The sun is setting over central Athens as 3000+ protesters gather in Omonoia Square in opposition to the treatment of immigrant workers by the Greek state. No police can be seen as the crowd gathers, yet the mood is tense with grim determination and anticipation of the real possibility of extreme violence from the state. We march slowly down-town towards the Saint Pandeleimonas district, a suburb mainly inhabited by immigrants. A thunderous chant echoes through the darkening streets, as CCTV cameras and cash machines are smashed, shop fronts graffiti-ed and and hundreds of leaflets tossed across the pavements. On the flanks of the mass are defended by helmeted, pole-wielding marchers, as heavily armored riot police can be seen through side streets, moving down the parallel road. The crowd slows as orange flashes of fire can be seen far off at the front line, suddenly followed by the deafening boom of stun grenades, and plooms of tear gas. Fear spreads through some sections of the crowd as it surges back in retreat. Burning barricades protect our route to the ASOEE university and relative sanctuary. We are told that the front was attacked by moltov hurling nazis working within the police front line.

This co-operation between militant neo-nazi groups and the Greek police is nothing new, but in the last six months it has become increasingly frequent and audacious. The most dangerous neo-nazi group is Chrysi Avyi (Golden Dawn). Although they have relatively little popular support (23,000 votes in the last European elections), they are powerful due to their deep running relationship with the state, particularly the connections and wide spread support within the police force. In 2005 a leaked confidential internal police investigation concluded that:

1. Chrysi Avyi had very good relations and contacts with officers of the force, on and off duty, as well as with common policemen.
2. The police provided the group with batons and radio communications equipment during mass demonstrations.
3. The connections between the neo-nazi group and the Greek police force, helped delay the arrest of ‘Periandros’, a prominent member of Chrysi Avgi, wanted for the attempted murder of three left-wing students.
4. The brother of “Periandros”, also a member of Chrysi Avgi, was a security escort of an unnamed New Democracy MP.
5. Most Chrysi Avyi members illegally carry weapons.

This investigation only exposed a small, nasty taste of what was to come and since it was leaked, this co-operation between Chrysi Avyi and the police has increased dramatically. Even the bias mainstream media has had to accept and shamefully report this widespread collaboration.

Two days after the rally (09 July), as we were sat on the street corner where Alexandros Grigoropoulis was murdered last December, word quickly spread round that Villa Amalias, the 19 year old anarchist squat, had just been attacked by fascists with molotovs and projectiles. The squatters fought them back and the fascists retreated back behind police lines, which protected them. The attack was undoubtedly prearranged between the nazis and the police.

Twenty minutes before the attack, in the suburb of Agios Panteleimonas, the Minister of Public Order, Markoyannakis, met with the fascist vigilantes, headed by an army officer, Pipikios. They then left Agios Panteleimonas and attacked the squat. Attacks on squats are not that uncommon in Greece but this is the first time since the Junta dictatorship that a Minister has openly met with fascist combat groups. Two days later three immigrants (2 Iraqi and 1 Nigerian) were shot in a drive-by shooting in Omonia square. The same day the squatted former Court of Appeals building in central Athens, that accommodated hundreds of homeless immigrants, was hit by an arson attack. The police have attempted to evict the squat numerous times in the past and it has for a long time been the scene of constant nazi and police harassment and violence. Yesterday (21 July) the last phase of the eviction emptied the building. Of the hundreds of immigrants living in the squat, many have been arrested and will be imprisoned in one of the eleven disused army bases that have just been converted into concentration camps. Recently, on the July 12, the largest refugee settlement in Greece, outside the city of Patra, was brutally evicted, bulldozed and ‘mysteriously’ burned to the ground by police. More stark evidence of the rising totalitarianism in the treatment of refugees, a trend that is currently growing, in Greece, as well as most of Europe.

In the recent European elections, extreme-right party LAOS made a political breakthrough, with 7.2 per cent of the vote. Desperate for support, the ruling, conservative New Democracy party has taken to increasingly far-right behavior: the moronic scapegoating of immigrants, squatters and anarchists, fear mongering propaganda and constantly pleading for “national unity” though out the population. The Greek press and television have recently taken extremely xenophobic views, fully supporting the government’s attempt to unite people in an ugly wave of nationalism, and to drive people’s attention away from the economic crisis.

This increased police-nazi cooperation brings the counterinsurgency strategy of the State into harsh, new perspective. The government has previously said that the “terrorist” harboring squats will be evicted this summer, between the middle of July and the middle of August. Tactically this makes sense, as a lot of people have vacated the cities to escape the choking summer heat, leaving the squats more vulnerable to attack or eviction. This week a squat in Thessaloníki, where the local pirate radio station operates, was also attacked with molotovs. The tension is high, defenses are being built and a lot of squatters have stayed in the city and are organising resistance strategies. The threat is uncertain, but there is no doubt that mass evictions would result in a massive flare up of resistance. The authorities are aware of this and are apprehensive to fulfill their desired plan. Instead they have been focusing on the easy targets of immigrant squats and so not losing face.

