Fear First Nests in Our Souls and Then Raises the Walls of Its Prisons

A provocation… The flight of Christodoulos Ksiros from prison and his return to the armed struggle.

Many lies… The tv monologue, which describes how things inside prison are, making them look like a movie. “Terrorists who run things in prison…”

“The members of CCF are bossing prison guards around”

“Terrorists celebrate new year’s Eve and plan a prison escape.”

The enemy… The contruction of a prison inside prison codenamed “maximum security prison, type C”.

A truth… All of the world’s locks are not enough to imprison our unfaltering decision to remain enemies of authority until the end…

I. Propaganda becomes practice

In recent months, journalists, as owners of the only truth, following the commands of authority, created a teriffying atmosphere. A television script of “truth”, that talked about “bloodthirsty terrorists” and which was enriched with a provocative bounty of four million euros for every aspiring snitch, who would contribute to the arrest of the wanted persons. Behind that ommunicative tide of lies, the truth of repression made its appearance.

Propaganda is followed by action…

The police campaign started with dozens of evasions in the houses of comrades and other individuals of the anarchist movement. At the same time, the terror hysteria had already thrived and the time was right to test the proposition of staritng thr first Greek Guandanamo. A Guandanamo, which authority firstly seeks to apply in Domokos prison, then in every prison and then everywhere, in the streets, in the city squares, into the people’s brains and souls. Because that is the target, indeed.

The fascist former judge, who runs the Ministry of Justice already pulls the strings, gaining the consent or even the applause of the tv public.

II. The isolation of oblivion

The maximum security prison doesn’t only mean more bars and thicker cement, which hides the sun. It is not only a legal poison that murders slowly and steadily the life of prisoners.

It is an experiment of amnesia. A scientific procedure, in order for the prisoners to forget and to be forgotten.

The increase of the limit of jail time, the ban of permits, the sensory isolation by removing and reducing human contact with our loved ones aim to make us forget there is life. A life that goes beyond the walls of the prison yard. At the same time they are burrying us in maximum security cement tombs, they seek us to be defeated by oblivion.

More specifically, they want to lock the experience of the armed guerilla, to disconnect it from reality and to delete it, both as history and as an experience. Whatever is being forgotten, is doomed to die…

III. Power loves to divide

On March 27, 2014, prisoner Ilia Kareli was murdered, a few days after he stabbed a prison guard.

Kareli was beaten to death by cops and prison guards. He is not the first and will not be the last one who gets released inside a coffin. His case just couldn’t be hidden behind excuses and lies.

Because everybody knows that prison, in its own way, is the kingdom of death. Death runs the prison, sometimes in a slow everyday manner through psychotropics and drugs and the blank pages of the diary and some other times in the form of bureaucratic statistics, lack of medical staff and dead-ends inside four walls.

At the same time fear runs the prisons with division as its partner. The punishment of the maximum security prisons divides the prisoners. There are the insubordinate-dangerous prisoners and the obedient ones, the “good” ones, the willing collaborators of the wardens and of the prosecutor. This is not something new, but now it is official. The draft bill about the maximum security prisons is clear. A prisoner that will help with information to prevent “terrorist actions” or the arrest of “terrorists” enjoys the state’s petting namely he is being released and included in a witness protection program. The poison of suspicion runs through the prison’s vains. The pimps have a new motive since the state can reward them with its own version of “freedom”. But there is something even worse than pimp. The new maximum security prisons work as a disincentive. The law is clear. If the prosecutor considers a prisoner to be “dangerous”, no matter what the “criminal offense” is, then he may automatically be characterized as a Type C prisoner and be transferred to maximum security prisons.

What does this mean behind the lines? Than anyone who claims the slightest of dignity inside the prison, from protesting against the living conditions to opposing the offensive behavior of the guards, he may be characterized as a “problem”. So there is now a storage room for all annoying “problems”. Those storages have a name… these are the maximum security prisons.

This way the heads of the prisons are trying to sink the prisoners in indifference and passivity. There is no lifeline for this sinking, only delusions that find shelter in silence.

IV. From theory to action

We don’t like analyses for the sake of analysis. Our wish is to break the surface of the problem and seek its extermination.

It is a fact that Democracy is an iron fist with a velvet glove. Now that the velvet glove is ragged only the iron is left. Authority as a whole has run out of promises and the only thing left are threats and punishment. Above the remains of the consumerist paradise, the petty happiness, the small property and the possession of objects, rises the Law and Order Party. The authority says “those that I cannot befool, at least I will intimidate…” So fear rules. The Conspiracy of Cells of Fire have made our intentions clear. To terror you respond with terror. The only way to dissipate fear and its tyranny is to transfer it in the enemy’s yard. The anarchist armed guerilla through autonomous affinity cells that sometimes meet inside the FAI informal network and sometimes they don’t is our response to the authority.

Of course for us who live in the land of captivity, there are few choices and they are often locked. But in the difficulty lies the beauty of the struggle.

Until we create “our own day” we often find ourselves in an intermediate state of struggle. Just like today, the moment that this text is being written, there are protests in almost all prisons in Greece against the fascist draft bill about the Type C prisons (by denying to be locked in at noon, prisoners’ gatherings and slogans in the yards, abstention from meals etc).

We are aware of the contradictions that exist in protesting inside the prisons. To put it simply, for us even a golden prison is always a prison. What we want is not the amelioration of the living conditions in the prison, but the destruction of the prison itself. Certainly, the intermediate struggles can neither express us in full nor do they contain the amount of hate we feel against prisons. But in a state of captivity, even these short moments of rudimentary destabilization of the prison’s normal functioning are, maybe, some necessary breathings that keep our promise alive, that “our day will come…”

V. For a… New Atlantis

We know that every day dozens of insubordination actions meet, wishing to take down the world of authority. Through the ruins of the state and the society a new uncharted territory may rise, not in geographical terms, but with unlimited freedom. In this new Atlantis there won’t be an inch of ground for prisons and hangmen. Today from the prisons of Greece we send strength and solidarity to the imprisoned brothers and sisters around the world. Separately though we want to mention Nicola and Alfredo (imprisoned for an action of FAI) in the special wing of the italian prisons, where their mail is being censored and their texts confiscated by the police of… thought.

Comrades we are always by your side.