Signalfire

WHO KILLED THE UNBORN BABY, ALSO? [ crossposted from act forfreedomnow  slightly edited for clarity]
An insurrectionary destructionist perspective on the dead bodies of the uprising which were in a burned/locked bank in Greece;
Let’s cry for the baby, too
And have rage against capital and capitalist moralists, in order to attack better!

The workers who were locked in a bank, why did they not break down the door of the bank when they saw that people, -COMRADES- were shouting and fighting with the “weapons” that they had decided to use; stones, molotovs, bottles, sticks of the banners etc…
Were they afraid of losing their job? Were they afraid of losing their job when they knew better than anyone that the building had no fire-exit; they could also die because of an electrical fault, couldn’t they? Were they afraid of living in hunger? Other than the pregnant woman did they have children to feed? Were they afraid of living in a worse situation; getting less money then the -present-, when compared with the unemployed situation/unemployment? Do they really like to count the meaningless amounts of the capitalists’ profits? Who forced them to be inside and why? What kind of guard is this? Do they like to have money for their holidays which is like paying money for making love?
Or were they waiting for a revolution which is in a process by: “revolutionaries, marxists & socialist parties, anarchist pacifists, unions, intellectuals; the ones who have the map for the way that goes to the “free society”, the ones who are sitting in the “bourgeouis-homeland of pacifism”?
We are, and we will just think and discuss it, but for sure, it’ll be impossible for us to learn,because they are – all  “four”- dead. And nobody can speak for them, anarchists included. But we have a letter from another worker who was in the same bank on the same day, too. And we know also, when comrades wanted to burn the TV station vans they forced them to get out; they forced the “workers”: journalists, to get out of the van, and AFTERWARDS they burned the van as happened many weeks ago, also.

“All great things must first wear a terrifying mask
in order to inscribe them in the heart of humanity”
Nietzsche

Did the comrades do something “bad” in burning the bank? Of course not, we wish we could destroy them all, along with prisons, courts from now on, too. But also we would prefer, – as comrades- when they are empty as we can see and we are sure about that; when there are no innocent people, unborn babies. But if the situation is different, if it is fascist police that we are talking about, isn’t it something practical, isn’t this desire of destruction poetic, full of the desire for life?

Did the comrades really burn the bank when they knew that there were workers, who did not want to join the protests, and the feast of destruction? We are sure we can say no. But also we are sure, and ready to ask, what about the locked doors? What about the bastard ones, “anarchists” or leftists who are blaming the – comrades -, – if they did it for sure- that they burned them all, laughing at them and shouting and attacking the police at the same time?

To make a “critique” like this, especially if they are “comrades”, they must be in a situation which is encircled not only with fear, which stops their thinking. It should be the State and society attacking pyschologically masking themselves as fears too; more than just one that blocks faced with the realities of chaos’ feast.

There are also some voices who are afraid of crying. And manipulating the purposes and for sure, this is a moral of order, and it’s also to have the present order again, the order of things, the order of this world, something totally different to the natural order of things; chaos, destructionist and creative anarchy at the same time body and soul.

To fight and destroy – this world -, we should just be ourselves to feel, to think, to attack.

To take back our lives into our hands again, to destroy “everything”, everything which is beautiful when dying, when it lives in the other form. As it was happening and as written on a wall in December 2008, after Alexis’ murder…

For a poetic life with love. With tears and rage, with attack and escape.

You are not forgotton Alexis, along with the unborn and unnamed children. The murderers and planners of murders are clearly on the other side of the doors.

If we can’t cry – with or without a voice -, how we can live and enjoy life?

Let’s stop negotiation and attack the bosses of the power and prisons. Greetings to the comrades who are fighting more than symbolically.

Then, radical self critique is always necessary.

Guerilla Group Of Libertarian Destructionists and Terrorists, Rain Cell

SANTA CRUZ – Investigators with the Santa Cruz County District Attorney’s Office raided the SubRosa anarchist Cafe on Wednesday, reportedly looking for workers’ compensation documents.

Details of the raid were sparse Thursday. But Rick Martinez, Santa Cruz deputy police chief, confirmed the incident.

Wes Modes, co-founder of SubRosa, said four officers were at the Cafe and asked about “workers’ comp issues.”

“We were closed at the time,” Modes wrote in an e-mail.

“SubRosa has no employees and has an all-volunteer staff and is therefore not obligated to pay workers’ comp,” Modes said.

Once investigators left, Martinez said, members of the SubRosa called the Santa Cruz Police Department to complain that their door was kicked in and they were not treated well.

Officials from the District Attorney’s Office did not return calls late Thursday.

SubRosa’s website does not mention the raid, but asks readers to “contribute to what might end up being a long and expensive legal defense.”

The raid on SubRosa comes on the heels of the May 1 riot that led to broken windows, graffiti and paint-ball splatters causing about $100,000 in damage to 18 downtown businesses. Police have called in the FBI and have said an unnamed anarchist group is responsible and one of two men arrested in connection with the vandalism said in court he worked at SubRosa.

