Within the framework of the Direct Action Cells, as a Cell of Insurgent Violence, we take responsibility for the arson attack at the entrance of the house of Giannis Pretenteris.
We were not surprised by the condemnations of the bourgeois political parties, the ESIEA (Athens Daily Newspaper Editors’ Union), the government representative. Giannis Pretenteris has proved on every possible occasion that he is the most loyal watchdog of the corrupt economic and political elite that has been ruling this country with arrogance and impunity for all these years. Pretenderis symbolises a person – a role model for the bourgeois world. His position in the system, the posts and the tasks he has been called upon to carry out follow a double path that ends up on the same road.
The first one that makes his appearance in front of the cameras of the television channels. Fancy, dominant, powerful, subsidized, manufactured. Pretenteris is a shining example of a tireless propaganda machine called upon to represent state and capitalist interests and to shape a social ethic, the ethic of the system. This morality that always presents itself in the imperious guise of the social majority, in order to strike with the stick of the dominant class violence and to order with impudence – using techniques of psychological warfare – those who harm the interests of the powerful. Spreading fake news, constant attempts to manipulate citizens, slander, character assassination are on his daily agenda. At the same time, its ideological profile, which can be described as “modernist” in the standards of the hard neoliberal centre, is the official television representation of political power and the most unscrupulous economic interests. For Pretenteris there is one unbreakable rule: Whatever suits and serves the power system that supports him is ethical and legal. Whatever threatens its interests is illegal and arbitrary.
Pretenteris’ other path is dark. It is that of shady dealings with political and economic interests, of willing brokering all kinds of state and parastatal dirty tricks, of well-paid under-the-table deals on where to provide his required political support. It is the route of a loyal courtier who has pitched his tent outside the villas of the big business tycoons, the media owners, the contractors, the big political families, waiting with excessive servility for their dictates. The route of black money, offshore, extensive tax evasion, the mafia-like operations of the system that are laundered with no compensation by appointed journalists like Pretenderis.
Giannis Pretenteris, as a stooge of Lambrakis and Bobolas, made his first appearances on private television, on ANT1. He was one of the first to give voice and political legitimacy to the nazis of Golden Dawn in the 1990s, calling out Nikos Michaloliakos and giving the floor to Periandros Andritsopoulos and other henchmen of the then Golden Dawn to drip their Neo-Nazi poison in public. After all, when it serves state planning, bourgeois democracy reproduces its version of political pluralism and tolerance. Of course, as long as the opposing voice has given credentials of allegiance to the state and the capitalists that the deep core of their interests will remain untouched.
Giannis Pretenteris quickly jumps to MEGA1, while writing for the then Lambrakis-owned print press (VIMA, NEA2). He becomes a key commentator on the main newscast and has his own political show. His tireless insistence on the ideological and political defence of every act of state violence, every economic and political scandal, turns him and his show into a slogan shouted in the streets of the cities by the student movement fighting against the then Diamantopoulou law3 – framework: “Subversion is not a show, Pretraderis die to make a celebration”. Pretenteris had deservedly earned the dislike of those involved in social – political demands, as everyone was ground down by his propaganda millstone.
Alongside his daily defence of the memoranda and the policies being pursued in that period, he was again one of the first to give a television voice to the racist “residents’ committees”4, so that the racist poison found a response in the armies of the newly deprived of the crisis. We are sure that in May 2012 Pretenteris was looking at the election results with pride. He had contributed the most to the 7% of Golden Dawn, as the shipowner who now has him on his pay roll at IOM (International Organisation for Migration) also wished.
Depending on the period, Giannis Pretenteris changes his views like his well-pressed shirts. He becomes racist and xenophobic by turning a blind eye to fascists, racists, right-wing extremists, calling for more drowned migrants at the sea border, and more murders of refugees at the Evros fence. He becomes a ‘modernist’ and liberal calling for more wage cuts, more privatisation, more labour flexibility. He becomes “anti-fascist” from a right-wing perspective, omitting that Golden Dawn has been a golden reserve for the political system. In any case, Pretenteris remains throughout the ages a hack journalist who provides his services without compensation to the gangs of political and economic plunderers who continue their unabated plundering at the expense of the oppressed.
Pretenteris’ main propaganda strategy is the cultivation of social automatism. “Civil servants are lazy” only when they complain about pay cuts. “Students are idle” only when they are squatting. “Students are driven” only when they protest. “Public transport workers are inconveniencing the public” only when they go on strike. As long as the respective social groups tolerate this whip on their backs, they are the pillars of the national effort for “blessed” economic development, they are the candidate base for the reconstruction and staffing of the “serious” national body, which is nothing but the social expression of modern dogmatism.
Because, for Pretenteris, the blood spilled in the streets by the batons and guns of the police does not matter, the thousands of suicides of our fellow human beings do not matter, the destruction of the public health system that closes the door to a decent life for thousands of people at the bottom of the social pyramid does not matter, the auctions of houses and businesses by the ravens of banking capital do not matter, the privatization of all public enterprises for a plate of lentils does not matter, the privatization of all public enterprises for a plate of lentils does not matter, and the destruction of the public health system that closes the door to a decent life for thousands of people at the bottom of the social pyramid does not matter. And they don’t matter, because Pretenteris expresses the promiscuity of the local version of sovereignty. He seeks to reinforce the ideological mechanisms of social indifference in order to intensify the social cannibalism, privatization, and individual solutions promoted by capitalism.
