Communiqué for the bomb attack against the ministry of Press

On December 21^st, 2008, the ‘Revolutionary Organization December 6^th’ had fired bullets against Kougias (a well-known lawyer who defended Korkoneas, the cop murderer of Alexis Grigoropoulos) as well as against Pretenteris (a major sold-out TV presenter, one of the most arrogant and filthiest ‘journalists’ of the Greek corporate media). The same urban guerilla group also claimed responsibility for a bomb attack against the general secretariat (ministry) of Press on January 15^th, 2010, via this communiqué:

‘If keep your laws, the worse for you. The violence of the State legitimates the bloodiest of the reprisals and after the stifling voice of arms, you will hear another voice, even louder, the voice of dynamite…’

The armed struggle is one component of a multiform movement. It has its own space and time within the revolutionary history. It is an inevitable part of the struggle, not because the revolted human asks for it out of fetishism or whim, but because it will occur on his path as a result of a chain of incidents (political, social, and economical). In a power armed with uniformed killers, in a mechanism fortressed with jails-white cells, we draw a separative line between us and the enemy. As long as there will be laws that convict us, as long as you will keep burying alive our comrades, the more we will deepen the lines of armed conflict.

Today we introduce ourselves in public for the first time, under the name ‘Revolutionary Organization December 6^th.’ Our choice to use the date of the assassination of Alexandros Grigoropoulos was not made just to pay a tribute to his person. It would may be more accurate to use some assassination date of dozens locals and immigrants that are being executed ‘in silence’ in the borders, in poor neighbourhoods and police stations. For all these deaths that the public opinion and its journalists were never shocked, enraged, touched. This date, doesn’t take its meaning for us just from Alexis’ death, but mainly from what followed; the revolt. We don’t have the arrogance to believe that our organization expresses December’s revolt, nor the illusion that it represents it’s continuing with other means. Our signature expresses only us and our souls. Our tears and hate; the revenge. The hope and the wild joy of the revolt we lived. The oath-vow we took those days, that when everything should end, we would never come back. And indeed, that December passed and it may take long time until it comes again, but the promises remained, and our duty now is to organize our own every-day Decembers. We do not intend to provoke any kind of supposed sentimental emotion or a contemplation of the revolt as a nice memory with our signature. We are disgusted from the anniversaries, we deny the symbolisms. The execution of Alexis and the revolt that followed were not at all symbolic acts. They were decisive events. And events produce proposals[1]. And this is exactly what we intend in: Within the events that our actions create, to imprint the proposal of December; the proposal of a revolted life.

We’re staring at the future by travelling to the past

So here we find ourselves in our turn to imprint our own interpretation of the time that we’re living in; to describe our own decisions for our choice to get organized in the armed struggle. But before we start talking, we first need to travel into the past and meet our roots. Go where everything started. To start from the circumstances that gave birth to the local urban guerilla struggle, continue until its fall and degeneration to end up again here, today, to its massive reappearance. We meet, so our roots, in the post-dictatorship period and the revolutionaries of the extreme Left. It is the period of the labour reformation that brought the just arrived capitalist model of Karamanlis[2], with the official Left co-signing the social peace, which however is not yet to come. Squatted factories, autonomous labour groups, violent strikes and clashes with the cops, invasion of protesters in the American embassy and arson of the British embassy, are the scattered pictures of the social-class war of those times[3]. In any case, it’s the collective historical memory, with the experience of the dictatorship being the most recent one that had rooted in the consciousness of a big part of the Greek society, the shape of the enemy in the face of the cop, the fascist, the American, the industry owner. It’s this memory, from which the first armed groups’ assault, executing American agents and dictatorship’s torturers and blowing up local and international corporations; actions that are connected and accentuate the movement struggles of those times; actions with wide acceptance and positive impression. The activity of the armed groups, during the first years of the ‘passing to democracy’ procedure, sketches out the strategy of what we call social guerilla fight. From Latin America to Europe, history teaches us that the social guerilla fights, anti-state or national liberation oriented, have as permanent reference point the positive impression to the masses. It is born and developed either through a general social malaise (poverty, dictatorships) or through the contestation movements that flourish during periods of intense social–political happenings (Europe in the 60s). The quintessence of the social guerilla fight is found in what the Tupamaros so simply declared: ‘without social support there cannot be guerilla fight.’ This is what the guerilla fighters were looking for in the first years of the passage to democracy and for this purpose, they were claiming with their actions a dialectic relationship with the movement and the resisting people so that they could promote the armed struggle as a feasible perspective for the social inversion.

