Author: tameio

Thursday, October 7, 2010, 8:40 p.m.: After being followed on motorcycle for about a kilometer by pigs from the DIAS squad, I inadvertently got stuck in a dead end. I was immobilized, restrained, and brought to the nearby police station on Bournazi Street in the Peristeri neighborhood for identification, since it was impossible to confirm my details on the street due to the rain. During the pat-down at the station, they found an incendiary device I had on me.

The theatrics that followed are well-known by now: threats, advice, and attempts to “talk things over as friends” from every rank of neighborhood pig guarding me at the time. This went on until 11 p.m., when they transferred me to the sixth floor of Police Headquarters. Almost immediately, I was brought to the office of the head of the department (Security and Order), who—alongside another high-ranking official—bluntly proposed a collaboration: If I promised to snitch, they would release me immediately and the charges would be forgotten. After they got the response they deserved, they stopped talking to me, and the treatment I received from then on became more “crude.” Later, accompanied by the prosecutor, about 20 undercovers searched the house where I live with my parents—the inside as well as the backyard and surrounding area. We ultimately returned to headquarters, where at 2:10 a.m. they informed me that I was under arrest. During this entire period, I was isolated with my hands cuffed behind my back, unable to communicate with anyone. Despite asking them repeatedly, they wouldn’t tell me what was going on. At 4 a.m., I was finally allowed to speak to a lawyer. I remained locked up in the seventh-floor cells until noon on Monday, October 11, when—escorted by a horde of undercover and counterterrorist agents—I was brought to court to plead before the duty judge and the prosecutor. The two of them had a disagreement over whether or not to stick me in pretrial detention, so they released me on probation and referred my case to a judicial committee. Quite a while later, the committee reached its decision: “pretrial detention for being a danger to public safety.” On November 17, I was brought to Korydallos Prison, which is where I am now.

I have no doubt whatsoever about what led the judges to their decision. It wasn’t a question of evidence (or the lack thereof). Rather, it was my lengthy presence in the antiauthoritarian milieu, where my activities have been known to the pigs for years. From the 1998 student movement that occupied schools in protest against the dumbing-down of education, to the November 17 march that same year, until today: Even in times of expensive consumer goods and cheap ideals, I took part in most of the important moments of the social struggle. Of course, those activities led to quite a few detentions at Police Headquarters—some of them “circumstantial,” others less so. Once they even came for me at my house. All this, combined with my “bad little habit” of frequenting the Exarcheia neighborhood during those years and the “coincidence” of the currently prevailing antiterrorist hysteria, formed a set of prior conditions used to criminally persecute me on the basis of an additional charge—the legal instrument that criminalizes political ideas and friendships with a vengeance that only the dregs of inhumanity are capable of legitimizing and applying.

All of the above would already constitute sufficient analysis to explain the reasons why I was imprisoned, but in my opinion the thrust of my case is different. The imbeciles of legality speak the language of Domination, which aims to subjugate and lower the standard of radical discourse, distancing it from its natural habitat in order to declaw it and turn it into easy “prey” for the sterilized analysis of “specialists.” The scientific perversion of Justice, after imposing rules whose object is to delineate and define the personality of the individual and/or her acts, condemns subjective dialectics to the malice of the aforementioned language of Domination, which by definition excludes and eliminates anything foreign or alien to its terminology as “too insignificant to mention.” Keeping in mind this idea, which has always been considered immutable, I will make no further reference to the legal aspects of my case, nor will I use terms like “innocent,” “guilty,” “set-up,” or others that might leave room for Power’s words to assert and impose themselves over my own words. I take active responsibility for my foundation of values and I will uphold those values until the very end, because through them I take a stand as a fighter, not as someone who infringed on a few paragraphs of the fundamental rules of conduct decreed from above called the Penal Code. I accept no one’s Right to judge me unless that Right is conferred by prolonged revolutionary combat, which is nothing less than the impetus for the Struggle against capitalist gangrene; the impetus for all who, each in their own way, contribute to the destruction of authoritarian subjugation and act in the interest of popular emancipation. I therefore consider myself a political prisoner, not to disassociate myself from “criminals” but because—from my point of view—I am where I am because of my political decisions and my tactics, which are consciously hostile toward those of my mortal enemy: the regime. At the same time, I am paying the consequences for an error I made (understood by the many whom it’s a pleasure to consider my comrades, and the few who happily consider me their friend), about which I don’t want to divulge anything more.

