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Title: Revolutionary Struggle trial Author: Jean Weir Date: 2012 Language: en Topics: Greece, solidarity, armed struggle, revolution Source: Retrieved on April 17, 2013 from http://guerrillanews.wordpress.com/2012/11/15/athens-the-revolutionary-struggle-trial-statement-of-anarchist-jean-weir-to-the-terror-court-of-korydallos/
Weir to the terror court of Korydallos
I wish to clarify right away that I stand here as an enemy of the State
and society. Far from being a lively community sharing social well-being
and the joy of life, what is referred to as society is no more than the
dull organisation of inequality and exploitation through social roles
and forbiddance. The law is the barbed wire that holds everything in
place, and has been internalised to such an extent that it forms the
unconscious basis of daily habit and routine even for those who apply
it. The media form opinions to maintain consensus and the delegation of
individual responsibility to that organ of institutionalised terror, the
State. The State, which includes its subjects, is at the basis of every
social relation at the present time, including the one here in this
court today.
I have come to stand face to face with the enemy inside this bastion of
State terror because I was invited by the three comrades of
Revolutionary Struggle. I havenât come to enter into dialogue concerning
these comrades or any others. My presence here is an act of solidarity
and a continuation of my struggle as an anarchist. At least the present
judicial proceeding has discarded every vestige of the democratic
swindle, revealing the true essence of power. Itâs impossible to pass
over the fact that this trial is taking place inside a prison, the
greatest crime perpetrated by man over man, and the physical proximity
of the judge and the gaoler is an unusual if unintentional declaration
of truth. The judge is nothing without the gaoler. The gaoler is nothing
without the judge. They are one and bear equal responsibility for their
actions. Terrorists and criminals are the servants of the State and
capital, not those struggling to survive or fighting against a world of
strife, war, poverty and oppression.
It is in the context of this struggle that I first heard of the
anarchist Nikos Maziotis. He was in the extreme and dangerous phase of a
hunger strike to enforce his refusal to wear a uniform and become a
killer in the pay of the State. At the time many anarchists in Italy
where I was living had also refused to do military service, choosing to
go to prison rather than join the armed force that keeps humanity
divided into classes and intervenes violently to extinguish any attempt
at liberation. But also and above all because military service is one of
the Stateâs weapons for building model citizens devoid of personality,
individuality and their own way of thinking against which it is
necessary to rebel and refuse.
I was already aware of the anarchist struggle, of the importance of the
anarchist struggle in Greece alongside the exploited, the students, the
bus drivers, schoolteachers, the people of the villages of Halkidiki,
etc and had read inspiring reports of their actions and also about the
State repression against them. But it was Nikos Maziotis, who without
knowing it, was to be the propulsive element in my coming to Greece in
person. It was on the occasion of his trial in 1999 that I came to
Athens for the first time, to attend the court in solidarity with him.
It was then that I discovered the wild beauty of the Greek anarchist
comrades, their passion for freedom that found immediate expression in a
thousand ways and never ceases to grow and intensify, inspiring and
igniting free spirits all over the planet. Two things in particular
impressed me on that occasion. First and foremost the unmitigated
courage and dignity of Nikos Maziotis as he faced the perpetrators of
power and privilege. His statement to the court, his affirmations as a
man, an individual, a revolutionary, an anarchist, were made looking
into the barrel of the gun of judgement without any concern for the
consequences in terms of the years he was facing locked up in a cell.
What he said that day is a classic of anarchist theory concerning the
need for violent attack on the class enemy in first person and I
personally have contributed to spreading it in the English language (the
text, I mean, hopefully also the attacks). It has inspired comrades and
rebels all over the world. What also impressed me and has affected my
life ever since was the immediacy of so many comradesâ action in
solidarity, without mediation, without the taboos about so-called
violence that put a brake on the just anger of the exploited. They
expressed solidarity in its only authentic manifestation, by continuing
the struggle, the conscious attack on the profits of the bosses and the
instruments of repression, even and above all when the class enemy was
out in all its force to protect the property and arrogance of the rulers
of the planet. Each with their own means, each with their own
responsibility.
