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Wanneer: 18/02/2014 - 16:58

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ANARCHISTS AND COMMUNISTS ARE SOCIAL FIGHTERS

STATES AND CAPITALISTS ARE TERRORISTS AND THIEVES

The current state of -permanent- exception, that constitutes an attempt to pave the way to yet another developmental invasion by the capital, unleashes an onslaught against almost all working people, confirming that class war is not only raging but is also becoming more extreme. States have always been instruments of class rule; the state is a system of social organisation that aims to reconcile the historically irreconcilable contradictions between exploiters and the exploited.

The unpopular government policy, perfectly aligned with their bosses’ (EU, IMF) orders, aims at the unconditional surrender of the contemporary working class and its decommissioning of each conquest of the past in order to make it even more exploitable, even more profitable for capital. More than any other period, the political system is acting on behalf of the transnational economic elite serving its interests. It’s acting on behalf of bank colossus, loan-shark states, serving, and facilitating, the economy of the markets and global capital.

The capitalist system, which is in the midst of one of the most severe structural crises in its history, both in terms of its depth as well as its multiple manifestations (banks, real estate, trade), has also launched a crisis of equivalent weight in the political system.

It is self-evident for the capitalist system that the accumulation of capital will always be the norm as well as a point of crisis, not only for the system itself but also for the political establishment. The flow of capital and its profitable growth, that is, a basic principle on which the whole system is built , will always determine the political alignments of nations. Wealthier states implement policies that transfer their debts either to the European or to the global periphery, in order to ensure a powerful geographic concentration of capital. Poorer countries, on the other hand, impose exhausting austerity policies, regardless of the economic conditions of poverty and misery which they cause. They destroy the lives and dreams of entire peoples, jeopardize their future, and remove all hope, in order to secure the interests of particular economic elites and to safeguard a system that maintains their dominant privileges.

“Propaganda is to a democracy what a bludgeon is to a totalitarian state” suggests N. Chomsky.

Today, unpopular and extreme political imperatives that the rulers are called to impose require both a bludgeon and the fabrication of consensus through media. During the first memorandum between the greek state and the so-called troika, major media owners were called to a meeting with the prime minister to negotiate how onerous economic measures would be promoted as necessary in order to minimise the risk of social uprising. Instructions were sent to well-known journalists through usb memory sticks about how they should align their positions with the government’s policy, while it is a fact that a number of journalists were removed from their posts because they were not as effective as the political circumstances required.

Today, objectivity and the reliable character of the mainstream media floats somewhere between governmental “blackmail” of media owners through the auctioning of channel frequencies and the liberalization of the broadcast licences market – a term in the memorandum -, halts in bank loans to media owners without guarantees and, of course, common media and government interests in dismantling workers’ rights. It is no coincidence that all three memorandum governments have outrageously exempted major media owners from their tax obligations while the people are suffering from high taxes and austerity in general.

The unofficial propaganda ministry of the government, with the help of mainstream media, is struggling to convince us either by propaganda or suppression that any kind of resistance to the present unequal economic and political distribution is futile and doomed, since it will always be confronted with all the mechanisms, institutions and functions of the current totalitarian regime. They want a confused society, passive towards developments and perceptively decommissioned that will accept without protest the government’s extreme anti-popular policies. They construct an artificial climate of precarity so that memorandums and measures of new impoverishment can be applied unquestioningly.

They characterise militant anarchists as terrorists and employ rhetorical mudslinging in an attempt to persuade the public that it is threatened by their actions.
But how effective can this propaganda be in the context of the current situation?
If more than 4 million people living below the poverty line are asked who is responsible for the poverty they experience…
If 1.5 million unemployed are asked who is responsible for their exclusion from modern wage slavery…
If 20,000 homeless are asked who is responsible for their impoverishment…
If they asked themselves who is responsible for over three thousand suicides recorded in the years of memoranda…
If you ask yourself who is responsible for the huge increase of psychiatric drugs use – an effect closely connected to the current economic and existential poverty – and a host of other examples of social decline, will the answer be “Sakkas” or any of those that the regime’s media call “terrorists”?
I don´t think so…

Whoever wishes to identify the real terrorists, they can look at the ministry of finance and the ministry of labour which are responsible for people’s impoverishment.They can look at the state’s account department and the social security funds that gambled taxpayer’s money in the stock market.
They can look at the SRADF [T/N: State Republic Asset Development Fund] and all these committees responsible for the selling-out of public property.
They can look at political parties and their accounting departments that indebt people with huge loans for their election campaigns.
They can look at the ministry of public order and the maritime ministry which are executing assassination contracts in the name of “immigration policy”.

Actions of terrorism for the people are the sell-out of shipyards, airports, ports, the Hellenic Railways, the Thessaloniki Water supply and sewage disposal, the country’s resources.
Terrorist actions are the olympic games and the corruption,
the tax exemptions and loans for media owners,
the disintegration of health and education,
the mortgaging of the lives and dreams of future generations…

Mass media with their dirty propaganda are trying to undermine social activists’ struggles and to convince people that their actions are directed against society. They seek to portray tension between the ministry of public order and the ministry of justice within the government, but in fact these are working together to lay the grounds for intensifying repression against political prisoners. The intensification of repression aimed against today’s anarchists and communists is obviously aiming to intimidate and deter tomorrow’s rebels and resisters. It’s an act of preventive repression.

