but was a matter of life and death, and very often the farmers chose precisely this second option by ingesting as an extreme act of protest the well-known Glyphosate produced by Monsanto itself.
So we had these GMOs that had become for a small part of the world the symbol of American imperialism, with all the world represented by it including that ever-present exoticism of the struggle that leads one to be radical with the enterprises of others, better if distant geographically. In Europe, there were not a few complaints about this genetic technology, which started out decidedly badly in the imagination of the general public. Then, too, there was the vast array of rhetoric deployed to make the innovation accepted as saving poor countries in the South, reducing the use of pesticides, and, of course, increasing productivity. The propaganda sometimes went perhaps a little too far, a child of the old slogans of the Green Revolution of the 1960s where ‘miracle seeds’ were the stars. Again, it was promised that they would work miracles with genetic modifications in living organisms. Some images became the symbol of the so-called Frankenstein food, such as the famous tomato with a fishbone inside: a tomato with fish genes inside in order to keep longer. The promise of miracles was not very successful and rather frightened because, according to the researchers, that ‘irrationality’ towards scientific progress and in general towards what is not known has taken over. After all, even the scientists, although they acted rationally, indeed the only repositories of true rationality, had no idea where they were going and had to put their transgenic chimeras back in the hothouses early on to await better times. In fact, it was obvious to any survey that the image of GMOs in food and agriculture at least in Europe was ruined, and it was difficult to remedy this situation unless it was immediately clear that we were dealing with GMOs. In the feed of animals destined for industrial animal husbandry in Italy, GMO feed, grains and flours have been present for many years, so those who feed other animals have also been consuming elements of genetically modified origin and, as we have said elsewhere, these grains often also ended up sown in the fields. Despite specific campaigns against these feeds, the presence of GMOs was denied for years, because it would have meant admitting that the entire livestock sector, still mindful of the so-called ‘mad cow’ disease, was using such technologies. Clarification was only made after a major sabotage at Veronesi, an Italian company specialising in importing animal feed. A large forecourt with numerous toasted vehicles with their load of quintals of genetically modified feed that had become crunchy and unsuitable for ending up on farms was the backdrop to the arrival in a helicopter of the company owner who, besieged by the press, briefly, perhaps shaken by the incident, admitted that his feed was in fact GMO, having come from the USA. Local groups could have made good on that long-awaited statement that never came in years of demonstrations, but instead it was thought more prudent to distance themselves from the incident. A cautiousness that over the years has always surrounded the so-called debate on GMOs and more generally on genetic engineering, postponing struggles that have never taken on real stability by favouring particular cases and leaving critical thinking, at least in Italy, to contexts that could not see beyond the threat of their own fair trade supply chain. Once again, therefore, mere ‘economic reason’ always proved to be the counterpart in a small paradigm that was easily overwhelmed.
At the European level there was still a block on the entry of GMOs, although in fact Spain and Romania had been flooded with them for some time, but waiting for the right moment, the right emergency that could justify such a radical technological leap in the countryside. But even if there had been no discussion about GMOs in the fields in recent years, the ground had been laid so that when that right moment would come, there would be no great upheaval, as yet another innovation among many. We are talking about the transition from agriculture to agro-industry up to recent times with agriculture 4.0 where digital technology is entering what remains of the countryside. There are those who have promoted this process piece by piece over the years and those who have obviously benefited from it because it is simpler, more modern and above all more subsidised. From the bottom you can see the agro-enterprise that over time has replaced the peasant activity, or rather had to suppress it in order to move forward, whether conscientiously or not money has given the trail to follow and the companies have not let themselves be pushed around. Smaller forms failed to adapt and with them real possibilities of creating communities truly connected to the land were lost. Research on the development of genetic engineering has only rarely been juxtaposed with that on GMOs in agriculture, rather it has been considered as if they were different fields. Once again it was easier for a green environmental company like Greenpeace, a ubiquitous guest at Davos, to ask questions about the new genetic engineering technologies linked to humans, better to talk about soya and deforestation, so as to remain within the established framework of reform and then to give the direction to the new protesters armed with paint who, by the way, are more realistic than the king if the motive is the climate change that so obsesses them and that they understand so little, have already committed themselves to accepting TEAs. In the new resilient eco-sustainable framework where complicity even from below is wasted, the reset of agriculture is announced by technocratic pipers as inevitable, indeed among the first places where intervention promises to be radical. The real alarm, not the umpteenth emergency, should have long since caught our attention when the laboratories started talking about preserving the countryside. It simply meant that the degradation of biodiversity and the social degradation of what was left of the farming world had reached such a level that they were ready for a new imagery arranged by them, using so many companies as accomplices, like those who would see no difference in growing vertically with hydroponics, breeding crickets instead of cows farting CO2, planting extensions of solar panels and wind turbines. And if the species leap got too big, one only had to look at modern industrial animal husbandry to find everything that would be proposed for human societies over the years.
