I go to the first year of high school at Psychiko Public High School. I knew Alexandros, or Gregory (the pet name we used for him, from his last name) since 4th grade in elementary school. We used to go to the same school. Until the first year of middle school we didn't keep close company. From the first year of middle school however, until yesterday when they killed him, we were close friends.

Yesterday 12-6-2008 were you with Alexandros?
Yesterday around 5:50 p.m. I went with a friend from next door to Larisis Station. Before I went there, however, I had spoken with Alexandros. He told me that he was going to go to a polo match... I told him to call me when the match was over so we could meet at Mesolongi Street, in Exarcheia. He was going to go to the match with his friend Nikos F. and P. Ch. At regular intervals we used to meet there. We planned to go to Faros Psychikou, to find our friends from our old schools and go do something together because yesterday I celebrated my name day.

In the end, Alexandros called you when the match ended. Where was he going to go?
Yes, he called me and told me to start out and he would set out as well from the athletic field... From what I see on my cell phone the call from Alexandros happened at 7:10 p.m.

When did you meet with Alexandros on Mesolongi Street in Exarcheia?
I don't remember exactly. About 45 minutes before the incident. From my friend's house I went by foot. I went up Ipeirou (if I am not mistaken), then right to the Museum, left up on Stournari up to the square on the right, and 10 meters afterwards is Mesolongi. I waited for him 3 to 4 minutes.

When he came what did you do?
When he came we went to a convenience store 10 meters further up and we bought something to eat and two soft drinks... We went back again to the sidewalk on Mesologgiou Streeet to eat and talk.

Where exactly did you sit?
We sat there by the entrance of an apartment building at the intersection of Mesolongi and Tzavella, on the left side where we were watching Zoodochou Pigis Street. There they have three railings on the walkway where you can sit. We sat there. (At this point they show the witness a printed map of the area.) We ate the things we had bought and suddenly, as we were talking, we heard a somewhat loud bang. Near enough to us that we could hear it, but far enough away that we couldn't figured out what had happened. We didn't pay any attention...

Did you see light accompany the bang that you described to me?
No, because from the direction where we heard the bang, we didn't have visual contact, because there was a wall in front of us... In order to see what happens on Navarinou Street you have to leave down the middle of the walkway of Tzavella Street.

After a minute and a half we heard about 4 or 5 passers by "the cops are coming, something happened...". So out of curiosity, Alexandros and I went to the middle of Tzavella Street to see what had happened. A distance of 2 to 3 meters away... When we went out into the middle of the walkway we saw from a distance of 15 to 20 meters two police officers. They were right at the intersection of Zoodochou Pigis and Tzavella. One was taller than the other. Next they stopped at the intersection of the two streets... In front of us there was no one else. Alexandros was in front of me and I was behind and to the right of them. When the police stopped at Zoodochou Pigis and Tzavella, they had their hands, left or right I don't remember, on their weapons which were in their holsters which hang from the belt. Someone from behind me tossed an empty plastic bottle and naturally it did not reach the police. I forgot to tell you that when I saw the police, they started to curse at me and Alexandros, saying "We will f... the Virgin Mary, come here and I'll show you who is the tough guy" and things like that. The guys behind us were yelling "get back" and "go to hell..." at the police...

When someone threw the plastic bottle, the police, both of them if I am not mistaken, took their weapons out of their holsters, aimed in front of them, that is towards the place where I, Alexandros and the other person were, and three continuous shots were heard. I forgot to tell you that I am sure that one of the two police officers held his weapon with both hands. I saw then - and I am absolutely sure - that the police weren't shooting either towards the sky or towards the ground. They aimed towards our location and fired!

Alexandros fell down, if I am not mistaken on the first or second gunshot, surely anyways before the third... Afterwards, I didn't know what was going on. People were yelling and some people lifted up Alexandros' shirt. I saw that he had a hole in the middle of the chest and a little towards the heart. There was blood from the wound...

Let me tell you also that the police who fired, when they saw Alexandros fall, they left. I don't remember which direction... Then the ambulance came and took Alexandros, dead. I say this because he didn't have a pulse and there was blood coming from his mouth...

What light was there in the place where you described the incident?
Even though night had fallen, there was light from the street lamps on the poles which shines and also from the shops... Only one lamp wasn't working, to the left of Alexandros...

