Below is the full text of the comrades’ letter (13.10.2012)
Let us speak at the occasion of the trial against the revolutionary organization Conspiracy of Cells of Fire, because we happen to be wanted in this case.
No, we’re not making any appeal to the judicial representatives of Power. It makes no sense to address our enemies. We appeal to our comrades, in the narrow and broad sense of the word. We try to meet with every rebellious spark in the souls of people who feel—just as we do—drowned in the contracts imposed by the system.
We want to first clarify that we are not members of the R.O. Conspiracy of Cells of Fire, not to forego any of our legal responsibilities, but to avoid the identification of our political discourse with the organization’s discourse, given that we maintain our disagreements. Of course, we remain unrepentant for our choice to support and be factually supported by the CCF comrades, and our choice to join actively in the anarchist struggle.
In any event, we are enemies of their justice, and it’s only reasonable to be treated as such.
As anarchists, we are hostile to the judicial system and the State in its entirety. Therefore, to us, any state prosecution against us is also a title of honour. Of course, we were clandestine even before the State declared us as such, as we had questioned and rejected the validity of its laws long ago, breaking them both overtly and secretly. We chose not to respond to the dilemma ‘legality or clandestinity’. After all, revolutionary action can never be defined as an act authorized by law. If the law managed to assimilate it, it would lose its true meaning.
Of course, the act of refusing to give oneself in freely is not just a partial choice of rejection and disdain for the judicial system and its puppets. It is a life stance against the dozens of small- and large-scale coups which the Power inflicts on our lives; from the extortion of salaried work and being trapped both physically and psychologically in the tentacles of economic dictatorship, to the violent repression through the cops’ firearms and batons, and the virtual projection of ourselves as a pale imitation of roles, identities and prototypes seen on the screens of the technological world. The economic dictatorship, based on weapons and drugs trafficking, feeds itself of the blood emanating from the human slaughters that it causes, and organizes the industrialized world by rejoicing in the pillage of the earth, torturing all living beings which are useful to its purposes and killing everything that is not able to adapt itself to its fierce development.
The life and existence of a free person, of an anarchist, cannot be determined by the books of law, judges’ benches or authoritarian pundits. This is the language of defeat, of reconciliation and unconditional surrender; it is like depositing your own existence in the mincer and waiting for the sentence to arrive. Guilty terrorist or innocent citizen. Such a point of view precludes the acceptance of identities that the Power imposes on us to divide and fragment us, in the same way as it does with all its enemies within the capitalist world. Innocent or guilty, legal or clandestine, peaceful or violent… This is why the repressive mechanism delivers pretrial incarcerations and prison sentences judging, above all, our stance, rather than through obtained evidence. The only dilemma that we identify clearly is: with rebels in all parts, with enemies of the existent, or with those who create and support the existent…
In this way, beforehand we had already decided that if the repressive mechanisms put us in their scope we would defend our freedom as a personal cause. Because when freedom is bargained in a courtroom in return for a little bit of renunciation or a slight reaffirmation of one’s own political conviction, it is no longer freedom. It is submission. If we had not managed to remain free (besieged), surely right now we would pour scorn on the judges and profane their rituals covered in blood, being alongside our comrades that are already spitting on their faces, be it through their absence or fighting to demonstrate the contradictions of the judicial system.
We thus declare that one reason for fleeing from justice is purely our individual dignity. Another reason is to continue the anarchist struggle by all means and in all its forms. Because, if we’d abandoned the struggle in this difficult condition, it would have been like if we’d never engaged in it. Our defensive line in any court will only be the defense of anarchist action; and in this case the defense of revolutionary violence in general and its guerrilla form in particular, that’s being attacked by terror-courts.
The fight is carried out in the first place and above all at the level of consciences and later at a ‘military’ level. This does not mean that we are going to renounce violent action, insofar as the act of passively putting up with our tyrants surely would not promulgate the consciousness. We choose instead the promulgation of action by all means and in every way.
In the world of universal violence in which we live, whatever life stance that in its totality is not violent obviously becomes unviable. Capitalism is the war of all against all; it is the application of the slogan ‘your death is my life’; from the competition of wage slavery to the transnational wars. Therefore, even its passive acceptance implicates support for a totally brutal system, seeing as it allows you to survive if you only work and consume within its framework. Consequently, the question is whether to turn our own existences against the machine; to enact violence, yet not indiscriminately or pathetically against everyone including ourselves, but specifically against the administrators and defenders of this system, against all powermongers, small and large, beginning with great capitalists who most benefit from the exploitation, through to the state curators who manage the politics, and finally to the ‘last cog in the machinery’, the cops, those armed mercenaries of the State.
Taking into account the weak position in which we find ourselves against the State, the most severe blows we can unleash at the level of violence are easiest to reach using guerrilla tactics. At the stage at which we find ourselves, the guerrilla structures are invited to contribute not only to the diffusion of our ideas through certain impressive events, but also to create a countervailing force to repression. For example, all the territory won in a demonstration is evidently more fertile, seeing as it makes the violent revolutionary practice immediately appropriable to many more people, but for now, given the aforementioned weakness, the action in the streets has the option of respecting certain conditions or be repressed, and for this reason also the means of violence chosen by demonstrators do not yet correspond to those of repression. The more our number grows, and the better we are organized, the stronger we will be on the street as well. And at this point we have to stress that the guerrilla structures can also serve to draw the outlines of a combatant organization for the future battles on all fronts. That is to say, in the organizational part, such structures can contribute as an example and projectuality.