Another dangerous organisation co-operating with Greek police is Scotland Yard. In March this year British “anti-terrorist experts”, including Sir Ian Blair, ex-head of Scotland Yard; as well as American “security advisors”, were in Athens giving advice on the tactics of oppression. The Greek government is desperate to upgrade its social control and surveillance apparatus, Greece’s parliament has just approved measures allowing police to use surveillance camera footage, create a DNA database and banning anonymous mobile phones. The British state have proven to be experts in these tactics of surveillance and intelligence gathering, and of course the information gained using these techniques, is falling into the hands of neo-nazis.

Despite the savage rise in right wing violence, the anarchist movement is still gathering more popular support, and now even the mainstream media have acknowledge it as legitimate political force. It seems unlikely, that the ruling government can maintain its treacherous course for long. Urban guerrilla insurrectionist groups has kept up a constant stream of attacks on the state and corporate business. Some of the attacks so far this month alone, include a bomb attack on the Athens home of a former deputy minister, a firebomb attack on a tax office, a bomb attack on a McDonald’s causing “extensive damage”, a bomb attack on a prominent Judges car, a failed bombing attempt at the Chilean consulate and there have been a string of strategic arson attacks on offices and vehicles. This month a police bus has come under fire from a masked gunman and last month an anti-terrorist policeman guarding a witness was shot dead by a two gunmen. Different anarchist and leftist guerrilla groups have claimed responsibility for most of these attacks.
The movement has learnt a lot from the December insurrection and while support for the guerrilla groups is widespread, many feel that without more wide spread social change, the revolution is distant. Yet resistance is stronger then ever and stands resolute in the sinister face of fascism. It is also worth noting, that during the recent upsurge in molotov use by neo-nazis, no one has been injured by the bombs, except on two separate occasions when the fascists managed to set themselves on fire. In the words of one Greek anarchist:

“Those comical scum, who have no idea how to handle the simplest of street weapons, the molotov firebomb, they are unable to fight us with our weapons. Molotovs are and will remain the people’s weapon, in defense of their freedom against fascist bastards.”

Amendment: Just before posting this piece, one of the squats, where we have been staying, the big squatted factory space called Yfanet, was attacked at 5 in the morning (25 July). The bomb containing 6 gas cans, a four-liter petrol canister caused no damage. The struggle continues…

LINKS:
ATHENS INDYMEDIA TRANSLATIONS.
ORIGINAL POST.

For this ex-industrial, ex-major port-city in the Western tip of the Peloponnese the passage to the post-industrial era has left little more than illusions. Illusions of having any sort of substantial industry, any mechanism capable of sustaining the city’s “growth”, or even simply bringing back “the good old days”. In this illusion, perception is key: Everyone becomes what they show to be and the city becomes a sum of places facilitating this to-be-seen process. Out go the factories, in come the glamorous, trendy cafés. The assembly line gives way to the “catwalk”, as the pedestrian road running in the café district of Patras is euphemistically called. It is right here, on this catwalk, that the illusory perception is simultaneously produced and consumed.

The impromptu shanty town-like camp stood as the catwalk’s absolute antithesis: In the safety of its size, and that only, its permanently temporary residents could seek refuge for as long as it would take to sneak into one of the ferries heading further West, to Italy – or be arrested by police. The camp’s size, its very visibility within the urban entity of Patras safeguarded its residents’ individual safety. The camp acted as shelter and cover for those in Patras on-their-way-somewhere-else. There was nothing illusory about the residents of the camp. Why they were in Patras (because of the war), why they were on their way further West (because Patras could offer them nothing)… Their crudely real presence was putting the entire city’s post-industrial function at risk.

The camp was striking at the heart of the city’s illusory function of perception. For this reason it had to go. From the openly fascist voices of the extreme right calling for the deportation of the migrant-subject all together to the “pragmatic”, subtly fascist voices of the left calling for its elimination from public view: The object has becomes one, the safe functioning of the illusory city – uninterrupted, clean, orderly. Their cleanliness is cleansing, their order is death.

In this, we should have no illusions.

