Repression – Page 25

Thessaloniki, Greece: Responsibility claim for arson attack on COSMOTE van in solidarity with Giannis Michailidis & anarchist prisoners

Posted on 2023/06/04 - 2023/06/04 by darknights

VICTORY IN THE HUNGER STRIKE OF GIANNIS MICHAILIDIS

Once again dystopia is dangerously close to us. The state is constantly inventing new ways to undermine more and more our living conditions. Labour rights are now a thing of the past as partial employment contracts, the daily dismissal of trade unionists, often fatal work accidents, wage cuts, and the repayment or non-payment of bonuses under extortionate conditions are the status quo. At the same time, it is becoming increasingly shamelessly obvious how expendable our lives are to the state apparatus. The 57 murders in Tempe, the daily deportations and repatriations of migrant women on equally murderous terms, and the more ‘indirect’ method of the state’s death policy by raising the prices of everyday products, electricity and gas, as well as rents. Of course, even if you have to pay for all this, no one can guarantee that the next day you will still have a house to live in, since there is no longer any protection of the first home and the cops and prosecutors may appear one day in your living room and literally throw you out on the street within a few hours with all the things you have managed to collect.

To enable this condition to be established, a lot of money was spent on hiring cops from every service and buying official vehicles, placing them in ‘key’ places like squares, universities, hills and playgrounds. Apart from their physical presence, the state is more present than ever before through the installation of cameras on every corner, illegally or legally placed, and through the microphones and cameras on our mobile phones. No longer is the ‘big brother’ a fictional character from a novel, but the terrifying everyday life in which we live and grow up, where social control is brutal and universal.

The context of modern totalitarianism could not fail to include the further “upgrading” of the prison system and prisons. The state and those in power, known for their fetishism in punishing and torturing anyone who opposes them, are constantly reinforcing the dungeons of democracy, aiming at the complete annihilation of the imprisoned militants. Thus, in the winter of 2022, in a more comprehensive attempt to fortify the state against the social upheaval that prevailed, the new penal code is passed. According to it, type C prisons were reintroduced under the name of ”maximum security prisons”, disciplinary procedures were tightened, the conditions for granting leave and for the temporary dismissal of those prosecuted under 187A or accused of robbery and drug offences were changed, thus discrediting the position of political prisoners. It also introduces a ban on the transfer of certain categories of prisoners to rural prisons. Continue reading “Thessaloniki, Greece: Responsibility claim for arson attack on COSMOTE van in solidarity with Giannis Michailidis & anarchist prisoners” →

U$A: 2023 Statement from Marius Mason for June 11 EN/ES

Posted on 2023/06/04 - 2023/06/04 by darknights

Dear Community, Family and Friends,

Thank you for the work you are doing to make the change we need to make into the world for our collective survival. Your dedication, support and love are a constant source of inspiration and motivation for me; and I am betting for other prisoners, as well.

This has been as eventful year and a half here at FCI Danbury. My transfer to a male facility had been viewed with great trepidation both by those supportive of trans people and by those who are adamantly opposed to our existence. I’ve had many memorable experiences; some humiliating, some merely annoying and awkward. But, also several that have been rewarding and deeply affirming.

There has definitely been a sense of working things out as we go—the way strip searches have been conducted has been all over the board. Sometimes they have been done by one male staff person, sometimes by one female staff person and several times by several male staff people. Strip searches occur before and after visits, before and after medical trips out, and also when going into the SHU (I had to go there before a medical procedure to fast).

I missed one that was conducted down at the Rec when a fight between inmates was suspected. For the most part, as embarrassing as strip searches can be (they definitely trigger my dysphoria), most staff have been professional about them. There have been some unprofessional remarks made on occasion, though, that have been dehumanizing and dispiriting, but actually have happened a lot less often than I was expecting. A nice surprise. Continue reading “U$A: 2023 Statement from Marius Mason for June 11 EN/ES” →