The 80s find the armed groups in front of very fast social incidents. The Greek society is starting to change and get a new ideology of life. The up to that time existing ‘civil war atmosphere’ starts to be considered backward and the political conversations in the labour places and cafeterias pass slowly but gradually into the sphere of communicational picturesqueness. Greece is looking ahead, is moving towards its new European environment. In this new social contract of national alignment and peaceful way to the ‘new era,’ the social-political ‘fermentations’ surrender once and for all to the capitalist way of life. The ‘change’ of PA.SO.K[4] and the fraud of the historical vindication of the lefts that are now ‘ruling the country’ led to the total disarticulation of the up to that time combatant extra-parliamentary Left and actually to the cease of social-class struggles. The local and global deep structural changes create a new system of values. The class reformation in Greece is eventually completed after the fall of the Eastern block and the massive arrival of immigrants. An extremely cheap working force is coming to offer its services, so that Greece transforms into a modern western country. The petite-bourgeoisization of the working class transforms the payed per day worker by that time, into a householder and boss that is getting rich exploiting cruelly the illegal labour of the immigrants. The labour worker has Albanians working for him and is now playing in the stock market. The class consciousness is now becoming the consciousness of the fools that refuse to grab the chance for quick money making. The struggle never gets vindicated because the Western way of life provides more than efficient ‘solutions’ in the problem of livelihood with a feigned but imaginative quality of life. The Greek can now get rich, make new houses, buy cars, watch the new programs of private television. In the face of this new reality already by the end of the 80s the armed groups started to become less and less in number, either because they felt they had lost the bet of inversion, either because even these guerilla fighters succumbed to the allurements of the capitalist ‘well-being.’ But even the armed groups that continued to fight made the historical mistake of the most groups with a long-term action. They couldn’t re-define their strategy according to the new data.

Speaking about the armed struggle today

The arrests of the members of the ‘R.O. November 17^th’ [17N] in 2002 actually close the historical circle of the period of the so-called passage to democracy. The State, having finished with the last ‘suspense’ left from this period, tried to rewrite history using its own interpretation; the winners’ interpretation. The mechanisms of propaganda went on a merciless defamation of the members of 17N, trying to politically denude them and twist their struggle. In the face of these events, the infamous ‘generation of the Polytechnic [uprising]’ and the official Left whistled indifferently, dissociated themselves or interfered referring to those people as psychics. This ridiculous rabble of veteran ‘fighters’ was democracy’s certificate of victory, speaking about the struggle in a past tense. Like something that should be buried in oblivion, like something that has no reason to be happening today.

We don’t know if we can speak with terms of victory or loss about the revolutionary movement of the past decades. We can however say that we live today the times of its global recession. The class and social consciousness are entirely forgotten in history’s time-closet, surrendered to the precepts of the modern behavioural industry; to lifestyle and individualization; to loneliness, fear and passivity. We live the most evolved form of social consent, to the imposition of a scientifically rationalized acceptance of oppression. We live in the times of rebuttal of speech and alternation of the meanings: ‘FREEDOM’ of the markets, ‘REVOLUTION’ of technology. Our attacks are now interjections in the normal flow of the TV schedule: TV show, interval, breaking news, images of destruction, commercials, TV show again. And the enemy nowadays is not clear and visible because democracy creates crimes with no guilt; wars in the name of peace, violence and repression in the name of citizens’ protection. We come from another time. We come from the strangest version of history. We come from a devastated society where the war of everyone against everyone reigns. We come from suffocation, from the on earth city sewers and the rat-cage apartments. We come from the ideology of non-violence, of vanity and surrender; of dope and video games. We come from the times of fetish, pose, the fake and the image. We come from the times of public relations where the proletariat is having extreme fun on Mykonos Island. We come from the times of isolation, neurosis and mental breakdown. We come from a fucked-up life. And you, comrades who are somewhere up there shedding your blood for a better world, listen to this: It’s not just the fat sworn enemies of the proletariat that drink your blood in the workplaces but the leftist ex-comrades of yours as well. Those that were the persecuted of this world are now drinking our blood, and the immigrants that became bosses are now worse than the ‘proud Greek patriots.’ And the cops are no longer just the offspring of fascist families but our childhood friends and schoolmates with whom we used to hang out in the streets.

Nowadays, that infamous saying of Tupamaros about social support to the armed struggle doesn’t find anymore the place to be vindicated. We talk about the social revolution and its relation with the armed struggle, but we cannot ‘serve’ the strategy of the social guerilla fight as it was shaped by the comrades that acted in a completely different time circumstance. Today, we cannot speak about the creation of the ‘armed anti-imperialist block in the heart of the Western metropolis’ nor for the working autonomy. Today, the armed struggle has to pose the same questions that were posed in the past but on a different basis. Which are the social correlations and how much do they affect us, in what phase is the movement right now and what is our relation with it, what is it exactly that we can look forward to -in terms of strategy through the armed struggle?