To us, guerrilla action in its whole entity in no way functions confrontationally to our presence on the street or in open procedures; it may and should be complementary instead (partial false choices can only be competitive, arising from disrespect of one another in their struggles). This is an impression that the State tries to instill into our minds to divide us. The State’s method is based upon the prevalence of repression after each dynamic action takes place. This begets this psychological reaction to people who are experiencing repression by internalizing it. Because we’re consciously able to realize that any violent activity stands as acquisition for us in the long run, since it creates a deterrent to the enemy. Conversely, the more our activity declines, the more gigantic the repression becomes, until it will have deadened everything and no longer have any point (for example, in European countries where there’s no violent revolutionary action anymore, it’s customary for cops to arrest almost every protester without objections after rudimentary demonstrations, a fact that the legacy of ongoing clashes in the Greek territory has made unthinkable so far). A crackdown is sure to come by the time you choose to resist the State, and of course the solution is not to stop acting but to multiply your struggle in order to overcome repressive blows.
An argumentation that waits for ‘the objective conditions to mature,’ in reality, waits for a situation where the State will have already prevailed. Neither the violent revolutionary action, nor the urban guerrilla warfare are any occasion of calumny; on the contrary, inactivity is the reason that our ideas are pushed aside in the abyss of over-information about profanity offered to us by the capitalist propaganda with its publicized products. If we do not continue creating breakthroughs and going on the offensive, the bourgeois democracy will assimilate us and later sell us as one more product in the shelves of bookshops, in the university conferences for intellectual consumers, or even on the t-shirts and spiked hair of trendy-punks.
The ‘other path’ passes through resignation and ends with total defeat. Because there are always going to be ‘defeats’ in every single battle while we continue to wage war, but they are fermenting the continuation and strengthening of the fight itself as long as we remain standing and dignified. While we live and breathe in this world, we ourselves also have the capacity to contribute to the shaping of its conditions. It is thus an attrition warfare, a flame that a handful of people can maintain alight waiting for the revival of fire, in the same way as throwing stones to the repressive forces was as an activity performed by just a few comrades until in the end it has become widespread, enjoying nowadays a massive participation. If it was not because of this legacy, the street would without any doubt be a lot different in these times. So, the only lost battle is the one that did not even occur.
The wager is to radicalize the struggle, both in terms of ideas and action. Revolution is a constant struggle within and outside of our own selves, a continuous self-development effort; static ideas have no place in a rebellious mind. Each value and idea is called into question, to give birth to new ones, and these will soon be challenged too. But every mental process would lose its meaning if it didn’t reflect our relationship with the real world; if it doesn’t lead to an intensification of confrontation with the authoritarian edifice. What makes us anarchists is our firm position of hostility towards Power. A position that finds its purpose through oppugnancy; because the more we try to doubt an idea, the stronger it may become. While trying to build communities of solidarity, we look even more deeply into the authoritarian plague, with which we gradually stand face to face, and become able to define ourselves and our relationships. Because anarchy does not belong to an imaginary hereafter; it is here, in the struggle for its conquest in the now. The fantasy of its universal spread nurtures our hopes, not our self-illusions. In human history, nothing is a given.
This is our positioning in respect of the trial. When the judicial procedure is applied to the declared enemies of the State, it takes another form. It becomes a battleground in which the State tries to maintain the image of its omnipotence against the rebels that continually show the contradictions of that miserable proceeding. The ritual of obedience is being profaned. It is for this reason that the contemporary democratic State assures itself that these trials are carried out under a special regime.
Solidarity must shine, in order to acquire the importance deemed appropriate to face this trial, and to temporarily knock down the walls that separate us from our imprisoned brothers and sisters, who carry out their own struggle in the graveyards of souls where democracy has buried them.
It is also for this reason that the gap of action, which occurred when the Conspiracy were arrested, requires the creation of new organizations. Today, it is even more necessary to organize our forces and act at all levels. Today, that their world finds itself thrust into crisis and the single cages of comfort collapse together with the state social benefits, we must take the chance to thrive, rather than shrink in fear of repression. Repression comes as a consequence of the State’s shielding, and we have to retaliate at all levels.
May our two empty seats in courtroom—coupled with the prisoners of war who remain unrepentant—remind our persecutors of the fact that repression hasn’t won, the struggle continues; and for each one who’s held hostage someone else will pick up the gun and go on, and this pistol will be pointed at them forever. As long as they’re trying to obscure the sun of anarchy, the danger of being showered by a heavy rain of bullets always lurks.
WE DO NOT RETREAT – WE DO NOT SURRENDER
We stand in solidarity with our comrades of the R.O. Conspiracy of Cells of Fire, our comrade Theofilos Mavropoulos, the anarchist revolutionaries accused in the same case, and all unrepentant prisoners of the revolutionary war.
ATTACK, IN EVERY WAY, ON THE DOMINATION OF THE STATE/CAPITAL
Comradely salutes to those who fight against the authoritarian system.
NOT 1 MILLIMETER BACK
7.62MMS IN THE HEADS OF FREEDOM’S ENEMIES
Long live the R.O. Conspiracy of Cells of Fire
10… 100… 1,000 Revolutionary Organizations
LONG LIVE ANARCHY
Dimitris Politis
Yannis Michailidis
PS. We declare that we do not wish our representation by any lawyer, because we want our non-participation in this trial to be absolutely clear. We do not need legal representation; we will publicize in another letter whatever we might have to say.
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