Acceptance of Responsibility for the Bombing Armed Attacks on the Ministry of Labor and Hellenic Train

We dedicate these two actions to the Palestinian people and their heroic resistance. Honor forever to Kyriakos Xymitiris and to all those who fell fighting on the path to the social revolution!

“Death on scaffolding, death on trains, capitalism feeds on blood”

A slogan born in the great demonstrations of March 2023 against state capitalist crime in Tempe.

On January 26, 2025 and February 28, 2025 respectively, hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated against the government of murderous anti-worker restructuring and Hellenic Train, a subsidiary of the Italian monopoly Ferrovie Dello Stato, which bears primary responsibility for the murder of 57 of our fellow citizens in Tempe on February 28, 2023.

The demonstrations and strikes are a contribution to the formation of our collective defense as a Class and at the same time, since they took place within a country with an active role in the American-Zionist genocidal war in Palestine, a practical act of solidarity with the heroic Palestinian people, who with weapons in hand show the way for the liberation of the peoples of the whole world.

In particular, the strike of February 28 was a response to the rivers of blood that are shed daily in the labor camps. A response to the unspeakable pain of our colleagues , our brothers and sisters, our mothers and fathers, our sons and daughters, our friends, who were lost or maimed in the struggle for a living wage. A response to the relentless class war that we live every day here.

The massacre of the working class in the workplace as a conscious policy of capital and the state apparatus

The numbers for deaths at work, even those given by official government statistics, which do not record a large number of incidents (e.g. immigrants) or show deaths as pathological, are relentless. In the last three years alone, over 600 workers have lost their lives and over 1000 have been seriously injured (amputations, permanent paralysis, severe respiratory and heart problems), while thousands of others have been injured and required medical treatment (with all the multifaceted costs that this entails ) in over 40 thousand work “ accidents”. Numbers that become much larger if we include the hundreds of deaths per year, according to estimates by independent international organizations, from diseases (cancer, cardiovascular) related to unhealthy working conditions ( e.g. permanent exposure to chemicals, exhaust gases) , and which the Greek state does not even record as such in violation of international guidelines.

The slaughter of the working class in the workplace has a name: it is called class exploitation, the pursuit of maximum profit from capital, the extraction of surplus value. It is called employer terrorism, it is called state policy to enhance the competitiveness of the labor market, it is called employer unionism. It is called memoranda, a policy of reducing public debt, it is called the EU fiscal stability pact, it is called the Achtsioglou law, the Hatzidakis law, the Georgiadis law. It is called poverty, unemployment, blackmail of survival.

PARLIAMENT is a mechanism of class domination. The ministers and deputy ministers, the general secretaries, the technocrats of SEV, the banks and the shipowners who staff the legislative committees for the establishment of anti – labor laws are very well aware of the consequences of the laws they vote on. They are fully aware that the abolition of collective labor agreements, mandatory unpaid overtime, the six-day workweek, the skinning of heavy and unhealthy workers, the linking of a productivity wage ( minimum wage law ) , the increase in retirement limits, the virtual abolition of labor inspection, the criminalization of strikes and the liberalization of dismissals, the abolition of basic safety standards, lead with mathematical precision to a skyrocketing number of deaths and injuries of workers. But this is their job, their role, that’s why they are in this position. To shield and reinforce the profitability of the capitalists with the blood of the working class: with the blood of builders, seafarers and dock workers, with the blood of motorcycle drivers and train and transport workers, with the blood of workers in call centers and catering, with the blood of workers in industries and public works, with the blood of migrant farm workers . 

This is precisely why  its figures and structures have been in the sights of the proletariat and the revolutionary movement throughout time. From the execution by city guerrillas during the Occupation of the fascist, pliant Minister of Labor Kalyvas to the bloody battles of the construction movement in the 1960s in front of it and the attacks on its structures during the Junta by anti-dictatorial organizations , and from its constant targeting by revolutionary organizations post-politics to its militant exclusions from labor unions.

The defense of the life of the working class is a condition for its political formation and counterattack. 

The struggle against the generalized labor slaughterhouse is for the working class a struggle for life. A struggle for its present and future. A defensive and at the same time offensive-revolutionary struggle. No labor claim can be won if we cannot first effectively defend our own lives, and on the other hand, no substantial safeguarding of our gains can exist if this safeguarding is not perceived as a starting point for conquests and revolutionary leaps. We certainly have no illusions that safe working conditions can exist within the capitalist system. Work in capitalism was, is and will be inherently insecure as a legal theft of labor power by capital, as alienated labor, as wage slavery in the final analysis.

Until  labor is liberated from the shackles of capital, or rather, in order to pave the way for it and the “society of freely associated producers ,” we must first of all return from our jobs alive and well. And for this to happen, our first concern cannot be anything other than the multifaceted development of the promising multinational proletarian current that is being born today in the bowels of capitalist production: from the call centers to the courier companies, and from the ports and factories to the strawberry fields and all the labor camps of wage slavery .

Because as historical  experience has shown , it is precisely there, in the high temperatures of the class struggle where “the steel is tempered,” that the revolutionary class organizations of the future are born, those that will ground the revolutionary project in the present historical time, and will form in this direction the necessary political – military structure for the confrontation with the bourgeoisie, its state and its imperialist allies .

