Letter from prison

A month after my arrest I still remain sunken in thoughts trying to find moments of calm and clarity, so I can finally put the pen down to write a couple of words. My mood changes at the speed of light, it goes up and down non-stop and is finding it hard to find a steady point to hold on to. The account of what happened in Nea Filadelfia sickens me, the renewed conclusions that come out hurt me, the realization of what exactly happened kills me. I relapse when listening to daily boring and endless discussions evaluating months, years, charges and all the other relevant matters. We know very well why we are in here and the reason is definitely not for some common criminal practices just like we know that from now on time does not necessarily roll with us counting down to the exit.

That afternoon of April, one fucking mistake of ours was more than enough to enclave us and stay there to haunt our dreams. In one moment the universe was de-stabilized, the hands of the clock turned back and the flow made a sudden reverse. One fucking conspiratorial rule was not followed that day — in a series of many followed — and this was more than enough for the thugs of the anti-terrorist force to catch us. In a — as much as the term is allowed — unsuspecting moment the bastards got the upper hand. Four people, a circle of anarchists, a cell in Koridallos. A series of arrests that took place these last years in front of us were enough to trouble us but not to make us realize the surgical accuracy and consistency our moves require in the frames of security. What is required for sure in this cases is the strict alignment of attack and security and obviously I am not talking about making discounts on the first part. We saw imprisonments, we saw numerous prosecutions coming to people from nowhere, we knew very well about discreet and indiscreet surveillances but still the bad moment came. Let me be the last sucker that gets caught, I will be glad, I would accept it as an honour to manage to write the epilogue in such a long history. This is why you comrades out there, while conspiring your plans, look at each other and say: “We will do better than them. They got to the impossible, we will dare the unthinkable!” And this promise might secure you the ticket to the sky…

These imprinted thoughts are a retreat before emotions, more of a soul deposition than an “obligatory” deposition of speech, an attempt to find already existing common worlds and an individual redefinition on exterior factors, which all together and each one separately anticipate the absolute. The words in here want to communicate directly with the insurgent heart out there. A heart which was shot from authority at the peak of its innocence and since then was scared for ever. It was shaken, wounded and bled endlessly but a strange thing — destined to be revealed later — saved it. And this heart did not cease, but was only left to not feel anything, except hate. Time passed however and slowly slowly it started feeling some interior processes. A tough dual between numerous insecurities and their overcoming, were evolving with the intensity increasing rapidly. It wasn’t long before the inevitable came and this heart broke and overflowed, releasing from its depths a mysterious, new substance in abundance. As a result an unprecedented feeling was born which gradually revealed the hidden lust of life, the refusal. A new condition of life is established which is freely translated into war with authority, conscious and permanent and a general unwillingness for anything besides that. This heart still beats hard…

The existing condition amongst us, pleads for only one thing, destruction. No analysis can can give it an precise description but only confirmation. The socio-centric analyses ignore a basic fact for the reading of “objective reality”. They ignore out of naivety that is, that authority in the form of exploitation as meant by many today, begins where the individual ends. Authority which characterizes the existing around us, pre-exists in the individual as a basic element which defines its existence, like an instinct which defines its survival. Authority in other words is not a metaphysical element which one morning came to infect “free” society, authority is an element of nature as sure as life and death. The socialized individual therefore, as much as it fights it, it equally carries it. The infamous revolution therefore, is nothing more than the overcoming of this contradiction. The revolution is an endless motion cycle, a spiral of life and the most honest element of the individual which represents better than any else its general organizational dead-end besides itself, without the existence of any kind of exploitation. The cop, the judge and all the other shit therefore, are nothing more than roles of enforcement/survival which result from our individual continuation, from our extension to the other individual. The possibility of a liberated and without authority society which some propose for tomorrow is an imagination of the mind, an illusion of hope for the naïve and the dangerous who while realizing the existential gap of the repeated daily life in the world of authority and want to cover it with something more substantial, they do not realize the authority of lying, depravity and wretchedness resulting from the exploitation of the purest intention of an individual who is looking for a way to express spontaneously, directly and without inhibitions, the accumulated oppression and rot shared out by mass society, this disgusting world of accumulated authorities. Authority is neither good, or bad, not small or big. It is one and contagious, widespread like a flood.

