On December 15, in the evening, we attacked with an incendiary device the house of the president of ΟΝΝΕΔ (Youth Organization of New Democracy), Pavlos Marinakis, at 29 Ariannou Street in Pagrati.
Another act of direct action that is deliberately concealed by the mainstream media, aiming to protect, first of all, the target, but also to safeguard the overall prestige of power that wants the rulers to be immune away from the hands of their “impoverished subjects”. But nevertheless, we are here to refute this false security that they diligently seek to present as the privilege of the powerful.
So we too have sought out and found this particular subject who lately, apart from being outrageously provocative with his audacity and statements, seems to be on an upward trajectory in New Democracy. This is anything but coincidental, of course. This party has invested in the profile of a popular right-wing party that clearly leans towards the far right, while at the same time launching an image of sophisticated “excellence” through the universally controlled media in order to cover as large an audience as possible.
So let us say a few words about this gentleman in order to illustrate the rot that he carries and serves. Part and parcel of the vanguard of an alt right, he has given credentials of political compatibility with the obscurantism of New Democracy quite early on. A servant of a rhetoric that wants “national interest” to be identified with a creeping fascism in all aspects of social life. A nationalism of ‘everyday life’, accessible and palatable to the whole of the constituency, an extraction of political discourse through the constant promotion of social media. An outgrowth of this covert nationalist dimension is his macho statements with references to the civil war.(Tsipras if we lived in the civil war by me you would “go”) Of course we have no desire to take a position in this verbal dispute as we are sure of the role both of them would have had during the civil war. But we would like to point out to the much heavier Marinakis that he would most likely have had the end that fate had in store for his like-minded and fellow countrymen in the Meligala well.*
It is clear that in Greece the treasonous battalions of Nazi collaborators were not only never punished, but they formed (and as it seems still do) the backbone of the new Greek state. It is no coincidence that the subject in question is the grandson of the lawyer defending G. Kalambokas, the murderer of N. Tebonera. The stench and smell is passed down from generation to generation.
Of course, the “tough” Marinakis defending Bogdanos, when the latter published a list of names of underage children, seemed to invoke forgiveness and absolution “I mean, the point is to take the head, politically speaking of a man who apologized” seeking understanding and compassion.
Of course all this far-right passion and history will be rewarded by the government with Mitsotakis proposing him as the new secretary of the ND Political Committee.
Covid-19 crisis and its management:
Of course we cannot ignore the fact that this, in essence, far-right government has been called upon for two years now to manage the issue of the pandemic and the general crisis brought about by covid-19. An issue that almost monopolises our daily lives, even though events with an enormous political and social impact have taken place during this period and have de facto gone almost unnoticed.
We will not go into the process of talking about the scientific data and their implications, we leave this part to the scientific community, without, of course, considering this whole as one and unified and without ignoring the fact of bias (at the altar of power and capital) that has characterized it over the years. For us, the socio-political crisis that we are experiencing takes precedence in this case, because this is the only area in which we could act and have a real impact as a political space. Unfortunately, however, the unprecedented nature of the treaty in terms of its management, combined with the very nature of this crisis, has resulted in the partial inactivation of a large part of the antagonistic/radical space. Although from the very first moment of the pandemic we saw deep class measures of control and repression imposed, we failed to rally and respond in any meaningful way, instead we watched “numbly” as our freedoms were increasingly curtailed, looking for the means and ways to respond, always taking into account the specific nature of the health crisis. It was there that power found the space to develop and eventually universally impose the concept of ‘individual responsibility’ by shifting the burden of managing such a crisis to the people themselves. Using fear and human life as a vehicle, the ruling class finally succeeded in creating a division in society as a whole on the basis of a by definition indefensible “either with us or against society”. Thus a large part of the radical space, ignoring or overlooking the fact of class, both in the management and in the crisis itself, found itself adopting the policies of the government even as it tried to adapt them to its political project. The result of this peculiar condition was that dissonance was heard from our ranks about the “class duty” of vaccination and compliance with the measures if we want to overcome this crisis, etc. We realise, unfortunately, that we still need tons of ink and years of political dialogue to finally establish what is defined as a simple duty, let alone a class duty and even more so a revolutionary duty. We cannot talk about managing the crisis without analysing the political reasons for its explosion, we cannot ignore the fact that the flattening of public and free health care is one of the main reasons for the upsurge in deaths. We cannot talk about individual responsibility without fighting to overturn this system as a whole. We cannot as a political space allow state propaganda to define what and how contestation is and how it is expressed and generously provide them with a monopoly of political definition by characterizing any opposition as the work of “sprayed” deniers. Power is always looking for a flimsy political space to oppose its tactics in order to serve its narrative. What is innovative in this case is that it attempts to include all social groups and political nuances in this flimsy set of “sprays”, thus achieving the heteronomy of the most politically conscious, thus consolidating the constant dichotomy of “either with the measures (with us) or against society”. We as a political space have a duty to defend our class, to overcome the dominant narrative and to fight by all means against power and the way it manages human lives.