-The state capitalist crime in Tempi as a turning point in the class struggle

Similarly, like the labor slaughterhouse, the state capitalist crime in Tempi and its government management-cover-up in terms of mafia and social humiliation, brought the issue of class organization and defense, forms of struggle, and revolutionary perspective to the fore. For the development of class struggle in the post-memorandum era, Tempi was a turning point. They illuminated and at the same time condensed in an explosive manner central aspects of the Greek social formation. From the intensity of the capital-labor opposition and the -predatory- appropriation of social wealth by local and foreign capital, to the role of the state as a collective capitalist and the class content of bourgeois justice. And from the -insignificant- value of the lives of our class for capital and the -rotten- moral background of state government power to the power of popular mobilization, class solidarity and humanity. In particular, the crime in Tempi demonstrated what the memoranda, privatizations, policies to reduce public debt and deficits meant. What the national goals of remaining in the EU and the EMU meant. No matter how much the systemic propaganda strives to the contrary, since 28/2/2023, the “death-murder of 57 people in Tempi” has been imprinted in the social mood as an answer to the above questions, among other things.

-The debt of the OSE as a transfer of wealth from the working class to capital, with the state as guarantor 

The privatization process of the public railway and the results it has signaled are revealing and leave no room for misinterpretation. Similarly, as happened in all public infrastructures, from OTE, PPC, EYDAP and forest firefighting, to public Health and Education, the depreciation and dismantling of the public railway was a specific state policy, integrated into the strategies of Greek capitalism and the EU. Public transport, like all public infrastructures, is for the Greek bourgeoisie a burden, an unnecessary burden that it always wanted to get rid of before the large public contractors, the banks and the cronies of the bourgeois parties and governments plunder it.

In any case, the term “public transport”, referring to the OSE, can only be used abusively, just as any use of the term “public” when it identifies enterprises of the bourgeois state is equally abusive. Because the OSE, since it was founded in 1971 by the Junta (retaining a large part of the junta’s administrative staff even after the Transition), was established under the terms of a private enterprise and certainly not as a service oriented towards promoting the public interest. That is why it was always subject to the capitalist accounting framework defined by the relationship between profit and losses, contrary to what would correspond to a public, albeit state-controlled, service that supposedly exists to serve the public interest, regardless of profit.

But what appeared as a loss to OSE, and how over the years these losses accumulated to create the organization’s enormous debt even after its bankruptcy and its sale to capital, and specifically to the  Italian railway monopoly Ferrovie Dello Stato, of which Hellenic Train is a subsidiary? Beyond the provocative theft of public money by the OSE administrations appointed by the bourgeois government parties and closely linked to State contractors – which also gave birth to the socially detestable caste of the upper civil servant bureaucracy, as in the rest of the public sector -, what appeared as a loss was the difference between the meager income – from the relatively cheap tickets – in relation to the large expenses required for the railway to operate in an elementary manner. A deviation that the state duly covered, albeit to a limited extent, since the money it spent was enough for OSE to simply vegetate, money that was certainly not its own, but the people’s money that came from its heavy taxation. In reality, therefore, the stolen social wealth that the bourgeois state embezzled – at the same time that it exempted big capital from taxation – to substandardly finance public services, withholding of course a not inconsiderable amount for its people, was registered as OSE’s debt. And to whom was this debt of OSE and therefore of the state and ultimately of the people and the working class? But to the lenders of the Greek state, namely the banks and consequently the lenders of the Greek banks, namely European and mainly German, English and French finance capital, as well as of course American capital. The predatory nature of the capitalist imperialist system, which transforms the debt of capital to the working class into a debt of the working class to capital and the robbery of a country’s social wealth into a debt of the people of that country to imperialist capital, is revealing.

The privatization of OSE, as a state strategy, an EU imperative and a memorandum commitment 

In this context, and while debts were accumulating while the railway continued to operate under the terms of past decades with an outdated and small network, the urban clamor for the modernization and consolidation of OSE and the EU’s demands for “enhancing the competitiveness of the transport and communications sector” as a prerequisite for Greece’s accession to the EU and later to the EMU, in reality constituted the battering ram for its dissolution and eventual privatization. In 1996, the now modernizing PASOK party would proceed with the first division of OSE, with the establishment of ERGOSE SA, which undertook the modernization of the network using private economic criteria, while five years later GAIOSE SA was established to exploit OSE’s real estate. In 2005, during the New Democracy government, the fragmentation of OSE deepened – after another huge transfer of wealth from the bottom up had previously taken place through the nationalization of OSE’s 4.5 billion euro debt – with the establishment of TRAINOSE SA, which took over OSE’s passenger and commercial routes,  generously endowed , in fact, on the basis of EU directives, with tens of millions of euros. Three years later, in 2008, and while the then New Democracy MP Kyriakos Mitsotakis was speaking openly in Parliament about the need for the immediate privatization of OSE “in order to no longer burden the Greek people”, the then Minister of Transport K. Hatzidakis will lay the foundations for its reconstruction-privatization, unabashedly demagogueing about the circumstances of a serious railway accident in Bralos in the same year with 16 injuries, where again “human error” and “public misconduct” were cited as causes, and not the overloaded wagons for the purpose of profit in violation of every regulation, as the experts’ findings proved.

What the New Democracy party did not manage to implement due to the change of government in 2009, the new PASOK government will undertake to continue by transferring 49% of TRAINOSE to private individuals, until the bankruptcy of the Greek state in 2010 and its submission to a memorandum  supervision regime by the EU, the ECB and the IMF create new dynamics. The full privatization of the railway will become a memorandum commitment of the Greek state towards its lenders, in order to disburse the installments of its “salvation” from the gigantic debt that had accumulated from a multitude of predatory procedures of similar content to those that created the railway’s debt, which in 2010 had hopefully reached 10 billion euros.

In the years to come, the railway will operate with a reduced and poorly paid staff, non-existent investments in new technologies and safety standards, completely discredited, so that in 2017 – under the SYRIZA ANEL government and with the consent of course of PASOK, ND – the privatization will finally take place, through the HRADF, in a sale for 45 million euros to the Italian  monopoly Ferrovie Dello Stato. In other words, a public good was sold to capital for the aforementioned low price, which had been paid for with tens of billions of euros of stolen labor surplus.