]]> http://www.occupiedlondon.org/blog/2009/07/23/62-hitler-on-tiptoes-the-subtle-rise-of-fascism-in-greece/feed/ 0 http://www.occupiedlondon.org/blog/2009/03/05/in-the-struggle-against-this-world-konstantina-is-not-alone/ http://www.occupiedlondon.org/blog/2009/03/05/in-the-struggle-against-this-world-konstantina-is-not-alone/#comments Thu, 05 Mar 2009 07:48:09 +0000 admin http://www.occupiedlondon.org/blog/?p=367 (second in a series of texts on Konstantina that are distributed in the streets of Athens these days – the first one is here)

When, in hearing Konstantina Kuneva’s name, we bring in mind “slave-trade” and the new work conditions’ “Middle Ages” we immediately forget that the model of subcontracting workers via agencies is not a set-back of the capitalist system to archaic models of work management that should be somehow “reviewed”. It is one of the most extreme contemporary forms of exploitation.

We forget that, from the continuous intensification and flexibility of work conditions to insurance, job lay-offs and work accidents, the attack of the bosses concerns the repressed in their entirety – and in this sense one and all can feel close to them the case of Konstantina.

So-called “employer lawlessness” does not concern individual bosses and specialised exploitation methods. The maximization-of-profit-by-all-means is the only issue that concerns each and every boss, who “risk their capital” over our own heads. The terrorism of the bosses concerns conditions of exception as much as the bullets of the cops do. Although, in the case of the attack against Konstantina what shocked was the upgraded form of violence against her, her case managed to spontaneously reveal to one and all that the bosses drink our blood by all means possible every-single-day.

Solidarity is not humanism of any sort. Solidarity means to take a stance: to connect the events with their true causes, the dismissal of life with the real face of its executioners. The increasingly conscious polarisation is the only radical and feasible answer to the war waged from the bosses and organised apathy. In the face of the coming revolt, compiling our negations is half of our common task.

In the struggle against this world Konstantina is not alone.

–

On the dawn of 5/1/08, at around 3 a.m, a riot police unit was shot at while guarding the ministry of culture in the Eksarhia district of Athens. They speak of more than 20 bullet shells and a hand grenade. The cop injured, they say, was saved only thanks to his mobile phone, which slowed down the bullet that hit him in the chest.

Our initial thought is that any individual that is part of our movement, no matter how enraged or in support of urban guerilla tactics they might be, would not chose the area of Eksarhia (literally under police occupation for the past few days) in order to launch an attack of this kind and manage to escape safely.

Therefore, we cannot consider coincidental the fact that mass media, politicians and their lackeys have been building up an atmosphere where some dynamic revenge action against the cops was imminent. We cannot rule out, of course, the possibility that such incidents could happen – but we are not foolish enough to believe that they would take place in Eksarhia, or in the case of the earlier incident (-the shooting against the police van a few days earlier – trans.) in the university campus of Zografou.
The state, via its mouthpiece media was preparing public opinion for some ‘imminent’ action against the police. The choice of the place of the attack (the ministry of culture in Eksarhia) somehow spoiled their recipe: An attack in such a heavily surveilled urban area clearly points at attackers that can only be directly linked to the state itself.
It goes without saying that these people would have no hesitation whatsoever to shoot one of their own – there’s no need for a second thought on that: Life means nothing to them.

Their action shows that they are trying to neutralise the climate for the shooting, in cold blood, of Alexis Grigoropoulos, and to create once again some sympathy for the police – who at the moment are spat at on the streets by pretty much everyone for anything they do. They are trying to create, at the same time, an atmosphere of violence and terrorism for all the rest who resist in any possible way.

The choice of Eksarhia, an area that no armed revolutionary group would ever chose under the given circumstances, builds all the necessary associations in the mind of the society; it frees the hands of cops and judges for violence and convictions against the social whole… this always in the face of the pending unemployment and financial crises.

Already there have been 75 detentions, many police attacks against residents and passers-by in Eksarhia, while there is also information on house raids – how handy for them.

There are strange days coming; the government has lost control a while ago and is now launching a full-scale violence, some violence in which it has a near-monopoly.

A disproportionate violence that faces stones and molotovs and responds with tons of chemical gases, bullets (plastic and regular), attacks of the wild revolted against fully equipped state units with military training.

The pre-planned right turn of the government (not that it wasn’t right-wing already, but having seen its conservative core moving to the far-right, it further hardens its rhetoric and repression tactics) can only be confronted with mass and unitary demonstrations and events against state terror. With answers and clashes on the streets; with mass barricades. With a political word that will talk of the people and their needs; of how they are masters of themselves, how they need to move away from the authoritarian leadership of political parties which ignore the pressing demand for liberation from the confines of the state, of homelands and capitalism.

Without rushed-up actions yet with our gaze in the immediate future, we need to produce ideas and proposals through our public assemblies so that the self-organisation of the people from below can become visible, viable and possible -precisely in the ways many of us witnessed during the days of the December revolt.