A few words about the organisation of the anarchist movement:
In Greece over time, the anarchist space has been moving between existing and forming as a movement with the appropriate dynamics and existing as a political “current” involved in diverse socio-political conditions. For years we have been a space of ‘negative’ propositions, a space of heterodoxy, reactionary with a lack of organisation and long-term objectives. This does not mean, of course, that all these years of existence and action of the anarchist space in these terms have offered nothing in terms of political maturation and ultimately the formation of favourable conditions for the next step, far from it. It was this process of maturation that contributed to the anarchist space as a movement beginning to march, creating intersections in socio-political time, setting up points and objectives. It was this process that eventually led the anarchist space to carry the 2008 uprising on its shoulders and give it its own political characteristics by groping for structures of organizations that emerged from the dynamics of the data. It was this history that led us to draw anew on the knowledge and experiences of 2008 during the period of the anti-monetary mobilizations. Small and big moments when the anarchist space showed its strengths, its reflexes, but unfortunately also its limits in many cases. There were opportunities that were missed, steps that were not taken either out of inexperience or timidity. But in any case, these moments nourished our space, both structurally (with the arrival of new people, new haunts, new collectives, etc.) and politically. The ferment and political confrontations of those moments pulled us out of deadlocks and entanglements of the past and laid the foundations for something new to develop.
The coordination at the level of action, but also the frequency with which the incendiary groups acted in the period after 2008 was an example of organisation that could potentially be the vehicle for a movement with clear revolutionary characteristics and implications in many different aspects of everyday life.
However, every era carries its own particular characteristics and admittedly today’s conditions overall are very different from those days. The constant change of the facts requires a corresponding adaptation on our part.
The existence and prevalence of social media in terms of the everyday life of a huge part of society has brought radical changes in the way “public opinion” is formed and its reaction to what the “trends” impose. Unfortunately, a large part of reality is now reflected through a digital dimension on the fringes of virtual reality, which tends to replace living everyday life entirely. Evidence of this peculiar and unprecedented condition is the governance of the New Democracy in the present day. A government that in two years has flattened the so-called welfare state and passed some of the most authoritarian bills of the post-independence era manages to survive with the least possible damage precisely because it systematically controls and shapes the media and, by extension, the digital world of social media. Twitter trends have the role of opposition for the government and unfortunately any reaction that arises exhausts its potential e.g. social, with a few bright exceptions such as the latest marches for Koufontinas, the Nea Smyrna march and the response to the efood employer mafia.
It seems dystopian at a time when everything is changing at tremendous speed for the worse for those “from below” for our reactions to find a ceiling to the aforementioned, which is why the question of organizing the competitive space in order to create a dynamic movement becomes imperative for us.
Various comrades have opened an informal dialogue around the organization and coordination of incendiary groups operating in Greece. A dialogue that has rightly been opened and we, inspired by it, are taking a stand on the issue. As we have already mentioned, each era is defined by its own particular characteristics. At one time what was really lacking was an organisation of actions in a long-term planning of the many and different, in terms of individual political analyses, direct action groups in order to create a movement with aggressive implications against the state and capital, as was attempted for a short period of time.
Today, unfortunately, other steps have to be taken in order to be able once again to intensify social competition and to intensify the conflict against all forms of power. Today, we lack as a space a political analysis and position that could (even with the minimal agreements) encapsulate the larger part of the antagonistic/radical movement. We have unfortunately once again left a substantial project of attack, organisation and political ferment in a revolutionary context in the background and this unfortunately brings the results we are all experiencing. Opportunistic gatherings of a more process-oriented nature that do not give due importance to political analytical tools ( which leaves room for incongruous, for anarchist standards, positions to be formulated and sometimes imposed ) which are scattered as soon as the current situation changes. Of course we do not in any way underestimate the efforts of collective action and fermentation, even if initiated by events of the current news, but we cannot fail to identify these problems brought about by the lack of analysis and the division of individual political issues. An organisation on offensive actions would therefore be lame if we did not at the same time fill the gap in the field of open public political dialogue. The Tupamaros used to say that “action unites and words divide” and to a certain extent this is true, but when the words are now acquired and are common ground for all. We find ourselves in this politically indeterminate time when we are called upon to rethink our agendas, our structures, our relationships with each other, our relationship with the broader society and much more in order to be able to follow and ultimately overcome the ever-changing social conditions.
There are more than a few collectives and individuals who are fighting for them, contributing in their own way to this evolutionary process, but we must intensify this effort, both at the central level, in our nuclear projects, and at the level of the infrastructures of the space. Positions and practices of vital importance that once characterised the anarchist space tend to fade, the consequence of this is that the militant/aggressive dimension of our choices is also largely lost. We believe that our first step is this, to put the attack on our constitutional discourse back on a revolutionary basis, to give weight to the formation of a multifaceted movement that includes every collective/individuality from its own perspective with a common goal, that of anarchist revolution. Here we come to the core of our thinking and reflection in terms of the organization of our space. The existence of a diffuse infrastructure and the familiarity of comrades in means and practices certainly gives us a relative head start in the face of a systemic crisis and the corresponding state repression.
All of this may sound utopian but we cannot help but fight for it, this cause is what defines us and ultimately differentiates us from the systemic political morass.
Let us create the conditions for a revolutionary movement guided by the precepts of anarchy, solidarity and anti-authoritarianism.
We dedicate our energy to all imprisoned militants.
IMMEDIATE RELEASE OF COMRADE HARIS MANTZOURIDES
NO COMRADE ALONE HOSTAGE OF THE STATE POWER
ANARCHISTS AGAINST THE ROBBERY
Source: athens.indymedia
* In September, 1944, communist guerrilla forces of EAM-ELAS encircled the retreating forces of the collaborationist Security Battalions. After defeating them in pitched combat, the guerrillas executed the surrendered along with scores of civilians from surrounding villages who were suspected of sympathizing with them, throwing their bodies down the well. During the post-war period and following the Greek Civil War, the right wing governments and the Junta immortalized the Meligalas massacre as evidence of communist brutality, and memorialized the victims as patriotic heroes. Following the Metapolitefsi, the official support of this commemoration ceased. It has since been used as a rallying cry for both the communists and the far-right/fascists.