This enormous transfer of wealth from the social base to capital, especially foreign capital, was attempted to be justified by the then Prime Minister Tsipras as an obligation imposed by the memorandums and that without this sale the Greek state would pay a fine of 600 million euros to the EU, while the payment of the installments would be conditional. And indeed it was so, except that we do not forget that the then government was the one that had voted for the third memorandum, annulling the sweeping popular anti-memorandum will of July 2015, just as we do not forget that he himself had publicly expressed himself positively about privatization, emphasizing that in the sales contract the Italian monopoly was expected to make productive investments of 600 million euros in the coming years. However, no investment was made – in fact, there was no control in this regard, lest the new investors become dissatisfied – despite two very serious railway accidents, the first in Serres in 2016 with two deaths and the second in Adendros, Thessaloniki, with three deaths. Accidents that had highlighted the lack of even basic safety standards, light signaling, remote control, the European ETCS system, single track on a large part of the network, etc., according to the clear complaints of the workers since then. Difficulties that had highlighted the scandal  of the non-implementation of the famous contract 717 of 2014 worth many millions of euros, a contract with which much of what was necessary for the safety of the railway would have been implemented, but which was deliberately undermined by the private – in essence – ERGOSE and the competent state government officials (ministers, general secretaries) in order to keep OSE discredited, while the contract funds were the subject of provocative embezzlement by the ERGOSE administration.

Thirsty for services to big capital after almost 5 years away from governance and its income, New Democracy, the historically pre-eminent party of the Greek bourgeoisie, will deepen its policy of privatization and its policy of “everything to capital”, in all sectors. In particular, with regard to the railway, the government will boast about the positive balance sheets that the privatized railway of state subsidy and state-written debt was now showing, but also about its “modernization and safety”, despite the constant complaints of workers about the miserable state of the network, the non-implementation of the 717 contract and the inappropriate type of many trains used by Ηellenic Train. To reward it for its services, the New Democracy government will arrive in July 2022 to sign a contract with Hellenic Train by which the Greek state undertook to pay over 60 million euros annually for 15 years (over a billion euros in total), among other things, for the development of the network’s barren lines – something that never happened – while by law it exempted the company from almost all of its obligations of 600 million, which it had undertaken when the sales contract was signed in 2017. A law that was unabashedly accompanied by euphoric statements from the government and the competent Ministry of Transport headed by Costas Karamanlis about the “new era in railway services and safety”.

Crime in Tempe, the government and Hellenic Train 

From there on, everything was predetermined. Hellenic Train, heavily financed and free from any trace of formal restriction, and with a government ruthless in serving its interests by its side, could now devote itself unfettered to what is defined by the DNA of every capitalist enterprise. That is, to the pursuit of maximum profit, in that field where, as Marx said, “there is no crime that capital is not capable of committing and no human law that it cannot trample on.”

So on February 28, 2023, in circumstances that had been approached several times in the past, a commercial and a passenger train collided head-on in Tempe, resulting in the death of 57 of our fellow human beings, working class people. Mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, grandmothers, grandfathers. Young people, students, workers, train drivers, immigrants, pensioners.

The country’s railway network, which still operated on single lines, in the absence of any investment for its development, “as a cost that burdens the positive balance sheets of the company”, was not equipped with either light signaling, or remote control, or of course with the modern means of preventing opposing traffic on a single line. These too constituted “costs that were counterproductive for competition”. The management of Hellenic Train and of course the government and the Ministry of Transport knew very well what these criminal deficiencies meant. They knew very well that without all these systems, the railway, understaffed due to staff cuts and without safety infrastructure, was destined at some point – even on the basis of a human error due to the lack of training and the over-intensive work of the employees – to bring many fatal accidents. And of course, woe betide if in 2023, with this development of production capabilities, the issue of the safety of hundreds of people is left exclusively to the human factor, without multiple safety controls that would nullify the result of an error. However, these controls did not exist, with full awareness on the part of Hellenic Train that such a thing is equivalent to direct exposure of the passenger public to death. And of course with full awareness on the part of the Ministry of Transport, which through the mouth of K. Kramanlis, slandered the workers as “spoiled” – as today the Minister of Health calls the struggling health workers – when they exposed to him the huge safety gap, the miserable working conditions and the non-implementation of contract 717.

Certainly the attitude of Hellenic Train and the government is completely compatible with their “being”. And certainly one cannot expect sensitivity for the lives of the people, from those who have systematically robbed them for years. Unscrupulous criminal capitalists are the owners of Hellenic Train, the Italian state monopoly Ferrovie Dello Stato. Una faca una raca with our respective “our” murderers of the working class: the shipowners, the industrialists, the bankers and their political representatives, with many of whom it also collaborates closely. And of course Ferrovie Dello Stato is flesh from the flesh of the always fascist at its core – and openly today – Italian state and the imperialist Italian big bourgeoisie with its spheres of influence in North Africa and the Mediterranean and the central position in the European industrial division.

A monopoly with organic relations with the NATO war machine and the Zionist state that murders Israel, as evidenced on the one hand by its business with military industries that supply NATO and on the other hand by its relations with the Zionist ZIM, the main carrier of arms to Israel, as well as with the Zionist state itself for which it undertakes numerous commercial transports, which is why it maintains offices in Tel Aviv. A monopoly with a long history of class war against the Italian proletariat, which also bore the armed anti-violence on the part of the latter, during the years of the revolutionary confrontation in the 1970s in Italy.