Do you want to tell us something else from everything you know?
The only thing I want to tell you is that they didn't kill Alexandros. They murdered him in cold blood...

Monday, December 8, 2008
21:52 GMT: Heavy clashes at the Law School of Athens - a demonstrator who just came back from the school will report on the blog shortly.

21:48 GMT: The rumours on the government calling a state of emergency are thickening and being reported across mainstream media. The Director of the University of Athens has just resigned, which could (or could not…) be important in the university administration waiving the academic asylum (the law that prevents university and police from entering university campuses).

Mainstream media report the situation to be out of control. There are clashes on the following main streets of Athens: Akadimias Ave, Syggrou Ave, in the middle-class area of Kolonaki. Tens of shops are on fire; a gun shop in the central square of Omonia, in Athens, has been looted.

In Thessaloniki, groups of people have left the university and are smashing up the shops in its periphery.

Unconfirmed reports are coming in that the government cabinet is considering calling a state of emergency and that PM Karamanlis could resign as early as Tuesday morning.

These reports are taken from http://www.occupiedlondon.org/blog/

Updates from Athens and Patras 9:07 pm

PATRAS

CONFIRMED: The anarchist block was attacked and chased by riot police and fascists. Demonstrators found shelter in friendly flats in groups of tens and twenties; fascists and undercover cops attacked them from the streets, smashing up windows.

UNCONFIRMED: It is rumored that the fascists were transported from Athens and provided with tear gas by the police.

ATHENS

Heavy clashes with the police outside the NTUA (National Technical University of Athens) continue. The situation at the Economics University is calm.

8:01 pm Athens
Police confirm shots being fired in Palaio Faliro, claiming only one shot was fired. Residents have found at least 7 bullets. The situation outside the two campuses in Athens remains very tense.

18.52 ATHENS: “These are Alexis’ nights”
UPDATE 18.58: POLICE SHOOT TENS OF SHOTS AGAINST THE STUDENTS IN PALAIO FALIRO – CONFIRMED.

A short eye-witness report

Daytime in Athens was relatively calm. High school students attacked, once again, the riot police units outside the parliament on Syntagma Square. Eksarhia, through which we walked during the day, resembled a battlefield in limbo: burnt cars blocking off its main streets; Stournari Ave is completely smashed up, barricades constantly burning across it.

Most groups have retreated in the universities (NTUA and the University of Economics). Assemblies were held there during the day, to plan out the next few days. However – a group of up to 400 people is still in the southern suburb of Palaio Faliro, where Alexis’ funeral was held this morning. They are quite literally rioting their way into the city centre. There, it is assumed that they will try to join either the occupations of the NTUA or the University of Economics.

The breaking news is that the police have shot at least ten times against demonstrators in Palaio Faliro. Meanwhile, at the University of Economics, at least four units of the riot police are encircling the campus and trying to push the demonstrators inside.

A beautiful slogan is echoing across the city: “ο λαός θα πεί την τελευταία λέξη/ αυτές οι νύχτες είναι του αλέξη” - “the people will have the last word/ these are Alexis’ nights”.

*this is the last report for a few hours - need to go back on the streets! will send more info as soon as that is possible*

18.19 PATRAS
An eyewitness report from Patras, over the phone: Over 1,000 people are on the streets - effectively in control of the centre of the city. Many banks are smashed - at least 6 or 7 so far. The central commercial street of Agiou Nikolaou is completely blocked off with barricades.

UPDATE Mainstream media report that the demonstrators are attacked by so-called “concerned citizens” - enraged shopkeepers and others. This is UNCONFIRMED.

And so it begins
As of today, this blog will be hosting eye witness reports from Athens (where the author of the text below will be based), Thessaloniki and Patras. We will be posting a combination of short (transmitted via mobile phones) and longer reports – these written only when time allows. We are also working on an online map of the Athens riots, to try and mark the series of events and make it easier for non-Greek readers to put the events in context.