U$A: Eric King Statement for June 11, 2023 EN/ES

Posted on 2023/06/04 by darknights

Greetings comrades. Let me tell you about this prison, the federal supermax ADX [in Florence, Colorado]. In this joint there are different levels and units with varying levels of physical isolation and communication, but there are things we all experience. Everyone is locked down at least 21 hours a day, at max 24. When you have inside rec you are by yourself in a room without a pull up bar. Outside rec cages are 8 x 10 foot dog kennels surrounded by concrete walls and a chain link roof — a cage within a cage. Unless you are in the pre-release unit (K-A) or long-term elder unit (K-B), you will never be in the same room as another person. And even in those units you only come around your ‘group’ — which is one to four other people — for inside rec. The other 22 ½ hours are in your cell by yourself. I have been in C-unit, the discipline unit and K-A; there is one other person in my group.

The cells are sparse. Concrete walls and double doors make any communication between convicts very difficult. Cells feature a low concrete beed, an oddly shitty mattress, a concrete desk, concrete stool, and in some units, a shelf above the desk. You never have solo interactions with staff — you are always double-manned with one of them carrying a steel baton, and you’re always cuffed behind your back. Depending on the unit, you can get 4–10 calls per month. I’ve made two ‘live-monitored’ calls in the past 10 months, but I’m being told that by participating in psychology programs I’ll earn a few calls per month. Time will tell. We’re allowed five visits per month, all non-contact in a concrete booth over the phone. All visits have to be scheduled in advance, which can be difficult with such restricted communication. I’m the only Anarchist here, but I’m definitely not the only political prisoner. Within this prison there is a group of prisoners the US government has attempted to bury. The general abolitionist community has consented to this, and it’s devastating.

The most restrictive unit in the most restrictive prison in America is H-Unit, which is for people on SAMS (Special Administrative Measures). These restrictions are placed by the Attorney General, and they are sickening. SAMS vary per captive, but all entail only being allowed to write to direct blood family and your lawyer. The FBI must read and approve all letters, magazines, and books. Calls are severely limited, live-monitored by the FBI, and reviewed by magistrate judges. These convicts get three showers per week. The vast majority of people on SAMS are Muslim and foreign born. Because their families are in Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan, or in Africa, it is nearly impossible to get visits, calls, or mail. These people will never see their families or home countries again. Their children will get married, have kids, grow old, and they will never know it. If that doesn’t make you sick, I don’t even know what we’re doing here. Continue reading “U$A: Eric King Statement for June 11, 2023 EN/ES” →

Athens, Greece: Responsibility claim for incendiary attack on a Volkswagen dealership

Posted on 2023/05/14 - 2023/05/17 by darknights

The future dystopia of a fully controlled life by smart cities, 5G, where your fridge communicates with your mobile phone or a street lamp, and supermarkets offer you everything you ask for in the (anti)social media is already here. Everything is increasingly connected and everything is being monitored. It’s a future where people will be controlled by the artificial intelligence of big capital – big data and machine learning. Whatever information capital collects is shared with the state. Technology means repression, blackmail and total social control.

At the same time, the ecological war for plutocratic resources called green energy is nothing but a new form of slavery on other continents, allowing Western capitalism to be as independent as possible from Russian gas or oil-producing countries. All this is another new great stage of capitalism – green capitalism. It is the exploitation of the climate crisis and biological extinction by capital and the state.

When the New Democracy government came to power, it began an unprecedented upgrade of the repressive apparatus in numbers and technical equipment. The cops are used as a solution to every “problem”: the pandemic, the universities, demonstrations and protests of all types, the gentrification of Athens. The cops are the number one remedy for everything.

All of the above are condensed in the memorandum of understanding between the government of the New Democracy and Volkswagen with the aim of turning Astypalaia into the first smart island, a laboratory that leads the inhabitants to become guinea pigs of the dystopian future. The contract began in September 2021, and aims to gradually replace the island’s conventional vehicles with electric ones. The project is being portrayed by the mainstream media as a technological leap that will benefit the environment and residents. In reality, of course, the memorandum of understanding is nothing more than another way of increasing profitability and repression at the expense of the natural environment and the inhabitants. VW will be able to test autonomous vehicles on the island on terms outside the strict EU legislation, gaining the upper hand against competition. At the same time there is talk of installing hundreds of wind turbines on the island, turning it into a hub for electricity generation and completely destroying the natural environment. Finally, one of the first moves of the project was the donation of electric vehicles from VW to the murderous assault battalions of the cops and the coast guard.

