AJODA Blog Aggregator

Rough translation of a posting on Athens indymedia, the day after a riot cop was shot in Eksarhia, Athens. The text below is important as it seems to reflect a sentiment shared with the majority of the people in the anarchist, and the wider antagonist social movement in the country: The greek state seems to be pulling out some of its oldest and dirtiest tricks in order to go, once again, on the offensive. Luckily, our movement does have one of the most valuable assets - collective memory. In the US they called it COINTELPRO, in Italy it was the strategy of tension, over here it is lonely gunmen shooting from (but really: shooting at) the very spaces we are trying to defend. We don’t forget, we don’t forgive, we won’t be intimidated…

–

On the dawn of 5/1/08, at around 3 a.m, a riot police unit was shot at while guarding the ministry of culture in the Eksarhia district of Athens. They speak of more than 20 bullet shells and a hand grenade. The cop injured, they say, was saved only thanks to his mobile phone, which slowed down the bullet that hit him in the chest.

Our initial thought is that any individual that is part of our movement, no matter how enraged or in support of urban guerilla tactics they might be, would not chose the area of Eksarhia (literally under police occupation for the past few days) in order to launch an attack of this kind and manage to escape safely.

Therefore, we cannot consider coincidental the fact that mass media, politicians and their lackeys have been building up an atmosphere where some dynamic revenge action against the cops was imminent. We cannot rule out, of course, the possibility that such incidents could happen - but we are not foolish enough to believe that they would take place in Eksarhia, or in the case of the earlier incident (-the shooting against the police van a few days earlier - trans.) in the university campus of Zografou.
The state, via its mouthpiece media was preparing public opinion for some ‘imminent’ action against the police. The choice of the place of the attack (the ministry of culture in Eksarhia) somehow spoiled their recipe: An attack in such a heavily surveilled urban area clearly points at attackers that can only be directly linked to the state itself.
It goes without saying that these people would have no hesitation whatsoever to shoot one of their own - there’s no need for a second thought on that: Life means nothing to them.

Their action shows that they are trying to neutralise the climate for the shooting, in cold blood, of Alexis Grigoropoulos, and to create once again some sympathy for the police - who at the moment are spat at on the streets by pretty much everyone for anything they do. They are trying to create, at the same time, an atmosphere of violence and terrorism for all the rest who resist in any possible way.

The choice of Eksarhia, an area that no armed revolutionary group would ever chose under the given circumstances, builds all the necessary associations in the mind of the society; it frees the hands of cops and judges for violence and convictions against the social whole… this always in the face of the pending unemployment and financial crises.

Already there have been 75 detentions, many police attacks against residents and passers-by in Eksarhia, while there is also information on house raids - how handy for them.

There are strange days coming; the government has lost control a while ago and is now launching a full-scale violence, some violence in which it has a near-monopoly.

A disproportionate violence that faces stones and molotovs and responds with tons of chemical gases, bullets (plastic and regular), attacks of the wild revolted against fully equipped state units with military training.

The pre-planned right turn of the government (not that it wasn’t right-wing already, but having seen its conservative core moving to the far-right, it further hardens its rhetoric and repression tactics) can only be confronted with mass and unitary demonstrations and events against state terror. With answers and clashes on the streets; with mass barricades. With a political word that will talk of the people and their needs; of how they are masters of themselves, how they need to move away from the authoritarian leadership of political parties which ignore the pressing demand for liberation from the confines of the state, of homelands and capitalism.

Without rushed-up actions yet with our gaze in the immediate future, we need to produce ideas and proposals through our public assemblies so that the self-organisation of the people from below can become visible, viable and possible -precisely in the ways many of us witnessed during the days of the December revolt.

There is no other way - else, they’ll take us down, one after the other.

As they’ve proved one more time, they are ruthless.

(Breaking news)

• UPDATE, 12:12 As reported in mainstream media, the riot cop was shot twice (at the thigh and near the shoulder). He underwent an operation and is in a non-life threatening condition. According to the cops, 72 people were detained over the night in Eksarhia. Indymedia reports put the number up to as many as 100.