A cab spinning to Belgrade airport in the early morning hours. The driver, dropping the usual “serbo-greek” friendship clichés, is trying to communicate his amazement at what’s happening “down there”. I haven’t really got much of a clue myself. I am trying to put my thoughts together. The hurried-up meeting in Zagreb, the topic that immediately shifted (how could it not?) to the situation in Athens. The midnight train, this spinning cab trying to catch the first flight out. Just had to. “I’m coming as soon as I can”. “Yes, you should”. “You have no idea what is going on, there is simply no way to describe it”. “Every single, and I mean every single shop in the centre of Athens is damaged or destroyed”. “It is war, don’t you see? This is war”.
And so it begins. The biggest string of riots the country has seen in its post-dictatorship (1974) era. Talking heads on TV screens are completely freaking out. “What would the rest of the world say?” Endlessly shifting between the reaction of international media and the damage inflicted by the riots to the christmas shopping trade. The hanging threat of a declaration of a state of emergency. Government officials, for now, deny this is a possibility. But who can tell? No-one can; no-one has any way to predict what can happen from here on. Even for Greece, a country with high levels of violence in political demonstrations, this is terra incognita. No-one has been here before. No-one has come straight from three days of unprecedented rioting onto a fourth one (Tuesday, the day of Alexandros’ funeral) and a fifth one that is sure to follow on Wednesday, the day of the general strike. And no-one can possibly imagine just how things will calm down after that. The masses on the streets keep breaking through an ever-increasingly violent police: Students are injured inside the university of Thessaloniki, shot at with rubber bullets. In Athens, riot police beat senseless another 15-year old boy in front of shocked passers-by begging them to stop. And yet, the police have already lost control. Trapped between trying to avoid a second (surely catastrophic) death yet equipped with the single technique they possess in handling the demonstrators – sheer violence. The government, a sorry get-together of more talking heads on the TV, locked up in meeting rooms, one emergency cabinet meeting after the other. A dead government standing. The question is not if – the question is just about how it will fall.
On the other end of the line is a friend from Eksarhia. “I could not believe what I saw. Every single… Every single shop, every single traffic light, across the whole of the centre – all smashed up, burnt. I just can’t believe it”. In Patras, the furious demonstrators’ block besieged the main police station only hours after the assassination. The first five arrests. The following day, a well-known local poet, now in his fifties, walked up to the police station, alone. He calmly opened his bag and, one after the other, he lit and threw the molotov cocktails he had in his bag. A new form of poetry?
The plane is descending into Athens. It is Tuesday, December 9th, the day of Alexandros’ funeral and only a few hours away from the general strike. Yet at a few thousand feet from the ground, things seem pretty normal. I am coming home. Or am I?

8:44 Alexandros’ funeral and fresh demonstrations across the country
Alexandros’ funeral will take place at 3pm today (Athens time, i.e. GMT+2) at the cemetery of the southern suburb of Palaio Faliro, in Athens. Just like with the assassination of 15-year old Michalis Kaltezas by the police in 1985, it is expected that the funeral will turn into an anti-police protest. There is no public mass-callout for it, but people will be making their way there in large numbers.

Demonstrations have been called for this morning in cities across the country, including Thessaloniki, Chalkida, Aigion, Kozani, Mytilini and Patras.This is all ahead of tomorrow’s general strike, when demonstrations will be taking place in all major cities.

Reports from the funeral and from the demos across the country will be uploaded here as soon as this becomes possible.

Taken from live updates posted to http://www.occupiedlondon.org/blog/

#8, 16:46: Updates from Athens and Patras

ATHENS: High School students joined the trade union march. They pelted riot police with stones and paint. In the suburb of Kaisariani the school students attacked the local police station.

Meanwhile, a group of anarchists attacked the central courts while inside Alexandros’ murderer was appearing before the prosecutor. The court’s control room and a media van were set on fire.

PATRAS: General assembly now at the university about yesterday’s events.

#7, 13.28: General strike

UPDATE 13:43 A friend on the phone: “I just walked down Mesogeion ave” (far from the centre) “and a small group of students, 12-13 year old, are attacking a riot police van. They are just armed with stones but they are totally going for it!”

UPDATE 13:35 TV footage already shows 12-year old students pelting the riot police with stones this morning; fresh rioting has erupted at the Propylea of the university of Athens; riot police threw tear gas at people sitting in cafeterias &those people attacked them in response. The stalinist trade union (PAME) has already retreated and left the street. Now is our time!

Today is the day. Yesterday’s events showed that the Greek state will try to end the rebellion as soon as possible. The fascists are now out on the streets; mainstream media carry fresh reports this morning that the government has decided to declare a state of emergency tomorrow (Thursday), should the rioting not end by then. Reports on indymedia claim that the ballistic report of Alexandros’ death has been altered to claim show the cop’s bullet bounced off before killing Alexandros (should this happen, his killer cop will avoid conviction).

