Solidarity Poster for Polykarpos Georgiadis and Vaggelis Chrisohoidis (greece)

DEMOCRACY SHALL NOT WIN

“…this is the dead land
this is cactus land
here the stone images
are raised, here they receive
the supplication of a dead man’s hand
under the twinkle of a fading star…
….between the idea and the reality
between the motion and the act
falls the shadow
between the conception and the creation
between the motion and the response
falls the shadow.
Life is very long
between the desire and the spasm
between the potency and the existence
between the essence and the decent
falls the shadow
For thine is the kingdom
For thine is life
This is the way the world ends
Not with a whimper
but a bang.”

(reversed excerpt from T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men” on Guy Fawks, who attempted to blow up the British Parliament)

If it sounds unthinkable in our days for anyone to speak against democracy without being labeled a conservative or a fascist, it is because propaganda resides in the houses and in the minds of [democracy’s own] subjects. Democracy’s totalitarianism has otherwise nothing to envy from previous totalitarian regimes. Nepotism, aristocracy, men of the court, favoured men, businessmen, mediators, contractors and publishers still rule social life, while down “below” remain unjustly treated and at the same time, always willing to be “fooled”.

Society continues to passively tolerate them and wants to take their place at the same time. The ambitions of becoming easily rich, of spectacularly advancing to a higher social class, of having a career, accumulating property, securing material objects and double-locked doors is what democratic prosperity comes to promise. And so, the willful subjects surrender to the totalitarianism of capitalist sovereignty placed against a democratic background. The exploitation of our labour and our lives intensifies, social disparities grow, the world’s police become militarised, spectacle rules – material, and at times intellectual and emotional decadence becomes the choice of the many. Most of this is not new. This has been, more or less, the state of social life under any authority. Yet today, democracy sugars the pill. Democracy is the coup d’etat that doesn’t bring tanks out on the streets but TV cameras and reporter microphones instead. Democracy rules with the power of its propaganda. Labour is protected in the constitution as a supreme right, social disparities are the achievement of the free market and of competition, the police protect and serve the social demand for security, the spectacle protects the freedom of expression and your next-door neighbour might come to a plight, but it’s not you, so why bother…

Democracy’s new social contract is ratified across western capitals: in-between confiscated cars, endless queues forming outside social security services, the torturing take place inside police stations, new cell phone special offers, flat-screen TVs, unemployment benefits, psychological problems and loneliness, upsurges of nationalist pride and unpaid loan installments. And most importantly, non of this was forced upon anyone, nor was it carried by the order of some junta generals. These are “the people’s grand achievements”. This is why we claim that democracy is technique and the ability of power not to be understood as oppression. Capitalism is the boss and democracy is its spokesperson. We are not naive to believe that “the chosen few” the people have elected are really in charge. They obviously comprise bearers of state orders, “men and ladies of honor”. Most of them are not to be taken seriously anyway. Democracy’s main role is to function as the smokescreen for the monstrous capitalist machine. It is the systemic shop-front, modeled upon the mafia economy. It “launders dirty money”, it keeps the “profile clean”, sees that everybody gets “paid” (from those working in parking lots up to singers) it has an army of bouncers (from formal police force to para-state agents) and the clients (i.e. the proud people) always pay on time.

It would be a mistake on our side if we did not at this point mention the upgraded role of journalists in these dealings. Nowadays, in the democracy of our time, the media have taken on the role of mediators traditionally reserved for political parties. It is not by coincidence that an increasing wave of political officials are prime-time journalists [in greece, trans]. This is part of democracy’s advanced communication strategy. It now becomes clear how politicians and journalists work side by side. Their rhetoric might seem differentiated on TV news and on talk shows, depending on who might be speaking and whose interests are served – however, they have one common direction: to justify and to defend democracy. All talks and disagreements end up there. In order to achieve this, they invent an imaginary dialogue between society and politicians, using journalists as mediators. This is why they use the truth of a democratic “public opinion”. They construct the “immovable” truth of a majority that nobody dares to question. The truth in opinion polls and numbers. This is how public opinion becomes a client of political parties and vice versa. This is how politicians and journalists shape social relationships, and transform them at will.