Armed struggle is on trial. Anarchists also. For any struggle to be
worthy of the name it must be armed and self-organised, far from any
delegation to the self-proclaimed representatives of the workers
movement who have shamelessly betrayed the latter and collaborated with
the bosses by reigning in the bad passions of those who have nothing to
lose but their chains. Anarchists are against hierarchy and this also
applies to the weapons used in the struggle. The weaponry of the
anarchist combines the idea, the concept of freedom and the need to
destroy not only inequality and poverty but also and at the same time,
authority, hierarchy and obedience. They have the capacity to organise
themselves and go to the attack without leaders or led, and push others
to do the same. Words, stones, pistols, fire, dynamite, Molotov
cocktails, graffiti, sledgehammers, hacksaws, theory, analysis,
identification of the class enemy as it changes in order to stay the
same, machine-guns, spray cans, bazookas are some of the weapons for the
self-management of the attack.. (I forgot the catapult, la fionda..) All
combine in destructive playful alchemy far from the deathlike logic of
judgement. Even when a class enemy is struck down, it is just something
to be done and letâs get it over with.
Anarchists abhore the blind institutionalised violence of the State with
its arsenal of uniformed robots, tasers, tanks, drones, poisonous gases,
flash grenades, truncheons, jackboots, armoured vehicles, cctv cameras,
helicopters flying over our heads, courts, prisons, concentration camps,
bomber planes, missiles, institutionalised religion, the media, the
manipulation of peopleâs minds, etc. Only the State has the power to
send men to their death or to kill, always with the blessing of the
priest, after instilling them with patriotism and xenophobia from birth.
Greece was the first country to use napalm against the guerrilla in the
mountains. Now, irony of history, it uses nerve gas imported from the
Israeli State which, after evicting millions of Palestinians from their
homes to survive in camps, claims its legitimacy from the gassing of 6
million Jews by another State over half a century ago.
Anarchists are against prisons even for their enemies and know well that
when the present setup of the means of production is destroyed and
social wealth belongs to everyone, to each according to their needs,
from each according to their desires, there will be little cause for
strife. The State will do anything to obstruct the struggle for freedom
in whatever form it takes, whatever instrument it uses. Since the
beginning of the anarchist movement around the middle of the nineteenth
century the organs of power have always reacted particularly violently
against anarchists because the State, any State, be it red, black or the
multicoloured version of social democracy, cannot tolerate freedom, be
it in the form of ideas or in the self-organised action of the
exploited. I could give many examples but I think we are short of time
and Iâll carry on. And of course not only anarchists have been massacred
by the State but the exploited in any attempt they have made to self
organise their attack against oppression, and we saw this the other day
in South Africa when 27 miners were gunned down in a demonstration
against the conditions in the mine.
In the space of a century and a half the number of anarchists who have
been imprisoned, exiled, guillotined, garrotted, electrocuted, tortured,
gunned down in action, shot by firing squads, beaten to a pulp in the
street and left to die in a cell, pushed out of police station windows
or killed in traffic âaccidentsâ, add up to thousands, and often the
written word of the anarchist revolutionary has been as severely
punished as the bullet. Far from showing signs of penitence or begging
for mercy these proud fighters faced death as they had faced life,
fearlessly, with a proud cry of Long live anarchy! Long live freedom!
That is why the exterminatory delirium of the State is a battle lost
before it begins. For every anarchist and rebel slain by the State
thousands more spring up out of the nowhere of the uncertain, and the
undecided. And that was visible in 2008 in this country, something which
inspired people all over the world. Every second an anarchist spends in
prison his spirit strengthens, expands beyond the walls and nourishes
the solidarity that he or she inspires.