These are all rumours, but now seem increasingly likely to happen. What will happen today is extremely important and will define what happens from now on. I’m heading for the street, next short reports will come in from there.

3:11am, Patras: This is what a junta looks like!
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
eyewitness report

Tuesday’s demonstration was called by local anarchist groups. Participation was phenomenal by the city’s standards - around 3,000 people (some reports put this number up to 5,000) took the streets of Patras behind the anarchist banners and against state violence. The march cruised through the city; banks were smashed. Meanwhile, the city’s police force had gathered around the main police station in order to protect it.

Toward the end of the demo however the riot police launched a major attack, forcing it to retreat toward the city’s historical university building (the so-called parartima). Soon thereafter, the most incredible attack began: Tens of fascists (that seem to had gathered in Patras from across the country, in a pre-planned joint operation with the police) attacked the demonstration with knives and stones. Co-ordinating perfectly with the police, they continued their attack and, according to some reports, even did some joint arrests. The demonstrators were confronted with the following unbelievable spectacle: They were facing a group of people throwing them police-owned tear gas while chanting “blood-honour-golden dawn” (the name of a nazi group in Greece).

The demonstrators’ block (which only numbered around 500 at the time, as this happened near the end of the demo) was completely torn apart; people were chased all the way into their flats; demonstrators had to seek refuge in flats in 10s and 20s, while the cops and the nazis would smash their windows and try to force entry.

Patras Indymedia reports 26 detentions and 9 arrests. Thankfully, the reports that the fascists would head for the city’s Afghan refugee camp have proven false so far.

What makes the above story even more unbelievable is that the mainstream media report it as the “local business owners” being the ones who attacked the demonstrators, “taking the law into their own hands”. Putting aside the …minor detail that absolutely no local businesses were damaged (only multinational banks, the courts and the police station), these supposed “shop owners” and “respectful citizens” were depicted in media in their balaclavas, holding knives! There was an unbelievable joint police-fascist operation in Patras today and they are trying to cover it up and to claim the public has turned against the demonstrators.

It is crucial to confront their lies and to resist their repression - the future of this movement could depend on this. Please spread the word.

Athens, the day after Alexandros’ death: a policeman aiming at demonstrators, the second one pretending to be doing so. On 9.12 in Patras, police shot ruber bullets at the demonstrators

“We are an image from the future”…
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
(graffiti at the occupied University of Economics in Athens)

…faced with a dark, dark image from the past.

Fascists working with cops run amok in Patras; they stab two in Athens; police shoot 15 times in the air in Palaio Faliro and a flaming car is driven against the police station of Zefyri, Athens. These are what I consider to be the most important events of the day; there’s so many others (more attacks at police stations; tens of demonstrators arrested in cities across the country etc) – but it’s simply impossible to summarise everything here. The most important events of the day are those of Patras. Please read the separate post and spread the news.

police shoot a total of 15 bullets against youths meters away from Alexandros’ funeral

…and here’s a summary of today’s events in Athens. The day started with the funeral of Alexandros at the cemetery of the southern neighbourhood of Palaio Faliro. There was a mass turnout at the funeral, including many anarchists, high school students and local youth. The small group that took the neighbourhood’s streets after the funeral comprised mostly of these – simply kids from the neighbourhood angered at Alexandros’ death. What the image above shows is a policeman of the “Z-force” (Omada Zita, the police’s motorcyclist unit) who shot a total of 15 shots in the air. This is a few hundred meters from where Alexandros’ funeral took place a few hours earlier.

Meanwhile, in the city centre, there was much tension around Syntagma Square (see previous post), with high school students impressively confronting the riot police. It wouldn’t be until later in the evening that the by now usual rioting zones would start shaping up around two of the occupied university campuses (of the NTUA and of the University of Economics). I want to briefly describe my personal experience of tonight, not because a personal story is that important but because it might be able to help outside readers put things in context (to an extent, I also consider myself an outsider to this!)

Perhaps, the feeling of comfort and familiarity I felt after meeting up with good old friends made the feeling of unfamiliarity even starker once I stepped onto the streets this evening. This was a weird feeling, and one I have never felt before in Athens – a feeling that you had to have a clear reason to be on the streets: For the uprising or against it – but definitely one of the two. Like being in a remotely located demonstration, where you are either a demonstrator or the police; except this is in the heart of a bustling metropolis and all there is, it seems to be, is people angrily reacting to the death of Alexandros on the one side, and those who caused his death on the other. To get around Eksarhia these days you need to master the skill of zig-zaging around streets and blocks, to avoid riot police units, the hoards of undercover police and of course, the fascists.