There is no other way – else, they’ll take us down, one after the other.

As they’ve proved one more time, they are ruthless.

(Translator’s note: the text goes out to the good people of Gaza. We have them in our hearts and minds and they remind us, in the most horrific of ways, that we have a million reasons to revolt and not a single one to sit back, to be complacent, to return to their murderous normality.)

A Bedouin anytime! A citizen never.

Having by our late labours and hazards made it appear to the world at how high a rate we value our just freedom (…) we do now hold our selves bound in mutual duty to each other, to take the best care we can for the future, to avoid the danger of returning into a slavish condition

- Levellers, An Agreement of the People, 1647

Let’s look beyond the tear gas, the baton sticks and the riot police vans: The operation being conducted by the bosses since December 6th doesn’t comprise a mere combination of repression and propaganda; rather, it is the application of a series of methods aiming to re-negotiate social peace and consensus.

From the communist party, which views the revolted people as puppets of syriza (the euro-left parliamentary party – transl.) and of cia, all the way to socialist party politicians moaning that Athens resembles a city of the Eastern Block, what with its streets empty from consumers. From the archbishop of Thessaloniki, who begs his flock to go shopping and the city’s international exposition offering free parking to christmas shoppers, they all hold a common target: The return to the normality of democracy and consumption. Thus the day after the revolt, which happens to coincide with a dead consumer feast such as christmas, is accompanied by the demand that this must celebrated at all cost: not only in order for some tills to fill up but in order for us all to return to our graves. The day after holds the demand of the living dead that nothing disturbs their eternal sleep no more. It holds a moratorium legitimising the emptiness of their spectacle-driven world, a world of quiet and peaceful life. And the generals of this war hold no weapon that is more lethal than the appeal to that absolute, timeless idea: democracy.

The word-for-democracy, developing as it does ever more densely from the side of the demagogues of calmness, aims at the social imaginary – the collective field of structuring of desires and fears. It aims, in other words, at the field where procedures invisibly take place that can secure or threaten order and its truth. Everyone knew, well before the assassination of Alexis, that the oligarchy of capital had given up on trying even to seem democratic, even by bourgeois terms: economic scandals, blatant incidents of police violence, monstrous laws. Yet this fact is not, neither here nor anywhere else, what might worry the bosses. This is precisely because the constant reproduction of the establishment under such terms (“is it democratic enough? Is it really democratic?”) reproduces the capitalist oligarchy that builds around it a wall of scandals, remorses, resignations, demands and reforms – preventing, in this way, the questioning of (not the democratic qualities of the regime but) democracy as a system of social organising. Hence bosses can still appeal to this higher value today, this axiomatic mechanism of the political, in order to bring us back to normality, consensus, compromise. In order to assimilate the general spontaneous rage in the sphere of mediation before this rage can organise itself into a revolutionary potential which would swoop all and any intermediaries and peaceful democrats – bringing along a new form of organising: the commune.

Amidst this ludicrous climate of shallow analyses the salaried officials of the psychological warfare point at the revolted, howling: “That’s not democratic, that ignores the rules under which our democracy functions”. We cannot help but momentarily stand speechless in the face of what we would until recently have considered impossible. Even if having the intention to deceive, the bosses of this country have said something true: We despise democracy more than anything else in this decadent world. For what is democracy other than a system of discriminations and coercions in the service of property and privacy? And what are its rules, other than rules of negotiation of the right to own – the invisible rules of alienation? Freedom, rights equality, egalitarianism: all these dead ideological masks together cannot cover their mission: the generalisation and preservation of the social as an economic sphere, as a sphere where not only what you have produced but also what you are and what you can do are already alienated. The bourgeois, with a voice trembling from piety, promise: rights, justice, equality. And the revolted hear: repression, exploitation, looting. Democracy is the political system where everyone is equal in front of the guillotine of the spectacle-product. The only problem that concerned democrats, from Cromwell to Montesquieu, is what form of property is sufficient in order for someone to be recognised as a citizen, what kind of rights and obligations guarantee that they will never understand themselves as something beyond a private citizen. Everything else is no more than adjusting details of a regime in the service of capital.

Our despise for democracy does not derive from some sort of idealism but rather, from our very material animosity for a social entity where value and organising are centered around the product and the spectacle. The revolt was by definition also a revolt against property and alienation. Anyone that didn’t hide behind the curtains of their privacy, anyone who was out on the streets, knows it only too well: Shops were looted not for computers, clothes or furniture to be resold but for the joy of destructing what alienates us: the spectacle of the product. Anyone who doesn’t understand why someone delights in the sight of a destructed product is a merchant or a cop. The fires that warmed the bodies of the revolted in these long December nights were full of the liberated products of our toil, from the disarmed symbols of what used to be an almighty fantasy. We simply took what belonged to us and we threw it to the fire together with all its co-expressions. The grand potlatch of the past few days was also a revolt of desire against the imposed rule of scarcity. A revolt of the gift against the sovereignty of money. A revolt of the anarchy of use value against the democracy of exchange value. A revolt of spontaneous collective freedom against rationalised individual coercion.

