darknights – Page 152

Italy – Operation Scintilla: A Letter

Posted on 2021/08/24 - 2021/08/24 by darknights

Via & Translated by Act For Freedom Now!

In February 2019 I signed the declaration that I submitted at a review trial for Operation Scintilla. My responsibility for writing the text is entirely my own. The piece in question presents numerous problems, the most serious certainly that linked to the refusal of the alleged indiscriminate nature of certain practices which unquestionably belong to the history of the anarchist movement. The phrase in question is: “the idea or the will to harm ‘an unspecified number of people’ such as could be office secretaries, employees or passers-by, does not belong to us in any way”.

At the time of elaboration of the text I firmly believed that I was capable of expressing myself, that I was able to take a stand about my life, accept or refuse the accusations and profiles constructed upon me by the prosecutor. I expressed what I thought sincerely, as if I could do that without any problem. As an anarchist individuality I don’t belong to any group or court category, I have my own way of thinking and, reasoning superficially, I said to myself: “why can’t I express it?”.

I got it all wrong. What I was strongly experiencing was just an incredible lack of lucidity, I had naively fallen into a trap. As soon as I was free again, the world, that world which had been my life for years and years, came crashing down on me in all its force.

The comrades who realized my absurd mistake blocked me immediately; thanks to them, and not without anger, I understood what had really happened. No one came and tapped me on the shoulder, certainly I was helped, but my life has drastically changed for the worst. The emotional impact was heavy, and if it might interest anyone, it has rightly catapulted me into deep torment. To take such positions in an inappropriate place, publicly, and in the absence of a fugitive co-accused, is a serious mistake, showing confusion and indecisiveness. Continue reading “Italy – Operation Scintilla: A Letter” →

Genova, Italy: Against Special Surveillance

Posted on 2021/08/24 by darknights

While power continues to ravage and plunder territories, bodies and souls, we can still count on individuals who do not resign themselves and who, in spite of everything, continue on the tortuous path of freedom.

The capitalist system, now well established, always ready to hide behind the mask of democracy and security, unveils its tentacles a little more each day, which are insinuating themselves into the life of each individual, as well as into the exploitation of the earth, water and air. Those who (finally) realize this and those who are aware of it and have been opposing it for a long time, are immediately beaten and repressed, so that the dirty integrity of the authority that watches over the order and the instituted system is not damaged. Because of this, companions who have always thrown themselves with their tension against the power, see their affinities described as “terrorist associations”, their lives monitored and their freedom limited.

Faced with the current intensification of the exploitation of the weakest and the exploited, the new shaping of the repressive strategies (from the violent repression of the revolts in the prisons to the repression by force of the struggles in the logistic sector, to the permanent persecution of the immigrants, up to the more and more common application of the preventive measures of surveillance) carries its effects, always more incisive and widespread, with the purpose of putting in a corner those who struggle.
From Bologna to Cagliari, Genoa, Turin, Florence and Rovereto, the requests for the application of the Special Surveillance fall as if it were raining. It is a dirty and detestable fascist measure, which aims to strike in a discretionary way behaviors considered “dangerous” for the maintenance of the system. Continue reading “Genova, Italy: Against Special Surveillance” →

Chile: ‘The wind brings good signs’. Communiqué of anarchist comrade Mónica Caballero Sepúlveda

Posted on 2021/08/24 - 2021/08/24 by darknights

As I write this reflection on the day that marks one year since the Chilean State kidnapped Francisco and me, I hear the voices of comrades demonstrating outside the prison. On the other side of the bars, fences and walls, there are restless hands and hearts acting for those of us inside the cages of capital. On this occasion, not only did their shouts reach me, but I also received a pamphlet. The wind brought a beautiful and unexpected gift: beautiful anarchist propaganda!

For those of us who do or have done anti-authoritarian propaganda actions, many times we do not dimension the consequences that these can have on other people. In principle, the objective of any propaganda is to deliver a message, which ideally incites or inspires others to act against the current system of terror. But, perhaps, the receiver of this message will not act, will not be affected by the appeal and will remain a passive spectator. In that case, it is worth asking ourselves, perhaps the propaganda was not effective enough, what is it that leads an individual to confront what dominates him or her? Likewise, what drives someone to live passively in a world of misery and oppression?

I asked myself these kinds of questions on many occasions, sometimes I thought I had found answers but with time I understood that individual freedom, that is, the decisions and actions of others, cannot and should not be measured or foreseen. To speak of individual freedom in the first instance, there must be knowledge of reality and of the factors that create or limit it. In order to decide, it is necessary to know, and propaganda is fundamental in the latter.