The anarchist struggle is qualitative not quantitative. Its aim is not
to control and lead the masses into battle or act in their place but to
push the exploited and excluded to act in first person to attack the
class enemy and its structures. Sometimes itâs the other way around, a
mass explosion of rage erupts after some exalted lackey of the State
takes the law into his own hands and guns down a schoolboy, a rioter, a
respected elder in the ghetto or a kid in the banlieu. When anarchists
put themselves alongside the exploited it is not as their saviours but
to fight together with them to extend and widen their attack, to turn
riots into insurrections. Sometimes reality acts the other way, the
rebels surpassing the anarchists in their destructive fury. In recent
years in Greece and in many parts of the world there has been a
proliferation of direct attacks on the structures of capital and the
State by small groups or individuals. Unlike the seventies and eighties
when capitalism was undergoing ferocious restructuring that was
responded to in part, not only, by highly structured marxist-leninist
armed struggle groups, from the nineties the attack has taken a more
flexible form by anarchist groups based on affinity, often with no name
or acronym. The workerist element of the struggle more or less
disappeared along with the industrial working class due to the
introduction of robotisation and real time operations thanks to
information technology and capitalâs resulting ability to exploit
starvation wages on the other side of the planet.
The armed group Revolutionary Struggle appeared in 2003 at a time when
there was an anti-terrorist frenzy globally, which in Greece coincided
with the capture of the 17^(th) of November group followed by true media
delirium. At first their targets were symbols of authority and the State
â police, the American Embassy, the Ministry of Finance and Labour, and
also an attempt on the minister for Public Order who had been
responsible for upgrading the repression. They acted directly without
needing the alibi of the masses in order to strike the common enemy, for
their own dignity and coherence. When in 2008 the so-called financial
crisis became official along with the responsibility of the State and
the banking corporations, their actions turned to financially-related
targets such as the Stock Exchange, Citibank, Eurobank, etc.
During the whole period the group published extensive analyses which
were combined with their actions and contained a strong class position,
exhorting the class of exploited to rise and attack those responsible.
They are a part of this new complexive reality of the struggle against
capital and the State, one that is pushing towards a self-organised
revolutionary outlet. Their choice of armed struggle in the specific
sense is not presented as an end in itself but simply as a tool to bring
the revolutionary perspective to the fore and present the hypothesis of
the need for immediate attack in an unequivocal discourse addressed both
to the anarchist movement and the wider movement of the exploited.
The comrades who have claimed responsibility for this organisation are
individuals who have been active fighters in the struggles of the
anarchist movement in Greece in its many forms for decades and are well
known in the movement and beyond. In the face of the media outrage and
scaremongering following their arrests they came out and proudly claimed
the organisation, decriminalising it in the face of the terroristic
attack of the media on the minds of the population in order to prepare
the terrain for consensus and support for their political and physical
annihilation at the hands of the repressive organs of the State. They
have written volumes explaining the reasons for the attacks and the need
for social rebellion particularly at this moment where, as in many other
parts of Europe and the world, the organised crime of State, bosses and
banks has led to further extortion from the dispossessed who are now at
breaking point. Their message is that of the need for direct attack,
that the structures of capital and the State are not invincible.
The words and the actions of the Revolutionary Solidarity group [eh, you
mean the Revolutionary Struggle? interpretor] of the Revolutionary
Struggle group, (yes⊠itâs the same thing⊠solidarity is the struggle
and the struggle is solidarity⊠) have been translated into many
languages in the dimension of the continuation and intensification of
revolutionary solidarity in the dimension of attack. This has led to
multiform actions, from banner-hanging, sabotage, incendiary attacks on
banks and the structures of repression, discussions, international
meetings, publications, posters, etc. and have been one of the recent
sources of inspiration to anarchists everywhere.