Regarding the generally repressive climate of the times: The state is most certainly preparing its defenses in view of the growing popular rage provoked by the fierce oppression—especially on an economic level—battering larger and larger social sectors, and the best proving ground for the state’s repressive methods is the antiauthoritarian milieu. Plus, past experience has shown that the only real “danger” capable of creating situations that are literally subversive lurks within this milieu. However, these facts shouldn’t excuse inactivity or shackle rebels to the beginning of a campaign of victimization and defeatism. Now more than ever, reorganization is required in order to create an indivisible attacking front capable of demolishing the crumbling edifice of Order that tyrannizes our daily lives. The Struggle always continues, even from inside prison cells, and each person can contribute to it from their own barricade. Subversive ideas will invariably be forged on the Streets, which is above all where those ideas are reflected in each of our liberatory experiences. Nevertheless, even prison and its unique conditions can be a point of resistance where Dignity is preserved by opposing the barbarity of imprisonment.

I declare my solidarity with every self-organized and collective project that supports comrade prisoners, like the Solidarity Fund for Prisoners in Struggle and the Solidarity Assembly. I also declare my solidarity with every individual or group that—through its practice and discourse—wishes to express its solidarity, however it may choose to do so, on the sole condition that its attitude isn’t hostile toward the general theoretical core of antiauthoritarian revolutionary processes.

With combative greetings from the cells of “Democracy”,

Panayiotis Giannos
Korydallos Prison, D Block
November 19, 2010

Sorry, this entry is only available in Ελληνικά.

Sorry, this entry is only available in Ελληνικά and Español.

We are witnesses of a key historical development, of a new even more devastating world unfolding in front of us. The so-called capitalist crisis and the merciless pillage that follows it, signal a new phase of the metropolitan war and its two devastating aspects. Violence and violence; ideological violence, repressive violence. We speak of a new phase of war exactly because we perceive the era that preceded the crisis equally barbarian and flattening. It was that unforgettable era of “affluence”, which prefaced insidiously and patiently what we live today. It was a continuous “low intensity” war, which during two decades managed to extend itself by handing out dreams, illusions and ideology.

Lending, as the last “invention” in order to extend the lifetime of the developed capitalist world, was not only the yuppies, their statistics and their numbers. It was also those. Mainly however it was the ideological promotion of the then modern way of life through loans, which penetrated, determined and mutated the total of social relations. It was the language of dominion and its advertisements. It was the cynicism and the stepping-on- dead-bodies hunt for happiness, which transformed the metropolis in to immense theatres of war. The triptych of force, wealth and power, which had to be achieved by any means, was glorified by all classes in all aspects of social life and paved a guilt-free path for a continuous crime to be perpetrated against the “others”. The invisibles, the outcasts, the poor, the immigrants. A barbaric mass within which, isolated and against all others, one could consume, exploit, manage, have fun and rape without qualms. It was the era of everything’s allowed. However, it was on loan and as everything, so this must come to its end.

