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Greece: Statement from CCF comrade Christos Tsakalos for June 11th

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June 11th is an international solidarity day. A day against oblivion. A day for all those who are missing from the streets.

For everyone of us that learned to count our steps within the prison yard and divide our day between locking after locking and our night in tallies.

At the same time, June 11th is a day of war. It’s a day of rebellion because law and order may rule but they do not reign.

The existence of anarchist prisoners reminds us of the existence of the anarchist war. A war that sometimes burns slowly and sometimes blinds the sky with its fires.

Every war has its losses. There are comrades that were lost to cop’s bullets or from a bomb that “was in a hurry” to explode…

Comrades that will not be beside us in the next conspiratorial rendzevous.

And then there are those who got caught in the enemy’s snare. An enemy that is baptized in democracy and takes revenge with prisons and courts.

A democracy that likes to carry its captives as trophies from prison to prison, in special conditions, charged with dozens of years of punishment…

Inside the cell, a question that slaps you often visits you…

– “Was it worth it?”

They say that if your enemy doesn’t chase you, you must be doing something wrong…

Transports, special courts, special conditions of solitary confinement, hunger strikes, prohibition of visits, arrests and imprisonment of relatives, new trials, attempted prison escapes..proof that we didn’t give up…

The prison may take away our freedom, but we carry the war against authority within us, in every prison transport, in every cell search, in every locking of the door.

And sometimes, when the prison walls seem to grow taller and every locking from the guard echoes inside your head, you know that you are not alone.

You know that it didn’t simply happen to you, it isn’t just bad luck that you were caught.

You know that you are the continuation of a thread, a story that began with the rebellion of Spartacus and even more before that…

You know that there are others like you within the cells of Chile, in custody in Mexico, in prisons in the USA, in FIES status in Spain, in vague detention in Germany, in supervision of thought in Switzerland, within special cell-blocks of isolation in Italy, in underground solitary confinement in Greece, in conditions of barbarism in Russia, in captivity in Poland…

And this gives you strength…you feel like an accomplice.

And all of us are connected with bonds of memory and perspective.

Memory for those who were imprisoned, tortured and executed before us in far more difficult times, and perspective for those who continue the thread of history walking against the hands of authority’s clock…

So…the answer to the question is…

– “YES, it was worth it and if I turned back time, I would do the exact same thing again, a thousand times.”

And if someone asks again..

– “But the prison, isn’t it a defeat?”

The answer is simple…

– “Victory is defined by the life you live…That’s why we are winners.”

Christos Tsakalos, Conspiracy of Cells of Fire / FAI-IRF
Underground Cell Block of Korydallos Prison

via insurrectionnewsworldwide.com

english

A contribution to June 11th from anarchist prisoner Nikos Romanos (Greece)

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“A contribution to the International Day of Solidarity with Long-Term Anarchist Prisoners”

Many things have been stated about the value of solidarity, and everything has its importance because it contributes to the attempt of giving meaning to a sense that constitutes a vital ingredient for our plans and actions. I will try to state in my own way an existential aspect of solidarity obviously through my own experiences. Solidarity means first of all emotions. Beautiful, wild, but most of all authentic emotions. Emotions that constitute the driving force for the growth of anarchist dynamics, which are liberating and beloved sounds and senses in the city, by yelling slogans, building barricades and by throwing blazing bottles that target the servants of authority. Solidarity doesn’t mean identification, but complicity with everyone that chose to engrave liberating routes in the map of the anarchist insurrection. It’s a relationship and within this relationship experiences are being developed and common desires are being produced for the destruction of this world, not in a vague future, but first of all within ourselves and then around us. Destruction to the degenerated relationships that this world is producing, in its depictions, in its symbols, in its officials and in its loyal servants.

It’s been about 1.5 year since the time I was locked in a room-cell of a hospital with all the symbols of the state’s enforcement around me (armored cops, orders of district attorney regarding force feeding) that I was seeing and learning about dozens of wonderful actions of revolt and defiance that were unfolding in the streets. No matter the contradictions involved in such a conclusion, these days with all their roughness and difficulties were the ones that I was feeling my heart beating through a primitive feeling of joy and my mind was traveling far away, to blazing horizons without bars and iron fences. From the burned police cars in police departments of Athens and the incendiary attacks, to the cars of the MEP (members of the European Parliament) in Brussels to the solidarity gatherings of friends and comrades outside the hospitals, from the combative demonstrations and the barricades that behind them their enraged eyes were meeting beneath their hoods, to the occupations of city halls and universities that were transforming to spaces of struggle, by creating points of diversion in their operations and spaces of dispersion of anarchist ideas. The feeling that anarchy is able to find spaces and ways of vital development and stay alive and dangerous was one of the most beautiful and powerful emotions that I believe are reflecting the power of solidarity.

