This text [1] does not contain complete placements around the matters it grapples. It publicly places thoughts, conclusions and findings. It aims at giving food for thought and desire for action. Until next time.
If something stresses us and troubles us, besides the deprivation of our freedom, it is our worry if the life we gave and give to the struggle, will touch some at the degree we desire.
Those who will decide that anarchy is not a frozen meaning, it is not an ideology, it is not attached with the bug of diplomacy. Our anarchy is expressions of an authentic and slave-less life. One can see it in the flaming bottles against the ritocops in the demos and the night-time attacks, one can see it in the smoke from the incendiary attacks, attacks on fascists and every enemy of freedom.
For those of you who see it therefore do not even bother to speak to it of ideologies, it will not answer to you and despises wooden speech.
The language it speaks, demands passion, rage, imagination and destructive intention. You will feel it flood you when you revolt violently. Fall in love with it and make it yours.
Melt the ice of incarceration and warm our hearts with fire…
…And now words will speak. Words which are not enough to describe our armed decisions and contradictions. But even so they promise, reminisce. Words which revenge the organized silences of the modern world when accompanied by the sounds of explosions of guerilla attacks, creating thus liberated time-spaces in the generalized captivity produced by the system. In these moments therefore neither bruises for the newsreports fit, neither scratches for hypocritical evasiveness. Either way the bodies of the rebels always bared, the beatings, swearing, incarceration and handcuffs. And if some times they stop for a bit, it is not from the slaps and kicks from the pigs, but the subservient looks which silently admit their complicity.
Pity has no place, it never did and never will. It likes to pose however in front of the lens causing unanswered questions in the armies of tv-idiots who never wondered what really goes on in the darkness of invisibility with unknown protagonists the disinherited of the social margin. As for the people of our cast, the bet of destroying the existence and the existential mutiny remains open, for whoever, for those whom the flame of resistance burns their bloodied heart.
Then come choices. They should be analysed, become clear and understood, take down bridges of communication through their dialectic approach and revolutionary critic. The target? To be adopted by more and more comrades who will judge them as fertile and effective practices of the anarchist struggle.
For me bank robberies are a timeless choice of revolutionaries which “unlocks” many possibilities. First of all it releases you from the tentacles of waged labour and the contracts attached to it. Thus time is liberated from your daily life, giving you the choice to devote yourself to your passions. Where the destruction of joy ends, begins the joy of destruction. Simultaneously bank robberies consist also a necessary mean to fund multiform structures of the anarchist struggle with money re-appropriated from the enemy. We are talking about the support of anarchist projects, hostage comrades, guerilla structures. At the same time it is a factual opposition to the social ethics of waged labour and its social roles which the capitalist world reproduces.
Of course no action on its own has revolutionary characteristics. The subject through speech, motives and its aims, gives meaning to the action and leads it to the targets it defines. In my case, the refusal of labour is a part of the specific choice, the other is the support of anarchist direct action and attacks against state and capitalism through anarchist urban guerilla.
The mean of urban guerilla is a useful tool in the “arsenal” of every anarchist. An armed confrontation against dominance which disputes in practice so much the state monopoly in violence, as much as the fictitious need of a mass revolt in order to act. Urban guerilla action shows that the system is challenged and its myth of omnipotence can collapse together with the façade of the invincible machine. It causes fatal wounds to the enemy and is a message of insurrection and an open invitation to take action against the oppression. At a personal level you do not let yourself succumb and bow the head before the strength of the system but you arm yourself and attack it. Risks, decisions and consequences are weighed with political and personal criteria and lead to the choice. Either you fight for the destruction of the system or you capitulate with its benefits. A choice which goes along with the qualitative evolution of the anarchist struggle. Something that means we must cast off the political populism which has blossomed in the anti-regime circles. Lets tell it how it is. We are at war with the system, we have casualties, hostages, hunted. None of that can or should be said pleasantly in order to caress the “oppressed” ears. It must be said as it is, a punch in our stomach which we ought to return it to their faces.