SubRosa has denied involvement in the riot and has said the man, Jimi Haynes, a
24-year-old transient from Fresno County, was not affiliated with the anarchist cafe.

The raid also comes on the heels of the Saturday night shut-down of Guerilla Drive-In, a do-it-yourself event that for eight years has shown movies on the blank walls of buildings, bridges and other structures. Modes, a Felton resident and self-declared anarchist, is co-founder of both SubRosa Cafe and the Guerilla Drive-In.

Martinez said the movie shut-down and the district attorney visit to SubRosa were not related.

Supporters of Guerilla Drive-In say Saturday night’s early movie ending was an unnecessary response to the May 1 riots.

“It is a knee-jerk reaction to the events of May Day,” said Guerilla Drive-In spokeswoman Elizabeth Burchfield. “I may be naive, but you’d think that getting members of the community together to clean up public space and hold family-friendly events for free would be the kind of thing the city would support.”

But the May 1 vandalism happened under the cover of a non-permitted dance party, billed as a celebration of workers’ rights. After that destruction, city leaders have said they will crack down on non-permitted events.

“I think that’s a really great thing that they’re doing. I just want them to get a permit like everyone else,” said Mayor Mike Rotkin.

Martinez said his officers were responding to a noise complaint when they encountered the movie-goers under the Soquel Avenue Bridge along the San Lorenzo River.

Had the organizers requested a permit, Rotkin said, the event could have continued because it was held before 10 p.m. and thus not violating noise ordinances.

But Burchfield said the point of Guerilla Drive-In “is to challenge these laws that make public places off limits at night,” and that includes not taking out permits beforehand.

A neighbor of SubRosa hopes to bring people together this weekend to discuss healing the community after the riot.

Steve Schnaar, bookkeeper at The Hub for Sensible Transportation at the corner of Spruce Street and Pacific Avenue, has organized three sessions of small group talks Sunday, Monday and Tuesday that he hopes will connect city residents from varying walks of life to talk about the riots and their response.

“We were affected by this,” said Schnaar, whose employer sublets space to SubRosa.

Schnaar and facilitator Christine King with the Resource Center for Nonviolence hope to draw some of the students, shopkeepers, homeless residents and family members that Guerilla Drive-In often attracts to its movies to their talks. Already, Councilmembers Don Lane and Katherine Beiers have given the discussions their support.

The talks, which are limited to 25 people per session, are “not about who did it and how are we going to punish them,” King said. “Our downtown is really special and we want to feel safe. This is something we all have in common. We’re hoping it’s an opening to move forward.”

Councilman Ryan Coonerty, whose wife’s family business had its windows shattered on May 1, said discussion is typically a positive step.

“It’s a good thing if people want to find ways to engage and talk about downtown and solutions that would be beneficial to everybody,” Coonerty said.

ATHENS — Panagiotis became an anarchist at 15, a middle-class Athenian kid attracted to anti-authoritarianism and the gritty central Exarcheia neighborhood, where Greece’s activists came of age. Over the last 26 years, he says he has thrown stones, bottles and Molotov cocktails during hundreds of anti-government demonstrations.

His identity is often hidden behind a mask and hood and layers of black clothing, the dress code of koukouloforoi, the “hooded ones” that Greek police say regularly turn peaceful protests here violent.

Three people died during the last big demonstration on May 5, when a band of koukouloforoi broke away from the largely peaceful crowd of 100,000 and firebombed Marfin Egnatia bank, killing three young workers. Many Greeks call the dead martyrs of the financial crisis, and their hooded attackers murderers.

Panagiotis, now a burly 41-year-old, says he understands. He, like virtually all the anarchists, would not give his full name for fear of reprisals, but says he and other Exarcheia activists are appalled and saddened at the deaths.

“We are not against violence,” he said, over a shot of raki at a popular Exarcheia anarchist hangout. “But when we decide to use it, we will think a hundred times about how and why. These kids on May 5 didn’t even think for a minute. They only destroyed, only for the sake of destroying.”

In a country where taking to the streets is part of national culture, the koukouloforoi have long been tolerated as urban guerrillas splintered from anarchists, far-left activists and anti-globalization campaigners, who articulate deep frustrations about Greek cronyism and corruption.

On the eve of Greece’s fourth general strike and another planned demonstration against austerity measures, they have become a leading force in what many here fear is the beginning of a long, hot summer of social unrest that could hurt the country’s economic recovery.

But the koukouloforoi are by no means a unified force. In recent years, they have grown to include vigilantes and petty criminals who are not tied to any ideology, according to police and security experts. “They are not a disciplined group that’s easy to profile,” said Mary Bossis, a professor and security expert at the University of Piraeus. “Many are hooligans or robbers or just very angry young people who want to damage anything. These days, it’s hard to know how many are activists.”

Wearing black clothing, helmets and masks and carrying clubs, the koukouloforoi hijack some of the hundreds of peaceful demonstrations that take place in Greece annually.

Their favored targets are banks, government buildings and other symbols of wealth and power.