“That is how I want to see these years in prison, consider them as part of a conscious choice, a choice that in spite of the known and obvious limitations, allows a different perspective, not only concerning the anti-prison struggle but the anarchist struggle in general. In this respect I think that we imprisoned anarchists are not just ‘prisoners’; to reduce us solely to this definition would be like reducing our contribution and preventing us from continuing to participate in the struggle for total liberation in all its breadth and complexity”. – Francisco Solar

So, just as moments of struggle like the international day of solidarity with anarchist prisoners don’t constitute anything more than one more triggering event to sharpen the subversive remembrance and remind ourselves that the struggle against domination means at the same time a struggle against prisons. Because the offensive and destructive actions against the penal complex constitute moments where freedom seeps through our bodies and breaks the captivity status that they’re forcing on us. Till the human gestures between prisoners and free comrades acquire again the warmness of a hug, the fires and explosions will reflect our desire to meet again with our own conditions. Till all are free.

Strength and solidarity to all anarchist prisoners

Nikos Romanos

via 325.nostate.net

english

Message from the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire / FAI-IRF for June 11th (Greece)

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“For June 11th, international day of solidarity and action for the anarchist prisoners throughout the world”

Prison has the terrifying ability to leave its own indelible imprints on the bodies and minds of its residents.

Imprints of sorrow, frustration, violence, asphyxia, enforcement. Doors that keep locking and unlocking everyday at the same time with exactly the same awful sound in a monotonous rhythm of a murderous routine that drips its poison of immobility and vanity slowly and painfully.

A brief description about the distillation of sepsis that is being produced by incarceration is enough to become understandable of the hate we feel towards prisons.

That’s why every time a prison break succeeds, every time that a penal officer is being paid an uninvited visit, every time that a prison director or police sergeant pays the price of his despicable choices, our hearts fill with a unique feeling of enjoyment and pleasure. Because revenge for the captivity can’t help but to find its incarnation over the constant assaults against the prison’s representatives.

If something is missing in our days, it isn’t the harmless babbling but the beautiful and courageous choices of comrades in order to create spots of organized offensive actions, to answer dynamically to the ashes that were left behind by oppression, to assert anarchy against its enemies. The passionate conversations are missing, for the necessary practices that we have to build, for the planning of deregulation, today, tomorrow and for as long as the world of authority surrounds us.

The desideratum now, for everyone that feels asphyxiated by the contemporary way of life remains common. To coordinate and strike the rambling tentacles of the state, capital, civilization, social apathy, to the everyday misery in the cities. Countless hostile depictions in a hostile pattern of life which in order to destroy we have to reverse their rhythm, movement and detestable pace.

The only way to set an attempt like this in motion begins from each and any of us individually, from the great choice to turn our personal hourglasses upside down in order for our lives to stop rolling in the rhythm that authority forces us, but instead to begin from the time we go on the offensive, from our desires to watch the world of order catching fire by our own hands and for solidarity to become the kindling for this fire.

Because solidarity is a momentum, it’s power. It’s the power that arises through the internal admission that we are all part of the anarchist clash against authority. The admission that we may end up in captivity tomorrow, in the place of someone in captivity today. An admission that constitutes essentially an indissoluble bond between all anarchists who are fighting authority, each one with the way he/she chooses. A bond that mustn’t break in spite of all the personal differences, in spite of the individual disagreements, this feeling of complicity is always there. It doesn’t fall back. It persists and takes different forms.

A banner, a poster, a fire during the night, a deafening sound of an explosion, a blast at some authoritative scum, an action of liberating prisoners. Because only this way, only then, solidarity is indeed our weapon.

Conspiracy of Cells of Fire / FAI-IRF
Michalis Nikolopoulos
George Nikolopoulos
Panagiotis Argirou
Damiano Bolano
Theofilos Mavropoulos

via 325.nostate.net

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Letter from anarchist prisoner Grigoris Tsironis for June 11th (Greece)

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A greeting for the international day of solidarity and action for the anarchist prisoners throughout the world

An international day when all prisoners from all corners of the earth, all those who are experiencing the obligatory status of incarceration in the penal prison camps of democracy, those who are being deprived of the most valuable good of freedom, are uniting their voices, their thoughts and feelings, in order to send a signal among them that no one is alone.

Despite the hundreds of kilometers that are separating us, despite that we don’t know each other, despite of all our differences, there is something that surpasses borders and achieves the elimination of all distances, something that can’t be imprisoned, that escapes out of the walls that loom up around us, something that is priceless within the hearts of those who feel it, express it, or receive it.

It is this strong feeling of solidarity that fills us with strength, it gives us courage, in order for us to not give up even in these very difficult circumstances that we are experiencing, but instead to keep on fighting with the same passion.