The greek version of the text below was distributed in the occupied Economics University of Athens (and elsewhere, I imagine) in the first week of the revolt. The photo is from Athens yesterday, posted on Indymedia. At first sight the image and the text might seem to clash – yet this is one good reason why I wanted to put them together… Do hold in mind that Greece has no historical memory of May 1968 as such; at the time when France was looking under the paving stones, Greece was entering military rule.

Barricade and history/ Notes on the intensification of bourgeois antagonism

The violent clash is first and foremost a clash within the latent level of the enactment and the assignment of meaning to space and time. It is the clash between the objective structure (the dog) with its knowledge and practice-based assignments of meaning (the dog’s tail), some assignments critiquing the conditions of objectification of these very structures “arming the tail with teeth so that it can bite the dog”.

Every social class tries to use or transform the space of the city for its own gain. In this way we see the inscribing, in an elliptic trajectory, of a tradition of the oppressed: some tradition that holds the barricade as its visible material expression. The barricade represents on a spatial level what already exists in the social: The rupture with the assignment of meaning to the city as a unit that is supposedly whole and equal. A rupture with a definition of society as a permanent union of equals. From the part of sovereignty, it is this very unity of space that guarantees its continuation in time. The verge-esque state of the barricade reveals the radical division of the urban space. This division seems no longer solid, functional, inescapable - and becomes the main component of unity instead. It becomes a (national) unity (an ideologically constructed identity) that is divided. The propositional rupture of the social fabric comes to confirm the theoretical observation of a process of social change. The theory and practice of the oppressed come together in a materially effective cosmology. It is this very practice that accelerates the rhythm of the flow of historical time and it is this theory that conceptualises this acceleration.

The historical genealogy of the contemporary process of gentrification of “deprived” areas can be traced to the “strategic embellishment” of cities. Same like then, the contemporary target is met in its duality: 1) The prevention of possible revolts or their effective dealing with the literal flattening of their epicenters and 2) the production of a space with no properties: of a city with no memory. Capital, in its tight embracing of urban practice, turns towards this speculative field during periods of underdevelopment of other traditionally more profiteering fields of investment activity. As for the other side (that is, the side of the oppressed), its hereditary nature is reflected upon the urban geography of struggle. Topographies of clashes are soaked with historical memory; the past is a field of non-accomplished opportunities and capacities and our dead comrades are potentially vindicated in the historical future.

The dominant ideology perceives the capitalist model to be insurmountable, natural, eternal: the arrow of history is circular and thus the future is a recycling of the past. And since the past, as a sum of results, has nothing to show other than temporary elements of freedom, we can easily set things straight – seen, as they are, from the viewpoint of an inunequivocal evolution heading to the theological telos of progress. An End, in other words, in the sense of a conclusion and a goal since what is targeted is not that which becomes but that which is repeated. This understanding is the metaphysical carrot and we are the mules pulling the carriage of the bi-historical king richards – being, at the same time, the carriage’s last wheel.

What overshadows the meaning of modality in the activity of the philosophy of history is the pragmatic definition of truth. The conception, that is, of truth as a result.

In our attempt to reach the utopia of freedom we see that freedom is a concept that one cannot easily define yet everyone can understand.

Comradely, plebeian.

ANNOUNCEMENT BY THE POLYTECHNIC OCCUPATION

Immediately after the murder of Alexandros Grigoropoulos by the special police guard Ep. Korkoneas and the first clashes in the streets of Exarchia, the Polytechnic university was occupied and turned into a focus for the expression of social rage. Being a space historically and symbolically connected in the living memory ofthe rebels and of a big part of society with the struggle against Authority -from the period of dictatorship until today’s modern totalitarian democracy-, the Polytechnic became the place where hundreds of people gathered spontaneously: comrades, youth and workers, jobless, pupils, immigrants, students…