The third pole and politics in first singular person — Strategy as active theory

The urban guerilla fighter is not broken away from the social life but exists within it, is a piece of it. He/she is involved with it and interprets it in order to become more accurate. Today, the armed struggle is taking place in an environment of altered meanings and relationships, so we cannot focus just in how many buildings we will blow up and how many lackeys we will execute. We anyway know well that there will be built new, more guarded buildings, and the lackeys will hire better trained guards. The issue that has the highest strategic importance for us is how we will manage to break these social relations that conserve this world, through our actions. How we will take back the words, so that they become ours again, so that they become sharp again. FREEDOM, STRUGGLE, REVOLUTION… In order to analyse and de-organize the modern social relations, we won’t search in books of sociological approach but we will dive deep into ourselves. This is why we won’t seek for any truths. For us, none fixed view, no ideology is capable to interpret what we live today. Our own speech is articulated through the daily life; through our own fears, conformities and contradictions. Because only if we discover what is found into us we will be able to destroy what is around us. ‘… It is impossible to understand the daily life, without denying it. It is impossible to know it until the end, without fighting to change it…’

The Revolutionary Organization December 6^th is for each and every one of us an experiment. Using this group as a tool, defining it first of all as a relationship, we claim the progressive deliberation from our petit-bourgeois residues, and the re-definition of the relationship with our own selves, through a new collective identity; the identity of armed struggle. However, this is our own way, and our own choice. We don’t propose arms as the only solution, because arms alone make no one a revolutionist. This is why our choices do not separate us from anyone, except from our enemies. The issue, for us, doesn’t have to do with the means but with the goal itself. And the goal, for us, is to fight with one’s heart, no matter from which bulwark [bastion] one does it. This is what counts.

We propagate the third pole and the politics in first person by promoting the bet for the creation of a new point of reference; of a new point of gathering between comrades that target in a de-ideologized approach of the struggle starting from zero; from their own selves. Since the very moment we placed this bet, we chose to stay away from the encirclement of the modern ‘revolutionary’ lifestyle; away from the ideologized pseudo-dilemmas that it places. Anarchist or nihilist, social or antisocial. Terms already lose that tend to become a code of entrance and acceptance into groups, or spectacular jargon of separation from them. Codes, roles, pro-types of behaviour are what form an alternated ‘revolutionary’ identity. They are the elements that contribute into our political defeat. The ‘hardcore ones’ and their fans, the orators and their audience, the petty leaders of any kind and their followers, the ‘neutrals’ and their good intentions. In this way, not only life but also the struggle itself is not experienced as a struggle, but as a representation. This is why if we really want to speak today about the case of revolution, we have to speak about ourselves first. For the way that we overpass ourselves since the moment we enter the struggle and we de-attach from the symptoms of our life until that time. From the cowardices, the safe hideouts, the selfishness, the silent consent, the self interest, the competitions. Because, comrades, if we really want to change this world, we first have to vomit it out of us. Because the revolution is not a future overthrow, but the way we live and fight today. All the rest stink ideology and repetition.

They say you have to learn to leave your traces back on the snow; so that you don’t get lost, so that the rest will find you. In relation to the issue of the social addressing, we don’t conserve fake hopes. We know well that the armed struggle today cannot ‘rise the masses up,’ but we know as well that not everything is lost out there, and December’s revolt happened to remind this to us. We will not divide society in two sides. There aren’t just these who fight and those who consent, nor we consider enemies all these that are not directly by our side right now. However, we don’t want to ‘caress’ anyone as well. A big part of the social body is full of the dominant ideologies, in a way that we automatically consider them our enemies. The snitches, the pimps, the jail guards, the junk dealers, the fascists, the big and small bosses that patron our lives, all of them are our targets from now on. But apart from those that go along with the dominance there is also other people. And they’re quite a few. It’s the people of December’s revolt. It’s also those that didn’t participate in it but defended it like something of their own. It’s the lonely people, the ‘outsiders,’ those who differ inside the vast dump of social stupidity; these which as clockwork bombs in ‘off mode’ we now want to put back into function. We address in all these people and with our actions we encourage them to fight and discover together the ways to win over our daily freak-outs. For this reason you, friend, that you now read these lines, don’t believe anything you may hear about us. Don’t believe those who’ll speak about ‘fanatic criminals’ or others who will say we’re dark revolutionaries coming out from novels. We don’t differ in anything. We may be your neighbours, your colleagues at work, the company that hangs out in the same cafeteria with you.