It is the powerful bond between those who perceive themselves as fellow travelers, among those who transmute theory to action, those who are developing a polymorphous action with the purpose of destroying the existent, those who struggle against every form of enforcement and limitation, who fight back against injustice and exploitation, those who with rage and consciousness follow a decent life choice.

It is solidarity that in our days, more than ever, has been targeted by authority, by repressing and criminalizing it. But it is our weapon as well, no matter how much they’ll try they’ll never succeed in disarming us. Because solidarity’s “bullets” are all these small or big gestures of support from all those who see in us a part of themselves, and those who can’t feel free when at the same time there are imprisoned comrades, hostages in the hands of the state.

SOLIDARITY TO ALL CAPTIVES
OF THE SOCIAL-CLASS STRUGGLE
TILL THE DESTRUCTION OF THE LAST PRISON

Grigoris Tsironis
Korydallos Prison
11-6-2016


via 325.nostate.net

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Letter from Giannis Naxakis (Greece)

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In prison, the sense of time has its own imprint. While days seem endless to me, at the same time the 3 years that have passed since our arrests in Nea Filadelphia seem like nothing. The environment of incarceration encourages rapid emotional swings and thus in a limited space, the sense of time is especially changeable because of the concentrated periods of emotional moods.

So, 3 years and a month with an intense experience of multifaceted disappointment and disgust. I could write infinite things about prison besides the usual, but it is all so fictitious now both inside and outside, that any extensive reference to anything seems meaningless to me. I will just say, continuing from older letters, that the prisoneresque stench is not a privilege of just one wing obviously, but a general phenomenon in prisons and that the reversal of meanings is something more than a rule in here, showing-off is a virtue and macho is dignity…

After 3 years and a bit therefore came the time for the appellate trial. On June 22nd begins the appellate trial for the robbery in Pirgetos for which I and G.Sarafoudis have been convicted. Obviously I am not making any sort of callout for a gathering since my stance of abstaining from this wretched procedure is known. This announcement of mine for the appellate trial is only a reminder to some few active comrades and is simply informative and open to interpretation. Also, it is intended for the unknown anarchists out there who have not been fooled by the political chameleonism, opportunism and patronizing which have flooded the “milieu” in the last years, and who think and act freely, independently, against ambition and, of course, on the offensive.

What follows is a short description I wrote about the case. After an operation by the antiterrorism agency on 30/4/2013 at a café and in a street in Nea Filadelphia, Athens, 5 of us are arrested. Two are wanted (A.Dalios, F.Harisis) therefore the 3 of us are accused of harbouring a criminal.

At GADA (Αthens police headquarters) they violently extract DNA samples from all of us and, amongst other things, they find that mine and Sarafoudis’ match DNA samples found on two different mobile objects after a robbery in Pirgetos, Larissa in 2011.

Accused of bank robbery now, we appear before the interrogator in Larissa who decides we should be detained in Koridallos prisons. Sarafoudis is also accused of one more robbery in Filota Florina based again on DNA samples.

A few months later we are summoned by the special appellate interrogator to upgrade our charges. The robbery becomes robbery in the frame of terrorism, so now we are also accused of participation in a terrorist organization (CCF).

In July 2014 the first instance trial takes place in the special court room in Koridallos prisons and we are convicted of all charges in a merged sentence of 16 years each. The appellate trial is set for 9/10/15, was then postponed to 10/11/15 and then indefinitely, to be finally set for 22/6/16.

Concluding, I would say that there is no way I would ever believe in justice as an institution or as a social value. There are no judicial scandals, the only scandal is human civilization and the only value I recognize is absolute freedom.

G.Naxakis, Koridallos Prison

via 325.nostate.net

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Greece: Disciplinary sanctions against members of the CCF in Korydallos prison

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A few days ago the prosecutor V. Marsioni punished CCF comrade Giorgos Nikolopoulos with one year of disciplinary measures after ‘finding’ prohibited items during raids and searches of comrade’s cells.

The same prosecutor also punished CCF comrades Michalis Nikolopoulos and Panagiotis Argyrou.

(via Anarchist Black Cross Anarchist Solidarity Cell, translated by Sin Banderas Ni Fronteras and Insurrection News)

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Athens ,Koridallos prison -Text by anti-authoritarian Grigoris Tsironis concerning the judicial methods.