The fights with the forces of repression and the flaming barricades in the surrounding streets became the spark of a revolt that spread with spontaneous demonstrations in the city, the occupation of the Economics University and the Law School, with attacks against state and capitalist targets in the centre and neighborhoods of Athens and in most cities across the country. The following days, with demonstrations of thousands of people ending up in riots and attacks against banks, ministries and big department stores, with occupations of schools and public buildings, with young children besieging and assaulting policestations, the riot police guarding Koridallos prison and the Parliament, the revolt became generalized; this revolt that was triggered by the murder of A. Grigoropoulos and exploded by the immediate reaction of hundreds of comrades to that event of the widespread state violence, inspiring actions of rage and solidarity beyond the borders, all over the world. This revolt that was simmering in the conditions of a generalized attack by the state and the bosses against society, growing in the reality of the everyday death of freedom and dignity that is reserved for the oppressed people by the increasing exclusion, poverty, exploitation, repression and control. This revolt that was persistently being “prepared”, even in the darkest times of state and fascist terrorism, through every small or big gesture of resistance against submission and surrender, keeping open the way for many more people to meet in the streets, just like it happened during these days. In this explosive social reality, the occupied Polytechnic became a point of reference for a direct confrontation with the state, in all forms and with allpossible means, through consecutive insurrectionary events that burned down the order and security of the bosses, smashing the fake image of social consent to their murderous intentions. It became a place where rebellious social and political subjects met and influenced one another, through the general assemblies and their daily presence in the occupation. It functioned as a base for counter-information, through communiqués and posters, its blog and radio station, and with the PA system sending the messages and the news of the ongoing revolt. And it also gave life to political initiatives of resistance, like the call made by the Polytechnic occupation assembly for a global day of action on the 20th of December –which resulted in coordinated mobilizations in more than 50 cities in different countries, and in which the Polytechnic occupiers participated by calling for a gathering in the place where A. Grigoropoulos was murdered-, like the concert held on the 22nd of December for solidarity and financial support to the hostages of the revolt, and the call for participation in the prisoner solidarity demonstration that was organized by comrades who took part in the open assembly of the occupied GSEE (General Workers’ Confederation).

As a stable, for 18 days, point of the revolt that expanded, the occupied Polytechnic was a continuous call of insubordination to the people resisting all over the world, and a permanent sign of solidarity to the hostages taken by the state from within this struggle. It became the territory we used in order to diffuse the message of solidarity between the oppressed, of self-organisation and of a social and class counter-attack against the world of Authority, its mechanisms and its symbols. These elements and values of the struggle created the ground for the oppressed to meet in rebellion, armed our consciences and, for the first time maybe, became so widely impropriated by so many people of different age and different nationalities; people with whom anarchists and anti-authoritarians shared the same slogans against the police, the same words, the same practices of struggle, the same rage against those who are looting our lives, and, many times, the same vision for a world of freedom, equality and solidarity.

For this reason, repression was not only expressed in the form of police brutality, arrests and imprisonment of demonstrators, but also with an intense ideological attack launched by all sides of the political system which saw its foundations trembling when repression, in which it is based, not only was unable to restrain the waves of revolt, but, contrary, it was the one that caused them in the first place. This ideological attack selectively targeted anarchists, as a political and unmediated part of the revolted, exactly because of the impact their words and actions had, and because of the danger that is presented for the state when they communicate and coordinate with the thousands of the oppressed. In this context, there was an hysterical effort to divide the revolted in “good pupils” on one hand, “evil hooded anarchists – ‘koukouloforoi’” or“immigrant looters” on the other, as well as the good old myth about provocateurs, in order to manipulate the anger for the assassination, to exhaust the social explosion, to criminalize, isolate and crush the steady points of reference of this revolt [This is, by the way, the same rhetoric of repression that led to the murder of A. Grigoropoulos, as it is responsible for recognizing specific political-social milieus, spaces and people as the “enemy within” on which state violence should be“legitimately” enforced]. In this effort made by the state, the continuous targeting of the Polytechnic was included on a daily basis, with statements made by politicians and a slandering campaign by the mass media. After the hours of clashes in Exarchia and around the Polytechnic during the night of December 20, the state, in the face of the public prosecutor, threatened to proceed to a police raid, after suspending the academic asylum in the campus, despite the disagreement of the university authorities, in order to suppress the revolt by attacking one of the first places where it hadstarted. Their intentions were defeated because of the refusal of the occupiers to obey to any ultimatum, their decisiveness to defend this political and social territory as apart of the revolt, their open call to people to come and support the occupation with their presence and by proceeding to the planned prisoner solidarity gig on the 22nd of December which gathered hundreds of people at the Polytechnic. The threats for an immediate eviction returned stronger the following day, December23, when, while the assembly was discussing the end of the occupation, we were informed by political and academic figures that the ministry of Interior and the police are demanding our immediate exit from the campus otherwise the cops would invade. The reply of the occupiers was that the Polytechnic does not belong neither to the ministry not to police for us to surrender to them; it belongs to the people of the struggle who decide on what to do based exclusively on criteria of the movement and do not accept blackmails and ultimatums by the assassins. This way the Polytechnic occupation was prolonged for one more day, and called to the demo which was realized in the center of Athens for solidarity with the arrested. No repressive project and no ideological attack managed or will manage to blackmail the return to normality and to impose social and class pacification. Nothing is the same any more! The surpassing of fear, of isolation and of the dominant social divisions, led thousands of young people, together with women and men of every age, refugees and migrants, workers and jobless to stand together in the streets and behind barricades fighting the tyrants of our life, our dignity and freedom. And this is a reality lighting with its flames the future of revolt, both its intensification and deepening, until the absolute subversion of the world of the bosses. Because we shouted in all ways that those days belong to Alexis, to Michalis Kaltezas, to Carlo Giuliani, to Christoforos Marinos, to Michalis Prekas, to Maria Koulouri and to all comrades murdered by the uniformed assassins of the state; they aren’t though days that belong to death, but to LIFE! To life that blossoms in the struggles, in the barricades, in the revolt that continues.

