Solidarity Poster for Polykarpos Georgiadis and Vaggelis Chrisohoidis (greece)

News » Düsseldorf/Germany, 26.11. 2004

Düsseldorf, 26.11. 2004 « Ce qui est vivant bouscule tout pour vivre et crée, pour vivre, ses propres lois, c'est irrésistible. » -Antoine de Saint-Exupéry « That what is alive bumps into everything to live and creates to live its own laws, that is irresistible. » -Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Comrades asked me to write something about myself. I am not a person of many words. But cut off from any kind of interaction, from any kind of human sincerity, plenty of ideas come up quickly. Well, I am a 26-year-old anarchist; I have been carrying these ideas around with me for the last 3-4 years and am living with them in a kind of symbiosis, with reality as nurturing ground. They shape me as I am shaping them with my individuality and experience. That’s how we turned from acquaintances into lovers, still with daily quarrels and doubts, along the conflicts with the life they enforce on us and which we are looking for. Anarchy turned into a necessity for life. I tasted freedom in individual and collective ways, beyond the routine abstraction of the capitalist existence. I can't get rid of this savor anymore and everything else just disgusts me. Every day we are wandering around in a net of relationships between forces, a "matrix" that forces a role without any relevance for our peculiarity and our desires upon us. We have to organize our day according to a crazy economy and a bureaucracy that is entangled in itself, only in order to lose every feeling of spontaneity in the end. With drug problems, depressions we go and see a doctor, a psychiatrist… only to end up in a cellar with a rope around our neck. „Why on earth did that happen?“ wonders the tensed up TV viewer. Room and time for collectivity has been taken from us. But we are free, more than ever before, aren't we?............ our upright democracy kicks us below the belt, every day, but we don’t even feel it anymore. Free will and respect for ourselves vanishes in "public welfare". Everyone contributes by earning their daily bread, which means to crawl on all fours, to secure the luxury of the bourgeoisie. Blinded by a false work ethic we stray through our own life. We don't realise anymore that the world is burning. We got lost in our mirror image, the social war lost every meaning for us. Our struggle starts exactly there, unleashing ourselves from modern despair that drowns us. To realize our own struggle as individual and to find allies in this struggle in order to discover our strength in collectivity. Unfortunately over the years - and this brings me back to my own history - I have seen the dejection in many anarchists again and again, and it turns out to be truly infectious. And this to a degree that even effects their ideas and actions, spoon-feeding old formulas, "left" traditions. There is not much to say about the readiness for battle/the pugnacity of the "left". It has become a predictable, suitable part of the system to which democracy likes to refer to in order to prove its tolerance. Others might be wandering around being lost, because they can't mobilise the masses... - a grinning wink to the authoritarian communists and reformists. We know that reality sucks. But we can't allow it to trap us. We know that we are a small minority... our lack of "efficiency" is no reason to turn away from our horizon, but just another reason to remain critical and keep on fighting. The "hope" is based in ourselves and in our struggle. Hoping for........ is just a Christian reflex that makes us faint. The conflict is permanent and will remain a constant one. And even if it was only to maintain our dignity. That's what anarchy and the reality taught me. Now in the hands of the enemy I see the core of the repressive apparatus for the first time. They tell me prison is a reflection of society. If that is true than it is really miserable at times. To some of you I did already write that I feel like being in school again, because of the narrow-minded mentality and the forced routine here. Hmm, does this reveal something about the school system or about prisons.... If you look at this situation like a pigeon from a roof - it is absurd. When I come back from my hour of walking in circles, the watchdog is already waiting for me at the open door of my prison cell. He says "tschüss" (bye bye), sometimes really friendly, and then he locks me up for 23 hours... good democratic manners. Well, it’s a job like any other. Follow the rules, no matter what they are. If they had to beat me up tomorrow, they would have no scruples either. That's the prevailing work ethic...... after all I am the prisoner here. It is as if, like in a background scenery, I hear the jailers sing: "He is still alive, he is still alive." And I have to think of the suicide reports that are so often main topic to conversations here. Cynicism and fatalism are decorating the corridors......... but it just strengthens my convictions. Prison will always be part of an anarchist´s experience and an anarchist movement. We are doomed to struggle in illusion and to live in dishonesty with our ideas, if don't allow this fact a clear space in our actions and organisations. Ok, I want to close by saying that if you can't find the necessity to fight within yourself, stop talking about it. Anarchism will only turn into an abstraction. For some it turns into a fashion show, for others into guardianship upon others. Revolutionary solidarity, the connective tissue, lives within the realisation of our own struggle, the one of others and the resulting action. Everything else is just civil chitchat. Hereby I use the opportunity to greet my three comrades with a warm hug. See you the theatre of justice. I am looking forward to seeing you again. Thinking about it makes me smile. I also wish all those a lot of strength, who are struggling against the loneliness of prisons and who are locked up, because of their rebellion against any kind of power and manipulation. Let’s grow like crushing weeds through their concrete. A warm hug for all you who are with me. My heart is with you. For anarchy and the end of this spectacle. Bart