Life in the metropolises is suffocating. In recent years, we have seen the urban beast growing larger and sucking life into its path. Cops and snitches lurk around every corner, poverty and deprivation are reflected in every aspect of daily life, oppression (labour, sexual, racial) is a brutal reality, while the circle of ‘freedoms’ and ‘breaths of life’ are getting narrower and narrower. In this suffocating grip, capitalism comes to remind us that we are expendable materials for its machines, which produce endlessly and thirst for profit.
The gentrification projects are the blunt admission by the state that we exist simply to produce for them. Squares, parks, neighborhoods that were once appropriable by their inhabitants are being gentrified by labor and handed over to tourists and urban bourgeois. Expensive cafes, airbnb, surveillance cameras, increasing tourist population, overall increase in the cost of living are some of the consequences of redevelopment. Consequences that result in the displacement of people who once lived in these neighborhoods as they can no longer cope with the new existing situation. So the so-called ‘gentrification’ thus creates ‘fortress’ (urban) areas with increased social control and repression while other urban areas are ghettoised and impoverished. The segregation of neighbourhoods within cities and their so pronounced differentiations, clearly facilitates the work of the cops in terms of mapping and surveillance.
We see such a project unfolding before us in the Pavlos Mela military camp. A huge space within the confined metropolitan prison, freely appropriable by all and sundry, has been included in the redevelopment plans of Mayor Dimitris Demourtzidis.
But to introduce ourselves to the “gentleman” in question.
This right-wing trash has been in politics since he was 25, which seems to have given him the opportunity to create “strong friendships”. For the “Antonis Tritsis” project concerning the redevelopment of the Pavlos Mela military camp, he met with the then Deputy Minister of Interior Stelios Petsas, the Deputy Minister of Interior of Macedonia and Thrace Kalafatis Stavros and the Bishop of Stavroupolis-Neapolis Varnavas. A “successful” meeting, judging by the fact that the amount of 10 million Euros was approved for this project. In a poor district of the city, with residents deprived of basic needs (heating, electricity, etc.), Demourtzidis chooses to ask for and use 10 million euros for a place where he and his friends will set up festivals. In fact, this scum had the audacity to sue groups of residents who wanted to oppose his “grandiose” plans.
So for these reasons, at dawn on 27.03, we chose to set fire to Demourtzidis’ professional car, which was parked at the back of Stavroupoli’s town hall.
This attack is a small contribution within the framework of the diffusion of direct actions in the dead silence of the city. The boundaries are constantly narrowing. The state has launched a new witch hunt, with new cycles of prosecutions, new criminal codes, cops in universities, gentrification of areas, intensification of controls, and so on. But the noose they weave for us will become the gallows they find before it and our hatred will become the rage that kicks the stool, because our rage against what we hate is our weapon and you would do well to fear it.
Solidarity and strength to those who are prisoners in the hands of the state
For anarchy
Nightriders of the Flame
Source: athens.indymedia