Greece

Greece: Giannis Michaildis – Announcement of a hunger strike for my release

Posted on 2022/05/23 - 2022/05/23 by darknights

After 8.5 years in prison, after all these arbitrary actions against me, I decided to put an end to my 11 years of suffering, by putting a stop to the practice of pre-trial detention, or the additional punishment of escape through legal loopholes. After 5 more months of pre-trial detention, I start a hunger strike for my release. This choice, with the deep motivation of the much desired freedom, I intend to support it with the same consistency that I have supported my choices so far and for which I am being persecuted.

“Woe to those who will accept prison as a condition of life, and from the brightest sunlight, the smallest ray” – The rallying cry of the Alikarnassos prison uprising

For 11 years I have experienced state vengeance against choices in line with my values and ideas. The difficult journey, from which I choose to share some blatant vengeful acts of arbitrariness against me, began in the distant 2011, when an arrest warrant was issued against me for the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire case, for which I was eventually acquitted as there was not the slightest connection between me and the charge against me. It was the incrimination of a relationship of solidarity with wanted anarchists that put me in their place when they were arrested.

After 2 years of being on the run, I too am now walking through the heavy doors of prison, as the existence of a warrant that entails a decade of incarceration has led to certain choices and consequent mistakes. The comrades who were arrested at the time in the bank robbery in Velvento, Kozani, were tortured by the police, which is common, and then the Ministry of Public Order published photos of our swollen faces, provoking a public reaction. Of course, no police officer was accused of this by the blind Greek justice system. Continue reading “Greece: Giannis Michaildis – Announcement of a hunger strike for my release” →

Athens, Greece: Political text by Anarchist Georgia Voulgari, a prisoner in the women’s prison of Korydallos

Posted on 2022/05/23 - 2022/05/23 by darknights

Political text by Georgia Voulgari, a prisoner in the women’s prison of Korydallos.

We are in a daily war, a war with the status quo, with every form of power that eats away at our lives, and in this war I realized where I belong. In a world where patriarchy rapes and kills us, where capitalism crushes us, impoverishing what we call life, in this world where humanity itself dominates nature and animals, perpetuating anthropocentric thinking and speciesism. So I chose sides. For the power complex will not destroy itself, no social change will come about unless our action transcends reformist logics, having a will to believe and a commitment to our ideas, putting theory into practice.

I proudly declare myself anarchist, proud that in this rotten society, the society of submission and spectacle, I did not bow my head before exploitation and power and chose to stand next to comrades who, by supporting the multiform struggle, also wrote their own page in the revolutionary historical memory. So far, living my new life next to them, in squats, through their common struggles for freedom, I learned what solidarity and comradeship is, what it means to give everything for what you believe in even if you are going to lose your freedom. I take the political responsibility that is due to me for my complicity in the incendiary attack that took place on 8/2 at the Foundation for National and Religious Reflection. A fragmentary action, which was not carried out by an organisation, namely the Anarchist Action organisation of which I am accused as a member, but was motivated by the desires and anger of two people against religious obscurantism, patriarchy and state power. Continue reading “Athens, Greece: Political text by Anarchist Georgia Voulgari, a prisoner in the women’s prison of Korydallos” →

Berlin, Germany: Discussion about the perspectives of revolutionary anarchy

Posted on 2022/05/21 - 2022/05/23 by darknights

Discussion about the perspectives of revolutionary anarchy Starting from the call „International Campaign for Revolutionary Anarchism and Solidarity with Revolutionary Prisoners“, which was published last winter, we want to discuss common perspectives with you. This call was written from solidarians in Athens to the case of Dimitris Chatzivasileiadis and his conviction to sixteen years in prison for participation in the Organization of Revolutionary Self-Defense. 30.05.2022 at 19.00, New Yorck at Bethanien Mariannenplatz 2A, 10997 Berlin

Discussion about the perspectives of revolutionary anarchy

Starting from the call „International Campaign for Revolutionary Anarchism and Solidarity with Revolutionary Prisoners“, which was published last winter, we want to discuss common perspectives with you. This call was written from solidarians in Athens to the case of Dimitris Chatzivasileiadis and his conviction to sixteen years in prison for participation in the Organization of Revolutionary Self-Defense.

