ROME – Over 70 email addresses , screenshots of emails and inboxes, photocopies of passports, and police orders in Rome have been leaked by the online activist group, Anonymous, over the weekend. Their Italian chapter claimed responsibility in a blog post opening with a quote from Plato’s republic:

 “Here, in my opinion, is how dictatorships arise. They have two mothers. One is the oligarchy when it degenerates, for its internal struggles, into satrapy. The other is democracy when, in the thirst for freedom and in the ineptness of its leaders, it falls into corruption and paralysis. So democracy dies by abuse of itself. And before the blood, is ridicule.”

 The oligarchy that Anonymous speaks of is the European Union, an organisation they previously called "created at a table, the result of extreme forcing with which it was artificially ‘unified’ peoples and states far away from each other for their origins, history, cultures, traditions and economies.” The second mother, corrupt and paralysed, is the Italian state.

 This nationalist outburst from the international organisation of hackers is most likely in reference to the EU’s plans for an integrated military, or a permanent structured cooperation as they refer to it. The idea behind this pooling of resources is to free the EU from the military dependence on the United States. German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel called it a “milestone in European development,” and the pact signed just two days after Remembrance Day, has great symbolic as well as strategic value for Europeans.

 Anonymous, however, views this situation as “the umpteenth time the Italian State betrayed and embarrassed the values of our military who swore to defend it.” This comes after the announcement that Italy’s highest ranking general, Claudio Graziano, has been elected to the head of the EU Military committee, therefore, making one of the world’s most powerful militaries in the hands of an Italian. While the Italian state is evidently weighed down by corruption and bureaucracy, Anonymous’ brand of euro scepticism that is rooted in a disbelief in the broader European identity that underpins the notion of international cooperation is a worrying trend for the union.

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