On Thursday 6 October 2022 we carried out an incendiary attack with Molotov cocktails on a passing MAT (riot police) convoy in Kaisariani. In his panic to escape, the cop driving it drove into bystander cars on the road.
We live in the era of constant and generalized war. Every declaration of war is accompanied by a corresponding invocation of the Crisis. Financial, fiscal, health, energy, food, climate… This spectacular ritual of the state apparatus is the prologue to every old and modern war manual: every war operation presupposes the imposition of discipline and rallying at the rear through the spread of fear towards the enemies of the day. A state of permanent emergency to which we tend to become addicted.
In a collapsing world, the Dominion holds on to its monopoly of producing mass insecurity by tooth and nail. If the dangers and threats invoked by those above are increasing in numbers, the orders and commands directed downwards show a clear geometric progression. This is the balance of the violent restructuring of our life, the new social contract of modern totalitarianism. Or in the words of Petsas1 “adaptation or death”. Social experience can translate these words without equivocation. Memorandum or bankruptcy. Mass incarceration or collapse of the ΕΣΥ (National Health Service). Graveyard silence or beatings and fines. Compulsory vaccinations or redundancies. Preventative power cuts or general black outs. And the list may soon stretch to the light bulb switch or supermarket receipt.
The realm of fear and insecurity is the baptism font of the new form of the State and its Violence. The modern capitalist world breeds only police. Police of thought and attitudes, police of norms and culture, police overt and covert, police with shields and automatic weapons, police of crowd management and police of surgical operations, police in the suburbs and in the city centres, police who demand identity cards, passports and health certificates, police who beat, charge and execute, police who sometimes resemble an ideological army and sometimes a fascist battalion. Police of every kind, in every place, in every spot on the map, with multiple jurisdictions and no barriers.
Modern police doctrines are not limited to suppressing and dealing with the riots and riots generated by the exacerbation of injustices and inequalities but are generalized and diffused through the social body with constant surveillance, pervasive snitching, the exaltation of snitching and the exemplary punishment of deviant behavior, “inappropriate” and “pointless” choices. This is precisely the so-called ‘social’ role that the police perform. It assigns the task of policing and surveillance to any willing partner and supporter of social order and peace. Mass recruitment of cops not only increases the number of social parasites but also increases the self-confidence of cannibals everywhere in every social formation. In modern warring societies, social-class antagonism does not reset itself but boils so loudly that at every crack it creates, it forcefully ejects the incredible amounts of violence it accumulates into its very foundations. Every class war contains a civil war, and vice versa.
In Greece, the establishment of new police forces (Panthers, O.P.P.I. team, O.D.O.S., etc.)2 and the massive recruitment of uniformed scum have already generated enough grotesque excesses useful for satirical broadcasts and any form of leftist opposition. However, the onslaught of police brutality on society and the transformation of the police force into the administrator of all social affairs is neither a joke nor a communicative termination. It is a clear declaration of prolonged class warfare against us. Society in a cast, resistance in the crosshairs, police violence on the agenda. At the borders and in the streets, in the squares and neighbourhoods, in the strike blockades and student rallies, in the combined interventions and union meetings, in the homes and vehicles of our comrades and comrades-in-arms, the police and their dummies are spewing hatred, snitching, torture and murderous violence.
The rage of the cops is proportional to the determination of the state. The responsibility belongs as much to the uniformed scum as it does to the suited scum who run them. Particularly in the field of universities, the police’s entry into the new business outposts is a prestige battle for the government’s “law and order” doctrine and a well-weighed strategy to prevent the tensions that will be generated in the coming period. When they talk about hotbeds of lawlessness, they mean hotbeds of struggle and laboratories of freedom. Situations hostile and unacceptable both for the privatised and intensified future of universities and for the new generations of underestimated teleworkers. For this very reason, we refuse to believe that all these masses of students and youth who are being beaten inside and outside the higher education institutions with their riot police, their water cannons and their tear gas, are simply rebelling out of a collective concern for the presence of the cops inside the higher education institutions and the defence of “academic asylum”.3 The real issue at stake is the fomenting or crushing of a new long cycle of struggle and indiscipline inside and outside the schools. An event that will not only affect the physiognomy of the Greek universities but also the course of capitalist restructuring as a whole in the coming years. Therefore, approaches and slogans that (also) reduce this struggle to an anti-government rhetoric or to a sterile refusal of the police to enter the universities while our whole life is already surrounded by cops, are worn and dangerous and cultivate the withering and defeatism in the struggles. Cops are unwanted all over the land and our lives are far more important than the party careers of a new generation of student fathers.
