These words come the Greek prisons where the comrades Babis Tsilianidis, Dimitris Dimtsiadis, Socrates Tzifkas, and Dimitris Fessas are held. These four went into hiding on October 13, 2010 when their friend and comrade Giannis Skouloudis was arrested red-handed arsoning a Greek Electricity Company vehicle and arrest warrants were issued for them. They carried out a string of attacks while underground and wrote under the name “Collaboration of Individuals for the Realizing of the Negative” before they were finally arrested on January 13, 2011. They published this letter on March 4th of the same year.
We are proud to reproduce today, May Day 2011, their March 4th letter in new and reworked form (with gratitude for the original boubouras translation). We consider it essential material for the anarchist revolutionary to study, digest, and debate, but most importantly, to translate into activity.
Contents:
- October 13, 2010: A refusal to surrender and an all-in for freedom…
- January 13, 2011: The Royal Flush of the Greek Police
- The primarily individual revolution
- The Why
- Everyone has a responsibility
- From the me to the us
- We are the death rattle of this society
- The economic crisis: another opportunity of struggle, another opportunity to reveal meaningful judgment
- Intervention in partial struggles: terms, fermentation, “alliances”
- The contribution of anarchists in the intensification of social conflicts, their organization, and revolutionary potentiality….
- From the realization of the individual to its gigantic growth through collectivization
- The bet for the transition from the friend-group to the organized minority infrastructure
- The infrastructures of attack and the diffuse revolutionary guerrilla: myths, reality, and sycophancy
- The connection of revolutionary infrastructures; informal networks of coordinated action; the construction of the chaotic army
- Confinement does not mean defeat
- From the biggest loss, we have learned to gain everything
- Stubbornness – force – the total and whole continuity of the struggle
- The hostilities continue
Letter from Babis Tsilianidis, Dimitris Dimtsiadis, Socrates Tzifkas, Dimitris Fessas
March 4, 2011
“This is why I want you, my lads, with sword, fire and rageful mouth to come out naked in the cities, as the viper goes through the gardens of barley with its proud eyes furious as the lightning streams through the youth.”
October 13, 2010: A refusal to surrender and an all-in for freedom…
An arson is carried out on a vehicle of DEI (national electrical company) in the center of Thessaloniki, where our brother and revolutionary anarchist Giannis Skouloudis is arrested. And 4 arrest warrants are issued for us based on the testimonies of cops.
The dilemma was short-lived and thus began the unfortunately brief journey of clandestinity (although brief, it included in the absolute degree the sweetness that the conscious decisions of life and their militant applications can give to those who ignite it). A journey that we consciously chose to lead us to new ruptures with the existent and to the unafraid followers of an orbit that the antiterrorist force and its judges had set. We had to survive, and in order to do that we stopped feeling like victims and prey, and instead anointed ourselves perpetrators and predators. Anyway, for us defeat was and is an unknown. We recouped therefore and decided: “Let’s go again, this time to the end.” We published the first pamphlet of the Collaboration of Individuals for the Realizing of the Negative, we read a lot, we learned more, we prepared with caution and care new grand and minor stormings of the heavens, we planned new hostilities with the state, its society, its values and its ethics.
January 13, 2011: The Royal Flush of the Greek Police
“Now they should speak to be saved, they should cease to dream in order to live…
The DAY is still far off and they are afraid not to kneel as you are also afraid.
Now they should speak to be saved, they should cease to love and to live.
The captain says: speak
The whip says: speak
The night says: speak
But the night is short and the comrades they cut their tongues with their teeth as you would also do”
After nine days of surveillance (something we noticed in the last three days but wrongly believed that were suffering from paranoia and were seeing “undercover ghosts”) the bad thing happens. Three of us are arrested by helmet-wearers in the narrow streets of Vironas area and the fourth in a house by some green-wearing dudes with bulletproof shields and automatic machine guns. We are transported to GADA (police headquarters of Athens) with hoods over our heads, with our escorts reciting:
We are for the action
You are only for texts.
We have the superior firepower.
This is what a surprise approach is. etc.
There we remained standing, naked, hooded and turned to the wall for many hours declaring only that we are revolutionary anarchists. An informal process of questions, also hours long, followed while they transported us without reason to the corridors in order for them to take the first photographs that they would release to be publicized. Our refusal to give prints met an affirmative: “I did not ask you, you will give them even if it means we have to break your fingers, it is an order of the interrogator.” The first three proved too little to “convince” us, so they mobilized seven or eight individuals.
They slammed our heads on the tables, they stepped on our ankles, they twisted our arms to the point that they were completely numb, they hit and bent our fingers in order for them to swell, so that they could take the prints by force.