The cover-up of the crime in Tempe as the government assuming political responsibility for it

The class nature of the crime in Tempe determined, as was to be expected, the terms of its political and judicial management by the government and Hellenic Train. Even before the blood had dried, they directly attributed the disaster to human error and the “chronic pathologies of the Greek state and public”, demanding in reality even greater freedom of movement for capital, more privatizations and new attacks on whatever public infrastructure remains. They quickly swept the scene of the disaster under government orders – indifferent to the piles of dead bodies – and in violation of every protocol, thus significantly complicating the investigation in order to cover the various responsibilities of Hellenic Train, including those for the enormous fireball that cost the lives of passengers, responsibilities that could reveal serious aspects of the connection between the state, capital, Hellenic Train and illegal-black capital. They removed from the framework of criminal liability, through their own justice, the management of Hellenic Train and the Ministry of Transport, as well as of course all those responsible over the years, senior government and state officials, who contributed to the railway being in the exact situation it was in on 28/2/2023: that is, a railway that is a public danger.

In reality, we are not even talking about a cover-up here, but about assuming responsibility for the murder of 57 people. Because when the owning company that is clearly responsible for the crime is not simply not prosecuted, but remains at the helm of the railway, then we are certainly talking about assuming political responsibility by the government, capital and the supervising EU, through civil justice, in its historically familiar role of the latter covering up the crimes of the system (from the grandiose sycophants of the occupation and the torturers of the Junta, to the murderous capitalists today and their executive organs, the security forces). An assumption of responsibility that becomes even more deafening when even today the elementary security systems have not been installed on the railway, as demonstrated by numerous incidents, most notably this one in Agioi Anargyri a few months ago, where luckily we did not have another head-on collision of trains full of passengers. Which becomes even more deafening when the EU continues to make its budgetary programs for Greece dependent on the course of privatizations in transport, while appointing Mitsotakis’ chosen one, Tzitzikostas, as EU transport commissioner, essentially as a guarantor of the cover-up of the crime in Tempi.

In practice, today the government, the state, capital, the judiciary, the entire domestic system of power, say with bottomless cynicism to the entire society: “this is the operating framework of the system in which you live”. Similarly, like the dead in the labor camps, similarly, like the dead in Pylos, similarly, like the dead in the fires and floods, similarly, like the dead in the police stations, similarly, like the abused and murdered women of the trafficking rings, similarly, like the genocide in Gaza in which the Greek state actively participates, the dead in Tempi are the necessary blood sacrifice for the system to exist and reproduce. Just as the slogan of the demonstrations in March 2023 said: “Death on the scaffolding, death on the trains, capitalism feeds on blood”.

The fascism of the domestic capitalist political system and the opposing class awe that struggles to form

The rulers believed that with the above line – a mixture of bourgeois neoliberal arrogance and far-right brutality – they could impose themselves against a society severely wounded by the defeats of the recent past and exhausted by the daily battle for survival. However, they were resoundingly proven wrong. The great social outbreak of March 2023, with three weeks of mobilizations with many hundreds of thousands of people throughout the country , which achieved the synthesis of a multitude of political practices (demonstrations, major strikes – one of which was even organized from below without the employer’s GSEE, occupations, clashes – street battles) was the first resounding response. A response that obviously drew on the legacy of the remarkable rearguard battles of the previous period (pandemic-health crisis, hunger strike of the revolutionary D. Koufondinas, labor struggles, insurgent events in Nea Smyrni), and which opened a serious rift in the relations of social representation, which fueled various political processes and dynamics, visible and underground, that would eventually find their way to manifest themselves again. The 2023 elections with the emphatic victory of New Democracy did not close this rift, nor did they certainly mean, as unfortunately and not a few voices within the movements claimed, that there had not even been a rift and that society had accepted its submission. Alas, with over 45% abstention, elections can be the absolute indicator of the orientations of a social formation. And in any case, what the elections showed was that this rift exists, it’s just that one side is coherent, having created around itself, on the basis of some relative benefits that it can still marginally offer, a strong social coalition with petty and middle-class strata as well as with backward sections of the working class, as the bourgeois power has always done. In contrast to our side, which continued without organizational preparation corresponding to the intensity of the attack and with political discourse often incapable of giving necessary transitional goals (e.g. lifting privatizations) strategic impetus, while failing to listen in depth to the universal demand for justice and therefore to give it the political class content that corresponds to it, gradually even going so far as to put the crime in Tempi in second place among its priorities.

Almost two years later, in January 2025 – and while the politically significant solidarity mobilizations in Palestine have intervened – the intensification of the class struggle will unleash unprecedented dynamics. An audio document was enough to capture the last words of the young people who were dying from lack of oxygen on the fatal train (and thus shed light on the horrific circumstances of their death and the provocative lies of those in power). The huge demonstrations of January 26 throughout the country were the confirmation that the divisive intersection centered on Tempi not only exists, but has much greater depth, seeking the organization and political content to become a social explosion and class uprising.

The system of power, in panic, not waiting for the development and seeing the popular current threatening it with overthrow, mobilized all its class hatred, revealing to its full extent its rotten value base, turning without hesitation against the relatives of the dead, practically the dead themselves, practically the entire society, telling them in reality: “We will kill you and you will bow your heads!” But this is in reality the speech of a regime, more correctly the speech of a fascist regime that demands through force mass social humiliation and submission.

If we want to face reality, what the government and its bosses (local and foreign) attempted to do since January 26, 2025 – and much earlier of course – was to impose a fascist regime on the country, a regime that they have been diligently establishing for years through specific movements (repressive murderous management of the pandemic, wiretapping, employer and state terrorism, transformation of the country into a vast American base, alliance with Israel). Because only as a fascist regime can a condition be perceived – and is perceived today by significant sections of the people – where the authorities will murder en masse and openly cover up the murderers, while simultaneously dogging the memory of the dead, slandering their relatives and suppressing with murderous instinct the people who demonstrate in the streets. Precisely because only such a regime can today guarantee the needs of Greek capitalism in the destabilized international environment of intensifying antagonisms (interstate and imperialist), the new economic and fiscal crisis and generalized social discontent, and of course only such a regime can effectively serve the interests and plans of its imperialist protectors (the USA and the EU) and Israel.