However, we are not betting on a temporary polarization with the cops. The strategy of revolutionary movements cannot be based on the projection of victimization, nor can it rely on the “democratic limits” of action of a state army. Our accounts with the cops are constantly wide open and our confrontation with them is an integral part of the struggle against the world of domination. As deadly as the strategy of struggle that is exhausted in the confrontation with the cops is, the approach of the police as a mere bunch of idiots, sexists, sadists and well, “misfits” who need… better training. As much as we are sick of hearing about their deranged psychopathology, we are also disgusted with the parrots of the left talking about “children of the people” and “working cops”. Either we consider the police our class enemy and organize strategically against them, or we bang our heads against their batons to no avail. Our goal is to be feared, not fear them. Our goal is to win every inch of territory controlled by their occupying army. Our goal is to fill the streets with the feared and the dreaded, the dispossessed, the once resigned and the indifferent. Our goal was and remains to pass over them.
Our militant self-defence and the defence of our collective self in the street and in every form of mobilisation remains an ongoing political stake. But social war is not one-dimensional. The lines of confrontation can be drawn everywhere we choose, making our dynamics a constant asymmetrical threat against a hostile repressive machine. Sometimes massive and concentrated, sometimes more agile and diffuse, the initiative of action must pass into our hands, setting up dikes to the unfolding of their repressive plans but also actively challenging the fatalism of our time, which unfortunately is constantly gaining ground in the sphere of movements and struggles that we find around us. The multiform direct action can generate a series of possibilities of sabotage and conflict with the enemy body of the police. To map its army, where we can target its soldiers, where we can break their bones. Exploit their routes by ambushing them. Attack any and all informers and collaborators of the police. Our imagination and organizational readiness to be fertilized by the challenges of the future, not the dead ends of the past.
We need as much as ever plans and actions that crystallize our theories.
We need as much as ever actions proportionate to the seriousness of our words.
We need as much as ever to spread and thicken the net of solidarity with those who raise their fists.
We dedicate the present action against the uniformed scum:
- to the students who guard their schools against the police presence and turn their schools into bases of collective struggle
- to the militants who defy the police bans and defend in practice and non-negotiable the obvious of the demonstration to the workers of Malamatina SA who stood up against the forces of MAT and strike-breaking, guarding with their bodies their strike and the lives of their colleagues4
- the diverse world of the components that defends the square and the Strefi Hill from the steamroller of redevelopment and gentrification, refusing to give in to the police occupation
- to the immigrant women who continue to experience the daily racist pogroms in the centre of Athens and to those who stood up against their astronomical expulsion from the Eleonas camp
- to the youth in Larissa who retaliated against a few cops for a small percentage of the police violence that their peers around the world are subjected to by police forces around the world!5
- to the 16-year-old cyclist in Thessaloniki who was dragged and killed by cops.6
We send our solidarity to the women uprising in Iran and the uprisings around the world!
THE FEAR TO CHANGE SIDES
ORGANIZING AND ATTACKING TO INTENSIFY THE SOCIAL-CLASS WAR
Incendiary Committee
Source: athens.indymedia
DN Notes
- Stelios Petsas, the Deputy Minister of Interior, who when asked to speak about the measures for heating in the coming winter, among other things, said: “The key issue in these cases is adaptation. Whoever refuses to adapt dies.”
- – Πάνθηρες, Police Emergency Response Team, also known as “Panthers” or “Black Panthers” as they were “christened” by the media. Consists of cops, who, for the first time in foot patrols, will have heavier weaponry, such as the MP5 submachine gun. The units will concentrate where there are so called “problems of delinquency”, with orders to patrol, to make checks on suspects and generally to be particularly visible their presence, to prevent criminal acts and “to instill a sense of security in citizens.”
https://www.grtimes.gr/ellada/episimi-quot-proti-quot-gia-toys-quot-panthires– Ομάδων Προστασίας Πανεπιστημιακών Ιδρυμάτων (Ο.Π.Π.Ι.), University Protection Teams (O.P.P.I.), the new university cops. – Ο.Δ.Ο.Σ Ομάδα Διαχείρισης Οργάνωσης Συγκεντρώσεων, O.D.O.S. Assembly Organisation Management Team, a new “softer” facilitating cop unit in charge of arranging on the street how many lanes of traffic can be occupied by the demonstrators and they are the ones who will be in contact with the people in charge of each demonstration, smiliar to ‘liason’ cops in the UK. - Academic asylum, introduced to protect freedom of thought and expression on campuses in 1982, when memories of Greece’s repressive military dictatorships of the late 1960s and early 1970s were still raw. The rules made it illegal for cops to enter university property without the permission of rectors, and guaranteed students sanctuary from arrest or state brutality.
- Malamatina, a popular brand of cheap wine that is drunk by many in Greece, normally mixed with coke.
- An incident in which a violent arrest by patrol cops turned into a fight between the people in a square who had enough of cop violence. Two cops ended up with broken bones after getting a beating. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f98sjvlqeQk
- A 16 year old boy riding his bicycle in a main street in Thessaloniki was hit and dragged along the road by an unmarked cop car. He was in a coma before he died, no action has been taken against the cops involved.