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. Continue reading “Athens, Greece: Responsibility claim for the arson attack on the house of Giannis Pretenteris by Direct Action Cells – Insurgent Violence Cell” →