At the same time, relationships change as opinion polls that supposedly derive from society eventually return and come to shape society through the spectacle. And so the people, just like consumers, are always right.

In this odd clientelist relationship, democracy, allied with the media comes to shape social behaviours. Especially nowadays, the epidemic of fear is spreading. On the one hand are the American-fed employees of the ministry of police, with their imaginative statements and the “leaked information” about ruthless terrorists, and on the other hand, the journalists’ cutting headlines and stories on an “upsurge of violence” and “violence and insecurity”. In this way the squeeze and mix together different cases and contrastive incidents – bank robberies with pick-pocketing, arson attacks with mafia dealings, kidnappings of rich people with trafficking, setting a price on the heads of three comrades with those of the aspiring murderers of [migrant worker and syndicalist Konstantina] Kuneva…

In this way, the demand for security is restored and the ideology of terror is produced. We bring up these examples, because with them as a guide we can perceive a percentage of the operation of democracy. All the statements and announcements above are in reality not made in order to face the problem of “criminality”. “Criminality” partly serves certain state interests. The objective therefore is not exactly neither safety neither order, but their spectacular reflection. What happens with democracy is exactly the same. When the institutional minister of police declares that he will not turn Athens into a police-city, when he meets with local self-government officials to discuss the issue of criminality and when he claims that police departments and the parliament will remain “unguarded” defending, in this way, the freedoms of democracy, he simply does not tell the truth. Because in reality democracy is the spectacular reflection and the substitute of freedom. No freedom can exist for as long as democracy exists.

Of course, beyond these tricks and techniques, even if democracy in its substance did exist, we would never understand an axiom that invokes the “objective” right of the many over the few. History has proven we should have no confidence in the opinion of the masses. The persons that willingly adopt for themselves the term of “the people” and who speak as part of “we the people, who pay for it all”, abandon every creative self-confidence and let themselves drift in the fallacy of their leaders. This is the people. A noisy mass with lowered heads, incessant moaning, misery and crowd mentality that degrades life to repeated operations and sequences of rules. No good reason exists for us to respect its judgement and its choices. We wish for a world in which each one individually will undertake their responsibilities, will communicate their thoughts, exchange arguments, will have the courage of their opinion even if questioned by the majority, without hiding behind representatives and mediators.

Voters in democracy are never satisfied with their lives and their environment. They always have a complaint about something, they exasperate, they are angry and protest – but every four years they wrap their conscience in a ballot and support, once again, the system. They postpone crucial decisions about their life until the next elections, believing as they do that someone more suitable, more correct and more fair than the previous one will come to power. They stubbornly refuse to admit that no one is more capable than themselves to manage their own life, as otherwise they would be confronted with the void of their life, the years of resignation, an entire life of captivity – and they would have to admit that they have been slaves. That they were victims of fallacy – and no one is ever willing to degrade themselves in this way, by admitting something like this. They prefer to always blame others, the incompetent politicians, the foreigners, the terrorists, everyone but themselves. No one offends his ego, even if for the rest time, they will let themselves be trampled by the system. For us however, the issue is the questioning and the rupture with any dominating system, never mind how liberal they may be presented to be. We understand that the power for the management of our lives lies within us – and the decision of how we shall live belongs to us. Which is something that the voter refuses to understand: the power of their self to exceed set barriers, the prohibitions, moral values, ideals and to define their Ego by themselves. As a result we believe that the voter is responsible to a large extent for what happens to them, since it is their own life decisions and choices that perpetuate their very condition.

“… All that frighten us are consequential of the system, and the one causing the terror is the voter inside us, the one who maintains the system…”
(extract from an interview of prisoner V. Stefanakos)

Amidst all this, the new urban guerrilla movement “… is not a dry political proposal, but the revolutionary dimension of the existential human problem. The passage to illegal action reverses the limits of a miserable, routine survival and realises a revolutionary being” (Group of Revolutionary Internationalist Solidarity “Christos Kassimis”).

