Pola Roupa

June 11, 2022: International Day of Solidarity with Marius Mason & All Long-Term Anarchist Prisoners

Posted on 2022/05/21 by darknights

[En Español]
[Français]
[Bahasa Indonesia]
[Deutsch]
[Português]

As time moves on and the seasons change, we approach once again the June 11th International Day of Solidarity with Marius Mason & All Long-Term Anarchist Prisoners. Another year has passed, and many of our dear comrades remain captives of the state, subject to its daily subjugation, isolation, and brutality. June 11th is a time to stop the ever-quickening rush of our lives and remember.

Remember our imprisoned comrades. Remember our own histories of revolt. Remember the flame – sometimes flickering, sometimes blazing – of anarchism.

WE ARE ALL POTENTIAL PRISONERS

With June 11th, we desire to deepen a critique of prison that challenges the distinction between prisoner and supporter. For us, these differences are conditional: we, as anarchists, see ourselves as potential prisoners. Some of us have been, some of us will be. This is the basis of our solidarity – a recognition of ourselves in the plight of those in prison.

The continuum of prisoner and supporter can only be seen as tenuous if one looks to the examples of imprisoned and formerly-imprisoned comrades: Marius Mason’s activity with the Anarchist Black Cross, Bill Dunne’s liberation of an anarchist prisoner, Pola Roupa’s attempted helicopter rescue of anarchist prisoners, Claudio Lavazza‘s actions to liberate prisoners. The connections deepen when one considers that numerous anarchist prisoners are locked up for attacks on prison, judicial, and police institutions; and that others connect us to prisoner uprisings from California and Alabama to Greece and Italy. Continue reading “June 11, 2022: International Day of Solidarity with Marius Mason & All Long-Term Anarchist Prisoners” →

Athens,Greece: Solidarity Poster : 5 and 6 of Nov. for a political event and concert for financial support to D.Hatzivassiliadis and the members of Revolutionary Struggle P. Roupa – N.Maziotis

Posted on 2021/11/04 - 2021/11/04 by darknights

Poster for the 2-days event of political and financial support for the armed guerrilla Dimitris Hatzivassiliadis and the members of Revolutionary Struggle, Nikos Maziotis and Pola Roupa.

Friday 5 November Hip Hop Live benefit gig. At 8pm strictly inside the ASOEE. (Athens University of Economics and Business)

Saturday 6 November political event with interventions of political prisoners Dimitris Hadjivassiliadis, Nikos Maziotis and Pola Roupa at 4pm at the Analipsi squat in Byronas area

Dimitris Hatzivasiliadis: Political statement on Revolutionary Self-Defense, the period he spent in illegality, his arrest and trial.

Nikos Maziotis and Pola Roupa: An account of the action of Revolutionary Struggle and its members and the perspective of the struggle today.

In Solidarity

Source: Athens IMC

Translated by Act for freedom now!

Anarchic and subversive words from Chilean prisons, in the framework of the international week for anarchist prisoners

Posted on 2021/09/01 - 2021/09/01 by darknights

Shouts of war; true sounds of freedom!!!

In this week of solidarity with the anarchist prisoners we make an open call to war, to continue and intensify the conflict against every expression of Power and to strengthen the bonds of affinity for combat among all the anti-authoritarian sectors that exist and walk common paths.

It is from this position that we remember comrades Sacco and Vanzetti as part of the broad sector of anarchic illegalism, who were called “the Galleanists”, who with bombs, expropriations and executions made the American soil tremble at the beginning of the last century. Supported by the creation and multiplication of affinity groups and violent action, the illegalists expanded anarchic ideas from the facts, understanding that word and action are inseparable.

