Since 23.5, comrade Giannis Michailidis chose to put his body on the line, starting a hunger strike demanding his immediate release. The comrade has served 3/5 of his sentence and meets all the formal conditions for his release. However, the judicial council vindictively rejected the comrade’s request, using as an excuse that Giannis does not meet the substantive conditions for release as the same council considers him to be a risk of committing new offences.
Class power wants to impose on us a world where ‘danger’ is identified with the vision of a world of equality and solidarity. Where any form of self-determination, self-institution and self-organisation, any attempt to overcome state mediation is considered a crime. The same system that creates and reproduces exploitation, oppression and the culture of power uses itself as regulator and judge. Thus it imposes laws that protect sovereignty, punishments that unfold at the grassroots level. And when the latter realises that if it does not fight it cannot survive and chooses self-defence, the omnipresent regulator puts on its most bloodthirsty face, because at this moment not only is sovereignty threatened but its own role is called into question. This is how his political courts are built. On moments of practical questioning of a devastated world, moments of questioning those who guard it.
Incarceration is nothing but the consolidation of the proletarian condition in contemporary capitalism. Democracy is imposed not only by tactical victories, but also through the constant effort to subjugate those who challenge its rule and fight for their survival through its overthrow. It attempts to bring the resisting parts of society to their knees by burying them in mass repositories of souls, condemning them to a fate of permanent captivity, deprivation and torture.
But within this condition, within the prisons of the world from below, there are people who resist. People who do not bend and do not repent. Who have not renounced their ideas and overcome their choices at all costs. Militants like Giannis Michailidis, who, by putting his body on the mound in a last battle against the machinations of power, gives life to class memory, bringing urgently to the forefront of history the spirit of sacrifice of the oppressed and the unquenchable hatred for the ruling classes.
Thus, the struggle for Giannis’ liberation is a struggle to actualize and legitimize what he has fought and we have been fighting for so many years. It is the struggle against borders and wars, the plundering of nature, the impoverishment and social and economic exclusion imposed on us by the ruling classes. It is the always, timely and just, mass and armed struggle against the state and capital, the struggle that keeps alive and grows the flame of proletarian insurrection. The struggle of those who carry a new free world in their hearts.
As a minimal sign of practical solidarity with the struggle that the comrade is waging, we chose to carry out an attack on the National Bank on Alexandra Avenue, placing an incendiary device at the back entrance on Mavromichalis Street. In this way we chose to stand by the comrade but also against every symbol and institution of a system of exploitation, oppression and power. And we will be there for as long as it takes.
Deep breath until the death of the state, capital and the culture of power.
Anarchists
Source: athens.indymedia