• UPDATE, 12:10 A few minutes ago the anarchist group “Anarchiki Syspeirosi” (anarchist crouch) informed us via indymedia that one of it’s members’ house was been raided and the comrade has been arrested.

(Comment: the idea that whoever shot the cop would chose to hide in Eksarhia, or would be active in one of the most public and well-known anarchist groups in the city is absurb, to say the least. What is happening in Athens and Eksarhia in particular at this moment is an obvious attempt by the police to predetermine a connection between the shooting and the movement that has been confronting them en mass for the past few weeks).

• UPDATE, 05.13 At approximately 3.23 this morning a riot cop was shot while guarding a building of the ministry of culture in Eksarhia. Mainstream media outlets confirmed the news; apparently the riot cop is injured (not in a life-threatening condition) and currently undergoing an operation. Meanwhile, IMC reports that there is an extensive police operation in Eksarhia right now; riot police have raided a number of bars and cafes, beating and arresting people inside. The entire Eksarhia square seems to be cordoned off by police.

Update, 01.10 photos (from Athens IMC) from today’s solidarity demo with Konstantina in her neighbourhood (Petralona, in Athens)

“Konstantina is not alone, ISAP-OIKOMET, murderers”

The ticket validation machines of the local metro station, smashed during the demo

(outside a bank) “Burn me! I’m drinking your blood”

On the 23d of December Konstantina Kuneva, a migrant cleaner and militant union organiser at the Athens Piraeus Electric Railway (ISAP), had sulphuric acid thrown at her face as she was returning home from work. She is still in critical condition. Even if there is no hard evidence for this, people here know the attack against Konstantina was ordered by her employing company, Oikomet SA, a subcontracting company working with ISAP. Since the attack people in solidarity have occupied and hold the headquarters of ISAP in Athens (here is the occupation’s blog). In Thessaloniki, the local Labour Centre (i.e. the mainstream trade union headquarters) has been occupied (their blog). Both occupations have organised a series of demonstrations, solidarity concerts and counter-information actions (occupying, for example, the speaker system of metro stations to read out communiques on the attack). A solidarity demonstration is taking place now (2pm) in Petralona, Konstantina’s neighbourhood.

A few minutes into 2009 prisoner solidarity demonstrations were held across the country. In Athens up to 1,000 people gathered outside the Korydalos prison, firing fireworks and chanting solidarity slogans with the prisoners inside. People say it was one of the most moving demonstrations in a long, long time.

The next big meeting seems to be the January 9th education demo. This is called for by high school and university students and teachers, yet it is considered as an important first gathering in the year that might determine how things will go from now on. The date of the demonstration is anything but coincidental as it marks the 18th aniversary of the assassination of Nikos Temponeras: Nikos, a high school teacher, was assassinated by right-wing thugs (members of what is now the governmental party) outside his high school in Patras, which was at the time occupied by its students. There are demos called for in Athens and Patras and we’ll carry live reports from both on the day.

reposted from here.

“What you feel as the intimate estrangement of corporeal need is what I feel as the estranged intimacy of desire: your need is my want; my want is your need”
- Sade

The cradle of democracy is burning. It may change its frequency, its duration and its specific location, but I want to be clear about this: the interruptions that strike at the thresholds of the state-form and that press against the fleshy anterior of capital are en route.

I risk speaking in terms of slogans when I say this but I want to go to where the fires are—where everything enables the desire to reduce monoliths and dialectics to ashes. I think this is why there are these riots; because we can’t afford to go to where the riots are, because the people in Greece are at home with their perverse desire and are at home with their endurance. Alexandros Grigoropoulos, who was murdered by the functionaries of the state, for fifteen years inhabited this fact and his friends, comrades and so called genre, continue to inhabit this fact. I see my self in Alexandros, as I see my self each time the state exposes its function—when police act by grace of sovereignty to erase bodies with an “accidental” just violence. The libidinal economy of death acts as a force to produce human bodies as subjects. By the 6th century this originary biopolitical imperative is already clear in Pindar’s Platonic proverb:

The nomos, sovereign of all mortals and immortals

Leads with the strongest hand

Doing violence to the most just.