The cooperation between the bloodthirsty New Democracy government and VW is not unprecedented. VW has a long history of supporting fascist and oppressive regimes. From Nazi Germany in the 1930s, to the military dictatorships in Brazil and Argentina, to Franco’s Spain, VW has always been and continues to be at the forefront of capital profiting on top of harsh oppression.

For all these reasons, at dawn on May 10, we visited the VW dealership on Alexandras Avenue. Our intervention resulted in the destruction of several new electric vehicles and the destruction of the front of the dealership, without endangering passers-by or residents of the area. We consider it an integral part of anarchy to recognize those who profit on oppression, misery and exploitation and it is our duty to return the violence they cause.

We dedicate our action to the prisoners of the social war, Fotis, Iasona, Panos and Lambros, who are being prosecuted for the attack on the Piraeus traffic police.

Solidarity with our wounded comrades Boris and Serge from the militant ecological defence on the territories of the French state.

Solidarity to Mónica Caballero and Francisco Solar whose trial against them starts in a few days.

For a Black May, in memory of comrade Mauricio Morales, who fell in battle 14 years ago.

Anarchists

Source: athens.indymedia

Athens, Greece: “Put an incendiary device at your neighborhood cop” Responsibility claim for incendiary attack at cop’s apartment

Posted on 2023/05/05 by darknights

Solidarity to G.Voulgaris, Th. Chatziangelou, P. Kalaitzis

We wish a good recovery to comrade Alfredo Cospito

Solidarity to the 4 imprisoned comrades F.D. – I.R. – P. & L.B.

Signal of solidarity with the French insurgents

The unswerving solidarity with the imprisoned comrades, the multiform daily struggle against the power structure and the inexhaustible desire to destroy it will always be in our consciences and will help us to define the path of the insurrection.

Whenever you take your holidays within the normality of defined etiquette traditions we are given another opportunity to break through it to remind you that nothing is interrupted as long as our lives are silenced, imprisoned and suppressed.

It must be understood that wherever the scum of the authoritarian system responsible for repressing, punishing, beating, raping those who do not fit in or who oppose it exist and reside, they will be targeted

As our lives degrade and fragment their realm of emasculation expands along with their dying civilization. While to them not a nostril is opened we continue to plan and act step by step for our revenge.

On the night of April 13 we placed an incendiary device at the entrance of the apartment building of the cop Maravelakis Nektarios (Patriarchou Jeremiou 63) as an act of revenge on the police force.

10 – 100 – 1000s of arsons

Put an incendiary device at your neighborhood cop.

Source: athens.indymedia

Athens, Greece: Responsibility claim for attacks on Airbnb, hotels and cameras in Exarcheia

Posted on 2023/04/28 by darknights

In a virgin forest, a wild mountain, a quiet clean sea, a beautiful neighbourhood, the capitalist sees a “fillet”, a new field of investment and profitability. There is nothing in the world we live in, in the world of state power and the capitalist organization of the economy, that does not have a certain exchange value, that is not valued in money. Such is the nature of capital that it is driven to perpetual expansion as a condition of its survival and reproduction. Everything in nature and society is a target and a field for exploitation. In a miniature version of this process, the neighbourhood of Exarchia has recently been subjected to one of the strongest attacks in recent decades by the State and Capital. Like many other neighbourhoods in the centre of Athens, Exarcheia is still an ‘unexploited’ field for various kinds of big investors. A neighbourhood in the centre of the city, in the midst of its facade, that has been “left behind” in terms of infrastructure, big investments and profit supply to the capitalist machine.