My poor zig-zaging skills nevertheless brought me to the grounds of the NTUA, where a good 2,000 people quite clearly would show who it is we are fighting with. An absolutely crazy mix of groups of punks, migrants, junkies and anarchists lined up across Patision Ave outside the Polytechnic; dancing, drinking and waiting for the riot police to come.

A few hundred meters (and some more zig-zaging) away, at the grounds of the University of Economics, a 400-500 person assembly was taking place, the subject being the anarchist presence at tomorrow’s general strike. You will have to wait for tomorrow to hear how that went; however, the most important and shocking developments came a good few hours later…

Reports started coming in that fascist groups had started making their appearance in the area and around Victoria Square in particular. One male (a migrant, his ethnicity is not being reported) and one woman have been stabbed tonight. This was after we had heard about the incredible course of events in Patras. Combining the two, it becomes quite clear: The “official” Greek state has reached its limit in dealing with the revolts. Monday’s riots were simply out of the police’s capacity for control. This is the time for its informal forces to kick in: the fascists. Their perfectly coordinated attacks in Patras clearly shows this.

This is not a time to panic, of course – we have so many new allies on our side that if we play this properly the fascists won’t dare strike again. The attack against the police station of Zefyri shows this: Zefyri, in the outskirts of the city, is one of the most deprived (if not the most deprived) neighbourhoods of Athens, with a large Roma majority population. At about 10pm tonight, a crowd of around six hundred besieged the police station, attacking it with molotov cocktails while a flaming car was driven toward the building (though stopped by guards before reaching it).

I guess it is quite evident from the above that this is an extremely tense situation and everyone feels that we are reaching a make or break point. Tomorrow’s general strike is absolutely crucial. People have to fight four days of tiredness; the sold-out trade unions that have turned the demonstration in a static gathering (to prevent mobility of the crowd and make it easier to control); the police running amok – and now the fascists too. Things are going to be far from easy, but there is no other way to get rid of those images from the past.

taken from www.occupiedlondon.org/blog

#12, 21:41 ATHENS, PATRAS, THESSALONIKI, KOMOTINI: Fascists and cops get the response they deserve

Athens 2-3,000 took the streets responding to the callout of the Law school occupation for a demonstration. The cops seemed very passive, for once. There are rumours that they are running out of tear gas, which is why they had to play passive today. A large part of the demonstrators passing in front of the police lines spat at them, throwing them stones, paint.

Patras at least 5-6,000 people took the streets for the demonstration called by the university occupation and in response to the recent coordinated police &fascist attacks. Eyewitness says: “one of the most beautiful demonstrations I’ve ever been to. The atmosphere was simply amazing, an unprecedented amount of people on the streets… The riot police are still on the street, together with the hordes of their undercovers, but the demonstrators made them look so much weaker today”.

Thessaloniki Eyewitness account: “The demonstration, called by the occupation of the Theatre School of Thessaloniki, started off with around 500 people. High school students kept joining in though, so we ended up with 1,500-2,000 people marching through the working class suburbs of the city. The cops tried to provoke us but it was impossible. The most amazing thing about today’s demo was that the meet-up between the anarchists and the high school students that we were all hoping for, did happen”.

Komotini Reports are coming in on Athens IMC that the besieged students in the town’s campus have managed to leave. The students who were from the neighbouring city of Xanthi are on the way back; local students left the campus also. The fascists, undercovers etc who were following the demonstration with crowbards and knives, attacked and besieged the students with no excuse and no provocation from their side whatsoever. No passaran…

#11, 18:52, THESSALONIKI: Cops provoke 2,000-strong demo; students besieged in the Northern town of Komotini

Eyewitness in Thessaloniki: 2,000-strong demonstration in Thessaloniki is constantly being provoked by the police. In the Northern town of Komotini, in Thrace, 300 local students and students from the adjacent city of Xanthi are besieged in the university - around the university grounds, 200 riot cops, undercovers and Golden Dawn fascists are threatening to enter.

More updates will follow.

#10, 14:18: 25 police stations besieged by students. The murderer cop was member of a nazi group (?)

