The constant distortion of reality by the authorities and their sycophants everywhere.
On 22/10/2021 the 18 year old Roma Nikos Sampanis was shot with 36 bullets by the uniformed scum of the DIAS unit (motorcycle cops) in the area of Perama. This was preceded by the torture of Vassilis Maggos, which led to his death, followed by the rape at the Omonia Police Station, while on 22/09/2022 16-year-old Michalis was dragged and abandoned by an police vehicle in Ampelokipi in Thessaloniki, resulting in him breathing his last breath in hospital.
A little over a year after the murder of Sampanis, the 16-year-old Roma Kostas Fragoulis was murdered in Diavata, Thessaloniki on 05/06/2022 with a bullet in the head by a cop of the DIAS unit as he committed the crime of not paying for twenty euros worth of petrol.
On 11/11/2023 shortly before midnight after a chase, the cops once again murdered a Roma minor, 17-year-old Christos Michalopoulos. Two and a half months before, Kostas Manioudakis has left his last breath due to a beating by cops of the Souda police station during a random check. One month after the murder of Michalopoulos, a cop beats and abandons 19-year-old Ayse in the city of Xanthi, killing her.
To these incidents we could add countless beatings, torture, murders, all carried out by the police and silenced by the judiciary and the media.
In the few cases when police violence cannot be hidden, the mouthpieces of the state apparatus are quick to present the obvious as an isolated incident, that it was a bad moment or that the cops were in self-defense or that justice will be decided at a later stage.
It is worth mentioning that they try to throw tons of mud at the murdered person. Whether it is the criminal record, the social group to which they belong, or their political beliefs that are emphasised over and over again, implying, where they do not say it outright, that it is a good thing the cop’s hand pulled the trigger. The presentation of the cop-killer is diametrically opposed. A family man with children, hard working for the safety of the citizens, with a social contribution, particularly beloved by the rest of the gang (“Hellenic Police”).
The media narrative changes the times when social revolt erupts and targets the perpetrators of so many murders. Suddenly the value of human life has become the ultimate good and the justly targeted uniformed killers become heroes wounded in the line of duty and unfairly targeted. Those who experience state and capitalist violence in their own skin and at times respond combatively to it are portrayed as brutal criminals with murderous intent.
To the apologists of the police: you and those who settle for the fairy tale you are selling are ridiculous low lives without a shred of dignity and morality.
To put it clearly and succinctly there is no room for doubt, the Greek police operate as a gang of armed potential murderers with complete impunity.
In this context we chose to carry out a raid with Molotov cocktails on 07/12/23 on the MAT (riot cops) bus on Agiou Dimitriou Street at the height of the Agricultural School in Thessaloniki.
To the uniformed trash. We will suddenly appear before you for Michalis, Alexis, Sampanis, Vassilis, Kostas, Christos for those you have murdered, beaten, terrorized, raped. You will find us unexpectedly beside you with the simplest means and with only the determination and the belief in the justice of the struggle. Meet us in your nightmares.
This action was the reason why the riot police convoy was moved after one and a half year out of the campus of the AUTH. Apart from the obvious conclusion of the success of the action and the helplessness of the cops to react, we would not want this particular event to be misinterpreted as a victory of a small group of people against the state apparatus.
The student movement in the past succeeded in preventing the control of the university premises from being completely in the hands of the police (law KX4777). What the state did achieve was to establish a static force at a point within the campus, an event of enormous symbolic importance on the one hand but with obvious operational weakness on the other. There was no ultimate winner or loser in this round of educational restructuring. The partial political defeat of the state by not implementing the university police was sealed by the operational defeat and the expulsion of the platoon off campus. Nothing is definitive of course, justice will be decided in the streets.
In the present context, the retreat of the social movements of recent years, the daily media propaganda about crime as well as the fake recovery of Greek capitalism, has given the state the pleasure of legislating to suppress any possible reaction that challenges its sovereignty in the present or in the future. The attempt to criminalise and isolate movements from the social base is a strategy that has been unfolding over a period of years and has been tried in the rest of the western world in the past.
So the framework of sentencing is being tightened, with the increasingly suffocating changes to the Penal Code, but the conditions of imprisonment are also being tightened with the anachronistic reform of the Penal Code. These bills include, among other things: restrictions on licences by tightening the conditions for granting them, exclusion of the possibility of parole for sentences longer than two years, equating attempted and completed offences, the reintroduction of type C prisons, and a ban on serving part of the sentence in rural prisons for certain types of prisoners. We stand by and do not forget the people behind the bars of the prisons and the political prisoners who are paying the price of the confrontation with the state and capital.
At the same time, the capitalist condition at the local level includes the attack on social acquisitions with the auctioning of first homes and the increase in the cost of living, with the privatisation of education, health and energy sectors. Also the increasingly intensive exploitation and destruction of the natural environment counts burnt and flooded vast areas filled with wind turbines and solar panels for industrial needs, mining of rare earths, minerals and gold with devastating effects on ecosystems. The masses of impoverished migrants, when they are not drowning in the Aegean, are imprisoned indefinitely and repatriated with the luckiest ones working in slavery for local bosses, while international rivalries and wars in Ukraine and Gaza intensify militarism and nationalism at home. The hardening of the repressive policy of the Greek state at home can also be seen as part of its preparation for participation in one of the wars served up as a spectacle by the media.
The war that the state has declared against the movement is indirectly a war against the entire social base, against anyone who might challenge capitalist dictates in the future. It is a question of our political survival to set up barricades against this all-out attack. In the fields where social discontent is taking shape, our intervention and participation with multiform anti-authoritarian characteristics is more important than ever. Within the movement the building of structures and relations of comradeship in the face of micro-politics and privatisation itself. It is our task to block death politics and hold those who produce it accountable; it is our task to understand the times, the questions it poses and the struggles that are being created and to make our movement part of them. We have a whole world of exploitation and power to destroy and a whole world of equality, freedom and solidarity to create.
FOR ANARCHY
Source: athens.indymedia
Translation: Dark Nights
Note: photo not associated with action