From then until Saturday when we were transported to Thessaloniki, and again from Sunday to Tuesday, we remained in cells that were 2.5m by 1m (3′ x 7.5′), refusing to eat or drink anything.
Finally they took our photographs with two holding us while we wore handcuffs and one pulling us by the hair. When later they asked us to sign testimonies, to give in this way our prints and DNA officially, we reminded them that we have learned to be careful where we put our signature.
(Note: it is unnecessary to mention that what we publish is in order to communicate the experience to those who perhaps will go through it in the future, and surely not to complain for our trampled rights, since we have buried them along with our obligations to society)
Tuesday we were transferred to Koridallos and Avlona in order to continue now our struggle for freedom and the revolution inside the walls.
“This round never ends… The rebels turn once again…”
A few dozen anarchists, revolutionaries, guerillas of all tendencies are in the prisons of Greece.
Locked up (and undefeated) because they lived and because they acted as it suits every person who fights against power as an institution and power as a relation, as it suits every person who stands proudly and with audacity against their era.
And they are not defeated, because the hostilities do not seem to cease. Because the carriers of absolute refusal of this world, despite the multiplication of blows, mainly become more stubborn.
And our times make for an excellent wager for the construction of the chaotic army, a grand opportunity for one — or, even better, for a lot of vital and irreparable blows to the social structure and its stability.
Before we reach today, though, let us introduce ourselves.
The primarily individual revolution
Even though our choices, our struggles, our arrest is only one small piece in the complete revolutionary mosaic of our era, we feel the need to expose our courses, our theories, our experiences in order to communicate with those who fight, to contribute to the dialogue within the anarchist revolutionary community.
Our identities anyway we never hid. We are also part of the anarchist movement, we promote inside and outside of it revolutionary/individualistic analysis, mature (and not suburban) youth, and analysis of experiences and conditions of the 21st century.
1. And the individualism of the 21st century is not reported in its idealistic imprinting by office workers who lived 100 years ago nor its “martyric” realization by our desperate (communist-in-theory) French and Italian forefathers. Anyway, within our practical-theoretical toolbox is the tool of critical analytical thought, and our influences will not be identical with specific theories of the past.
The Why
Therefore we lived and we live a life that does not satisfy us materially or intellectually. We faced, in addition to the rest of the social totality, the relations of authority and exploitation, the moments of boredom and emptiness that were offered to us via the modern way of life and its idols. In short, we lived and we live an alienated life in which it was IMPOSED on us to function as producing-machines in order to enrich those who hold a higher place in the social hierarchy. A condition which we ACCEPTED – discovering, and then wishing for, what it offers us, having forgotten what we really need. We became consumers of commodities and spectacles transformed into the objectives of life. Our life fluctuated and fluctuates between a hundred disgusting musts–of the schools, universities, jobs–and a hundred even more disgusting wants–for social devolution, getting rich, over-consumption, snitching, mediocrity. Our life remained closed in apartments, bombarded with advertisements and television messages and wandering in front of thousands of cameras or often overlooked by the guards of order.
We felt loneliness, emptiness, mediocrity, and subjugation. We felt the chains deeply in our skin and in our minds. But we took our own responsibility for this situation, first by perception, and then deciding to act in the here-and-now, not able to wait passively for the conditions to “mature.” Anyway, not discounting a collective insurrection, it would not satisfy us if it happened through economic motives by a mass of people who function as such, aiming simply at a painless relaxation of our chains, or even at a total reform of the existing world, a realignment. We therefore began our own struggle. And we decided to arm ourselves…
Everyone has a responsibility
If the refusal of a life of slavery also meant moving to war against the administrators and their guards, its final destruction was and is stuck on its acceptance by the remainder who are (self)enclosed by it.
The enemy is everywhere, and the cop is in our heads:
Patriarchal relations, xenophobic deliriums, uniformed desires, the installation of microcameras in small shops, the need for safety and calmness, the majority’s vote, competition and ass-kissing in school and at jobs. Values and relations that were definitely promoted from above but were just as surely adopted from below. Large and small contracts and self-enslaved acceptances by each individual cannot be justified. VALUES, however, are realized by CHOICES, and to deprive yourself of your own force of refusal is one of these.
Our war, therefore, is first and foremost a war of values with whoever retains in one way or another the concrete social structure. Thus we did not want to become the avant-garde of a pliant massive dissatisfaction nor an elite fighting against everything. Understanding their ability to split from above the (for them) troublesome classes and groups, re-collectivizing them into a fabricated argument of safety, and supplying them through secure airtight channels, we stopped referring to sums and groups of people that had been defined as revolutionary subjects in the previous centuries and we defined instead the individual as a revolutionary subject.
For us everything begins from the formation of an individual-revolutionary conscience that is prompted and that prompts its carrier to dispute the dominant way of life and its institutions and to realize his share of responsibility in the perpetuation and maintenance of the existing system. To deny and to attack, finally, anything that maintains or develops this world and destroys his life; to seek freedom.