But it is also a special neighborhood. It is different from the other – several other – downtown neighbourhoods that remain ‘underdeveloped’ and undeveloped and for which the same future of ‘development’ is foreseen. It is the neighbourhood of movements, of struggles, of politicised youth, of radicalism, of anarchists. The state has every reason to allocate many of its forces and resources to subjugate, refine, clean up, normalize Exarcheia and offer it, under its auspices, as a pawn to investors. The state knows that, traditionally, Exarcheia is the reference point of radical movements, the “headquarters” of the internal enemy. In recent years, and with particular intensity during the New Democracy government, the state has been attempting to fight what it imagines to be the final battle for the neighbourhood.

This is not, of course, a choice detached from the big picture of state policy. At the juncture of the last few years, the state seems to have considered – and, moreover, proclaimed – that it is the historically and socially appropriate moment to end the deep-rooted domestic revolutionary tradition, political radicalism, anarchists, movements, what its right-wing managers call the “ideological hegemony of the left”. In the era of economic crisis, high inflation and the coming recession, war and geopolitical upheavals, the Greek state is being shielded in the face of an unstable future. Continue reading “Athens, Greece: Responsibility claim for attacks on Airbnb, hotels and cameras in Exarcheia” →

Italy: Updates on the Genoa trial of Gianluca and Evelin

Posted on 2023/04/28 by darknights

Updates on the Genoa trial of Gianluca and Evelin

UPDATES on the GENOA TRIAL of GIANLUCA and EVELIN.

The undoubted crisis that the capitalist mode of production is going through today manifests itself in an economy that bases its wealth on war, on the robbery and plundering of the commodity-rich global south, and in the sharpening of the class struggle.

While it is true that capitalism continually seeks “alternative” solutions that will ensure its continuation, often succeeding in finding them and thus creating new pockets of profit for the market, it is also true that the resource crisis and especially today’s climate crisis will not grant alternatives to this parasitic presence for long.
The commodity crisis affects not only the production of secondary consumer goods in the technology, war and digital industries, but also primary resources such as water. This leads not only to a change in geopolitical arrangements, but also to internal conflicts between exploited and exploiters as the example of reservoirs in France or mining in Germany highlights. Objectively, even in Italy, beyond the obvious shortcomings of radical opposition initiatives, the “hunt for ore” or residual gas supplies are accentuating the extractive machine of ruthless multinationals that destroy territories to increase their profits, with the favor of state concessions.

But the crisis of production is a possible prospect today, which is why states are organizing in an attempt to assert their interests and prevent radical struggles and forms of internal guerrilla warfare.

Against this backdrop the authoritarian turn underway in Italy and elsewhere takes shape, which on the one hand is evident in the adoption of economic and “social” policies aimed at ever greater class exploitation, and on the other in the tightening of repression against political crimes.

In the last period the authoritarian turn taken by the state has clearly and heavily characterized the exclusively political reading of social events and struggles by entering even the judicial spheres. It has strongly conditioned the use of repression with the application of punitive instruments that remain an objective problem for political prisoners, such as 41 bis, hostility and crimes arbitrarily reinterpreted, reformulated and used in a vindictive way as massacre and associative crimes. Continue reading “Italy: Updates on the Genoa trial of Gianluca and Evelin” →

Rome, Italy: About the constitutional court hearing on the convictions for anarchists Alfredo Cospito and Anna Beniamino in the Scripta Manent trial + Anarchist Alfredo Cospito ‘interrupted’ his hunger strike undertaken since Oct. 20 [Corrected]

Posted on 2023/04/20 - 2023/04/28 by darknights

DN Note: We have been informed by comrades in Italy that comrade Alfredo has only interrupted his hunger strike, that the isolation that is 41 bis prevents us knowing what his real motivations are at present.

About the constitutional court hearing on the convictions for anarchists Alfredo Cospito and Anna Beniamino in the Scripta Manent trial (Rome, April 18, 2023)

A hearing was held today in the constitutional court on the case of Alfredo Cospito and Anna Beniamino on charges of political massacre (art. 285 c. p.) within the Scripta Manent trial.

The current Cirielli law (year 2005, Berlusconi government) prevents mitigating factors from outweighing aggravating factors in the case of recidivism. In Alfredo Cospito’s case, in particular, this would have resulted in a certain sentence of hostile life imprisonment despite the fact that the action he and Anna are accused of did not cause any victims.