For all those who refuse our existence, avoid to connect micro-policies with the multiform anarchist struggle and dream of “self-organized” bloodless struggles and post-capitalist paradises. If we knew them, we have already forgotten them.
We live in a time where social contracts are delivered to the flames of the onslaught of neo-liberalism. Consequently the welfare state and social benefits shrink before the onslaught of multinational conglomerates.
The spearhead of civilization, the techno industrial complex consolidates its sovereignty. The new order demands a god which will be announced as the saviour of humanity. Its name is science. An authority which cannot be disputed by common mortals while its social acceptance prepares bloodlessly for total control. The application of new technologies, the growing technostructure of the state which abandons the bureaucracy of the past, the desire for voluntary mass control from society, is a taste of a civilized totalitarianism. Through dominating propaganda, daily crimes of science are groomed. With the excuse of improving the living level and medical care. The protectors of life raise the value by wearing the uniforms of hypocrisy. When however they find it necessary they drop the masks in order to exterminate in the name of their god (money), declaring the crusades of today.
Deterministic theories collapse, since despite the economic bloodsucking of the population, people remain prisoners of their inhibitions, fears, vested (which are decreasing more and more). Prisoners of a system from which they depend materially, mentally, spiritually. Tolerance therefore increases and humiliation continues. In the queues at the unemployment offices, the churches soup-kitchens, the bosses offices, in the refined charity of the humanitarian campaigns of the media.
A humiliation which insults human dignity, while the managers if political scene brag about the accomplishments and humanity of democracy.
Modern human beings do not choose, they simply follow the choices of others. They do not worry, they leave others to do that for them. They do not have a voice and prefer to listen to the voices of others. They do not arm themselves, best case scenario they become indignant. They do not live but simply are convinced that the virtual world of screens and adverts are their lives.
Screens of modern civilization project models of people and ideal products, decreasing thus the distance between them. People, products and machines become one in the whirlpool of control spreading constantly. The uniqueness of the individual ceases to exist and identifies itself with the mediocrity which takes on the responsibility of silence. A silence which murders while smiling drowned in between products of consumerism heaven, police stations, prisons, concentration camps, psychiatric clinics and the “developed” countries of the capitalist periphery.
Public opinion, this will-less systemic creation, settles with vulgar habits and strolls around the beds of the bosses. Empty opinions therefore are not susceptible of ideological repairs. Besides, no matter how much ideology you sprinkle, shit remains shit.
For the people who against their time take the risk to fight and fall in love passionately, attack will never fit into an ideological mold in order to be liked and fair. Tracing past historical experiences of struggle, discovering our common points of connection with other fighters, we strengthen the barricades of today and construct the revolutionary prospect of tomorrow. Lets built militant communities of struggle which will conduct a front-line struggle against state and capitalism. Lets built anarchist relations inside us living and promoting the anarchy of wild freedom in the present tense.
Lets dare and continue to dare.
10, 100, 1000 revolutionary cells against dominance and mass subjugation.
EVERYTHING FOR FREEDOM!
LONG LIVE ANARCHY!
My warmest comradely greetings to all anarchists who do not capitulate and maintain the bet of subversion open. To the comrades who choose to strike the state and capital anonymously, those who choose a name to baptise their mutiny, to the cells of the Informal Anarchist Federation – International Revolutionary Front (FAI-IRF), which continue the diffused attack.
To all hostage brothers and sisters at every corner of the world who at night look at the stars between bars and barbedwires.
P.S.1. Just before this text came out I was informed of the hunger strike of anarchist comrade Kostas Sakkas who demands his immediate release. In the near future I will publish a text in solidarity to the comrades struggle [2].
P.S.2. With my look on suburbs of Stockholm set alight and the flaming barricades inTurkey.
Avlona prisons
Nikos Romanos
June 2013
[1] The author is one of four anarchists (Dimitris Politis, Yannis Michailidis, Andreas-Dimitris Bourzoukos) arrested in Febbruary 2013, accused in the Velventos-Kozani (Greece) robbery case.
[2] Published at theanarchistlibrary.org as “Hunger Strike”.