From the me to the us
The human being, however, is a social being, and when his need for communication and collectivization is expressed simultaneously with his individual awareness but also with the knowledge of the strength he holds in his mind and his hands, then blooms what we call revolutionary individualism. Then at once emerges a negative collective conscience which in its extension abolishes roles, identities, relations, and institutions and creates qualitatively and quantitatively greater temporal-spacial trenches that can create authentic, individual/collective experiences of struggle capable of realizing the revolution in every moment through the constant deregulation of social balances.
We are the death rattle of this society
The social body for us cannot be faced as something homogeneous and characterized either as an ally or as an enemy. It consists of various social groups that are composed of various individuals. The relations that are developed in its belly are perpetually reshaped depending on the clashes, balances and contradictions of each era, but also–simultaneously and diachronically–reshaped by models of profound alienation, the imposition of force, and the exercise of authority. For us the social body is, in the end, nothing but a battlefield. A struggle that can become the property of and ground of co-formation for those who consciously listen to it, organize it, and enrich it and at the same time clash with those who do not. And therefore if we claim that our struggle turns against this society but also every society, obviously we do not mean that our struggle targets as prospective victims all the individuals who compose society. That would be contradictory and impassable because, whether we like it or not, we too are part of it.
It is simply that we believe that the existence of a mass human society itself creates institutions, hierarchies, specialization, oppression, and the exploitation of nature. We live in society and we shape in its interior a powerful minority that conspires against each of its expressions and undermines its perpetuation, organizing it once more into formations of fighting camps (based on properties of conscience) and immediately putting into practice the existence of and the collaboration, solidarity, and even potential contestation between small autonomous communities.
And remember that the struggle for us is a product of the lack of freedom and self-definition, and not the result of any economic inequalities and the “evident” exercise of authority from some collectivized subject against an already-collectivized object. For us the economic conditions are just an accelerating explosion as long as we manage it intelligently.
Welcoming…
The economic crisis: another opportunity for struggle,
another opportunity to reveal meaningful judgment
“The negative decides that the inevitable cannot be neutralized and takes positions at the start of the last adventure. And this time, no one will emerge from it alive”
Social conditions are not a stagnant situation but differ depending on the temporal-spacial economic situation. It is very important for a revolutionary to analyze them and take them into consideration in order for his action to be more effective. And obviously we do not speak here of a change of values or arguments, but of the accuracy and better aim of actions and words.
In the current era, we live in a period of social crash-testing in the form of an economic crisis. We witness a new allocation of wealth from the bottom to the top. The dilemmas that we did not think to set before the “neutrals” in advance were placed instead by the enemy. Testing their resistances, they remember their position in the social hierarchy and the situation is made evident to those who are not blind. Obviously it has a cost…
And we are obviously not referring to the increase in criminality. This will meet so much repression and management as to extend the feeling of insecurity. And the pie uneaten and the dog full. (old Greek proverb)
The rulers will generously offer what they know the afraid citizens will give their surplus labour value and their freedom for in return. News bulletins, cameras and cops.
On the other hand, however…
Albania, Ireland, Greece, France, Portugal, England (yes, England), Arabic countries, and the continually-agitated Latin America. The hibernation of social conflicts has been interrupted. And it is exactly as we imagined it. This force is not but:
Partial but still unforeseen.
Demanding but simultaneously conflictual.
Having national characteristics but also a bearer of class hatred.
Ready to return home but also ready to remain in the streets forever.
Employing blind violence but simultaneously offering essential moments of resistance.
Fragmentary but at the beginning of a rudimentary process and an embryonic collectivization.
The first tremble was dealt by the enemy itself. And the second one is obviously our own obligation.
The ignition of the revolutionary civil war, the social polarization, now looks even more feasible. The responsibility of the anarchist/revolutionary movement is to light up the wick that will ignite this particularly explosive social condition. And obviously it will not be a simple process. Besides, “it requires hard work, it requires persistence and a smile and a direction.”
The intervention in partial struggles: terms, fermentation, and “alliances”
“You are waiting for the revolution? Let it be! My own began a long time ago! When you are ready (god, what an endless wait!) I won’t mind going with you for a while. But when you stop, I shall continue on my way toward the great and sublime conquest of the nothing!
“Any society that you build will have its limits. And outside the limits of any society, unruly and heroic tramps will wander with their wild and virgin thought — those who cannot live without planning ever new and dreadful outbursts of rebellion! I shall be among them!
“And after me, as before me, there will be those saying to their fellows: “So turn to yourselves rather than to your gods and idols. Find what hides within you and bring it to the light; show yourselves!”