Revolutionary Self-Defense was a revolutionary anarchist organization active from 2014-2017. During it’s years, the organization took responsibility for five armed attacks: against the headquarters of the greek political party PASOK, the Mexican Embassy in Athens, the French Embassy in Athens and two attacks against the greek riot police (MAT) in front of PASOK offices in the neighborhood of Exarchia. The group claimed to „put all its strength into the construction of the broad armed social resistance and is struggling to construct a mass internationalist revolutionary movement, by strengthening militant resistance on the entire spectrum of class antagonism.“

After the robbery of a betting office in Ocrober 2019, in which he was injured, Dimitris Chatzivasileiadis was on the run for almost two years. With his arrest in Thessaloniki last year, the period of armed resistance in Greece seems to have been interrupted for the time being. That not only the armed struggle can have a revolutionary potential is obvious and so the above call poses some questions, the answers to which are one of the aims of our event.

Where do our movements stand faced with the immense challenges and demands of our epoch?

Can we retrace our revolutionary roots?

Can we become the creative force that can effectively abolish the cannibalistic authority of the rich few over the many?

In the event, the positions of Dimitris from jail will exchange with ours and hopefully with yours to develop a common ground for the creation of a revolutionary practice. We do not intend to organize an information event about anarchy in Greece, but we want to find out with you the necessities and possibilities in our region. The framework are further questions about the effects of repression and the meaning of solidarity, the meaning of social tensions and the question of the legitimization of self-defense by society. What can be the trigger for a revolutionary movement and do we need a ground like Exarchia or squats? Is the anarchist movement missing a theoretical base or agenda like Maoism or Marxism offers?

Source: de.indymedia

Thessaloniki, Greece: Responsibility claim for arson attack on BRINKS security vehicle

Posted on 2022/05/21 by darknights

Our lives are daily subjected to the devaluation and the all-out attack of the state in all areas of socio-political reality. Understaffed hospitals where people are dying without even having the possibility of a decent hospitalization, labor sweatshops where workers are murdered as security measures are non-existent, uniformed scumbags chasing and shooting unarmed minors because they are Roma in the name of property and security, arrests with inflated charges linking people to organizations because of friendly relations. These are all examples that display the dystopia that the rulers want to establish.

In this effort, therefore, we feel the need to set up mounds of resistance and to fight back by all means and in various ways against the enemy, while giving the answer that nothing will end with arrests and detention of militants. One of the ways we use and consider an important tool in the overall struggle against the state and capital is direct action. In various places in the urban fabric there are targets waiting to be visited in order to break in practice the sense of security that the rulers try to maintain.

We take responsibility for the arson of a BRINKS security company vehicle in the Triandrias area on the evening of 16 April.

OUR IDEAS ARE NOT IMPRISONED

SOLIDARITY TO ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS

Anarchists

Source: athens.indymedia

Greece: Thanos Chatziaggelou – ‘Don’t ask if we will win or if we will be defeated – Just fight!’

Posted on 2022/05/16 - 2022/05/19 by darknights

Solidarity message of the imprisoned member of the Organization Anarchist Action to the unrepentant anarchist Claudio Lavazza, in response to the appeal of his 25-year-old sentence which is to be examined on the 17th of May.

While being imprisoned in the most dystopian Hall of tyranny a combination of a few words on a piece of paper could never vividly describe the ideal of revolutionary intransigence. How could anybody fit a moment a life of disobedience, complexly devoted to the relentless struggle without leaving out any important detail.

Until today, there are only few people who wholeheartedly attempted to build a bridge filling the gap between a life and survival. These people who devoted their whole existence to the bright direct actions of the revolutionary base against the fierce doctrine of tyranny for the “end of history”, laid down their lives in the wholehearted hostilities of the revolutionary base. They enlisted sternly and unyieldingly on the fractious front of subversion, bled while comrades were perishing in battle, but imprisoned in the face of the danger of repentance and legitimacy, they chose ironclad pride.

Comrade Claudio Lavazza belonged to the same mixture of figures of struggle that divided them by a very important “particularity”: injustice and exploitation, social decay and tyranny were not just statements but issues that concerned them individually and collectively. They did not adapt ideology and politics to their lives; they devoted the absoluteness of their existence to vital and militant resistances. Enlisted in the armed ranks of the Italian Autonomy, he chose very early on the path of illegal freedom in the face of repression and political degeneration from statements of repentance. Continue reading “Greece: Thanos Chatziaggelou – ‘Don’t ask if we will win or if we will be defeated – Just fight!’” →

Athens, Greece: Incendiary-explosive attack upon cop’s vehicle in solidarity with anarchist prisoners Vaggelis Stathopoulos & Dimitris Hatzivassiliadis

Posted on 2022/05/14 - 2022/05/18 by darknights

For 3 years now, the far-right government of the ND has intensified state repressive action against those who fight and stand against its brutal capitalist plans.