At a time when life has been mortgaged to Capital and become little more
than a question of accountancy where every day people are bombarded by
the media with figures in billions while they are struggling to stay
alive and feed their children, Revolutionary Struggle has had
considerable impact on those who see the crisis not as something that
has to be readdressed and corrected, but faced head on and destroyed,
along with work and the whole economy. Poverty will never be eliminated
until we destroy work because it is the condition that forces people to
spend their lives doing soul-destroying jobs at starvation wages.
Millions of young people all over the planet are made to feel useless
and without hope due to spreading unemployment. Itâs time to destroy
work as a very concept and take back our lives. Work is a crime, an
ideological and physical imposition on the great mass of human beings,
animals, and the earth itself, for the benefit of a small percentage of
glitterati, but believed in and defended by the whole social set-up,
exploiters and exploited alike. In the words of Herman J. Schuurman one
of the founders of the Mokergroep, a group of young proletarians in 1923
wrote this: We want to create as free people, not work as slaves;
therefore we will destroy the system of slavery. Capitalism only exists
because of the work of the workers, thus we will sabotage it and put an
end to it. If we are not working towards the destruction of capital, we
are working towards the destruction of humanity! We do not want to be
destroyed by capitalism, so capitalism will have to be destroyed by us.
I donât know if the Revolutionary Struggle comrades are advocating the
destruction of work, but that is where the totality of the struggle for
the destruction of the existent takes us, without compromise or half
measures.
guerrillanews.wordpress.com
On March 10^(th), 2010, anarchist comrade Lambros Foundas was murdered
after an armed scuffle with police forces. Those were the days when
Greece was first subjected to the stifling scrutiny of the IMF/ECB/EU
Troika, those were the days when Lambros Foundas, member of the
Revolutionary Struggle group, lost his life in a shootout with the
police during a preparatory action aimed against the political and
economic elite that ravages the planet, and plunders and exsanguinates
social wealth globally, relegating human life to rock bottom.
After a month and amid a climate of terror-hysteria, in April 2010 the
police made preemptive detentions in order to dismantle the
Revolutionary Struggle group, and also arrested and imprisoned
anarchists Kostas Gournas, Nikos Maziotis and Pola Roupa, who took
political responsibility for their participation in the organization.
Simultaneously, anarchists Vaggelis Stathopoulos, Christoforos Kortesis
and Sarantos Nikitopoulos were caught and sent to prison. The latter
three categorically deny any participation in the organization ever
since their arrest, stating that their prosecution concerns their
years-long involvement in subversive projects, their political
affiliation to the anarchist/anti-authoritarian space and their
comradely relationships.
Kostas Katsenos is also charged with participation in the group, and
ever since the period of these pretrial incarcerations an arrest warrant
was pending against him, too.
The system wanted to deliver a decisive blow to the organization,
deeming Revolutionary Struggle as a threat; therefore, it expanded its
offensive through the aforementioned arrests so as to crush a wider part
of the subversive movement.
After six months, in the context of this expansion of the repressive
offensive, dozens of comrades from the anarchist/anti-authoritarian
milieu were called to testify and underwent interrogations, along with
friends and relatives of the six imprisoned anarchists.
The vindictiveness of repression mechanisms was proved once again, when
the State went as far as to charge Marie Beraha â spouse of Kostas
Gournas â with participation in the group. This prosecution is a purely
vindictive act against Kostas Gournas, in an effort to curb his
combatant stance.
On October 5^(th), 2011, the RS case trial got underway in the special
court of Koridallos prisons, in a closed room, withcomplete absence of
any publicity. While the mass media always seemed eager to aid the
repressive offensive and state propaganda, nowadays they keep silentâin
a provocative way and under a political mandateâabout anything related
to the court proceeding of the RS case.
On the one hand, the regime is conducting a trial against its political
adversaries and wants to gag any message of struggle and to distort its
meaning. On the other hand, the three comrades, who took political
responsibility for their participation in the organization, have
defended its actions and political plan. At the same, with their
statements in court, all defendants in this case have converted the
trial sessions into a harsh reproach upon the political-economic system
of wretchedness and exploitation, unveiling the nature of laws and
specific treatments that are enforced against those who have the
strength to resist.