To begin to fight means to stop seeing yourself through the eyes of the system, to allow no more for yourself to be determined by coercions, to be freed from fear. This imminent need for liberation can find itself within the guerrilla groups and revolutionary alliances. It is reasonable that the enemy deals with these ventures by using the language of lies and of calumny. It does not impress us that once again democracy’s propaganda resorts to cheap artifices such as the “theory of communicating containers” [a police claim that certain urban guerrilla groups hold members in common –trans]. The supposed existence of a central directorate, of the big heads, some specialised bomb constructor and a common revolutionary fund, want to isolate the new guerrilla movement and to present it as being then work of a dark clique of persons with suspicious connections. In practice however, things are much simpler. The conscience and the determination of certain persons to terminate the habit of survival are enough in order to pass from resistance to attack, to place the question of liberation – not in a vague future for the following generations, but in the permanent present; here and now, for their own selves – and this is how a guerrilla group is born. But the opponent wants history to be repeated as a farce. The “theory of communicating containers” is a carbon copy of the technique of the post-dictatorial years of the “droplets theory”. Then, the lie was that in guerrilla groups and the social conflicts of that time participated persons from the junta and fascists aiming at the destabilisation of democracy and a return of the junta. Then, also, there supposedly existed some “dark decision-making centres and a common directorial”. It is a constant tactic of the state, when it does not want to recognise something, to “explain” it in the direction that it itself wishes. Authority amends history seeking to prevent the enlargement of the practice of guerrilla warfare. Because it is henceforth obvious that the existence of a diffused guerilla network across the whole of greece, with old and new anarchist arson organisations, with raiding assaults in city centres, as these were materialised in December, the organization Anarchists of Action in the city of Kavala, all these prove that across the greek capitalistic territory, the rear lines will never be secure again.

In line with this strategy, on the evening of Saturday 9th of January we placed an explosive device in the courtyard of the parliament, beside the monument of the unknown soldier. Two comrades approached the courtyard while two others were in the wider area as support group. The two cops that stood at a distance of roughly eight meters from the point that the device was left, and stood there for plenty of time, did not trouble us and we went ahead with placing it. As for the area’s supposed “impenetrable” status we respond that determination, planning and imagination arm the
revolutionaries to achieve what is presented as being “unachievable”. An imposing, “royal-origin”, building, the temple of democracy, surrounded by the most cutting-edge systems of surveillance and a large number of policemen did not stand as an obstacle to our choice. The choice, that is, to offend this symbol, the prestige of democracy without any moral hesitation. Each place has its vulnerable point and the satisfaction of finding it will never cease. Now in regard to the communicative game of the not supposed non-removal of the presidential guard from the area of the attack, as a heroic action, this is inaccurate to say the least. Obviously the truth that we as much as the enemy knows, is that they were moved to the upper courtyard of Parliament before the explosion, in order for them to have suitable cover. We know as much as the explosives experts of the police do that anyone who would have remained in a radius of ten meters [from the explosion] would have been wounded at least.

Finally we want to point out that roughly four months after our supposed dismantling we obviously remain active. The spectacular fiesta after a raid in a student house in which absolutely nothing was found to connect our organisation with it reveals the system’s tendency for revenge: persons are targeted, others are detained without trial and the prosecutions have no end, all based on these people’s political identity, without the slightest clue of a connection with us. Our organisation suffered no blow whatsoever, to the contrary we are continuously strengthened as part of the Revolutionary Development. In either case, our actions speak for themselves. To democracy we shall show no respect, only rage and attack.

WE DEMAND THE IMMEDIATE TERMINATION OF THE PRE-TRIAL DETENTIONS OF THE 3 DEFENDANTS FOR THE CONSPIRACY OF CELLS OF FIRE

WE DEMAND THE END OF PROSECUTIONS OF INDIVIDUALS THAT HAVE BEEN ACCUSED IN CONNECTION TO OUR ORGANISATION

THE EXTENSION OF THEIR HOSTAGE CONDITION CONSTITUTES AN OPEN INVITE FOR THE INTENSIFICATION OF OUR ATTACKS

We do not forget the Urban Guerrillas and the Undisciplined Fighters that lost their lives in the fight against the system, for dignity and for freedom Ch.Kassimis, Ch. Tsoutsouvis, M. Prekas, Ch. Marinos, Ch. Temperekidis.

We send our solidarity to the guerrilla fighter Dimitris Koufondinas who is imprisoned in democracy’s white cells.

GUERRILLA GROUP OF TERRORISTS – CONSPIRACY OF CELLS OF FIRE