Ending the Polytechnic occupation after 18 days, we send our warmest solidarity to all people who became part of this revolt in their many ways, not only in Greece but also in numerous countries of Europe, of South and North America, Asia and Australia-N.Zealand. To all those with whom we met and we will stay together, fighting for the liberation of the prisoners of this revolt, but also for its continuing until global social liberation. For a world without masters and slaves,without police and armies, without borders and prisons.

DEATH TO THE STATE – LONG LIVE ANARCHY!

IMMEDIATE RELEASE OF ALL THE ARRESTED IN THE REVOLT!

THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES!

We call to the open assembly that will take place in the Polytechnic, on Saturday, December 27 at 16.00, concerning the organization of solidarity to the arrested, which was called by comrades in the assembly of the occupied GSEE.

The Polytechnic Occupation 12/24/08

]]> http://www.occupiedlondon.org/blog/2008/12/25/announcement-by-the-athens-polytechnic-occupation-24122008/feed/ 9 http://www.occupiedlondon.org/blog/2008/12/12/we-are-in-civil-war-with-the-fascists-the-bankers-the-state-the-media-wishing-to-see-an-obedient-society/ http://www.occupiedlondon.org/blog/2008/12/12/we-are-in-civil-war-with-the-fascists-the-bankers-the-state-the-media-wishing-to-see-an-obedient-society/#comments Fri, 12 Dec 2008 07:59:25 +0000 admin http://www.occupiedlondon.org/blog/?p=43 …you would be excused to think that the above extract comes from an anarchist statement; alas, no – it is from the statement issued by the association of employees of the suburb of Agios Dimitrios in Athens. Here’s a rough translation of the statement, as promised. Keep in mind that, as members of the association told some comrades, they tried to keep the style of the text as sober as possible, to ensure the maximum number of people take the streets with them.

STATEMENT

On Saturday night, the Greek police assassinated a 15 year old student.

His assassination was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

It was the continuation of a coordinated action, by state terrorism and the Golden Dawn, which aimed at university and high school students (with the private universities first), at migrants that continue to be persecuted for being born with the wrong colour, at the employees that must work to death without compensation.

The government of cover-ups with its praetors, having burnt the forests last summer, is responsible for all major cities burning now, too. It protected financial criminals, all those involved in the mobile phone interceptions scandal, those looting the employees’ insurance funds, those kidnapping migrants, those who protected the banks and the monasteries that steal from the ordinary people.

We are in Civil War: With the fascists, the bankers, the state, the media wishing to see an obedient society.

There are no excuses, yet they once again try to use conspiracy theories to calm spirits down.

The rage that had accumulated had to be expressed and should not, by any means, end.

Throughout the world we are making headlines, it was about time that people uprise everywhere.

The generation of the poor, the unemployed, the partially employed, the homeless, the migrants, the youth, is the generation that will smash every display window and will wake up the obedient citizens from their sleep of the ephemeral American dream.

Don’t watch the news, consciousness is born in the streets

When the youth is murdered, the old people should not sleep

Goodbye Alexandros, may your blood be the last of an innocent to run

A boy resides out-of-place. Two pigs charge into the out-of-place. In the conjuncture of these two trajectories, an event is born. The boy challenges the violation of the borders of his out-of-place by the pigs. The pigs park in-place and cross once again the limits of the heterotopia, on foot. The pigs injunct the boy. The boy responds to the injunction. The pigs shoot and destroy the life that “is not worth being lived”. The pigs return in-place. The borders of the out-of-place are ruptured and urban space, from end to end, is recomposed into a thick burning network of heterotopia: the city is on fire.