“Because every person who, searching his own inwardness, extracts what was mysteriously hidden therein is a shadow eclipsing any form of society which can exist under the sun!
“All societies tremble when the scornful aristocracy of tramps, inaccessibles, unique ones, rulers over the ideal and conquerors of the nothing resolutely advances. So, come on, icononclasts, forward!”
Especially in this period, the mixture in the social pot can be characterized as flammable.
It would be our mistake to abandon these situations as lost. An even bigger mistake would of course be for us to be absorbed by the dissatisfied crowd. What we are saying is that we can and we should extract from the crowd the minorities that are not satisfied with walks, voting, and symbolic clashes.
We do not have anything to lose, therefore, from our intervention in the social struggles, as long as we go to them with clear intentions. Deviation, communication, diffusion, but at the same time the protection and simultaneous propagation of our aims. To us, it is a critical attendance that can take “things” forward, and not identification or the blind following of each claim.
Not all struggles are the same, no matter how you look at it. And the contradictions firstly and largely strike the anarchists who participate in them.
The “thought police”–teachers who dole out expulsions, specialized knowledge and the values of this world–have not a few times turned into fighting schoolteachers; truck drivers who clashed with the MAT wore ancient Greek t-shirts and applauded king Konstantinos. The “hero” immigrants, our “damned brothers,” do not seek (most of them, at least) anything other than to devolve and live the “western dream.”
In order to not be misunderstood, and in order to finish, we should stop speaking of—and, even more so, in the name of—groupings of people and instead seek the moments, the relations, and the refusals that can’t be absorbed by demands and can be turned into a real danger for the state and its society.
Let’s embrace those who are ready to firstly deny their role (immigrants, schoolteachers, doctors, and generally the “oppressed”) and to secondly constitute the revolutionary community that does not beg, but fights.
Our bet is here, open to everyone who stops victimizing his existence and studies the force within himself.
Let’s be intelligent, let’s be crafty, let’s stand with those who fight. Let’s stop getting excited about and consuming spectacles of struggles, let’s become essential, experience the substance, and sow the chaos that we carry inside us.
The contribution of anarchists in the intensification of social conflicts, their organization, and the revolutionary potentiality….
For those who perceive the gravity of this era (or better yet the gravity of every era) and the importance of the anarchist/libertarian/revolutionary struggle in it, it is imperative that we ask the following question:
What do we do?
Forms of organization, structures, forms of struggle, their intelligent management, the use of language, the points of connection and rupture with whatever specific struggles, immediate and future objectives… Subjects which have received thousands of approaches from the combatants, the revolutionaries, the guerillas of every land and every era. The question of organization and the objectives of the revolutionary community have a lot of aspects and we are committed to approach them analytically in future texts.
At the moment we deem it useful to present in brief our own approach and point of view.
From the realization of the individual to its gigantic growth through collectivization
The meeting of the individuals who have realized that the modern way of life does not satisfy them is the first step for the growth of subversive action and the process of fermentation of libertarian ideas and practices. This meeting is achieved via the creation of informal groups, collectives and affinity groups (on a primary level between friends). In these, individuals can, in addition to going into action more organized, communicate their views, reflections, refusals and desires, their fears and their dreams. These re-groupings, at least as we have experienced them, despite sincere intentions and often their effectiveness in meeting their objectives, have the drawback that, precisely because of this relaxed relation between individuals, they are eventually weakened and finally dissolved, with a portion of the individuals who comprised them turning, disappointed, to isolation.
The bet for the transition from the friend-group to the organized minority infrastructure
The transition from the group to the organized infrastructure is not a question of the utilization of certain overused and substantially empty words. It lies within perception itself and the organization of our refusals. It is the attempt to experience the reality that the words responsibility, commitment, consistency, continuity, development, comradeship, and devotion stand for. Participation and organization in a revolutionary infrastructure has requirements. Requirements that are obviously decided collectively from all participating on the basis of respect of individuality but also on the common passion to fight. An entire world remains to be discovered, another remains to be demolished, not only by friends but by comrades and co-combatants.
Circles of self-education, practical knowledge, thoughts for the future of the struggle, setting up strategic plans that are judged advisable to be employed, experiences of attack in particular moments and in duration of time. The relations thus tighten and keep firmly shut the door to hierarchies, specializations, the silence of the “shyest” in conversations. Simultaneously, common experiences, progressive convergences of theories, and subsequently coordinated rhythms, not to mention the importance of the development and the timely diagnosis of the conditions (internal-external) that result, thus making more accurate the intervention in, correction of, or even contention against them.
At this point it would not be pointless to mention the question of means. The polarity between legal and illegal means should be immediately surpassed by every combatant; careful choice, however, should not. It is not only that each case be judged differently, i.e. that the distribution of texts can be more effective in one case, while in another an explosive mechanism can “do the job better.” This is obvious and in effect leaves it to the mature judgment of those who know not to fetishize but also not to excommunicate.