The traces on the snow remain. In this way, we’re able to find the paths that the comrades left in the middle, and walk them until where they go. So that afterwards the others will come and continue them. With our action, today, we guard the historical rings in the chain of revolutionary tradition. From the Tupamaros and Che, to Ulrike Meinhof and Dimitris Koufontinas, we have the historical duty to continue. Because as long as this invisible human chain will endure as years will pass, the history won’t appear to be finishing. Unless if we only say so. And we still have way too much to say…

Democracy or the myth of Power

Democracy doesn’t make us free. And even if you still insist that within it there are no dead ends, we tell you that we didn’t find any ‘passages so far. Democracy is not something supernatural, something far from our selves. It’s our daily life. It’s the way we describe the cultural poverty of the modern mega cities; the emptiness, the poverty, the loneliness, the alienation. Today, democracy receives proud laudations by ‘inflated’ politicians, ‘firm’ prosecutors, ‘uncorrupted’ cops, ‘truth-loving’ journalists, ‘charity activist’ wealth owners. And is now the time that we have to strip democracy from its ‘sanctity’ and throw it where it deserves: in the cesspool of history. And it’s now that we have to finish with this alienation that submits subconsciously the illusions –the illusion of the ‘most perfect’ regime in history, the illusion of normality, equality and peace. Let’s attack democracy by destroying whatever oppresses the individual and its ‘ego,’ thought and consciousness; its natural truths and desires. Let’s crease coolness and silence, the guarantees that the regime imposes for a well conformed life upon the pro-types given by itself.

The phony and contemptible inventions such as nation, State, religion, money, are all part of the diachronic mechanisms of obedience. They are the values that remain untouched through the years, what we call ‘social inventions.’ These disgusting inventions are undivided and necessary pieces in the alternation of our life. They are the tools that enshape a standardized moral and value code. The obscurantism, the fear and languor of the ‘inventions’ society, encage us into the ideological mechanisms (family, school, university, army, career, wedding, and family again), for which we cannot exist in any other way than through our submission. It is the contract of a programmed life, which we sign since we’re still inside our mom’s belly. It’s the loss of any desire for real life.

The accursed sickness of alienation and its victims

The reconstruction of the capitalist machine in the modern democracies proposes a re-definition of relations through new perspectives. The individualization, snitching, lying, self-interest, ‘looking out only for my ass’ are the modern social values that render the shaping of a whole personal identity, impossible. Relationships take now an alienated value. The reproduction of standardized gestures, behaviours and words kill slowly the true experience, enshape a fake ‘ego,’ a bad copy of advertisements. We now recognize ourselves through our car, our modern clothes, perfectly whitened teeth, and our sexy body. Everything change but remain eventually the same. A feigned reality imposes us to seek for the ‘imaginative’ experience. To sell ourselves so we can live the myth of beauty, wealth, power. But the promises don’t last too much and soon we’re back to depression. That’s why the precepts of the leaders of the entertainment industry, to be happy, are precepts to bury even deeper the misery that surrounds us. To accept that we survive through a procedure of deconstruction of our own life and that from now on we will build relationships according to a new value system. Introversion, self interest, dishonesty, usability. The wickedness to guard our constructed existence.

Repression and the law-abiding children of the State

In the modern democratic societies, the dominance is getting fortified through the upgrade of repression. By watching, supervising and charting the individuals. Repression is not related only to those who break the law. It’s not found just in prisons and police stations but marches inside all of us. It’s the internalized fear that makes us obedient and disciplined. It’s the erase of any hope for resistance and the distortion of its term as a vain and self-destructing procedure. Repression is a diffused social relation. It’s found in our homes, in the coward teachings of our parents for obedience and compliance. It’s found in the father’s punishment. It’s found into schools, in these manufacturers of people with fear as identity so that they get along with the alienation that surrounds them; so that they will be ready to silently accept a life inside the militarized environment of the metropolis; so that they learn that cameras are the extension of their ‘liberty.’ For their security and safety of them and their wealth; so that they learn that the streets are nothing else than a catwalk for the police cowboys. That the police stations, these training camps of uniformed rapers, murderers and torturers, are the fortresses of the citizens’ protection. That the borders are not places of death squads, but the nation’s ridges where everyone that serves there is protecting us with honour from the foreigner invaders.

We were absent during those classes. We learned however in the streets that even the last cop has full conscience of the role that the regime has given him/her. That he becomes consciously its ‘long arm.’