The dawn of this new era carries with it poverty, misery and prohibitions. It is the era of voidness, which spits in the face of those who live with illusions. And now what? Now that there is nothing left for them to promise, they will only order. The language of dominion drips blood and the rhetoric with which the sweeping social transformations are promoted as an essential condition for countering the crisis, is a rhetoric of war. Direct, violent and merciless. The declaration of a “state of emergency” and the obligation to obey whatever is demanded by the “national interest”, leave no room for misinterpretation. We are at war. The state is fortifying itself by setting up an immense wall of protection around it. Because it knows that even though it still survives-the leftovers of the “affluence” of the previous decades-, even though still individuation and fatalism absorb dissatisfaction, even though still we “from bellow” have not constituted a solid antagonistic force, the moment when the accumulated rage will be expressed is not far off. And then it will explode. Even if it is a dead-end and full of contradictions it will explode. And the strikes that are being criminalized, the terror-laws that are being upgraded, the urban disturbances and the army that is being trained, the apparatus and the budgets that are being approved, the cities, the neighborhoods, the houses, our own lives that are being surrounded, prove this to us.

In this setting, the prosecution, the arrest and the imprisonment of those who fight are inevitable. Because it is now that they must, by striking us, spread the fear in those that are already thinking and are ready to act, because it is now that they must demonstrate their supposed omnipotence, because it is now that they must declare every form of struggle as futile and leading nowhere.

We find ourselves under attack, therefore, because without a doubt it is what our era dictates. This might make us vulnerable and exposed; however in no case does it make us victims. Rather the opposite. This is why we speak of choices and awareness of the struggle. For the awareness that from the moment you begin to fight, that you take your life back into your own hands, you cease perceiving yourself as a victim. Never again. Definitively. We therefore say again, we are at war. And with this as a fact we will recount our story.

On Friday 17^th of September and at a long distance away from Psahna Evia, where previously a robbery had taken place at the local branch of the National bank of Greece, cops arrest us and lead us to the Artakis police station. While there is no evidence that connects us with this particular robbery, it is the police ID verification that reveals our “identity” and gives a specific turn to events. It is our arrests in the past for hostilities against the regime, which constituted the “indisputable” evidence of our involvement in this case. Our direct transport to the Halkida station and the cops’ persistent focus on our past during the interrogations, were indicative of their intentions. And since our presence in the wider area of the robbery on its own was not enough, the evidence had to be invented. What else therefore, than the ridiculous testimonies of some snitches-residents of the area, that “recognize” walking styles, watch brands, labels on jackets and other imaginative things that were dictated to them by the agents of Halkida, in anguish to fulfill the mission that was assigned to them by their superiors from GADA (central police headquarters in Athens) At this moment three of us are accused and two of us imprisoned based on, strikingly obvious, unsubstantiated charges.

We could denounce the police arbitrariness against us and make pleas of innocence. However for us words are not neutral. They are charged with meanings and rationales. They constitute entire worlds that are occasionally completely hostile to each other. Words are therefore in conflict. What does it mean in our strange times to denounce arbitrariness? For us it means nothing else but an indirect faith in the monopoly of laws. A consensual admission, that arbitrariness is not in the nature of the system, but a making of certain corrupted persons and perjurers. It is a disorientating tactic that skillful directs the problem away from the root. To revelations, scandals, isolated incidents. The system in its entirety is a criminal machine and violence and only violence is the oil that maintains it. Whoever still continues to ignore this, is either suspect or purposely turns a blind eye.

We will not focus therefore on the cops that “exaggerated”, on the public prosecutors that “acted with arbitrariness”, on the journalists that “misinformed”. What we seek also through our own story is to describe the modern terms of submission. To expose to common view these small stories that compose the whole of the barbarian world that surrounds us. Let each person take a position on them. We took ours. We demand the withdrawal of all charges against us and our immediate release, without begging for anything. We are not victims, we are a part of our choices. For all that we did, for what we didn’t have time to do, for other things that we left behind. No one should look for “innocents” among us. We have been for a long time on the side of the repeatedly “guilty”. We are next to the poordevils, the immigrants, the outlaws, the robbers, the “terrorists”. And we will remain here.

For the before, for the present and for ever.

Alexandros Kossivas, Michalis Traikapis

(imprisoned in the 1^st wing of Koridalos prisons)

Maria Ekonomou

(accused for the same case)

19/10/2010