On the other hand, of course, Giannis Pretenteris is laconic and not at all indifferent when his “friends” and masters are targeted – even in the intra-systemic context – and immediately rushes to defend them with his muddy pen. It is important to oil the junkie and oil smuggler Marinakis, as well as Mareva Mitsotakis with offshore accounts, “Because the method of blackmail was remarkably unchanging. The persecuted Maniadakis was asked to “give up” the Novartis politicians. The accused Papantoniou was asked to ‘give up’ Simitis. A Noor-1 lifer was asked to ‘give up’ Marinakis. From Papastavrou “to give up” Mareva!” (Yannis Pretenderis).
It is important that one of the biggest scandals of the Metapolitefsi5, the Novartis scandal, should appear as a plot against the Samaras government. A scandal that palpates the way in which capitalist giants (especially the big pharmaceutical companies), regulate for their own benefit and to the detriment of those from below the “terms of the game”, even by bribing politicians. Even for the only politician that the bourgeois justice system has gone some way in the proceedings and prosecuted, Loverdos, Pretenteris has come out to give credentials of a loyal tenant:
“In late 2016, A. Loverdos was returning from a trip with his children. He stops somewhere on the National Road because the kids were hungry and he hears on the radio that they are talking about a Novartis case in the US that allegedly involves (and involves) ‘Greek officials’. Later the US will clarify that by ‘official’ they did not of course mean politicians but executives from the wider public health sector. On the National Road, however, Loverdos knew nothing about officials or politicians. He did not even know about Novartis! Most importantly, he did not know that it was the beginning of a nightmare for him and his family that would continue for the next four years and until recently.” (Giannis Pretenteris)
It is important to oil the government and in particular the Minister of Culture Mendoni, but also Mitsotakis himself in the unpleasant case of the cover-up of the pedophile Lignadis:
“Does the government have responsibility? Obviously it has the responsibility of choice – in the sense of the responsibility a government has for all its choices. Whether it chooses an artistic director for the National Theatre, or a governor at Evangelismo, or a president at Attiko Metro SA (Athens Metro). Was there an attempted cover-up? The first lawsuit against Lignadis was filed on 5 February, Lignadis resigned on 6 February, followed by one or two more lawsuits until 19 February, on 20 February he was arrested. Any reasonable person can draw their own conclusions from the facts. The rest are stories for savages.” (Giannis Pretenteris)
These are just a few references to the systematic laundering through his articles and one of the reasons why he is in the upper echelons of paid mainstream journalism, but also a highly symbolic target for the fighting formations that, in spite of the times, try to keep the flame of social warfare burning. The arson attack outside his house in the area of Psychiko is dedicated to those whom Giannis Pretenteris has ridiculed, slandered, humiliated and disgraced over the years. It is also dedicated to all the political prisoners whom this scoundrel has slandered more than once. Finally, it is also a call to all fighting forces. Our enemy is not invisible. He has a name and an address.
Comrade greetings to all the groups, individuals, cells that choose to contribute to the formation of the network of revolutionary violence that we have described in our writings. We have said it and we are doing it, we are organizing Cells of Direct Action to strike at state and capital. From Athens, Volos, Thessaloniki, the smoke from the arsons foreshadows the unrest we will cause. With the language of fire we will respond to blackmail and state terrorism.
Solidarity with the political prisoners in Greek prisons.
A signal of solidarity with all the unrepentant revolutionaries in the prisons of Chile and Italy.
Rebellious memory for Luisa Toledo Sepúlveda.
Direct Action Cells
Insurgent Violence Cell
Source: Athens IMC
1 One of the main private mainstream TV channels in Greece.
2 To Vima, by Greek standards, is considered center-left and is politically aligned with the centrist (reformist) wing of the Greek social-democratic party PASOK.
Ta Nea, a traditional center-left friendly newspaper and has strongly supported PASOK, the Greek Socialist Party in the 1980s and 1990s.
3 The so-called “Diamantopoulou Law” included reforms for primary and secondary education ranging from rationalization of resources to educational content, the introduction of “Digital School” in all levels of education system and the introduction of a new Framework for Lifelong Learning. She also introduced legislation to partially liberalize higher education by permitting private sponsorship of science, technology and business programmes at state universities.
4 Local neighborhood groups in Athens set up during the ‘economic crisis’, that were infiltrated by Golden Dawn to attack migrants.
5 Metapolitefsi, ‘regime change’, so called period of re-democratisation after the transition from the junta era. It led to the instutialisation of the Communist Party and the creation of the New Democracy (Nea Demokratia) who won the elections in 1974. For many from the anarchist scene in Greece ‘Metapolitefsi’ is seen as a lie, that the old regime still exists in the background still shaping the country, that many laws and institutions still exist from the junta and that it was excuse to rapidly advance capitalism in the country, similar to transformations that occured after the juntas in Spain and Chile. This period gave rise to the saying in Greece that ‘the Junta never died!’