In my case, what pushed me to take the path of permanent conflict was undoubtedly the propaganda of others (among other factors). My political knowledge would have been very different if I had not been the recipient of endless propaganda. I don’t know if it was a pamphlet, a street scratch, a communiqué, etc. or maybe it was the set of messages, slogans that led me to question and confront the hegemony of power and the society that sustains and needs it.

Today a simple piece of paper broke all the suggestive measures of this prison and flew to me. This propaganda in this place takes on an extra aspect; it showed me that no matter how much power has or pretends to have us prisoners who fight for a world where only mutual support and solidarity rule, we will never be alone.

We need a lot of propaganda, we need a lot of direct actions, if we want to hit capitalism and the relations it generates, as well as the imposed hegemony of power.

I take this opportunity to send a strong fraternal embrace to the Vergara Toledo family. Luisa Toledo was a propagandist who contributed greatly to the proliferation of many generations of young fighters.

Death to the state and long live anarchy!

Mónica Caballero, anarchist prisoner
San Miguel Prison
July 2021.

Source: Buscando La Kalle

USA: Looking Critically at the Brooklyn Center Riot – An Interview from Anathema

Posted on 2021/08/24 - 2021/08/24 by darknights

Originally published in Anathema, an anarchist publication from Philadelphia, the following interview talks about the realities of the Brooklyn Center riot that kicked off in the wake of the police murder of Daunte Wright in the spring of 2021.

This interview was conducted two months ago, which was already two months after the events this spring in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota. The riot in Brooklyn Center took place in the context of the Derek Chauvin trial, almost a year after he murdered George Floyd. This interview was an attempt to reflect on one participant’s experience of the events in Brooklyn Center and consider what they tell us about how things might unfold in the future. For many of us, the George Floyd uprising has weighed heavily on our minds as we try to imagine next steps to take. What became clear to me in this interview was that between the George Floyd uprising and the Brooklyn Center riot — despite the direct influence and geographic proximity — was an expanse.

Although the Brooklyn Center riot was an outgrowth of the George Floyd uprising, it was also a reminder that the previous summer’s events would not be repeated. Now, after a relatively quiet summer, it seems all the more important to be looking toward the future rather than fixating our gaze on last summer’s uprising. In this interview, we explore some of the developments and unique characteristics of uprisings in the aftermath of the George Floyd uprising.

You were in Brooklyn Center in April. Can you describe what happened?

Yes, there was a police murder: Daunte Wright, 20 years old. He was basically trying to flee the scene where he got stopped. There was two nights of rioting — I am going to say rioting. Some people want to say “it’s not a riot, it’s a rebellion.” I am just going to say it was a riot.

People were throwing stuff at the cops. There was looting by car in the Brooklyn Center area, also in Minneapolis and surrounding suburbs. The first night the neighboring police station got shot up; someone shot the front doors of it. Someone else shot at a cop — maybe 3 days after it started.

All throughout people were calling for the burning down of the police precinct (that was the focal point of the riot). They never succeeded. People tried. The police set up a gate. It was similar to what happened in Portland at the courthouse. But they didn’t actually breach the gate.

After the first two days of looting, arson, street fighting, and property destruction, there was basically a week of confrontational protests in front of the police precinct. Continue reading “USA: Looking Critically at the Brooklyn Center Riot – An Interview from Anathema” →

Greece: Text, letter by Anarchist prisoner Dimitris Hatzivassiliadis

Posted on 2021/08/24 - 2021/08/24 by darknights

Informative announcement:

From October 2019, following my injury during the expropriation in a local store of a state casino in Holargos (Athens), I fled the nexus of preventive and criminal repressive control. The side effect of my injury was the discovery of a set of illegal tools of resistance and the revelation of my relationship with the guerrilla organization Revolutionary Self-Defence. Being an outlaw, I made public my political responsibility for the intended reconstruction of the guerrilla struggle, starting with the example of the Revolutionary Self-Defence Organization. Reversing the condition of political isolation of the one who escapes the blackmailing conventions which the state seeks and which serves it (wherever it comes from), I participated to the maximum in the public movement dialogue, with an eye to the evolution of the revolutionary class struggle. The period of exile was a transitional attempt to reposition myself in the global socio-political space of resistance in order to go forward. In the first year, the breaking of deep-rooted barriers was not achieved. I remained trapped in an isolation related to the collective impasses of the Greek movement.