The repressive attacks and frame-ups and persecutions against militants are countless. In these 3 years we have witnessed demonstration bans, torture of protesters and prisoners, informal hostage-taking of anarchists under harsh restraints, mass arrests, intimidation with non-existent DNA and detention. The purpose of all these state practices is to completely cut off and isolate militants from social resistance and physically eliminate them.

The basic premise of this repressive policy is to put the management of everyday life in the hands of the police, which, with the chariot of the pandemic, has been largely conquered by placing uniformed men everywhere like an army of occupation to decide who goes out and who does not.

Police impunity and police state repression has so far resulted in hundreds of incidents of beatings, torture and arrests, even murders, as in the case of Nikos Sampanis who was gassed for not stopping at a checkpoint.

One of the first state frame-ups is the prosecution and imprisonment of the anarchist comrade Vaggelis Stathopoulos, who has been locked up in state cells for two and a half years for showing his practical solidarity with the wounded anarchist comrade Dimitris Hatzivassiliadis.

In a mock trial with a tailor-made indictment by the anti-terrorist police, held in March-April 2021, Vaggelis Stathopoulos was sentenced to 19 years in prison.

On the night of 21 April we placed an incendiary-explosive device in a cop’s vehicle in the area of Ampelokipoi, destroying it completely, in solidarity with the anarchist prisoner Vaggelis Stathopoulos, whose appeal trial begins on 18 May.

It is our belief that state framing and trumped up charges are overturned through diverse solidarity actions.

IMMEDIATE RELEASE OF ANARCHIST VAGGELIS STATHOPOULOS

FREEDOM TO THE ANARCHIST DIMITRIS HATZIVASSILIADIS WHO IS BEING PROSECUTED FOR THE SAME CASE AND TO ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS

FOR FEAR TO CHANGE SIDES

THE ANSWERS ARE GIVEN IN THE STREETS OF FIRE

Anti-State Saboteurs

Source: athens.indymedia

Thessaloniki, Greece: Communique for an arson attack upon mayor Dimitris Demourtzidis’ car by ‘Nightriders of the Flame’

Posted on 2022/05/14 - 2022/05/14 by darknights

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. Continue reading “Thessaloniki, Greece: Communique for an arson attack upon mayor Dimitris Demourtzidis’ car by ‘Nightriders of the Flame’” →

Athens, Greece: Responsibility claim for attack on ‘airbnb StrefiHomm’ in Exarcheia

Posted on 2022/05/14 - 2022/05/14 by darknights

Last week we chose to disrupt for a while the now dystopian normality of the neighbourhood of the Exarcheia. The tourist industry is stepping on our bodies, displacing the local population, the poorer classes, the immigrant(s), grabbing more space from the hands of the antagonistic movement. A very important example of the ruthless march of capital into the neighborhood is the real estate firm, Homm.

This Greek company manages, buys, sells, rents apartments, villas and all kinds of properties in Athens, Mykonos, Evia and other areas. By browsing their site, one can see the luxury apartments they manage in “run-down” areas such as Patissia, but also in classic neighborhoods where gentrification has been completed such as Koukaki. Exarcheia seems to be their preferred neighborhood as they operate many properties such as luxury apartments and airbnb. Many of these are being targeted in protests in Exarchia. In fact, one can distinguish them by the paint people throw on their facades and the slogans they write.

The company has 135 properties on booking.gr and its offices are located at 83 Poseidonos Street in Glyfada. It is neither the first nor the last company that camps and does business in Exarcheia, but it is a main agent of gentrification that, despite the hostile climate it receives, insists on expanding more and more, opening more properties. We will not tolerate another one of them making fun of us right in our faces, investing at our expense, selling alternativeism, head-butting the struggles and the history of the movements in the region. Continue reading “Athens, Greece: Responsibility claim for attack on ‘airbnb StrefiHomm’ in Exarcheia” →

Athens, Greece: Demonstration at the French Embassy in solidarity with the anarchist prisoner Claudio Lavazza (17/05)

Posted on 2022/05/14 - 2022/05/14 by darknights

The open assembly convened after the call of the Anarchists’ Initiative against State Killings decided to convene a demostration at the French Embassy (7 Vassilissis Sofias Avenue) on Tuesday 17 May at 18.30, the day when the appeal of comrade Claudio Lavazza is being considered, through which he is demanding his release from prison. Below is the text of the appeal.

