As an inmate, you come face-to-face with the judicial apparatus and its bureaucracy at regular intervals, whether you like it or not. Documents that are either late or never come, documents that you don’t expect and turn up or look forward to and don’t come. Folders are closed, opened, plugs added, categories removed. There prevails, especially in the sub-judicial regime, a continuous waiting which sometimes gives motivation and sometimes causes tension. As far as our own case is concerned, the judicial system remains silent. After 13 months, the file was just closed after negative release decisions with ridiculous and non-existent justifications preceding it. The judicial mechanism, as it usually does in such cases, unfolds its vindictiveness in our case while it turns its gaze to the simultaneous systemic crimes.
This condition is now so obvious that it has begun to mobilize a large part of society. One of the most shocking examples of collective frustration and disobedience is last year’s 28/2 when almost a million people flooded the streets of Athens (and the whole country) targeting the incompetence and partiality of the civil justice as well as the ruthless side of its political system. Maybe not with the same participation, but with increased political reflexes and with 2 years of stubbornness, the pro-Palestinian movement raised an international struggle with continuous marches, interventions and actions, tirelessly and persistently in winter and summer. Dynamic cinematic moments were also the massive demonstration to preserve the revolutionary memory of comrade Kyriakos Xymitiris – where, despite all the unprecedented repressive methods, solidarity, camaraderie and optimism overshadowed the police brutality – as well as the response to the call for October: a month of action and memory for the anarchist revolutionary Kyriakos Xymitiris during which multifaceted actions took place, from interventions, and gatherings to a multitude of direct actions with the aim of preserving the revolutionary memory of the fallen comrade and connecting it with today’s dispute. The recapture of the evacuated Evangelismos proved once again that the territorialization of the struggle is a realistic option, project and tool. In the event that it is accompanied by a decisive, solidarity and fighting movement, the attempt of any evacuation can be answered immediately, dynamically and massively. The same impression was left by the suffocatingly full hall of Evelpidon for the trial of the reoccupation of Matrozou where 300 people stood by the persecuted comrades proving in practice that we do not leave anyone alone in the hands of the state and that we clearly support the militant defense of our occupations. Even on this year’s 6th December, despite the unprecedented decision of the repressive apparatus not to allow the demonstration to approach Exarchia en masse and the place of the murder of the anarchist student Alexandros Grigoropoulos for the first time, it showed that our political space will always be there, the tip of the spear at every police barrier.
We thus see that despite all the frontal attack that the social base and movements receive through continued impoverishment, precariousness and repression, the resistances always find a way to express themselves. It is this expression that the repressive mechanism tries to limit and prevent its aggravation and diffusion. That is why it is shielded with legal supertools such as the anti-terrorist legislation (187A), so that it can define what is acceptable and what is not, what it considers a crime and what a risk. The system has the power to define – arbitrarily – just and unjust, right and wrong. It also has control over meanings and definitions, the power to impose its reality and narrative.
Through justice, laws and especially 187A, the war of concepts crystallizes. Thus, fighters who mortgage their lives for a better world are called “terrorists”. Actions against predatory organizations (banks) that profit off our backs are called “disasters of public benefit institutions”. Attacks on military agencies that sow death, hunger, fear, are described as “endangering international organizations”. Actions against companies that prioritize profit over human life are characterized as a “serious danger to the country”. And all this is called “terrorism”. But are these movements really endangering the population? Are these choices affecting families, students, sick workers, unemployed, immigrants? Another meaning belongs to danger and another definition to terrorism.
It is the “saving of the economy” through the memoranda and the austerity measures that I would describe as robbery and the indirect murder of thousands of people. They are the “individual incidents” of police violence that I would call state murders of people who are surplus to the state. It is the “accidents” with the 57 murdered in Tempi and the 104 in Mati that I would describe as state capitalist murders on the altar of privatization and profit. It is the ¨wreck¨ of Pylos with the 500 dead immigrants that I would call a state racist murder in the name of Europe – fortress and white supremacy. It is the “modernization” of public hospitals that I would describe as the destruction of public health and the forcing of thousands of people into inadequate medical care. It is the “accidents” in workplaces that I would call labor murders and the bosses’ indifference to the lives of their workers. It is the “extreme weather” that I would describe as the inadequacy of state infrastructures and direct assignments to companies-scumbags of acquaintances and relatives of the political elite. It is the “household baskets” that I would describe as the further degradation of a life lived in deprivation, restriction, stress. It is the ¨3 lotteries¨ that I would call the entanglement of the political system and the filthy lucre of a few on the backs of the farmers. All of these are just the latest examples of real and substantial population endangerment.
So on the flip side of the world, where solidarity and equality would be a priority, perhaps the word terrorism and risk would have the meaning it deserves. That is, the condition that causes terror, insecurity, poverty in the masses. The description of dilapidated schools, failing hospitals, damaged dams, obsolete railway networks, thirteen-hour work, murdered inside and – precisely – outside the police stations. In other words, the description of a life – survival, a life not worth living, a life of Greece in 2025.
And while they use violence every day, intimidate, exclude, endanger our lives, and while they have laws to cover them up and repressive forces to protect them, why should we accept such a system that calls militants terrorists and criminals? Why should we limit ourselves to the definitions and finally to their prefectures? It is moreover impossible to peacefully address the claim to equality to the state since it is the principal responsible for this inequality. It is meaningless to ask the state for justice since it is the same that institutes injustice. It is pointless to rely on the state to protect and defend us since it is what arms those who are constantly attacking us.
So in a system that gives the content that suits it to the definitions and prefectures, that calls the indignant farmers a “criminal organization”, the struggling Palestinian women “dangerous” and the union doctors of public hospitals “miserable”, that characterizes as a “population risk” any attempt to respond to the daily violence experienced by thousands and not its death policies that spread death, insecurity and wars, the question is one: who really is the terrorist?
STATE AND CAPITAL THE ONLY TERRORISTS – SOLIDARITY TO THE ARMED REBELS
FREEDOM FOR ALL IMPRISONED COMRADES
IMMEDIATE RELEASE OF NIKOS MAZIOTIS
KYRIAKOS XYMITIRIS ALWAYS PRESENT
Marianna Manoura