Practically speaking, then, the dilemma in which we are now called upon to position ourselves, a dilemma to which the historic strike-uprising of February 28 throughout the country gave an equally historic answer, is clear. It is the same dilemma, albeit with different proportions, as that which the peoples and the proletariat of the whole world face when they are faced with the danger of tyranny: “Chains or weapons”. Let us decisively choose the latter!

We dedicate these two actions to the Palestinian people and their heroic resistance.

Honor forever to Kyriakos Xymitiris and to all those who fell fighting on the path to the social revolution!

Revolutionary Class Self-Defense

Source: Athens Indymedia

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=18320

Athens, Greece: Incendiary Attack on House and Police Guard of Supreme Court President

“Injustice is not anonymous, it has a name and an address”

Bertolt Brecht

In the early morning hours of June 27th [2024] we attacked the house and the police guard of the President of the Supreme Court, Ioanna Klapa, in the Papagos area. That summer evening found the cop who happened to be on duty instead of carelessly gazing at Instagram photos or playing slots (in earlier watches this seemed to be how those on duty spent their time) screaming from the Molotov cocktails that burned him and then being rushed to the emergency room by his colleagues, badly injured. And Klapa, instead of sleeping, fearfully putting out the fire in the entrance and garden of her house.

But why did we choose to attack Klapa while her house was being guarded?

First of all, it was an operational choice with three political considerations. It was not a matter of mere desire or convenience but of collective recognition of the need to attack, yes, using the element of surprise, but on a guarded target. In a field where, in theory, immediate engagement reflexes have been designed and provided for by the police guard to protect the high profile person. In this area there is not room for much analysis. Their preparedness and the proud spirit of the Greek police corps went out the window. Although their operational planning was disgraced, we, to tell the truth, acknowledge that we did not achieve anything particularly great. Life the next day went on as usual, a world of squalor and rot remained the same and the violence of apathy, misery and deadlock still lingers. We had no illusions that we would achieve the most decisive blow to the mechanisms of bourgeois justice and the police. To be a substantially dangerous pole in the social war, however, you have to sharpen the violent responses quantitatively and qualitatively. This is a finding that is eloquently described even by renowned academics and in particular by the jurist Manoledakis: “The overthrow of a political power, and especially today when the state has a perfected huge mechanism for eliminating its opponents, cannot be done on paper or with wishful thinking. In order for the ‘political criminal’ to reach his goal, he must willingly or unwillingly violate a multitude of legal value so that his crime always appears complex. The state is a legal value entangled with other legal values (human lives, personal freedoms, facilities, services, etc.). To reach it you have to go through these values”. So we recognized the importance of such an action and achieved a goal that was both realistic and decisive. To wound their confidence and arrogance, to wound the security they feel in the quiet of their homes and their service cars. We have succeeded, and literally. The burn scars of the security guard will be there to remind him and his colleagues when they notice them that they are in fact vulnerable no matter how much they may think otherwise.

Here lies the second aspect of the rationale behind our attack and the conditions under which it was carried out. The central outcome of our operational planning was to completely destroy the service vehicle and injure the cop, which is what happened. If to some ears this sounds too violent and alienating to their humanistic, pea-brained little minds, then we are speaking and addressing those who read this text and either consciously and with clear political and ideological commitment advocate revolutionary violence by all means or those who instinctively rejoiced and chuckled when they heard the news of a cop being injured that day. To all of them we say that this act was another contribution to the feud we have with the bollocks of the Hellenic Police. We owe this feud and its continuation to our dead. It is a deep and conscious choice with the first and foremost weapon being the determination that defines the need to avenge our dead.

“People do not judge like courts; they do not pass sentence, they throw thunderbolts; they do not condemn kings, they throw them into the void.”

Maximilian Robespierre

It is these dead people who directed us that night to examine Klapa and – instead of the position of the all-powerful judge as she is accustomed to have – to put her in the position of the guilty party. Klapa deliberately repeatedly and by being in an appointed office has been covering up for two years from her position as President of the Supreme Court the government’s responsibility for the murder of 57 people in Tempi. We found Klapa guilty of covering up and tampering with the traces left by the New Democracy killers. We found this scum guilty for not being ashamed to even take on the relatives of the victims. So we looked at her record as President of the Supreme Court and judged that the response of fire and the terror of an attack where her family comfort is housed is the very minimum she truly deserves. We do not expect every Klapa and every Adilini along with Bakaimi to deliver any justice. Just mentioning it makes us laugh. But we want to say one or two things to them. We know very well that among the worst things you can say to a judge and accuse him of is that he is controlled by political power. It gives them an allergy. They have nothing more sacred than maintaining the veneer of the shop window of the civil justice system as “independent”. Since it is not so unlikely that this text will fall into Klapa’s hands – after all, it concerns her – we say to her something that even the most ignorant (unless of course she belongs to the party apparatus and the core of the New Democracy) now believes: you right-wing tsarina, at least try to keep up appearances when you protect the boss who appointed you and don’t lick the Prime Minister’s ass so much. And one more thing, to the relatives of the victims – of the crime committed by those you so zealously protect – you’re going to make a toubeki*. Save the suggestions because as you saw your guarding wasn’t effective enough and as you remember we know where your house falls.