FREEDOM FOR CLAUDIO LAVAZZA

THE FRENCH STATE TAKES REVENGE ON POLITICAL PRISONERS

Our anarchist comrade Claudio Lavazza has been in prison since 1996, having already completed 25 years of continuous detention. He is one of the longest serving political prisoners in Europe. Claudio was one of the militants who took up arms to oppose capitalist rule politically and militantly.

An insurgent proletarian who participated in conflicts and expropriations in the early years of joining the movement in the dynamic 1970s in Italy. Armed fighter of the revolutionary movement of the 70’s-80’s afterwards. Member of the Armed Proletarians for Communism, a horizontal guerrilla group with strong ideological influences from workers’ autonomy. Participant in the coalition of groups under the name ‘Organised Communists for Proletarian Liberation’, an armed project to support fugitives and free comrades and comrades-in-arms from prison. Accomplice to the 1981 attack on the prison in Frosinone where imprisoned militants were released.

At a time when the meaning and content of words had not been surrendered to museification, revisionism, and limited activism. But it found meaning through the practical cultivation of hope in those imprisoned and “exiled” from the legal order by the relentless repression of the state and the parastate. That words like freedom and solidarity would be put into practice with guns in their hands. Continue reading “Athens, Greece: Demonstration at the French Embassy in solidarity with the anarchist prisoner Claudio Lavazza (17/05)” →

‘III) Class war is outdated’ – Conspiracy of Cells of Fire

Posted on 2022/05/10 - 2022/05/10 by darknights

We republish an excerpt from the CCF’s (Conspiracy of Cells of Fire) book New Urban Guerrilla on the occasion of “World Workers’ Day”, one of the few days when leftists remember to take to the streets, hold their ritual marches and speak their faded slogans. The left has never been able to fully recover from the consequences of the rise of neoliberalism and the fall of the USSR, and it never will as long as it clings to outdated and anachronistic theories and practices that struggle to cope with the rapid developments of the last few decades. The concept of ‘worker’ and ‘class struggle’ that they so glorify no longer have the same clarity and meaning that they had a century ago. The third industrial revolution, the automation it brought about and globalisation have led to the expansion of the tertiary sector at the expense of the primary and secondary sectors. For the average young worker who works in hotels and cafes, the ‘occupation of the means of production’ does not make as much sense as it would to a bachelor worker, especially when the rusty leftist rhetoric has not even managed to prevail against neoliberal standards, the doctrine of ‘there is no alternative’ and the false promises of social advancement and enrichment. The so-called class consciousness is now almost non-existent. We cannot even imagine how much more fossilized the left will look like with the arrival of the fourth industrial revolution, which is already just around the corner, and which will bring even more radical socio-economic transformations, changing and blurring even more the class dynamics and the meaning of ‘worker’.
With all that has been said about the left, it is therefore not surprising either why a ‘movement’ such as that of the a/a space, which tends to become increasingly leftist, is so alienated from population groups it is supposed to support, such as workers and minorities.
Or May Day is not the worker’s right.
May Day is sabotage, memory and consistency in the workers’ hellhole
Action and attack on the mechanisms of oppression
For anarchy and nihilism
– IO EIF

So here it is necessary to talk about society and the individual. We declare ourselves anti-socialists and have referred extensively to our conception of society. However, because we find that confusion remains in many mouths and ears producing distorted ideologies of revolutionary elitism, we for our part persist in striking down this misunderstanding.

First of all, by the term society we do not in any way exclusively define the numerical population of people. We characterize as a whole the majority framework of attitudes, traditions, morals and customs within which the processes of power are accepted. For example, the concepts of property, patriotism, religion, are pervasive social values deeply rooted in <> without the need for law enforcement and state surveillance.

Of course, the majority of society, beyond the common belief shared in the necessity of power, is at the same time divided into classes. Social classes that are not entrenched from one another, as in past centuries when natural exclusion from the upper echelons of power prevailed (pyramidal morphology based on descent and hereditary rights), but constitute categories of people based on their fluid position in production and their economic surface. Today, therefore, people are in constant class mobility due to the structure of the modern system. The participatory form of capitalism and the real or fictitious opportunities for professional development form a fluctuating scale on which petty bourgeoisie can become bosses (self-made professionals and careerists) and bosses can fall into petty bourgeoisie (company bankruptcies, failed investments). Continue reading “‘III) Class war is outdated’ – Conspiracy of Cells of Fire” →