Posted with the Anarchist Communist Group …
Solidarity with Rouvikonas (group-member of Anarchist Federation – Greece)
STATEMENT AGAINST REPRESSION OF RESISTANCE IN GREECE
After being identified following the attack on the Parliament, on May 21st – an action in support of Dimitris Koufontinas, a comrade imprisoned for life on a hunger strike – two activists must collect 60,000 euros before 14 June, otherwise they will spend up to 10 years in jail. (Links to the financial support below.)
The Prime Minister and Ministry of Justice are once and for all trying to put away Giorgos Kalaïtzidis, co-founder of ROUVIKONAS and Niko, both members of the same group and famous Greek resistance fighters. In fact, both are prosecuted not for a civil offense, but this time for a crime. By utilising an old law on the protection of historic monuments of great value – a law almost never used, intended for the likes of the Acropolis or Delphi – the state has found a way to trap our comrades who until now were always careful not to cross this legal boundary into committing criminal offenses.
As a result, Giorgos and Nikos face up to 10-years in prison and are being asked to pay a gigantic security deposit of 30,000 euros each (60,000 euros in total) by the 14th of June, that is, three weeks before the legislative elections. That the law is being used to quickly lock up several well-known members of the group and to offer a resounding media show is clear. The hardening of the repression against the group (whose last sentence in April amounted to 3,000 euros or ten times less) is one of the aspects of the state manipulating public opinion right now. As a part of the European and local elections, Tsipras,- the Greek Prime Minister – has just called for early parliamentary elections and will play his role on the 7th of July as an outsider facing the right. The right-center of the electoral spectrum hates Exarchaia (a district of Athens well known for art and resistance), the Anarchists and other revolutionaries, and is preparing to enable Mitsotakis -the leader of the right – to “evacuate Exarcheia in a month” and to “imprison the red and black bandits”
For the past two months, Tsipras has been striking with all the horrors of the right and flexing his position of authority: six refugee squats have been evacuated, the Exarcheia district is daily harassed by the police, a TV show about the district which announces its near end, the political prisoner Koufontinas brutally deprived of his supervised exit permits to see his son, and now members of Rouvikonas about to go to jail.
This attack on the resistance movement in Greece is probably the hardest since Tsipras came to power. No group has resisted so much in recent years as Rouvikonas: daily, like an elixir against the resignation that Tsipras is trying to provoke. Almost every day, we have heard about Anarchy and resistance in the news and in the press. Almost every day, more and more people said that nothing is finished. Because our solidarity is as unbreakable as is our will to fight, we will stand and support our comrades everywhere, by all means, as we struggle.
Support Giorgos, Nikos and all members of ROUVIKONAS!
Politics in times of madness: Franco “Bifo” Berardi
Psychosis: A severe mental disorder in which thought and emotions are so impaired that contact is lost with external reality.
It is unclear whether the metaphor of being in “touch with reality” is adequate to understand human life in general, or human social and political life more particularly. And if it is flawed, then to read contemporary politics as “psychotic”, in contrast to a presumably “rational” politics of bygone days, is itself problematic. Have we not always been at war, socially, or have not societies always been constituted by the temporary balance of contending forces and worlds? If so, then Bifo’s brief reading of our times, which we share below, may be of limited importance. But it is by no means without interest and invites further reflection.
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