The duty to defend the memory of our dead cannot stop at a violent gesture, at a single attack. We must create at every opportunity the conditions that will allow a direct and dynamic response to the demagogues of our thoughts and dreams and the usurpers of our lives. The same applies, of course, to those who protect them. The conditions that we must take advantage of also arise from mass violent outbursts such as that of 28 February. Diffuse groups and individuals clashed that day, putting the mentality of acts of revenge for the murder of 57 people in Tempe at the forefront. Any similar opportunity must not be allowed to go to waste. Not with the logic of a fetishistic violent vision and a simple clean-up. Too many years of absence of mass aggressive clashes and the few exceptions in between have damaged the reflexes of the militant minorities and have left behind a conspiratorial logic in many parts of the people who take to the streets. From the righteousness of the December rioters and the mass militant stubbornness of 2010-2012, we have moved on to insatiable securitarianism and the baptism of provocative cops with an obsession that is truly impressive. Most people are more or less aware of the responsibilities of the left, let alone the KKE [Greek Communist Party], for this provocative propaganda. On top of that, the huge crowds on 28 February ensure the presence of many ignorant people about what violent mass clashes at central gatherings signify and their necessity. It can only cause laughter that all of them, at the sight of incidents in other countries around the world, pull out of the quiver of the know-it-all, the shouting at the apathetic new Greek who no longer resists. Only the constant and repeated confrontational presence will answer all these sputtering people. Let us have no illusions that all this number of people will read the analyses of the space on provocateurism. Let’s answer them in the street with our unyielding and determined intention to attack cops, capitalist targets and state property. If they don’t understand words, let’s give it to them in words. In the general strike on 9 April the conflict minorities must, if necessary, respond forcefully to possible challenges and any threat to their security by sputtering vigilantes of social peace.

KYRIAKOS XYMITIRIS ALWAYS PRESENT

“What does it matter if death finds us? What matters is that our cry will be heard and another hand will be by our side to take our weapon and other rebels will rise up to catch the song, to hear the new cry of war and revolution.”

We dedicate this phrase of Che Guevara and its meanings to the dead urban guerrilla Kyriakos Xymitiris. We don’t need to talk about Kyriakos. His choices have spoken. The militant path he took was marked with signs of dedication, unadulterated faith and commitment to the struggle for the HOPE he so believed in. At noon on the 31st of October, Kyriakos Xymitiris left too early after a device explosion on Arcadia Street. But the signs that led him among the cyclones of a reality that struggles to impose apathy and starkism, those roads that Kyriakos opened with the stubbornness and passion of an armed rebel, those signs will be followed by all of us who will commemorate his passage into “illegality” along with the other outlaws Lambros Fountas, Michalis Prekas, Christoforos Marinos, Christos Tsouchouvis and Christos Kassimis. We will keep those streets bright because Kyriakos’ own life and his sacrifice prove so thunderously and blatantly that people who love the struggle for freedom and life are willing to risk it without a second thought. To give it totally to the revolutionary cause.

MARIANNA FIRM AND STRONG AS FREEDOM

IMMEDIATE RELEASE OF POLITICAL PRISONERS MARIANNA M., DIMITRI P., DIMITRA Z., NIKO R., ARGYRI K.

Provocateur Faction

Source: Blessed is the Flame

DN Note

*Τουμπεκί (Turkish: tömbeki) is the tobacco used in ναργιλέ, nargilé (shisha, hookah). In coffee houses until the interwar period, nargilé was widespread. There are various interpretations of the origin of the expression “κάνε τουμπεκί, kane tombeki”, which metaphorically means “shut up”, “shut it up”. The nargilé was prepared by the “tömbeki”, nargilé maker, of the coffee houses, and because they would catch up on the conversation and take a long time to offer it to the customer, the customer would in turn shout: “Kane tombeki”, meaning stop the conversations and make the tobacco.

Athens, Greece: ‘Provocateur Faction’ takes responsibility for the incendiary attack on the house and police guard of the Supreme Court President Ioanna Klapa

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=18293

Athens, Greece : Update on Health of Comrades Marianna M. and Dimitra Z.

DEPRIVING PRISONERS OF MEDICAL CARE IS TORTURE

Hands off anarchist comrades Marianna M. and Dimitra Z.

On 31/10/24, following an explosion in an apartment in Ampelokipi, the anarchist armed fighter Kyriakos Xymitiris fell in the battle for social and class liberation, while the anarchist comrade Marianna M., who was also in the apartment, was severely injured, hospitalised and guarded in the ICU of the “Evangelismos” General Hospital. The following days, comrades Dimitra Z., Dimitris and Nikos R., as well as A.K., were remanded in custody.

From the very beginning, state violence was applied to comrade Marianna. With her transfer to Korydallos women’s prison just one day after the second operation she underwent, her hospitalisation was violently interrupted while she still had open wounds on her face, she could not walk or fully care for herself, was dizzy and in pain. The “Evangelismos” General Hospital discharged her as a patient in this condition, knowing full well the miserable environment of the prison to which she would be transferred, where there is not even any kind of hospital and therefore no possibility of providing her with extremely necessary medical care before she fully recovers.

Her torture in Korydallos prison continues to this day. Her serious health condition, as well as the risk of long-term complications, are the result of the deprivation of necessary medical post-operative care. From the very beginning they deprived her of the provision of pharmaceuticals and forced her to stay in cells full of cockroaches, in extremely poor sanitary conditions. While to this day – four months later – necessary and urgent diagnostic tests have not been initiated. To her request to be assessed by a doctor and immediately initiate a brain CT scan requested by an outside doctor who visited her a long time ago, the response of the prison neurologist was “if you don’t fall down with an epileptic seizure, we won’t take you to hospital.” A response that accurately reflects the condition of vindictiveness, punishment, and torture that the rulers impose on anyone who finds themselves captured in the cells of democracy.

