How many Friends does the compulsive Pacifism have on facebook?

On May 25th, from afternoon until dawn, nearly 40,000 of all types of neo-Greeks filled Syntagma Square to validate in the worst way the Troika memorandum, the austerity measures and the exclusive privilege of the use of force by the State.

Yesterday’s necrophilic, petit-bourgeois gathering took place just two weeks after the State’s fierce attack against the strike demonstration of May 11th with a record of hundreds of heads bleeding and the demonstrator Yannis Kafkas hospitalized in a coma, and only a few days after the unprecedented escalation of racist violence and social cannibalism a bit farther than Syntagma –in the other, downgraded centre of Athens: with repeated attacks of cops and fascists against homes, shops of immigrants and anarchists’ squats, with devotees of fascism abusing the brutal murder of Manolis Kantaris while neo-Nazi groups launched pogroms injuring a total of hundreds of immigrants, and fatally stabbed the Bangladeshian Alim Abdul Manan.

The peaceful gathering at Syntagma was held in about the same time when comrades gathered in Victoria Square to resist actively against the State terror, the racial segregations and the scums of the national backbone.

In accordance with the standards of the pathetic movement ‘Democracia Real YA’ of Spanish reformists and ‘geração à rasca’ of Portuguese pacifists, one more apolitical gathering was called out through facebook, in front of the Greek Kynovoulio this time [Kynovoulio, Doghouse instead of Koinovoulio, Parliament –an untranslatable play of words]. The symbolic presence of cops in front of the ‘Unknown soldier monument’ should not fool us. It wasn’t only the riot police that defended the symbols of Power but mainly the large number of ‘indignant citizens’ that declared by all means allegiance to bosses and the State.

The compulsive pacifism of a pseudo-movement of resistance was, is and will be one more version of State violence. The proponents of parliamentary system, wherever these might be, propose pacifism expecting to manipulate the crowd and canalize the peoples’ rage into reformist paths of the existing system instead of its overthrow. After all, the profile of the peaceful democratic demonstrator is what the State and the Capital demand as well.

These particular first gatherings at Syntagma Square in Athens, as well as in central spots of other cities in Greece have given an unofficial vote of confidence to a system rotten from its foundations. We see in a European level such movements functioning as relief valves against the social and class war. What a cop’s baton and a fascist’s knife cannot reach, is handled by the reformist propaganda of apolitical facebookers.

The antagonist movement and radical dissidents should reveal the reactionary and counter-revolutionary nature of this counterfeiting of revolts in the Arab world. One of the fundamental characteristics of capitalism is its power to transform and absorb the voices of defiance. By designificating words such as rage, revolt, revolution the system and its applauders hope that they will demean the movement of social liberation and divert it into paths which are painless for themselves.

The warnings given by Madrileños to the campers of Syntagma like ‘make no riot attacks’ have resonance to many people. The regimes’ Press worldwide reproduces, invests and adorns the arguments of pacifists, and sells those as the only ‘hopeful’ perspective.

As long as we don’t act towards the seizure of the means of production, the abolition of property, the multiracial rebellion and the setting up of structures of mutual aid and self-organization but instead we surrender our flags and weapons at Syntagma [also Constitution] or anywhere else by singing and listening the national hymn; as long as we’re in a playful mood with guitars and treacly songs whereas we should have been grabbing a stone, we remain slaves of the bosses.


To refer to three of the (most vomiting) minutes of the so-called ‘first open assembly of Real Democracy Now at Syntagma Square,’ according to the official website of the movement:

– The youth comes out with soul, with faith, peacefully, not like in December 2008; we have all matured.

– The other day, the extreme-rightists were beating and stabbing the immigrants, the immigrants from the countries that pioneered and taught every insurrectional thing has happened in the world in the recent months.

– After the HNS Velos [mutiny] and the Polytechnic [uprising of 1973], this is the first act of direct Democracy and moral uplifting in Greece.

See also: a / b / c / d / e / Spanish f
Updates in English: a you may read Comments’ section / b / c
Former call for a gathering at Syntagma Square [February 27th, 2011]

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