The court therefore found this provision unconstitutional. More, reading the terse press release that came out of the building, the court seems to have raised constitutionality doubts in general with respect to all those cases in which the fixed penalty is configured solely as life imprisonment.

Recall that Alfredo Cospito has been on hunger strike for almost 6 months precisely against 41 bis and hostile life imprisonment. A struggle for which his comrade is risking his life and during which he may already have suffered permanent neurological damage. A struggle that Alfredo has always reiterated is not just for himself, but for everyone, particularly in solidarity with anarchist, communist and revolutionary prisoners. Today’s decision will have consequences not only for the fate of our comrade, but is a blow, however circumscribed, to the institution of life imprisonment in this country. Continue reading “Rome, Italy: About the constitutional court hearing on the convictions for anarchists Alfredo Cospito and Anna Beniamino in the Scripta Manent trial + Anarchist Alfredo Cospito ‘interrupted’ his hunger strike undertaken since Oct. 20 [Corrected]” →

Chile: In the face of the removal of the Noticias de la guerra social website

Posted on 2023/04/15 by darknights

In 2014, we started this counter-information project dedicated to disseminating and documenting the various attacks on the domain, some of them claimed and others anonymous, maintaining a simple format that kept alive only in and with the very pulse of the conflict.

Without worrying too much, we decided to use the most popular service at the time, “wordpress,” since the websites hosted in other “alternative” servers (noblogs, espiv, altervista, lahaine, entodaspartes, etc.) were not considered to be “alternative”. [altervista does not qualify as an “alternative” server, since it is part of the Mondadori group, ed.]) were often removed, either due to repressive attacks or simply due to the termination of their respective projects.

In October-November 2022 https://noticiasdelaguerrasocial.wordpress.com/ was removed from the web, losing that valuable archive and tool for communication and information among antagonists. Far from appealing to “freedom of expression” or complaining about the servers’ own “privacy policies,” we merely noted the fragility of Internet-based projects. Fragility that we knew a priori, but we decided to bet on informal communication and the diffusion of living and latent conflict.

Questions remain in the air: what are the characteristics of our media? How solid are they? What is their degree of autonomy? Do we have our own infrastructure of communication and counter-information? How dependent or susceptible are we? We need to draw some collective lessons from the Italian state’s repressive attack on communication tools such as Radioazione, Culmine or “Vetriolo.” Continue reading “Chile: In the face of the removal of the Noticias de la guerra social website” →

Athens, Greece: Taking responsibility for the attack on the central MAT riot cops’ den in Goudi area

Posted on 2023/04/15 - 2023/04/15 by darknights

We take responsibility for the massive arson attack that took place at the central premises of the riot police in Goudi on Tuesday 28 March. Our action comes as a minimal response to the orgy of repression unleashed by the New Democracy government against the mass and militant protests against the state-capitalist crime in Tempe.

The government’s law and order doctrine is the other side of neoliberal policies, class inequality, poverty and privatisation. In the run-up to the election period, attacking the law and order doctrine, attacking the forces of repression, causing unrest targeting, among others, the pigs of the police, is a priority in order to defeat in practice this political doctrine that has left dead and wounded in its wake.

The incendiary attack on the central riot police headquarters was a signal of solidarity with those who took to the streets and clashed with the uniformed watchdogs of the State. To those who lost their own people to State-capitalist crime. To those who are thinking of taking the step to move from abstract condemnation, denunciation, peaceful protest, to a political strategy of which revolutionary violence is an integral part.

Against the organised violence and terrorism of the State, with their guns pointing at us and sometimes going off – always by accident – with their truncheons breaking our bones, with their tear gas suffocating us. Organized revolutionary violence that seeks small and large cracks to make itself felt, to fight back, to make fear change sides, is the only solution.

Solidarity with the anarchist hunger striker Alfredo Cospito who is fighting against the regime of isolation and torture 41bis

Solidarity to those who are in the streets of rage in France and who are revolting in the heart of Europe-capitalist castle.

Cell of Destabilization

Source: https://athens.indymedia.org/post/1624777/

Via & Translated by Act for freedom now!