Olivier and Dan
“Nothing to declare” : Why we refuse to participate in our own repression
It has now been two years since the investigation into “public defamation of public officials” and “incitement to the commission of an attack against a person without effect” was opened in relation to the tract “Correspondants de nuit: des agents de proximité de la guerre aux pauvres” [Night correspondants: [1] Agents of the war on the poor], published in late 2010 on Indymedia and then reposted on many sites, such as Non Fides and Retour à Belleville, but mainly distributed widely in several districts of Northeast Paris.
During the course of this investigation, we have received several summons (simple letters and then certified letters, and calls from the police on our mobile phones) which we have chosen to ignore. Some of our relatives have also been summoned and questioned.
After our refusal to cooperate with the pigs’ work, they decided to proceed with two searches, first of Dan’s house on May 15, 2012, and later of Olivier’s house on January 22, 2013, during which they robbed us of computers, USB sticks and external hard drives. Until now, we had not been indicted, but today, judge Maïa Escrive has called us to a “first appearance for an indictment.”
Olivier is accused of having published the tract on Non Fides. Dan is accused of publishing it on Non Fides and Retour à Belleville, and of being the author.
A ceremonial you can see right through, which we refuse to participate in for the following reasons:
First of all, because this judge and his armed extension, the BRDP, regularly team up in all sorts of defamation cases concerning miserable people [2] and other licensed racists, in which the issue of “freedom of expression” keeps returning. But clearly as anarchists we are not interested in this debate, because for us freedom is not a question of a concession from power in the form of rights, and nor is it freedom in the liberal, bourgeois sense of term: conjugate, negotiable, and infinitely divisible. To summarize, it is quite out of the question for us to discuss with a judge what we would or would not have the right to write or disseminate.
Next, we know very well what this interrogation would accomplish: questions for the sake of questions, and our refusal to give any answer. We have nothing more to say to a judge than we have to say to the pigs, namely: “nothing to declare.”
Also because we know that this affair is only a pretense for the pigs and the courts to further harass us, after having thrown us in prison for some months in 2011 for another affair, and after about three years of various almost-uninterrupted legal monitoring, during which we theoretically could not see each other, nor leave the country, and were required to check in with the police every week and pay a ransom of € 4,000 to the state. All these measures (that affect us as they have impacted other comrades before us and tens of thousands of people everywhere) aim to break us, by isolating each of us from the other and isolating us both from a movement, but also by breaking dynamics of struggle. All this while a judgment on charges including “destruction or damage by explosive device, fire or any other manner which creates a danger for persons,” “gang-related property destruction,” (and refusing to have our fingerprints, DNA, and biometric photographs taken) threatens to come down day after day, a process which targets a total of a dozen people in the struggle against the deportation machine in Paris.
Finally, it would be degrading, when beckoned with a whistle to the kennel that is the “Palais de Justice”, to come hurriedly, slavishly wagging our tails.
For all these reasons, we will not present ourselves at the convocation scheduled for March 13th at the TGI [3] in Paris, certainly not by our own volition.
These few lines are not intended to raise indignation, nor to cry out against the repression of our free speech, nor to shine the spotlight on anyone.
As for the modest tract, we don’t give a damn who wrote it, we leave this task to the villainous murderers who rule, whether in a suit, a cassock or robes, or a uniform, but we agree with the content and the desire to distribute it. We affirm our commitment to distribute any invitation to revolt against the relations of domination that govern this world, because we refuse to leave the social war to those who wage it against us.
Long live anarchy.
March 6, 2013
Olivier and Dan.
[1] “Night Correspondents” are a sort of citizen-police initiative in France similar to “city ambassadors” in some American cities. They maintain social peace by surveilling and harassing the poor, as well as snitching on crime. Their propaganda encourages residents to report neighbors who play their music too loud or gather in public spaces.
[2] The original has “people” in English. It means the celebrities whose scandals fill the tabloids.
[3] Tribunal of grande instance–Superior courts–handles complex civil suits and has a criminal section that hears cases involving minor felonies or indictable offenses.