For us, events, flyposting, protests, clashes in the streets, smashing and paintbombing, all the dynamic practices of direct action compose the united and multiform revolutionary struggle. The distribution of our word and our deeds can be carried out in many ways. If somewhere we simply want to attract the attention of new comrades, what matters is that we are careful not about what means we are using, but about the way we do it.
Conspiracy (or, as it has been said, “the will for anonymity”), the low profile, the careful arrangements, the word games so as not to identify i.e. the writing on a poster with the communique for an attack, are matters that new revolutionaries should not overlook.
And obviously we do not speak of the segregation of combatants into illegal and legal. We cannot reproduce the language of the cops. On the contrary, we judge it necessary for the word of the guerrilla to relate to and not be hostile to the public.
Perhaps simply we should revise the ways i.e. we distribute a leaflet or flypost, or on the other hand we should learn to use the word, to make the enemy have to search for us in a foggy landscape. We do not want to extend ourselves more publicly, we are simply transferring our thoughts for those who continue and dare to fight, for them to judge and develop.
In conclusion, we stand beside and we have great confidence in the new generations of revolutionaries, that they will exceed our own errors and rigidity, and will, like our own generation, pass on to the next more complete, more targeted, harder, more careful experiences of struggle than the ones they received.
The infrastructures of attack and the diffuse revolutionary guerrilla:
myths, reality, and sycophancy
“Revolutionary action itself–even the fact that we equip ourselves, that we prepare ourselves, the fact that we carry out actions that violate urban legality–creates consciousness, organization, and revolutionary conditions.”
For decades the anarchist movement in Greece (and we obviously are not referring to any official bureaucratic and leftist version of it), because of theoretical disagreements, internal frictions, small-time politics, fear, and insistence on the spectacular approach of violence, remained primarily uninvolved in the issue of armed conflict with the forces of the state, leaving the “responsibility” to the armed organizations of the left (with few but luminous exceptions).
The spectacular image of armed struggle itself, in combination with its mystification by the perpetrators as much as the “spectators,” reproduced armed conflict–but also guerrilla action more generally–as a condition to be managed only by certain specialized commandos. The margins for those who saw the necessity of these forms of struggle was shifted by their participation in them, and fluctuates somewhere between gossip in cafes and applause from the couch.
Obviously, in the years from the regime change until 2002, the participation of anarchists in social mobilizations (that many times took intensely conflictual characteristics) and in low-intensity guerrilla actions (smashings and arsons with a lean analysis accompanied by a formal expression of solidarity each time to the imprisoned combatants) brought substantial results in the numerical growth of the anarchist/anti-authoritarian movement and likewise in vested experiences of direct/conspiratorial action.
The dissolution of the R.O. 17th November was a decisive point for those who perceived the necessity and importance of continual armed action.
The space of the attacks that would inspire other fighters, that would hurt the image of the “omnipotent” state in the times of the Left’s most shameless compromise, began to be filled by armed groups with a more intense anarchist/anti-authoritarian characteristic and phraseology.
A few years later, within the dialectic development, groups and organizations were born that had a clear anarchist phraseology (even if they used or use “heretical” speech).
The revolt of December 2008 acted as a catalyst and multiplicative for these groups, for the guerrilla tendency of our era, for the formation of what is called not unreasonably the new urban guerrilla.
The definition of “new” is not used in order to break it away from its roots nor the historical stake it received, nor to autonomize it temporally within the continuity of struggles that have been expressed historically (an impossible thing anyway), but in order to reveal the ruptures–for us necessary and fertile ones–with the theoretical quivers that were passed down to it.
The urban guerrilla of our generation did not choose to speak with economic or defensive terms in order to justify its existence socially.
It engraved and engraves its own orbit by speaking experientially, directly, and accessibly, not so much in order to be secured in the all-too pliable social conscience (if in fact that exists as a unified thing), but in order to constitute/co-form exclusively with those who fight, the revolutionary community and its own conscience.
It was and is a component of a wider radical and multiform struggle as much as it is a PERMANENT PROVOCATION (INVITATION) for anyone interested, a PERCEPTION OF A MOVEMENT IN THE URBAN FIELD, A WAY OF LIFE.
It is a fact that it did not seek social acceptance but rather INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE COMPLICITY.
Of no interest to us even now are the criticism, “understanding,” or applause of the couchlovers, the progressives, those who do not fight (and we are not referring only to armed struggle at this point), and they are not the criterion for us to act, for us to live. At the same time, something we truly anticipate is the critique of, as much as the co-formation of common struggle with, those who with a thousand ways fight and dream of the destruction of this world.