Today, there is only a zone of indistinction between the force of law of the ancients and the force of law of the modern states.

The Greek riots trace a seam directly through our bodies—dividing me and then dividing me again. At once, I am interrupted from my habit of producing pretty espresso drinks and culture; feeling the seam of the Greek riots cut through me, pulling me to the shadow of my historicity—recalling different riots I’ve experienced, watched on TV, read about in books and recalling my relationships with different people; the abuses I’ve dealt and suffered; the ways police and managers and doctors have acted on my body, the separations they’ve made. I think about watching that terrible movie The Dreamers just for the scandalous parts and for the money shot at the end and I try to distinguish whose body part was in what orifice and whose desire reigned with so-called impunity.

The media speaks of the “seven hundred euro generation”—it is they who riot, who have been let down by the Greek government in particular. Yet this month I will struggle to make a rent of three hundred dollars and my roommates will struggle as well. Tomorrow, we will go out on an odyssey to find cheap enough cigarettes. Tonight we trade roles of support; I have the pack that is not empty and my roommate the bottle of whiskey and the bag of coffee seized form work.

None of this new and those rioting in Greece know this. Certainly we could work more; two, three, maybe four jobs. Certainly that would keep us busy but we would prefer not to. I’ve learned to endure so much and what those of us who work for shit jobs and produce nothing material know is our conditions is more than mere poverty. It’s historically constructed, and it’s not necessarily of our choosing but we wouldn’t keep doing it if we didn’t like certain aspects of it. Maybe it’s the power to wield subcultural capital, maybe it’s the potential of not-work every so often—while on the job or on holiday (because all aspects of our lives are colonized by work); maybe we want to be in systems of asymmetrical power where we can be pretty and ugly objects. Whatever it is, we kind of like it. What is it at stake and what makes my skin so raw when I feel my empathy surface from the image of people gleefully demolishing temples of capitalism is the desire to interrupt functionality with play, with pleasure that is prefers not to reproduce, with violence that is bored with death.

I fear saying this out right because the psychologists of all the sciences want to know it; because they will sell it to public relations firms and they will employ me or my friends to mystify this fact and make it into more jobs. Furthermore because the state will put to a specific function the things we say over drinks that cause us to recognize each other. They will include us the way the Jewish religious hierarchy was included to make the ghettos and gas chambers function—the way black leaders are employed to neutralize the potentiality of rebellion every time what happened in Athens happens in every urban epicenter in the US.

Already in the US, the political class of simulations and the petite Leninists who paint themselves in red and black are getting organized; attempting to reconstitute the Left at Obama’s Inauguration. If it were not for the tactics they wish to employ, I would care less, but how matters and their desire for sovereignty is only loosely veiled. The advocates for the popular power bloc demand nothing less than recognition for their rightful inheritance of sovereignty and thus the state-form. When they say they wish to celebrate the victory of the “grassroots movement” of organizers that got Obama elected, they are clarifying this: a desire to celebrate management and discipline of a constituting (or so-called constituent) power. The horror of recognition prefers a site of pleasure in whatever singularities, not the banality of reproducing management and discipline of subjects.

I want to be vulnerable to you because I know you and you already recognize me and because you are always, and above all, anonymous—a quality that makes you potent. You, the unknown and the known, reading this text are a force and an orifice, a face and a chair. And yet so many managers; so many police are present here. At a party, in a bar, at a grocery store, we might cross paths; and I would want to share with you the simple pleasures of my existence but my desires conflict and our inclinations are veiled because my simple pleasures are criminal. I imagine yours are as well but what if you tell my boss or the grocery store owner about my proclivities?