Mr. Chrysochoidis [the former minister for civil order, or ‘for citizen’s protection’], from the first moment that took on his duty, wanted to make one step forward. Convert the frightened citizens into his direct partners. The method of putting a price on someone’s head is an effort to diffuse cannibal instincts. It’s the sneaky means for the creation of a new type of values’ of suspiciousness, social detectivism and denunciation; eventually, the creation of a self-surveilled society where the people will control each other. We already had, some months ago, the first snitch kiosk owner that put a price on the head of the ‘robber’ that didn’t even rob him. So just think you, Greek citizen, for how many thousands euros you sell your dignity. For how many Euros you will put on the hood of snitching. There are thousands of legal pistoleros passing around you. You should guard yourself from them and from their ‘malfunctioning’ guns that detonate ‘by chance.’

*** To the case in point

Mr. Chief of the ministry for the snitching citizen’s protection, veteran of the war against terrorism, officially honoured from your American friends, those that dream of insurrections will always find the ways to live them. Even if the times are against them. Even if they are a few. Because the more there will be uniformed killers around us, the more we will load our weapons and light the fuse of our rage. Veteran Michalis [Chrysochoidis], some people forget, but we don’t. Your socialist politics was the one that used against us the back-up police of Golden Dawn[5], the one that violated the university asylum for the first time after the military dictatorship in the chemical faculty in 1985, in ASOEE in 1994 and the Polytechnic school in 1995. It was the one that killed Koumis and Kanellopoulou in ’81, Michalis Kaltezas and the urban guerilla fighter Christos Tsoutsouvis in ’85, the unruled Michalis Prekas in ’87, the anarchist revolutionist Christoforos Marinos in ’96 and the dignified fighter of the prisons Charis Temberekidis in ’99. We don’t forget all those that we may don’t know but were tortured and murdered in the name of socialism too.

We claim responsibility for sending bullets to Mr. Pretenteris[6] and Mr. Kougias[7] and for the bomb attack to the ministry of Press on Friday, January 15^th, 2010.

21/12/2008. Days of celebration and joy for some people that want to base their careers on dead people’s bodies. So we decided to contribute in their happiness by sending a present totally non-symbolic. We sent a pair of 9mm bullets to the well-recognized Mr. Kougias and Mr. Pretenteris. Each one of them is very special, for us. Mr. PRETENTERIS is the modern neo-Greek democrat MEGA [TV station]-journalist with a styled snobbish attitude, silver tie and golden cuff-links. Even if having his mouth full of lip-gloss he thinks that he can keep slandering, misleading, deceiving, threatening, staining, propagating and snitching, following orders from the palaces of democracy. WE ARE BEHIND YOU. Mr. Kougias, the man-clam. WE ARE BEHIND YOU.

15/1/2010. We face a modern war of misinformation that targets on the human mind, the individual consciousness and finally our mere existence. In this war, we cannot stay without participation. The night of January 15^th we attacked the ministry of propaganda, also known as ministry of Press. With this attack we tried to disorganize, even just for a short while, the headquarters of the fake news industry. We wanted to remind the journalists, this famous carnival of the chosen ones that they will have to learn to live with fear. Because these snitches, as guards of the humble and respectful Christians alternate the reality with the power of their image, and condemn us in a lifetime mental deformation. Because these miserable, prostituted cold executioners of moral and dignity invade in every side of our lives, contributing in the shaping of a new type of human, the ‘energetic television viewer-TV stoned national citizen.’ Because they propagate the values of modern civilization. Apathy and unconditional surrender to a virtual reality where there will always be some other people talking, judging and deciding for us.

PS. We don’t believe in your justice. We don’t expect anything from it. We seek for revenge. And we will take it. We include ourselves in the queue waiting for Mr. Korkoneas to come out of prison.

FREEDOM FOREVER,
R.O. DECEMBER 6^th

[1] Or ‘projects’ –generally there’s a difficulty in translating the exact meaning of the Greek word ‘πρόταγμα’ as it literally means ‘what someone is putting forward as a suggestion for what we should do’ but is used exclusively in the political jargon.

[2] Konstantinos Karamanlis the elder, uncle of the former prime minister, governed during 2004–2009.

[3] 1974–1980

[4] PA.SO.K stands for ‘PAnellinio SOsialistiko Kinima’ (pan-Hellenic socialist movement), a quite typical socialdemocrat party that governed between 1981–2004 with a small break in the beginning of 90s.

[5] Golden Dawn goes for ‘Chrissi Avgi,’ national socialist parastatal organization-party.

[6] Disgusting TV-star journalist, main influential supporter of the socialist party PA.SO.K.

[7] One of the most famous lawyers, with extreme-right winged views, hired by the cop Korkoneas that shot Alexandros Grigoropoulos on December 6^th, 2008.