The new urban guerrilla of course traversed and traverses its own course, a course that obviously realized and surpassed its own errors and contradictions–something that happens in every healthy evolutionary course of a tendency and proposal of struggle.
The self-criticism of those who compose the new urban guerrilla, whether behind bars or through the continuation of the hostilities themselves, constitutes for us a foundational element in its promotion but also its continuous refinement in the spirit of continual improvement, joy, and sharpness.
“The profound good intention of self-criticism submits ideas to a tireless and exhaustive interrogation. The verdict decides unscrupulously–with the adequate strictness that suits coherence to the revolutionary situation–the rejection of dealings that rest henceforth in the opponent’s quiver. It sails without delay from any sentimental anchorage, blows up without leaving traces any remnants of false conscience, it destroys without hesitation whatever disorients or delays it.”
It is absolutely natural and beautiful that within an innate and newly conscious/experiential vitality and appetite for action exists so much enthusiasm and hurry. These two basic components of the character of the new revolutionary are necessary, and they are accompanied by their suitable management so as to avoid a pointless exposure to repression. The war that we conduct is endless; each move should be well-weighed and well-processed and should not be a product of compulsion.
We must learn to separate the war with the enemy from its underestimation. Big dreams do not need to be accompanied by big talk but rather by well-aimed actions and critical analyses.
We should be aware that critique and rupture with the official and orthodox revolutionary line of each era comes with great responsibility for those who practice it. The responsibility for the organization and the strengthening of their own “tendency,” and not the engagement with it as an occasional pastime.
Relations and awareness are surely not only created in amphitheatres but also in action, in our common experiences. We shall find the balance between the will for action and in the will for theoretical fermentation. The balance between the quality and quantity of objectives, and the quality and quantity of our relations and our analyses.
We should guard the secrets of revolutionary war from the hobbyists. The struggle needs dedicated people to intensify it and it cannot bear any more silent privatizations, retreats, and renunciations when things go bad.
We seek the essential and experiential imprinting of ourselves, our co-combatants, our tools of liberation, and the significance of destruction in our own lives. Let’s exile spectacular depictions from our thoughts from now on.
If there is an indirect reference to some of our experiences, exposing these publicly and directly is avoided in order to not feed clusters of inactivity and experts on the subject, gossipers.
We are nothing but a small but proud minority of this tendency, having the conscience for the clearness of our choices, and, in order to overcome our own mistakes, we want to share the experiences of our journey. Our small defeats and our big victories. Victories that cannot be measured in military terms (at least not only in those) but rather are an alloy of moments and experiences that we acquire as warriors of the revolution.
The damage (great or small) that we cause to the enemy, the joy that we experience in being 100% devoted to the struggle, the overcoming of fear during an attack, the smiles after it’s done, the precious relations that bore and bear the organizations and groups that continue in difficult times and those that now audaciously emerge…
The list goes on.
Because history counts the silences, but certainly also counts the struggles, and our struggle will have no end.
The bet we placed has already been won. The names of organizations and fighters are of no importance anymore, our war cry was met in the hearts and the minds of those who will not die as slaves in this shit world. Already new revolutionaries, new guerrillas process our forms and choices of struggle.
And as long as this chain does not break, our own involvement, our own small ring in this cannot be considered lost.
In conclusion…
The connection of revolutionary infrastructures, informal networks of coordinated action, and the construction of the chaotic army
“The negative recognizes the vastness of the duties it is called to serve. It restores to the historical limelight the meetings that were avoided whether because they skewed from the rota and the needs of time or because they were mishandled”
Communication, the co-ordination of action, the collective designation of affairs, the exchange of critical opinions, and mutual aid are the next steps for the organization of rebels, for the qualitative and quantitative upgrade of the struggle. Diversity of perceptions and practices, and the autonomy of each infrastructure (like that of the individuals who compose it), should not mean also unconnected action, at least not continuously. On the contrary, this diversity if communicated, cultivated, and connected with fertile terms is the wealth that is jointly shared by those who fight. What is necessary in the first place is the conquest of the conscience of COMMON STRUGGLE. Then can emerge (and we stress not necessarily) collaborations, fermentations, co-sailing. The exchange of theoretical disagreements but also the exchange of information of actions can lead to the co-formation of common public speech resulting in the greatest and best-aimed possible approach as much as it can lead to the co-formation of common objectives and the designation of affairs resulting in the greatest wound to the enemy. Henceforth individual development and awareness will be developed simultaneously through the collective as much as through the inter-collective. The horizontal-chaotic networks of multiform anarchist/revolutionary action are a feasible process, a necessary process, in order to compose as much as possible the disjointed community of refusal but also in order to signal in advance the end of every effort of hierarchical structure.