It is this surveillance that causes our emotional poverty—a surveillance that congruently silences our brittle lips from talking about abuse and that disables the force of our limbs to make gestures of care.

I know it seems absurd but it is in the spaces where I can feel anonymous—where I can lose my sense of individualism and even my sense of dividuality, where I can feel my singularity; my point in time and space that is attached to all that matters—that the force of kindness and my desire are proven to be potent. It is these spaces—where the party’s shared joy overwhelms our fear of foolishness, where our circumstances incline us to support each other—that I can be vulnerable, powerful and happy. I want to meet you there and I want to extend these spaces with more duration and with different frequencies.

So I’m going to put on a black mask or I’m going to transform the meaning of a t-shirt by wearing it on my face as such. There is no other zone of desire that is pleasurable. The t-shirt, the sneakers, the bottle, the car, all our commodities have proven they are bankrupt if they remain as property—they must be profaned and put to use in the sphere of human desire lest they end up in museums. I want to put everything to use to prove the fact of its potentiality and to locate that it is my gestures that inscribe meaning; that pull, stretch and interrupt the continuum of time.

There is an insurrection coming because there is always an insurrection coming; because there is always in-surrection. It is in place because it is in practice; always exposing the seam of power and desire of function and potential. Those rioting across the sea are sending to us this subtle communiqué: we are running faster, evading the social sciences’ force of recognition, of identification; running across borders; throwing rocks, burning arcades and prisons and kicking at the thresholds of the state.

The insurrection in practice draws us closer and whispers, “It is possible, it is in practice and you, these bodies that you are, are potent with its possibility; the secret is to really begin”.

Liam Sionnach, The ass-end of December 08

I’ve been meaning to write you this letter for a while, from the moment I heard about Alex’s murder… but there had been no time for love letters so far. There was no time to think, no time to write. Since it all happened you had been on fire. How can you hand a letter to a flaming city? I just tried to come back to you as fast as I could.

I knew this time would be no ordinary one as soon as I arrived. The talking heads on the TV screens were howling as usual yet there was something even more vicious and desperate in their tone, it had become something closer to the whining of a wounded and frightened dog. I gave up watching them pretty quick. For all my delight there was little use in listening to the sobbing for the crumbling of their order, there was little other than sheer joy to extract from that gaze, the gaze of the dog whose master has disappeared leaving it with nothing to defend but a hollow, burnt land. I knew I had to hit your streets. To get to you, I had to be out there. That I knew. What I didn’t know was what to expect.

I stepped out of the front door.

Walking on your streets on the night of Alex’s funeral felt like an odd dream. Like one of those dreams of mine where I see nothing, where I can only sense that I am falling. It’s a free fall, dark all around and I feel this mixture of fear, exhilaration and perplexity. I can only think, “what next?”. Street after street, corner after corner. Cops all around yet it was not them who worried me. What I was dying to find out was the situation at the Polytechnic. Where any more of your children still out there? To be alone, on a night like this, would only bring back that horrible vertigo feeling. To express the rage I felt, I needed many on my side. We all did.

I was approaching the Polytechnic.

A banging sound getting louder. A slow roar coming from the distance. I could begin to sense what was happening. A couple of nights ago they had taken away one of your children. Tonight, like in the two previous nights, the rest of your wild, loyal children were at play. We wouldn’t let you alone, we wouldn’t let anyone alone anymore. I walked out on Patision Avenue to an unforgetable sight. I knew you were proud on that moment, I could feel it. Thousands and thousands of your children were there. This was no called-for demonstration, no official gathering, nothing to even come to resemble some negotiation with normality, with their murky order. This was a fool’s feast, a delirious mass, a popular lighting up of the streets. I saw migrants from all over, I saw punks from Eksarhia, I saw your faithful crazies I usually find rambling your streets. The passers-by always see through them, they walk next, past, over them. Not on that night. That night there were no passers-by, that night we were all on the streets for Alex, we were there for us, we were there for you. That night we turned Patision Avenue into your flaming heart.