In the war of contradictions and towards the vocal commands of the authoritarian camp, refusal holds a special position. It speaks the language of its own desire, which is on its own its intervention, its truth and absoluteness among many.

We must say: “I am the organization, and I am the society. I am the property, and I am the economy. And only I can destroy them.” At every moment we must agitate, provoke, ignite and detonate. The next we must spit at ourselves for not accomplishing anything. There is no limit as long as we look up, except for the earth under our feet.

We must fall into the fire together with the molotov. So we burn, melt and from the ashes be reborn as an amalgamation stronger from the fire.

We must seek a life beyond the trodden. When a path seems familiar to us we should go off it and look for the unknown, the wild, the free one. We must glance at the horizon and say: “I am coming to you even if we never meet.”

We must know the yesterday but not look back in time even for a second. A moment is enough to do the damage, to trap you in a designated life you have lived before.

We must dispute the given, we must reject the vested. Our motive to get up in the mornings must be the deconstruction of the ideology. Or else tomorrow will find us rotten and history will find us finished.

We must renew ourselves. Know what to throw away and what to keep. See what we have acquired till today in our journey and say: “What we have, is what we are. And starting from now we will demolish the foundations of this world.” And renewal becomes regeneration.

We must have time as our ally in the struggle. With courage to say: “Hated world I will not give you even an hour of work. And when your miserable life tires you, I will find the opportunity to ‘lift’ all of your surplus value.” The monster, creates monsters.

We must as well among others recognize the irony and its provocations. Not so much in the part that says: we fight the authoritarian world with its own means and we want to flatten human civilization with tools invented and found in our hands, but the other part which says: fuck yeah, this is what I desire even if the whole fucking universe is against me. Irony on one side, loads of right on the other. No matter how you look at it, civilization is a gigantic crime. If we want something, it is a life without any elements from this one. If we want freedom, we want it wild. Not primitive, new-found.

No matter how many words are said, how many literature volumes are written romantically describing resistance, how many books with heroic stories of insurrections are printed and reprinted over the centuries, how many revolutionary poems, how many preachings of orthodox anarchy, how many wild misanthropic cries or beautiful melodies of unity travel to the ends, how many passionate and graphic chants are shouted loud and send shivers and how many clear as day propositions of struggle and ready made recipes of liberation — let alone abstract manifestations of refusal — fill thousands of pages of communiques, the world of practices, violent actions, the “dirty” war only can give meaning to whatever theory around the clash with authority. The dynamic of the actions, direct and sudden interventions on the existing is what symbolizes the anti authoritarian justice and sets the terms in the endless hunt of free life. Informal and autonomously the anarchist struggle has a pulse, militantly intrudes into enemy time-spaces destroying structural elements of the opposite world and unites us like a real revolutionary community which has abolished barriers and borders triumphantly, evolving thus the individual conscience to the unpredicted as the sole matter.

From prison now, through a condensed and tough social reality, I come even closer to my responsibilities dealing with the consequences of my choice to follow a provocatively beautiful and strange journey to the world of factual refusal. A new test, harder and more dangerous awaits me around the corner now. With my thought on the fighters who “left” early because they dared, those who their daring journey, included a sudden and long stop at the institution of “correction”, the “incorrigibles” in here who did not expect to see me but in reality joyfully awaited me because this is how fucking things go, those stubborn ones who I entered the gate of the institution with, those stubborn ones outside who ridicule their phobias everyday and those who simply do not understand what means law, police, death, and smiling go ahead to the unknown, I clench my teeth and after a deep breath I start again from zero…

31/5/13
Giannis Naxakis
1^st wing Koridallos prisons