For sovereignty, every life out-of-place is a life that is not worth being lived. The state of exception is imposed, even by suspension, on every life out-of-place, on every life that is acted not as a contemplation of privacy and its commodity-panoply, but as a social relation, as a self-constituted construction of the space and time of conviviality. The sovereign exception is not so much about the control or the destruction of a excess in itself, but about the creation or the definition of a space where juridico-political order can be perpetually validated. The state of exception classifies space and the bodies within it. It puts them in order. It imposes order upon them. With assimilation, commodification, surveillance and discipline. Executing the delinquent with prisons, psychiatric units, marginalisation. And wherever, whenever might be necessary: with bullets, with bullets, with bullets.

In a society dedicated to the production of privacies, the murder of a boy can only be conceptualised in the terms of the value of his privacy, the ontological base of property: the sacred right to one’s own life. This is the only way in which death can be political: as a destruction of the source of property. The destruction of property, let alone its source, is a dreadful crime in the bourgeois world. Even, or especially when it is committed by the apparatus charged with its protection. But to destroy properties in order to take revenge for the destruction of property, that is a doubly nefarious crime: Have you not understood a thing? All those tears, all the dirge, the requiems are not for a boy that attacked the power-that-safeguards-property, they are for the power that failed in its duty: the duty to defend life as the ultimate property, as privacy.

The body of an enemy now deceased can be sanitized, pillaged, transformed into a symbolic capital for the reproduction of sovereignty and finally, in the announcement or reminder of the capacity for the imposition of a generalised state of exception. An emergency confirming the sovereign monopoly on the definition of the real through the abolition of its symbolic legitimisation. The sovereignty, in tears, shouts: you are all private individuals, else you are all potential corpses. And society falls on its knees in awe of its idol and shows remorse: mea culpa; from now on, I will take care of myself only, as long as you safeguard its reproduction. The return to the normalcy of the private is paved with the spectacle of generalised exception.

10-12-2008 fleshmachine from the squatted Athens School of Economics

Flesh Machine is an anarchist magazine “on the body and its desiring machines” published in Athens. It focuses on original publications and translations of articles and interviews on biopolitics, schizoanalysis, feminism, queer politics and the other wet aspects of capitalism and the revolution.

A cab spinning to Belgrade airport in the early morning hours. The driver, dropping the usual “serbo-greek” friendship clichés, is trying to communicate his amazement at what’s happening “down there”. I haven’t really got much of a clue myself. I am trying to put my thoughts together. The hurried-up meeting in Zagreb, the topic that immediately shifted (how could it not?) to the situation in Athens. The midnight train, this spinning cab trying to catch the first flight out. Just had to. “I’m coming as soon as I can”. “Yes, you should”. “You have no idea what is going on, there is simply no way to describe it”. “Every single, and I mean every single shop in the centre of Athens is damaged or destroyed”. “It is war, don’t you see? This is war”.
And so it begins. The biggest string of riots the country has seen in its post-dictatorship (1974) era. Talking heads on TV screens are completely freaking out. “What would the rest of the world say?” Endlessly shifting between the reaction of international media and the damage inflicted by the riots to the christmas shopping trade. The hanging threat of a declaration of a state of emergency. Government officials, for now, deny this is a possibility. But who can tell? No-one can; no-one has any way to predict what can happen from here on. Even for Greece, a country with high levels of violence in political demonstrations, this is terra incognita. No-one has been here before. No-one has come straight from three days of unprecedented rioting onto a fourth one (Tuesday, the day of Alexandros’ funeral) and a fifth one that is sure to follow on Wednesday, the day of the general strike. And no-one can possibly imagine just how things will calm down after that. The masses on the streets keep breaking through an ever-increasingly violent police: Students are injured inside the university of Thessaloniki, shot at with rubber bullets. In Athens, riot police beat senseless another 15-year old boy in front of shocked passers-by begging them to stop. And yet, the police have already lost control. Trapped between trying to avoid a second (surely catastrophic) death yet equipped with the single technique they possess in handling the demonstrators – sheer violence. The government, a sorry get-together of more talking heads on the TV, locked up in meeting rooms, one emergency cabinet meeting after the other. A dead government standing. The question is not if – the question is just about how it will fall.

On the other end of the line is a friend from Eksarhia. “I could not believe what I saw. Every single… Every single shop, every single traffic light, across the whole of the centre – all smashed up, burnt. I just can’t believe it”. In Patras, the furious demonstrators’ block besieged the main police station only hours after the assassination. The first five arrests. The following day, a well-known local poet, now in his fifties, walked up to the police station, alone. He calmly opened his bag and, one after the other, he lit and threw the molotov cocktails he had in his bag. A new form of poetry?
The plane is descending into Athens. It is Tuesday, December 9th, the day of Alexandros’ funeral and only a few hours away from the general strike. Yet at a few thousand feet from the ground, things seem pretty normal. I am coming home. Or am I?