To the already heavy situation of confinement was added the appearance of intense rashes and itching in comrade Dimitra. A short time later, the comrade Marianna also showed similar symptoms and only then was the diagnosis of scabies made, while they have been torturing Dimitra for two months with their icy indifference, attributing the symptoms to psychological reasons and administering sedatives to her without having ruled out pathological causes.

The climax of the insult to our comrades was the torture suffered by the comrade Dimitra on Saturday 29/3 evening. After showing a sharp deterioration in her symptoms and developing a fever, she was transferred to Korydallos “Agios Pavlos” hospital, where – among other things – the doctor in charge addressed her by saying “for us you are just numbers”, indicating the already well-known perception of such scumbags about the lives of prisoners. Despite these conditions, the comrade demanded and achieved the obvious, her transfer to the Nikaia State Hospital.

In a clear decision to exacerbate the physical and psychological exhaustion of the comrade, the EOM, following central orders, called the hospital doctors to the transport van, inside which the comrade suffered the torture of a dermatological and gynecological examination using cell phone lenses and in the presence of the cops, with the comrade repeatedly asking them to turn away during the “examination”-torture. She was then transferred to the pathology clinic, as it was deemed necessary to carry out medical examinations. When the comrade requested to speak to the doctor again regarding a problem, the cops refused, saying “we know what they told you, there’s no need.” Tension prevailed, in which a nurse was involved in defending the comrade, who, true to their thuggish methods, the cops pushed away and took the comrade back to the prison.

The comrades are walking the path that hundreds of prisoners take when they are imprisoned. Their torture reminds us of how the state apparatus takes revenge on those who challenge its monopoly of violence, but also on those it considers “excessive”. The sadistic way of treating and torturing prisoners through the deprivation of medical care is yet another means of trying to discipline and oppress them. The lives of prisoners are devalued, considered inferior, thrown to the sidelines, forcing them to claim the obvious and pushing them towards deterioration, physical and mental extermination.

In Korydallos women’s prison, the medical examinations performed on prisoners are minimal and superficial, while when examinations are required in hospital, the wait can be up to three months. In addition, many of the treatments that prisoners were undergoing before being imprisoned are generally prohibited and forcibly interrupted, with serious consequences for their health. The necessary medication that each one needs is prescribed by the prison doctors, but the medicines finally reach the prisoners after even two months. Ultimately, as is largely the case outside the walls, access to basic medical care acquires clear class characteristics, since prisoners are forced to resort to external private doctors to visit them in prison, a process that only those who have the corresponding financial means can support. The rest, the majority, are left to their own devices, victims of the indifference, bureaucracy and vindictiveness of the state machine. Such impositions of state power clearly constitute torture and potential murder.

We remember the dozens of murders of prisoners due to lack of medical care and utter neglect, the dozens of immigrants who are murdered daily in concentration camps, detention centres and police stations, the suicides and the hundreds of complaints by prisoners about inhumane and unsanitary conditions inside prisons. The examples are many and fresh in our memory.

However, we also remember the hundreds of struggles and uprisings carried out by prisoners inside prisons, the fighters who gave their lives to demand basic needs and care inside the cells of democracy. Struggles that continue to this day and will find us by their side, uniting our voices with those of the prisoners.

Comrade Dimitra needs immediate hospitalisation, while comrade Marianna must be taken immediately for a brain CT scan. The administration of Korydallos women’s prison with director Triantafylli Konstantopoulou, the “Evangelismos” General Prison with commander Anastasios Grigoropoulos and deputy Batis Veniamin, the State Hospital of Nikaia as well as the Ministries of Health and Pro.Po. (ministry of justice) bear full responsibility for the torture of our comrades, for the serious risk of deterioration of their health – but also of not fully recovering – to which they have been exposed. We make it clear in all directions, whatever happens to them will have consequences and will not go unanswered.

HANDS OFF THE ANARCHIST PRISONERS MARIANNA M.

AND DIMITRA Z.

KYRIAKOS XYMITIRIS IS ONE OF US, A COMRADE FOREVER

IN THE STREETS OF FIRE

SOLIDARITY WITH THOSE PERSECUTED FOR THE AMPELOKIPI CASE

UNTIL THE DESTRUCTION OF THE LAST PRISON

Solidarity Assembly for Prisoners,

fugitive and persecuted militants

—–

via: athens.indymedia

Translated by Act for freedom now!

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=18169

Athens, Greece: Under the Concrete, Something’s Boiling – Building Squad in Exarcheia by Rasprava Occupation

After the end of the event “Revolutionary memory and the struggle perspective “ in Messolonggiou [pedestrian area of Exarcheia], a crowd of comrades descended on the corner of Koletti and Themistokleous streets to defend the liberation of the building in course.

The following is the self-presentation of the occupation:

The silence of the metropolis weighs on our backs like a stone. The streets are full of tired looks, bodies crawling out of habit, fear, submission. People move along prescribed paths without questioning, tempering their dreams. Everything is programmed to work exactly as they want: work, consumption, obedience. But, always, beneath the surface, something is boiling.

History is not written by the obedient. Some choose to bear the burden of disobedience. To crack the concrete of normality. To confront the invisible hand of power that suffocates every aspect of our lives. Refusing to submit is not a mere stance. It is a call to question, overthrow, take back what belongs to us.