On Monday, August 9, I attempted the expropriation of a bank fund in Pefka area, in Thessaloniki. As I was leaving the area, in a car and having previously ridden a motorcycle, I was stopped and taken prisoner by uniformed state mercenaries who had mobilized to locate and trap the perpetrator of the robbery. My capture is not in the slightest connected with my earlier search by the special anti-guerrilla mechanisms and, more broadly, by police and digital surveillance. Until I said my name, they did not know who they had arrested.

Initially, I was detained at the police headquarters in Thessaloniki (AMET), in the garbage detention centre, together with the other social prisoners. I am now in the underground wing of the women’s prison in Korydallos, which was built 2 decades ago specially for the political prisoners of the repressive operations against the 17N and the Revolutionary People’s Struggle and through which the captured guerrillas of the Revolutionary Struggle organization and the rest of the political prisoners of the most relevant court cases have passed. The political prisoners Dinos Giantzoglou, Christodoulos Xiros and Savvas Xiros are currently in the same wing. The serving of the sentence (16 years) of the expropriation court in Holargos and the case of the Revolutionary Self-Defence Org. has begun.

So far the new case file concerns only the expropriation of the bank and, with the exception of a point of dubious concept (accusation of “use of weapons”), attributes accusations which, according to the ideological codes of bourgeois law, first correspond to acts by which I undertook the expropriation of the bank, the showing of a weapon, the temporary and potentially compensated appropriation of 2 private vehicles as necessary means for the expropriation of the bank and the refusal to be photographed during the pre-investigative phase, as a refusal of consent to the persecuting regime. Although neither the tactical defeats with their serious personal consequences nor their collective and personal background can be hidden, and although I considered a public trial for this specific bank expropriation to be of little importance as a political battleground, I do not recognize the law of what they are historically: a rule of subjugation to idealized class domination. For the political defence of each of my actions and all of them in class and cultural terms, the comrades can refer to the hundreds of pages I have written in the past year and a half. I hope to be able to publish a political account of the latest developments soon.

With the proletarian uprising in the heart, anarchy in the mind, libertarian communism in practice and ecumenical socialist self-government in the program I confirm my presence where a new free world is being conceived.

Dimitris Hatzivassiliadis

16/8/2021

——————

Source: https://athens.indymedia.org/post/1613901/

Via & Translated by Act For Freedom Now!

Berlin, Germany: Arson Attack on Vonovia

Posted on 2021/08/24 by darknights

In the night from 03.08.2021 to 04.08.2021, we torched Vonovia company cars in Berlin Mitte and in Lichtenberg.

Not much more needs to be said about Vonovia. They are real estate sharks and big capitalists worth billions. They are currently planning to take over Deutsche Wohnen for the third time. In capitalism, there are many responsible companies and individuals who ensure its continued existence through their existence. Vonovia, like many others, is certainly one of them.

But this arson is not a revenge action against their company policy.

It is meant to be a flaming call to do even more damage to property against the city of the rich and to fight for a society without hierarchies and authorities. In order to leave the age of exploitation and oppression behind us, the existing social tensions must be brought to escalation. The prerequisite for this is the symbiosis of theory and practice. We decide what, when is important for us, so attacks on the symbols and leaders of capitalism, among other things, can happen in the spotlight of the media or in the dark of the night. This time we have chosen the night. From an objective point of view, it is always to the advantage of politics and law enforcers if the subversives are accountable by acting in a temporally and spatially limited way. Subversion can be lived out, but only if it is not dictated by the guardians of the existing. This can also mean taking advantage of a demonstration to launch targeted attacks in order to eventually get into a confrontation with the cops, or instead of forcing a positional war against evictions, to occupy other houses. It would be fatal if the repression, the actions and the way of thinking of the authorities, would inhibit our insurgent ideas. We would become dependent on them and always react instead of deciding for ourselves what, when and how to attack or build.

This time it was a few cars, who knows what tomorrow will bring. Arson is only one of many tools that gives expression to destructive tendencies. It is up to us.

Source: Kontrapolis

Italy: Ethics wanted – or – a fairy tale at times anarchist

Posted on 2021/08/24 - 2021/08/24 by darknights

Almost two and a half years have passed since, after only 19 days’ prison – I’m telling you – 19 days, you decided to leave a declaration in a review trial, it was 26/2/19.