Since then much water has passed under the bridge, many have been the deaths and many prisons have seen the passing of comrades who have proudly confronted Power from the place where it has been their lot to be, nevertheless the ideas that translate into affinity and action have endured and are those that today motivate us anarchists and subversives of the territory dominated by the Chilean State to continue the war from this confinement and in the streets, always bearing in mind the necessary harmony between prisoners and supportive and complicit environments that walk from the confrontation with the normality of the existing. Continue reading “Anarchic and subversive words from Chilean prisons, in the framework of the international week for anarchist prisoners” →

Greece: Text by Nikos Maziotis, Member of Revolutionary Struggle, on the Denial of Exit Permit

Posted on 2021/07/13 - 2021/07/13 by darknights

I am already serving 8.5 years in prison for the activities of the organization Revolutionary Struggle. I have been sentenced for all the attacks of the organization to 137 years in total, of which the new CP stipulates that in 20 years are suspended. According to the «penitentiary» code, even with the latest modifications made by the government last November, when it increased the limits for granting leave to convicts with 10 years or more of sentence – from 1/5 of the sentence as it was before, to 3/10 – I am entitled to be granted a short leave, since instead of the 6 years required for someone with 20 years of sentence, I have served 8.5 years. I should also point out that I have served most of my sentence to the limit of being eligible for parole at 3/5th of it, as stipulated by law for decades. In fact, as I have been informed by the secretariat of the Domokos C.C. where I am detained, in the first months of 2022 I will serve 3/5 of my sentence. That is to say, the 12 years gross of the 20 years of imprisonment which will then include more than 9 years of my stay in prison plus 3 years of working days of beneficial computation in the serving of my sentence.

The granting of short furlough days to prisoners, which has been legislated following prisoner struggles, is essentially a transitional stage in the preparation of prisoners from confinement to release with restrictive conditions due to the suspension of serving the remaining 2/5ths of the sentence. Continue reading “Greece: Text by Nikos Maziotis, Member of Revolutionary Struggle, on the Denial of Exit Permit” →

Greece: Conclusions of the Revolutionary Struggle Trials for the Attack on the Central Bank of Greece (ECB Branch) & IMF – Pola Roupa

Posted on 2021/07/13 by darknights

On 14/4/2021 the curtain fell on the four courts that judged the attack of Revolutionary Struggle against the Central Bank of Greece, the ECB branch in Greece and the IMF, action that took place on 10/4/2014.

The decision to sentence me to 6 years for »simple complicity» in the attack and 3 months for »stealing the car» used in the action, shows the huge discrepancy with the first judicial sentence imposed on me, which was life imprisonment and 26 years of imprisonment. A discrepancy that does not have to do (only) with changes in the penal code, but reflects the distance between the judgment of different courts on the same issues, a distance that is mainly due to the different approaches to the cases that could not but have a political background. The frenzied vengeful attitude of the first two courts that tried me and comrade Nikos Maziotis to the maximum penalty for this action of Revolutionary Struggle is not explained by the existence of the Hun legal fossil of Article 270 of the Penal Code on the explosion, which was enacted in 1969 by the Colonial Junta to impose life sentences on those who chose attacks as resistance against that regime. After all, no post-Junta court has ever imposed a life sentence for any bombing and Article 270 of the Constitution is, in fact, ineffective to enforce its extreme version. Until only two courts imposed life imprisonment on me and Nikos Maziotis, making full use of this legal monstrosity of the Junta for political revenge.

Knowing the history of this law, we had repeatedly highlighted it, both in court and in texts we had made public, speaking of the need to withdraw it. The fact that it has «endured» so many years is not due to the negligence of the countless lawyers who have «served» in the legislature since 75, but to a conscious political decision, initially due to the explosive «post-coup» social period, in which there were many massive social reactions (riots, wildcat strikes, attacks, etc.). But his extreme version was never applied in other cases in the forty years since the end of the colonels’ junta.

In court during my appeal – following the prosecutor’s proposal – I said that the obsessively hostile attitude of the courts towards us is linked to political pressures on judges, which need not always be direct, but can be formed in a very vindictive political environment created around us by the executive, and which, combined with the personal political attitude of the judges and their personal ambitions for career advancement, form the conditions of the trials as the reasons why the executive and the legislature chose professional judges instead of citizens of the mixed jury to judge dynamic political opponents of the regime had been mentioned by I. Manoledakis saying: »… judges, subjected to hierarchical dependence and expecting their professional development within a hierarchically structured body, may be subjected to pressures in the opposite – punitive – direction, which is not the case with lay judges. As for the professional hardening of professional judges, which makes them stricter than lay judges, this, in my opinion, is not an advantage but a disadvantage for the administration of justice.» («Security and Liberty») Continue reading “Greece: Conclusions of the Revolutionary Struggle Trials for the Attack on the Central Bank of Greece (ECB Branch) & IMF – Pola Roupa” →