We are comrades, anarchists who come from different political and ideological starting points, but we have found ourselves in the same fires of struggle. There, where common struggles and collective experiences united us, we recognized the vital need to create a space for meeting, political fermentation, exchange of views and organizational empowerment. At a time where isolation is imposed and communities of struggle are being dismantled by the repression, the formation of such spaces is not only necessary – it is crucial. The repressive blows of recent years did not come by chance. The authorities are attempting to eliminate every source of resistance, crush every form of self-organization and extinguish the flame of questioning. Great gains have been lost, the movement has been driven into a defensive position, the recession is now visible. But we know that history is written by those who do not retreat, by those who are not afraid to face reality. To remain on the defensive means to accept defeat. And that will not happen. The time has come to turn words into actions, to move from defence to offence. To make it clear that the enemy will not get its way with us so easily. To carve out our own field of struggle, to claim our space and time. To liberate territory from domination, to create a living centre of resistance, a radical hotbed of fermentation and action. We see the occupation as an integral part of the movement and the movement as an organic element of the occupation. The existence of territories of struggle is not just a practical issue, but a deeply political one. Occupations are not just hangouts, they are not just places of hospitality. They are bastions of resistance, laboratories of radical practices, cracks in the normality that they are trying to impose on us. And this reality is non-negotiable.

Each neighbourhood, each street, each square is not neutral ground. It is a living map of contradictions, conflicts and claims. Cities are built on discipline, policing, the sterilization of public space. The squares are filled with cameras, the walls are painted grey, the buildings become inaccessible fortresses for those who do not have the means to pay the cost of existence in a world where everything has a price. Dominion is implementing a strategic plan of universal control of the metropolises, crushing every centre of resistance. With the weapon of black propaganda and ideological war, it attempts to shape consciousnesses, while the deliberate degradation of neighbourhoods through the spread of organized crime and the violent expulsion of the local population is paving the way for complete absorption by capital. State repression acts as an armed guard for investors, real estates devour the land, houses become commodities, rents rocket sky-high, public spaces are transformed into sterile fields of surveillance and consumer uniformity. The scourge of gentrification and Civilization is swallowing up cities, functioning as a mechanism of subjugation and social control. Exarcheia, a neighborhood steeped in the history of struggles, is in the crosshairs of the state and capitalist onslaught. On the one hand, the state unleashes waves of repression: evictions of squats, reinforcement of the police presence, militarization of the space. On the other, capital plunders the collective memory, absorbing symbols of resistance and transforming them into a tourist commodity. Our subcultures are being forged and adapted into “alternative” commercial projects, while the neighborhood is being altered to serve the entertainment and lifestyle industry.

We will not let them turn the place of our struggles into yet another decorative attraction. For all these reasons, we are opening the squat in the historic neighborhood of Exarcheia. Because its streets are not for sale. Because memories are not commodities. Because living resistance will not become tourist attractions, but battlefields.

Squatted places can certainly be islands of resistance in the archipelago of struggle. They are also barricades. Spaces where sovereignty loses control, where the state ceases to be the absolute regulator of life. They are workshops of struggle, meeting points, centres of self-organization and action.

Insurgent and revolutionary culture does not appear by itself. It is cultivated. It develops in basements, squares, hangouts, in gazes that do not bow down, in bodies that do not accept being disciplined by the enemy. The occupation is not an isolated event. It has the ability to walk in the practice of denial, to constantly remind us that we are not numbers in the state’s registers, we are not cogs in the production machine, we are not pawns on the chessboard of power. We are here and are taking what belongs to us, creating the cracks from which new possibilities will spring.

The circumstances therefore leave us unscathed in terms of our anarchist consciousness and practice. We refuse to join the terror resulting from the ”repressively unfavourable times”. Against reformist rhetoric, the manifestation of which are choices of political conformism in the field of action, we are stubbornly for permanent and total rupture. Our anxiety is not the repression that has existed and will exist against us but the continuous wager with ourselves, in terms of avoiding political strategies that are threatening to pass a movement into oblivion through an increasingly deficient militant presence both at the level of events and structures.

We understand that the absence of a militant culture weakens us as a movement, makes us vulnerable and helpless in the face of the onslaught of power. Inaction is tantamount to defeat. We are therefore attempting through this project to build a solid base that will promote the revolutionary/insurgent perspective, intensify the threat against the oppressive mechanisms of the present and cultivate the rebellious consciousnesses of tomorrow. Because rebellion is not a theoretical scheme. It is action, it is fermentation, it is constant conflict.

WHY DO WE CHOOSE and PROMOTE REVOLUTIONARY and INEVITABLE (DIRECT ACTION) as a culture?

i.Because, it is the only means of direct confrontation with the enemy in the here and now. It is the practice that creates “ground zeros”, breaking the chains of normality, giving subjects the power to determine their own fate.

ii.Because, at its core, Anarchy is a constant war for freedom. It is not a slogan, it is not a theory, it is conflict, it is action.

iii. Because comradeship is not an abstract concept, but living and non-negotiable relationships among fighters. These are forged in the fire of battle, side by side in every crisis, every defeat, every difficulty. It is there that we rediscover our lost collective self.

iv.Because it pushes subjects to exceed their limits, to break the chains of fear, to question the impossible.

v.Because the aggression of direct action is not blind violence, but a strategic choice. The spread of revolutionary action, the generalization of violent confrontation with the powers of authority, is necessary for the deconstruction of the state and capitalist edifice and the crushing of the social relations of oppression.

The duty of every struggling person is to enrich their tools daily, both on a practical and theoretical level, which will bring them to the fulfillment of their ideals. Boldness, risk, imagination, organization, faith and consistency are required. Intention is not enough, decision is needed. For these reasons, for us the opening of this occupation is a part of this direction.

FOR ANARCHY

Together we can do anything we can chase away the vision of the end that seems so close.

We can live as proud and free people

We can tear down the wall and see a whole life of joy waiting for us!

Rasprava occupation

Koletti and Themistocleous str.

——–

athens.indymedia

Translated by Act for freedom now!

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=18152