“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