(…)

The morning after never came. What came was a morning no more; the evenings that followed were evenings no longer. Nights and days all blended into one moment: our long, long moment of revolt. Do you remember that moment? What am I saying, how could you forget. At first, that odd feeling that people had abandoned you, that they had been scared, that the talking heads had finally won. Long assemblies in the universities, one demonstration after the other, two, three and four in the same day. We didn’t want to leave you for a moment, we didn’t want to leave your streets. If we went home, normality would win and so, living on your streets was our only protection against it. And from inside their homes more of your children would walk out. They would come out hesitantly yet confident that something was happening. They had all seen the gaze in the talking heads’ eyes, they knew something was wrong. But what? The only way to find out was on the streets. We were more. And more. Days turned into weeks. We were getting tired. Was that normality’s plan all along? To let the children exhaust themselves in play? Couldn’t it see (you could, I am sure) that this was no game any of us was playing, that it was changing us once and for all? Suddenly, as suddenly as it all started, it all began to reachi an end. The dreadful moment was coming, we feared: we were going home. I was on Patision Avenue watching one of the talking heads breathing a sigh of relief. For a moment, I believed it. I started walking up the road past the still occupied general confederation of workers’ building.

I stood still.

I tried to absorb the image in front of my eyes. The building was wrapped in banners and a huge red and black flag hanged proudly from its top. The speakers across the entire street were under the occupiers’ control. They were blasting out:

Landlords and power whores
On my people they took turns
Dispute the suits I ignite
And then watch ‘em burn
Burn, burn, yes ya gonna burn

They were playing our song, they were playing your song, the song of the thousands of Alexis’ that nestle on your streets. And on that moment, I knew it. I knew that we were not over, not by a long shot, that what we have lived so far was only a glimpse of the future. I salute you, I salute us and what is to come._

–deviant kid

(From the forthcoming Occupied London #4, illustration by Max Andersson)

From http://www.anarchistnews.org/?q=node/5860

Monday Dec. 29 2008

Hackers Against Oppression have called for Electronic Civil Disobedience in Solidarity with Greek Anarchists on Wednesday Dec 31, the final day of December. December is the month in which Alexandros Grigoropoulos, a 15-year-old Anarchist, was murdered in cold blood by Greek Police. It is also the month that will forever be remembered by all those who struggle. Minutes after his murder, thousands of Greek residents took to the streets as did thousands around the world. Even liberal groups have called for the resignation of the Greek government. The streets were taken back for the people, police buildings were firebombed, and banks were turned into empty charred-out boxes. This entire time, the Greek government has been fighting and oppressing people with guns, tear gas, and the media. It’s time that we take them down.

We will be attacking the websites of the Greek Police and the Prime Minister. They are directly responsible and we will directly respond. They will no longer be able to spread their lies to the media about what is going on in the streets. You can either load the file on the day of the action or download it ahead of time. We suggest downloading it ahead of time in the event that our site get shut down.

Please download the file you will need from one of the following mirrors we have set up. When the time comes, open it in your web browser ( ie Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer) and help us take them down! This action is part of a series of actions that will unfold over the next few weeks, targeting those who participate in and benefit from oppression.

http://FileHost.JustFreeSpace.Com/601test.html
http://www.filefactory.com/file/a0081df/n/test_html
http://w19.easy-share.com/1903035989.html
http://www.usaupload.net/d/emm2u0uz3j1
http://freefilehosting.net/download/43d0h
http://rapidshare.de/files/41232831/test.html

To view our site and start ECDing NOW or to download the file:
http://www.stormpages.com/greeksolidarity/test.html

You can also just open www.primeminister.gr and www.astynomia.gr in your browser and keep refreshing them. There are plenty of add-ons for Firefox that will do this. Just go to Tools>Add-ons and search for it. This will be a useful tool in further actions.

To a thousand more Decembers of resistance!