It must be emphasized that none of the accused comrades is currently
imprisoned. Vaggelis Stathopoulos, Sarantos Nikitopoulos and Chistoforos
Kortesis were ordered released after 12 months of pretrial
incarceration. Kostas Katsenos presented himself to the authorities at
the beginning of the trial, and was held imprisoned for six months
before being released.
Revolutionary Struggle members Kostas Gournas, Nikos Maziotis and Pola
Roupa were released from prison after 18 months, when the maximum period
of pretrial detention expired.
Today, Nikos Maziotis and Pola Roupa are at large (!) and no longer
attend the court proceeding.
As we write these lines, the trial is at the stage of defense witnessesâ
testimonies. Already, the witnesses in defense of Revolutionary Struggle
members K.Gournas, N.Maziotis and P.Roupa gave their statements in
court. In particular, comrades from Greece and abroad argued the
significance of the Revolutionary Struggle group in political and
historical terms, and defended armed struggle as well as the entirety
and breadth of revolutionary ventures. In the upcoming days, the court
will hear witnessesâ testimonies for the defense of V.Stathopoulos,
K.Katsenos, S.Nikitopoulos, Ch.Kortesis and M.Beraha, who deny their
participation in the organization, nevertheless demonstrate the
importance of struggle and the need to resist.
During the days of this international appeal, in late November, it is
estimated that the trial will likely be nearing the defendantsâ
statements. It is thus considered as very important to receive messages
of solidarity and resistance from comrades all over the world, who can
show in their own way that the accused comrades are not alone, that the
struggle for the overthrow of this world is always timely.
On April 3^(rd), 2013 the judgment on the Revolutionary Struggle case
was a slight improvement of the prosecutorâs proposal. The courtâs
decision on the Revolutionary Struggle case:
Defendants who have denied participation in the organization
- Acquittal of Marie Beraha, Sarantos Nikitopoulos and Kostas Katsenos
of all charges (on benefit of doubt).
- Conviction of Vaggelis Stathopoulos and Christoforos Kortesis for
alleged participation in the organization.
Admitted members of Revolutionary Struggle
- Acquittal of Nikos Maziotis, Pola Roupa and Kostas Gournas of the
accusation of âdirecting a terrorist organization.â
- Conviction of Nikos Maziotis, Pola Roupa and Kostas Gournas for
âsimple synergyâ with the actions of Revolutionary Struggle (without a
shred of evidence concerning their involvement in specific actions, but
rather applying the Nazi principle of joint liability).
To sum up, Revolutionary Struggle member Nikos Maziotis was sentenced to
86 yearsâ imprisonment; his sentence was merged into 50 years.
Revolutionary Struggle members Pola Roupa and Kostas Gournas were both
sentenced to 87 years; each sentence was merged into 50 years and 6
months. For all three of them, the maximum prison term is 25 years
(which are typically served either as a full sentence or by day wages in
prisons, or after the completion of 3/5 of the prison term, when a
prisoner can be granted conditional release under specific conditions).
Vaggelis Stathopoulos and Christoforos Kortesis were sentenced to 8 and
7 yearsâ imprisonment, respectively. The sentence against Vaggelis
Stathopoulos was merged into 7 years and 6 months.
In addition, for all five convicted anarchists, the judgesâ decision
provided for deprivation of their political rights (5 years for the
three admitted members of Revolutionary Struggle, and 3 years for the
other two anarchists), as well as non-suspensive effect of appeal.
While Nikos Maziotis and Pola Roupa are on the run, Kostas Gournas,
Vaggelis Stathopoulos and Christoforos Kortesis were immediately taken
to prison. The militant slogans of the audience and the clenched fists
of the three anarchist fighters were the last moments of the trial.
Solidarity with all anarchists imprisoned or persecuted by the Greek
State! The battle for freedom is far from over. Long live Revolutionary
Struggle!