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Text by anti-authoritarian Grigoris Tsironis concerning the judicial
methods.
It’s been 10 years since I decided to go underground, refusing to
surrender my body to the claws of the predators who constitute the
police-judicial complex, with stubbornness and abnegation I fought to
preserve the highest asset for which rivers of blood have spilt over the
centuries, that of human freedom ie the ability to self-define ourselves
in a world of slavery and injustice.
Ten years from the day the persecutory authorities in perfect
cooperation with the vultures of journalism, fabricated a badly staged
theatre play titled “the robbers in black” targeting and unleashing a
merciless hunt for me and my two comrades, Simos Seisidis and Marios
Seisidis.
A state frame-up which did not even manage to convince the judges since
me and Simos Seisidis were unanimously acquitted of all charges
attributed to us, as well as Giannis Dimitrakis who was acquitted for
the other 6 robberies they attributed to him, thus dispelling this myth.
Naturally I did not see this played on any main news report, nor was it
a main story the fact that if all these allegedly objective slugs of
journalism trust the decisions of civil justice, they should come out
and admit that for many years they lied repeatedly and presented us as
those responsible for any robbery or urban guerrilla act from back then
to today.
Yesterday’s unanimous court decision, my acquittal of all charges, is a
personal vindication for my conscious and dignified decision to go
underground. It vindicated my decision to not accept my arrest and my
unjust detainment for acts in which I was not involved and of course I
did not expect civil justice to recognize this. Either way, I do not
recognize the judicial terms of the dipole innocent-guilty.
The victory for the collapse of the frame-up and the emergence of state
and media methods is deservingly credited to the
anarchist/anti-authoritarian solidarity movement which stood as a mound
to their appetites. The big counter-information campaign by various
collectives, solidarity acts (gatherings, motorbike demos and
flyposting) and of course the loud presence of solidarians inside and
outside the court room sent the message that no comrade is alone. It is
they who filled me with strength and gave me the courage to rise, I’d
like to believe, to the occasion with my attitude.
It is a judicial victory that gave joy and is now a legacy, putting thus
one more stone to the collapse of similar frame-ups. Because essentially
when the joys and victory celebrations subside, what we see are these
state methods of targeting, the penalization of comradely-family
relations, the stapling of cases together under the umbrella of law 187A
(anti-terrorist law), the expansion of indictments and creating guilty
people, continue to exist in the most evident and obvious way, towards
me and my summoning by the appellate investigator for integration in a
terrorist organization, as well as against other comrades and not.
I will indicatively mention the cases of the mother and partner of the
Tsakalos brothers, M. Theofilou’s case, the case of the
“super-appellate” trial, “Phoenix” case etc.
So in no way must we rest after this admittedly important victory, but
be vigilant.
I call, therefore, the solidarity movement to rally up forces with its
strong and mass presence in the judicial battles of all the comrades
whose cases are now underway.
Solidarity and support by the movement cannot be given partially or
selectively.
Comrades who refuse the charges attributed to them and fight for their
collapse, deserve our solidarity. Comrades who claim responsibility for
their acts and with dignity and political arguments fight their battle
inside the court rooms, deserve our solidarity.
Finally, comrades who discredit civil justice and spit in the faces of
judicial employees, do not bargain for their freedom and they themselves
create the preconditions in order to regain it, deserve the same
solidarity.
Let us perceive, even if it sounds romantic, that we are different
pieces of the same puzzle, that when connected, our vision for the
revolution will appear.
Let’s look ahead and gaze this vision and let’s leave the mistakes and
hostilities in the past.
Solidarity is our weapon
Not a step back…
NO COMRADE HOSTAGE IN THE HANDS OF THE STATE
FREEDOM TO POLITICAL PRISONERS
AND IMPRISONED FIGHTERS
STRENGTH TO THE WANTED COMRADES
Grigoris Tsironis
Koridallos Prisons
4/6/2016

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Greece – UPDATE ON TRIAL OF ANARCHIST COMRADE GRIGORIS TSIRONIS June 3rd, 2016.

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The comrade was acquitted, unanimously, of all charges. This is another
victory which is credited to the anarchist/anti-authoritarian movement,
this time inside the court room. The attitude of the judges towards this
case, was admittedly mild and without provocations, while the lack of
evidence led the prosecutor to propose the acquittal of the comrade of
this rotten indictment. This acquittal has its roots in a dense
solidarity grid that for ten years now supported and supports the path
of four comrades, by erecting levees to their merciless hunt by the
persecutory mechanisms of the state.
You rarely hear such an oration by a prosecutor who stressed that this
indictment was completely rotten and it is shameful that these trials
take place, therefore he suggested the comrade’s acquittal. And that
Grigoris defended his positions, saying that he generally agrees with
the expropriation of a bank, although the main charge was his
participation in the infamous robbery of the National Bank of Greece, in
January 2006.
At the end he departed to the applause of the solidarians who were in
the room.
SOLIDARITY IS OUR WEAPON
FREEDOM TO COMRADE GRIGORIS TSIRONIS
STRENGTH TO WANTED COMRADE MARIOS SEISIDIS
TERRORISTS AND ROBBERS ARE THE STATES AND CAPITALISTS

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