The way mass media reported the “news” of me fleeing from trial is telling.

Although I haven’t been convicted by any court to date, according to the media crows the fact that the counter-terrorism police have found me guilty is sufficient. They have promoted the counter-terrorism administration [T/N: "ΔΑΕΕΒ" stands for Administration Dealing with Special Crimes of Violence] into a higher constitutional authority which judges and decides while the rest of the “misbehaving society” refuses to align with its outcomes (“the counter-terrorism police gets them and the judges are letting them go…”). There’s a series of despicable news reports alleging favourable treatment of my case by the judicial mechanisms, purposeful indifference, even a left-wing para-state (!), that opened the prison doors and let me go…

Absurdity and feasibility are in conflict with common sense.

Let’s recall that I am the person who in 2010 was held in preventive custody for participating in an “unknown terrorist organisation”.
I am the person who six months later was remanded again for participating in the CCF [T/N: Conspiracy Cells of Fire is a radical anarchist organisation based in Greece], even though both I and the organisation have denied my participation from the very first moment.
I am the person who after my 18 month remand had ended and I had to be released, was in remand again for actions of the same organisation (!).
I am the person who after my second 12 month remand had come to an end, had my imprisonment extended for another six months illegally.
I am the person who was on hunger strike for 38 days in order to be released with the decision of the second council after I announced to the officials that I was ready to start a thirst strike if they rejected my demand for the second time.
I’m the person who had the pleasure of feeling what solidarity and having comrades means… I am the person who experienced the political satisfaction of a genuine solidarity movement occasioned by my case which determined the victory of this struggle, a fact that the judges and political superiors know very well.
I’m the person who, five months after my release, I was arrested again by the counter-terrorism police because I didn’t sleep at my house(!), regardless of the restrictive terms which didn’t require that I stayed overnight at my residence.

Nonetheless, although the court ruled that I shouldn’t be convicted, the media crows had a different opinion…

Fortunately, people like Pretenderis, Kosioni, Mina Karamitrou and other mealy-mouthed, shufflebutt holdovers of the media don’t have the right – yet – to appeal court decisions..
For them, the magistrate’s court should send me to prison since this was the decision of the counter-terrorism administration, since this was Dendias’ [T/N: minister of public order and citizen protection] decision, since, to call things by their name, the previous day Ch. Xiros had violated his permit and they decided I should be re-arrested in revenge.

I’m the person who one week later was rearrested because the counter-terrorism police supposedly matched my fingerprints with those found in the house of 25th Martiou street in Chalandri [T/N: the apartment in Athens that cops in 2009 labeled a 'terrorist base'] which were collected in 2009, with the ridiculous pretext that they hadn’t properly entered my fingerprints into their system when I was arrested back in 2010, although there’s a -published- report from the counter-terrorism police confirming the opposite.
I was set free after testifying to the investigating judge and public prosecutor.

Once again media crows had a different view.

Once again the judicial authorities “didn’t act as they should have”…

According to the regime’s journalists, the judges act properly only when they set corrupted state officials free. When they release tycoons. When they release the media owners and the publishers…
Once again, they conscripted their dirty propaganda to construct an atmosphere of terror and hysteria and to disorientate public opinion.
This is what their job was, is and always be: the system’s crutch…

Especially today, when the need to “rescue” the economic and political system of power requires its operation as what it really is, namely a modern totalitarian regime, the rulers need the dominant media and their propaganda more than ever. Cultivating a climate of fear, terror and hysteria, they aim at the social disorientation and ultimately to alienate the people from the real fields of struggle.

There can be no doubt, today, that the struggle against the regime’s media is an integral part of social liberation.

We have to oppose the mentality that considers any real resistance as pointless. That considers unnecessary any real struggle, that wants all prospects of social liberation from the state and capital’s shackles to be nonexistent.

Especially today, when the leaders can only provide poverty, misery and repression for modern slaves, we can and must put all our efforts into realising our imperatives. We need to intervene in real time and space, in order to shape events towards a revolutionary direction. We should withstand those mentalities that doom to defeat and failure any attempt to take our lives into our own hands. To resist the dominant morality that wants humans subservient and with a bending head towards the oppressors. To resist the reality presenting today’s humans as unconcerned, passive, helpless and doomed to tomorrow. To resist the mentality of delegating and waiving those things that we must do on our own. In opposition to the legality of submission, we should engage in resistance, in an insurrectionary transgression.

Consciousness bears the burden of historical responsibility.

FIGHT AGAINST STATE AND CAPITAL.

ORGANISE AND ACT FOR SOCIAL REVOLUTION.

LONG LIVE THE ANARCHIST PRISONERS NETWORK!

Kostas Sakkas

17/02/2014