When I got to know of your decision at the time, sorrow and anger resurfaced as they did when the texts entitled “dotting i’s” and“I burabacio” made their appearance.

I ask myself and ask you: you declare you are anarchists and revolutionaries, you practice conflictuality in the neighbourhoods in daily life, you live in or frequent squatted places, you organize or take part in gatherings outside prisons, detention centres for migrants, benefits; but what do you talk about on those occasions?!

Empty talk, obviously, if you still haven’t understood when to keep quiet or what kind of declaration to make.

Everything seems as though you participate in order to have a clear conscience and to clock in.

Your declaration handed to a prosecutor is the umpteenth proof, even if some stupid anarchist hadn’t realized it, of the fact that it is we anarchists ourselves who give suggestions to prosecutors to create the famous differentiation between good and bad anarchists, between social and insurrectionalists. Continue reading “Italy: Ethics wanted – or – a fairy tale at times anarchist” →

Burning Churches, Taking Down Statues

Posted on 2021/08/24 - 2021/08/24 by darknights

Via: Montreal Counter-Info

Source: Antimídia

In different parts of the colonized territories, there’s been tearing down, demolishing or destruction of statues of slavers, rapists, colonizers and genociders. Why let go of these symbols? What do they represent? And what values keeps them standing?

[The video has English subtitles.]

France, Paris, Montreuil (Seine-Saint-Denis): Smoke signals of solidarity

Posted on 2021/08/24 - 2021/09/14 by darknights

August 22

Last night we wanted to send a message of solidarity to Boris, a fellow anarchist who is in a coma because of a fire in his cell in the Nancy-Maxèville prison.

In Montreuil, gentrification is advancing by leaps and bounds with new buildings for a more affluent population attracted by the extension of the metro. We are not admirers of the poor slums and the neighborhoods eaten up by traffic, a simple form of capitalism, albeit illegal. But the labyrinth of alleys between the small self-built houses have their charm and allow other relationships between the people who live there, less dictated by money. Another relationship with the State too. The winding alleys make the video surveillance less efficient, which is also advancing in Montreuil (as everywhere in Paname*).

In this context, publicity is an important vector to convey the capitalist and authoritarian values of this society. These values are: property, consumption, work, “success”, conformism. These ideas have colonized the imagination of most of the world, including the poorest and most marginal social strata. This conformism of thought prevents us from imagining something else, another life. How can we talk about revolution to people who only dream of wealth, family, and futile gadgets that fill up their lives?

So we thought that a JC Decaux van would make a good target. The one that was parked on Ernest Savart street went up in smoke. Same thing for an Enedis van (no need to introduce it, in the most nuclearized country in the world) a little further down, rue Victor Beausse

Courage Boris!
The head high, the heart burning!
Long live anarchy!

Source: Attaque

*French Slang to mean Paris & its suburbs.

Greece: About the anarchist comrade Dimitris Hatzivassiliadis arrested on 9/8/2021

Posted on 2021/08/11 - 2021/08/12 by darknights

According to the regime 9.8.21, the arrest took place in Thessaloniki. We must not leave it like this. There must be information through his own people (close comrades, friends, lawyers) so that we do not leave him alone in the hands of the State, without knowing his movements.

SOLIDARITY…

Update 10/8/21

After a telephone communication with the comrade D. Hatzivassiliadis, he is fine, they have not transferred him to Athens, they have still got him in Thessaloniki, maybe today he will go before a prosecutor. People in solidarity in Thessaloniki need to mobilize and stand in solidarity in the event that they are passed before a prosecutor or investigator there.

Source: Athens indymedia

Via: Act For Freedom Now!

Dark Nights Note: Dimitris Hatzivassiliadis has been wanted by the Greek police since 2019 accused of involvement for attacks & robberies involving Organisation Revolutionary Self-Defense. Anarchists Vangelis Stathopoulos & D.M. have already been sentenced after being arrested to 16 years and 10 years for the same case, denying any involvement in the organisation.

Organisation Revolutionary Self-Defence took responsibility for an attack on the Mexican Embassy in memory of 20th anniversary of the assassination of anarchist Christoforos Marinos by the E.K.A.M. (Anti-Terrorsist Squad), a hand grenade attack against the French Embassy injuring a cop, two shootings at a MAT riot police outside the PASOK party headquarters in the Exarcheia neighborhood of Athens and are also suspected of an explosive thrown at Russian Embassy along numerous bank and business robberies especially of an OPAP gaming store.