In Greece, anti-state protest has its roots in the civil war of 1946-49 and especially the military dictatorship of 1967-74, when tens of thousands of students helped overthrow the junta.

Most anti-authoritarians in Greece are not violent, though experts note that the movements tend to attract some disaffected teenagers and twentysomethings from comfortable Athenian suburbs. They rail against authority on Facebook groups like “I want to blow up Parliament (when everyone’s in there).” Like protest movements from Ukraine to China, they communicate and organize themselves using the Internet and cell phone text messages.

Many anarchists approached since the May 5 demonstrations declined to be interviewed, saying they felt unfairly targeted by the Greek police and mistreated by the news media. Only a few, like Panagiotis would go so far as to provide their first names.

In an interview last month, Kostas, a 21-year-old university student and anarchist who declined to give his full name because he feared police reprisal, said that he sympathized with koukouloforoi, even if he had never donned their garb.

Kostas said he lived with his parents in the upper middle-class suburb of Halandri. He was outraged that the Greek government applied for billions in loans from the International Monetary Fund and the European Union, which he likened to “two faceless, soulless bosses.”

Greek politicians “are the criminals, not the koukouloforoi,” he said, after an anti-I.M.F. protest on April 23 where he had broken shop windows in central Athens with pieces of broken marble.

A spokesperson for Public Order Minister, Michalis Chrysohoidis, said the minister, who in 2002 led the arrest of the long-elusive 17 November terrorist group, wanted to protect Greeks’ “sacred right” to protest peacefully. But because of what the ministry called a “zero tolerance” policy toward violence, the police have also stepped up patrols in Exarcheia — often unfairly, activists say.

On the evening of May 5, police officers raided the center of a prominent leftist and anti-authoritarian group called Diktio, or the Network of Political and Social Rights, injuring several people, said Yianna Kourtovik, a lawyer and longtime Diktio member. “They called us murderers,” she said.

In December 2008, Athens was shaken by weeks of rioting after a police officer shot and killed 15-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos after a standoff in Exarcheia. The teenager, who lived in a wealthy Athens neighborhood, is considered a victim of police brutality by many Exarcheia activists.

Though the activists have widely denounced the May 5 violence, they acknowledge that their call to revolution is often misunderstood by young people. Some anarchists say the movement has created a “monster.”

Vassilis Chajiakovou, the 44-year-old manager of the Ianos bookstore in central Athens, faced down one of the koukouloforoi who bombed Marfin Egnatia bank and his own bookstore on May 5. The bookstore was already in flames when a wiry young man in the hood and mask threatened Mr. Chajiakovou with a gasoline bomb.

“I’ll burn you alive,” Mr. Chajiakovou recalled the young man yelling in a shrill, boyish voice. But when Mr. Chajiakovou charged him, the young man ran away.

Across the street at the bank, employees trapped inside were screaming for help. Soon, two women and a man in their 30s were dead from smoke inhalation.

That day’s protests had a particular resonance to Mr. Chajiakovou. A former anarchist and anti-authoritarian himself, he recalled how, at 19, he had thrown rocks at the French nationalist politician Jean-Marie Le Pen, who was visiting Athens in 1985, while his friends lobbed Molotov cocktails.

Years later, his bookstore, which suffered €100,000, or $126,000, in damages during the recent attack, became a popular hangout for counterculture intellectuals. Yet now he fears that a legitimate protest movement that once was motivated by social justice has become consumed by hate.

“I don’t want to believe the people who threw bombs at us and murdered three people across the street belong to any legitimate ideology,” he said. “The people who stormed into our store wanted to kill for the thrill of it. There’s nothing revolutionary about that.”

“I think the fundamental mistakes made by everyone, from groups on the radical-left in general to the RAF itself, was that we weren’t based enough in reality and were too obsessed with ideology. There were meetings, papers, concept discussions, events, campaigns – but these weren’t reality”

Helmut Pohl.

Specifically in North America, where the anarchist and autonomous left is incredibly  weak, there is a certain heroification of radical currents in Europe or elsewhere which admittedly are stronger then our own, this serves to obscure the reality of the global relations of force between proletarian autonomy and capital.

to illustrate this point, one may note the recent police occupation of Exarchia, this district often mythologized by American anarchists as some sort of liberated zone, a awe inspiring base area of revolutionary counter power, has found itself taken over by somewhere around a thousand police without significant resistance.

while in Berlin arguably along with Hamburg, one of the strong points of the revolutionary left in Germany, a fascist street demo, was pulled off without major disruption.

in truth, even in some EU countries where the revolutionary left has built up an immensely greater social base then it possess in the United States, it is still in the grand scheme of things a marginal force.

whatever one may think of their politics, the Maoists in India have more political and social power, then the autonomous and anarchist currents do worldwide.

the purpose of making these points is not to encourage a resigned cynical defeatism, but to challenge the complacent triumphalism  of low expectations that is a common enough feature of radical politics in this country, in the context of a scene in which many people happily announce their retreat from even attempting to build a mass movement, camouflaging their acceptance of their own irrelevance with extremist verbal posturing.