From illegal radio stations to occupations. From counter-information attempts and publication of printed material to solidarity assemblies. From sabotage groups to armed organizations. From groups for defense and medical or legal coverage at demonstrations to networks of support for fugitive comrades. Let’s learn from enemy movements and the co-ordination of its forces and do the same. Or even worse. The unification of this world into a “single unbeatable destructive force” should become the aim of the revolutionaries of today.
A first attempt at constituting such a network of struggle has already been put into action. The Informal Anarchist Federation – International Revolutionary Network that is comprised by groups and organizations around the world aiming at the co-ordination of action and a thematic approach gives its own perspective on the organization of the struggle. Keeping safe their conspiratorial rules, people who perceive the existence of their common references and points of connection, practice and theory established and developed through their public written communication a platform of thought and action. Something similar should be in the planning by the imprisoned rebels all over the world. Something similar can and should be created in all territories where the revolutionary war is expressed and the anarchist/libertarian struggle is being composed. In our hands is the organization, strengthening, deepening, enlargement, and collectivization of our refusals. The times demand it and the consciences require it…
Let’s prepare the construction of the chaotic army…
We were and we will be part of those who fight for the connection and not for the rupture of forms of struggle.
We also believe that each one’s hands are capable of making both types of lead shake.
We promote and support the polymorphy of the anarchist revolutionary struggle without hiding our long-term objective:
the multiplication of guerrilla organizations, social polarization, and civil revolutionary war as an essential condition for the crushing of the social machine.
In this effort of ours, in the effort of organizing a guerrilla front, on the 13th of January we were arrested and on the 18th of the same month we were brought as prisoners of war to the enemy’s prisons.
Confinement does not mean defeat
There is also that point in the course of a revolutionary where he/she will fall into the hands of the enemy. Territorially, the captivity of an enemy of sovereignty will be in the prisons, while the time-line fluctuates from a few months up to decades.
What leads a revolutionary to captivity, however, is nothing other than her/his choices. The situations that we experience are shaped based on the decisions that we have selected to apply and then defend. As anarchist revolutionaries, it is obvious that we know and in the end should contemplate that each choice is accompanied by an equivalent cost. Within these frames, every revolutionary knows or at least SHOULD know (experientially and with a historical base) the particular cost, from the loss of social bonds and imprisonment up to death, and should be prepared for this.
From the biggest loss, we have learned to gain everything
Every revolutionary planning takes place with a complete analysis of all fields of its implementation (apprising the conditions) and its results (in all aspects). This price often comes in the form of punishment. Sovereignty knows from the start that no correctional system is able to function in the way in which it was initialized when it is applied to sovereignty’s conscious enemy.
Thus, the incarceration of revolutionaries, does not aim at their punishment but at:
1. Their material extermination, the quantitative reduction of revolutionary potential.
2. The cutting off of the revolutionary from the fields the social and revolutionary fermentations and activities.
3. Making an example that is addressed to those who attempt or even think about carrying out any subversive thought or plan.
Finally, incarceration in the shackles of the enemy attempts to reveal the spectacular supremacy of sovereignty and the militant conflictual of comparison (“I have caused x wounds to the enemy and it has caused y wounds to me”). A message of “look who has the upper hand” addressed to the neutral social body.
When the punishment finds us proud and ready to face it, it loses its real use. When, on the other hand, fear dominates us and influences our every choice, going above the substance of the choice itself, then the latter loses its revolutionary character.
Stubbornness – force – the total and whole continuity of the struggle
In every revolutionary innately exists a powerful measure of force. It is the same force that exerted, exerts, and will continue to exert itself on the existent. The friction between revolutionary forces that attack the state develops a bidirectional relation, a relation of aid or alleviation, which mainly depends on whether or not it continues to be applied.
More simply and specifically: half of the force and the stubbornness that a prisoner shows comes from the individual itself. All the remainder is an aid that comes from the continuation of the struggle itself. No, it is not exclusively solidarity actions that will give strength to a prisoner. It is solidarity actions as a partial application of the struggle that you continue to express. The stubbornness that will be shown by those on the outside functions together with the stubbornness that will be shown by those on the inside.
Both, however, concern the TOTAL application of the revolutionary anarchist struggle and depend on it.
We recognize, therefore, that only this would have importance on the implementation of any revolutionary planning. The combative continuity consistent with the pre-agreed forms. Besides, to this we commit ourselves. From there on, each hostage or free revolutionary is obliged to do the same.
The war today requires it.
The hostilities continue
“And the crops grew and bore fruit.
But the birds did not approach because a scary figure was guarding.
Time passed
and the black birds multiplied and grew hungrier.
Until one morning, they could not take it anymore.
They stopped being afraid and they attacked the sleepless guardian of the field.