If researchers have come to invent NGT – new genomic techniques – which in Italy curiously enough have been called TEA – assisted evolution technologies, it means that, as one researcher declared after sabotaging a GMO rice plant in Mezzana Bigli, they had been working on it for decades in their laboratories or perhaps in some international project, as happens with vivisection: in Italy it is not possible to torture macaques as one would like and so hospitality is asked of other research centres in countries where the laws are more permissive and then they go back full of good intentions, which means nothing more than moving the various lobbying channels and for agriculture it means starting the contamination and later denouncing the irreversibility of the damage as happened in Latin America.
All these things were denounced in the past when it was US capitalism that was to be criticised, but now that there are small projects, with often young researchers seemingly lacking in ambition who like to be portrayed in inclusive group photos, how do we deal with it? If, instead of Monsanto, we have the State University of Milan, which is about to take its third inclusive bath, and the CREA, which for years has been carrying out these genetic manipulation projects with public subsidies, what do we make of it? It all becomes more difficult and partly leads back to the timid opposition that such projects are having, but does not explain it entirely. It should not be ruled out that many have made their own the climate of permanent emergency that surrounds us; perhaps an answer to this umpteenth emergency could come from the very scientific research that here announces that it is manipulating plants a little, but at other times has heavily manipulated human beings with gene serums. It will be said that they are different levels and that the issues are not superimposable, and some on the left would already begin to wave the bogeyman of conspiracy, an immediate excuse to disengage and avoid making uncomfortable criticisms, but the short memory does not allow us to remember that with the same technology with which plants are now being modified, the CRISP/Cas9, researchers in China have edited the first two daughters of genetic engineering. And yet, despite the deadly legacy of techno-sciences, despite the fact that biolaboratories with gain-of-function research are being relocated and set up here in Italy, where the leading research is in genetic engineering, we still hear fairy tales about good or bad biotechnology, the usual question about the use of the means employed. At the Milan State University where they work on GMO- TEA rice, there cannot be researchers who only aim at profit, as a Monsanto researcher would do, there must probably be a mission and for the local critics they will probably be fellow sufferers who are wrong. The same applies to the strange critical dualism that has led biotechnologists and opponents to speak the same language. How was such a catastrophe possible? These are the times of the smoothing out of conflict, of the smoothing out of the sense of things if research has the face of progressive researchers. Even the protesters who are the children of that faith in science, which in 2024 is only the science of power driving unstoppable biocidal progress, have taken on that chronic possibilism that will contribute to our being surrounded by transgenic chimeras and, what will surely be the most dramatic, no longer recognised as such.
It is time to change the field of complicity in this struggle, which is going to be long and by no means easy; on our side we only have the fact that TEAs are new GMOs, but with the biocidal bearing of the old GMOs, at the message level it will be crucial to make it understood, and never without the separations between fields and bodies all as eco-sisterly prudence would have it.
Once again, the experience of past struggles will come to our aid, what remains of the TEA field in Mezzana Bigli uprooted by generous arms could become the new ‘control field’ as Swiss activists called the ETH Zurich’s GMO experimentation that came to be protected as a military site. The same had happened in Iceland before the research was terminated after yet another visit from the night mowers. Or in England, which saw all of its more than sixty fields destroyed, outdoor research suspended and laws against transparency of information and activists changed.
The little TEA test that you want to reproduce everywhere here in Italy could take other forms. It will be necessary to be vigilant and attentive to how they intend to invade us with their transgenic harmfulness. A good mobilisation with a radical critique of the world of techno-sciences could be an excellent basis for really broadening and diversifying the forms of intervention by intercepting all those who have understood the need to link all these aspects. We know for certain that the biotechnology programme is not something that the system intends to give up, it is the means and the end at the same time with which the Great Transformation is to be initiated in order to push us into a transhuman world.

July 2024, Bergamo, published in the newspaper L’Urlo della Terra, n. 12, July 2024, https://www.resistenzealnanomondo.org/necrotecnologie/ogm-tea-lattacco-al-vivente-continua/

Transumanesimo: L’ideologia del tecno-mondo – S. Guerini e C. Ragusa

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Transumanesimo: l’ideologia del tecno-mondo,
Silvia Guerini e Costantino Ragusa, in ACrO-Pólis

Leggi qui:

Transumanesimo: l’ideologia del tecno-mondo

Il testo è un capitolo del libro:
L’ideologia del tecno-mondo. Resistere alla megamacchina,
Silvia Guerini e Costantino Ragusa, acro-pólis, 2024
https://www.resistenzealnanomondo.org/documenti/lideologia-del-tecno-mondo-resistere-alla-megamacchina-2/