Thessaloniki squat “Terra Incognita” on the deaths of May 5th

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Thessaloniki Squat “Terra Incognita” on the events of May 5th

(for a full list of all translated statements on the May 5th events on Occupied London please see “the anarchists speak out”. Here is the news as it broke out; for our updates on the events of the day, follow the May 5th tag )

[Greek original ]
Concerning the events of May 5th

May 5th. Thousands of people take to the streets, we live through a shocking historical experience. In this atmosphere comes the news that makes our blood freeze. Three dead workers. The enthusiasm immediately turns into grief and rage. We can only put together a political statement regarding the events with much difficulty, however we believe that it is worth trying in this direction.

The tragic death from suffocation of three persons, is one more piece of information that the regime and its mechanisms of propaganda try to manage, expecting of course to gain maximum profit of it. In the remainder of the statement, we will not be possessed by any tendency of answer or plea in the calumnies as perhaps it appears. For us it is apparent that an attack is being launched against the entire anarchist/ anti-authoritarian radical scene and against the ideas and the values for which it struggles as such, in face of accusing it for the death of these three persons.

If one thing is known for certain, it is the fact that the state and its mechanisms can manage any deaths they leave behind in their course. From the galleys of labour with the hundreds of labour “accidents” every year, to the borders and the cold-blooded murders of immigrants. From the civilizing wars of Afghanistan, to the bordello – prisons of the countryside and the super-profiting businesses of the trafficking of women. And the list has no end – it always continues.

And to imagine, we only talk of direct (if we can we use this term) deaths that the system manages comfortably. Because the system of raw exploitation of persons produces violence every day. Violence that is channelled through the direct or indirect terrorizing of societies which, fragmented as they are, and without essential knowledge and real information, are not in most cases in position to conceive this violence – let alone to respond. It is no coincidence that henceforth the most famous threats hanging above our heads are:

“Strike equals Unemployment”
“Claiming dignity equals Hunger”
“Resistance equals Imprisonment and torture”

An immeasurable daily death is that of seediness produced by the terror-state of the market and the bosses, whose marks we see only little by little, from the individuals lead to suicide due to debt, to the unverifiable and henceforth even blind metropolitan violence exercised by the oppressed to all directions.

This is the result that the system foresees and tries to adapt to its own account. We do not try to justify the diffusing of violence from the side of the oppressed, we only try to explain this violence. The regime seeks the disorientation and by extension the easier management of the results of the crisis at all levels – a crisis it continuously produces itself as an essential mechanism of bloodletting and submission.

In order to avoid its own collapse, the system seeks and aims to manage for its profit the death of social relations, nodal and leading condition of its very existence.

We experience an attempt to manage yet another death.
How this management is taking place within this particular economic situation is something that we shall henceforth in our skin.
- With the raw terrorizing and our bombarding with misinformation at the same time.
- With the falsification and concealment of the state attack against the society.
- With the effort of breaking into pieces the society and its parts that are in struggle, under the orchestrated targeting and calumniating of its most aggressive political components.

The ostensibly “fanatic defenders of human life and democracy” try in any way and especially in this particular economic situation to step on bodies, to stop an evident tendency of large parts of the society to engage into radical practices of struggle and by this we do not only mean [attacks with] “fire” (see the recent occupation of the National TV Channel from teachers, and its violent repression).

Trying to turn the eyes of the “peaceful demonstrators” to an “internal enemy” of the demonstrations themselves this time, they accomplish one thing. They reveal how much the system and its supporters shake in the idea of their challenging. Some challenging that takes flesh and bones as mass conflict with toppling terms.

At this time the choice of counter-violence, (once again we do not mean only “fire”) has been diffused.

And the authorities know this well. Thus they create, once more, an atmosphere that now has some entirely obvious targets, beyond trying to make an example of those who consider making claims with dynamic terms: to scare, to terrorize and to de-contextualise something that as it seems, they themselves who try to form such an atmosphere are afraid of.

The “fanatic defenders of human life and democracy”, the “civilized” cannibals of the “news” and “informative” programs do not hesitate in face of anything. The mouthpieces of the regime will be the last ones to apologize for their crimes. The fact that the woman was pregnant for them was only an occasion for more blood.

That they do not give a dime for the human life was, is and will be the basic characteristic of all willing supporters of this miserable system.

We are not surprised. This is what we always have been saying.
However:

We are unable to know “who”, because we were not there. We can, however, interpret partly the “how” and the “why’s”. In the street meet disparate [social] pieces that not only hide a lot of internal oppositions but also bridgeless gaps. What we know is that the choice of violence not as means, but as treaty of existence, self-construction, confirmation through an image, does not have anything to offer to what we call competition with political terms. On the contrary, it is as far as hostile. When somebody operates with spectacular terms, they make action an end to itself. Counter-violence is a political tool among many, what it is not is a tool of survival in the street, or a habit. Thus the tripartite means-institution of means-economic situation is not separated. It is continuously checked by the subjects, and their choices that are translated in political responsibility, give it substance, name and space. It is the capable and necessary treaty in order to promote the issue of social emancipation and it is in this frame that we owe to act, to the extent that we can deter and isolate the logics that destroy overnight what people in struggle have been constructing for years.

According to our previous analysis, as anarchists, we cannot have any relation with the paranoia that power promotes. We do not see windows, we see the persons and their relations. We fight so the windows are broken at last from the inside. And this will not happen from one day to the other, nor can it happen in a moment. The gaze of people in struggle should not be locked to the shield or the shop-front.

As anarchists, we struggle for the emancipation of humans from what oppresses them. For solidarity and dignity. For human life. No miserable beings will accomplish changing the course of the anarchist antiauthoritarian movement, let alone its history.

It is the authorities who murder
and they know it, as much as each and every person does
Terra incognita squat, May 2010

terraincognita.squat.gr/