And while their beaks tore it apart, they realized it was only a scarecrow. Realizing thus that their biggest enemy
the one that made them starve
was their own fear.
From now on nothing can stop them.
From now on the land flooded with wheat belongs to them.”
And the war continues.
In the foggy battlefield we continue to dash armed with revolutionary dignity and stubbornness. The enemy attacks also in return. Some of us will fall into their hands, others will even lose their lives.
But as long as one of us still breathes in any corner of this planet the trenches are rebuilt and the plan will continue to develop.
And look!
New battles approach and this time we will be readier than never. Our ranks are staffed with new comrades, our structures are organized and our practices developed.
The result of the war does not interest us anymore; besides, each one of us imagines the victory celebrations differently. All of us, however, are expressed by this war because, very simply, the consequences of peace ate at our guts like carnivorous worms. We could not do differently. We could not allow fucking fear to march undisturbed in our hearts. We looked it in the eyes and this made it step back.
It is the pride of our choices that makes us not care for the consequences, and the reflection of our dreams in comrades’ eyes that gives us the strength to continue.
Our day dawns and the enemy can vaguely be seen from a distance. We have the wind against us and the sun is blinding. But the bodies of the enemies are rotten because for a long time now disease has ravaged their land.
Let’s go therefore, comrades, let’s attack in the name of revenge, in the name of our ego, in the name of freedom.
Let’s go therefore, comrades, we have already won.
Let’s go and crush them and get crushed in the effort.
”It is sad to write on a page with the heart wondering: and after what?
”But we are devoted to the struggle. Or to achieve our loss. It’s bound to happen and thus some one of us is inevitably lost. And then the idiots will shout, stubborn anarchist! Who, however, can comprehend the storm that roars in our brains? Who can understand our insatiable hunger for joy, for life? Who can perceive our victory over human cowardice?
”We are alone. We did not find a group of the daring and the risky, ready to participate in the struggle for the conquest of life. Consequently we were beaten and one of us was lost.
”But always the other remains with his gaze set on the horizon. It cannot, it should not deviate. This is our destiny. Will we find, we wonder, comrades on our course? And if not, again, will each one taking his own lonely course disappear silently or noisily from the scene of this world? A chapter closed, a chapter full of fights, hopes, delusions. But, the end has not come yet. This is all I have to say.”
– Text of revolutionary Kostas Pappas
As for us… We remain standing, we remain unrepentant, we remain proud of our action, our choices and the comrades who will evolve them.
SOLIDARITY AND UNITY TO THOSE WHO FIGHT INSIDE AND OUTSIDE THE PRISONS, HERE AND EVERYWHERE HOLDING THE BANNERS OF LIBERATION HIGH
Long live the revolution
Long live the new urban guerrilla
FREEDOM FOR EVER
Babis Tsilianidis
Dimitris Dimtsiadis
Socrates Tzifkas
Dimitris Fessas
3/4/2011
P.S. 1: Consciously we did not refer in our first text on the diagnosis and interpretation that we give to the recent repressive mobilization. The question of governmental counter-attack against those who fight and dispute its omnipotence obviously concerns us, and we will try to approach it in the near future.
Now we can make two small references.
We declare publicly that the anarchist Fee Meyer has no relation with us and what we lived or chose. Her only implication is her friendly relation with one of us and a coffee in Thisio that was finally proved bitter. Our solidarity even now that we heard of her release is a given, since she will continue to be dragged in the courts for a case she has nothing to do with.
Our parents and our friends have no relation with our choices (unfortunately and at least for now), so it would be wise of the antiterrorist force and the cops to stop HARASSING AND BULLYING individuals of relation to us.
We judge useful these facts and such motions are published IMMEDIATELY in order to show the role of EL.AS (Greek police) and its new tactics, not as a complaint but as one more element of polarization and clearing out of fighting camps. Camps that henceforth–if we judge from the movements of the thugs who show their hand more than they should–it appears our mothers, fathers and friends are also entering.
P.S. 2: We thank those who stood and still stand next to us. We took sufficient strength from the strength of those who were in the courts in Athens/Thessaloniki, those who broke the climate of terror in the neighborhoods where we lived, those who we found out that they think of us, those who honored us accompanying dynamic actions of attack with our names.
Simultaneously, let us ask something from those who feel what we mean. Solidarity to the prisoners of war has a meaning when it is simply another reason to fight, another reason of war. Don’t bite on this climate; we should not spend ourselves on the question of solidarity and limit ourselves to this.
For us there is no stronger sense of warmth and solidarity than the continuation of hostilities, especially in this era, especially in this condition.
DON’T STOP THE STRUGGLE EVEN FOR A MINUTE COMRADES
RAISE THE SAILS AGAINST THE WEATHER
(boubouras translations with modest reworking by war on society)