Mainstream media report that 25 police stations are besieged across Athens, with heavy clashes at some. They also report that more than 4500 tear gas cannisters have been thrown by the police these days; their supplies are running out (!) and more are being ordered from abroad.

Fresh demonstrations have been called for Athens, Thessaloniki, Patras and many more cities this evening. Reports on indymedia this morning claim that Alexandros’ murderer was a member of the nazi group “Golden Dawn” in the late eighties/ early nineties (without cutting his ties since) and that his family was active in the nazi collaborationist forces.

This is the global civil war: It is their world…

Homo Sacer Quartet

(an article written by our comrades at flesh machine)

A boy resides out-of-place. Two pigs charge into the out-of-place. In the conjuncture of these two trajectories, an event is born. The boy challenges the violation of the borders of his out-of-place by the pigs. The pigs park in-place and cross once again the limits of the heterotopia, on foot. The pigs injunct the boy. The boy responds to the injunction. The pigs shoot and destroy the life that “is not worth being lived”. The pigs return in-place. The borders of the out-of-place are ruptured and urban space, from end to end, is recomposed into a thick burning network of heterotopia: the city is on fire.

For sovereignty, every life out-of-place is a life that is not worth being lived. The state of exception is imposed, even by suspension, on every life out-of-place, on every life that is acted not as a contemplation of privacy and its commodity-panoply, but as a social relation, as a self-constituted construction of the space and time of conviviality. The sovereign exception is not so much about the control or the destruction of a excess in itself, but about the creation or the definition of a space where juridico-political order can be perpetually validated. The state of exception classifies space and the bodies within it. It puts them in order. It imposes order upon them. With assimilation, commodification, surveillance and discipline. Executing the delinquent with prisons, psychiatric units, marginalisation. And wherever, whenever might be necessary: with bullets, with bullets, with bullets.

In a society dedicated to the production of privacies, the murder of a boy can only be conceptualised in the terms of the value of his privacy, the ontological base of property: the sacred right to one’s own life. This is the only way in which death can be political: as a destruction of the source of property. The destruction of property, let alone its source, is a dreadful crime in the bourgeois world. Even, or especially when it is committed by the apparatus charged with its protection. But to destroy properties in order to take revenge for the destruction of property, that is a doubly nefarious crime: Have you not understood a thing? All those tears, all the dirge, the requiems are not for a boy that attacked the power-that-safeguards-property, they are for the power that failed in its duty: the duty to defend life as the ultimate property, as privacy.

The body of an enemy now deceased can be sanitized, pillaged, transformed into a symbolic capital for the reproduction of sovereignty and finally, in the announcement or reminder of the capacity for the imposition of a generalised state of exception. An emergency confirming the sovereign monopoly on the definition of the real through the abolition of its symbolic legitimisation. The sovereignty, in tears, shouts: you are all private individuals, else you are all potential corpses. And society falls on its knees in awe of its idol and shows remorse: mea culpa; from now on, I will take care of myself only, as long as you safeguard its reproduction. The return to the normalcy of the private is paved with the spectacle of generalised exception.

10-12-2008 fleshmachine from the squatted Athens School of Economics

Flesh Machine is an anarchist magazine “on the body and its desiring machines” published in Athens. It focuses on original publications and translations of articles and interviews on biopolitics, schizoanalysis, feminism, queer politics and the other wet aspects of capitalism and the revolution.

#9, 7.58: It is all up to the school students now

Undercover police arrest student demonstrator; Athens, 9.12

UPDATE, 13:22 The police station of Korydallos in Athens was attacked with molotov cocktails and stones. 700 students remain near a road leading to the local prison; there were clashes outside at least another six police stations in the capital.

Mainstream media report that at this point 10 major roads in Athens are blocked off by high school students. Reports come in, one after the other, of university departments being occupied by their students.

UPDATE, 8:08 The town hall of the suburb of Agios Dimitrios in Athens is now occupied by anarchists. Heavy clashes between police and anarchists at the Polytechnic during the night; one comrade injured. The occupation remains.

A kid of their age was assassinated. They took the streets to protest only to have tear gas thrown at them, to be violently arrested, to be shot at. Yet hour by hour, day by day, the school students on the streets become more militant and determined. So far they have attacked more than six police stations across Athens. Yesterday in the suburb of Petroupoli, around 100 of them attacked the local police station, smashing it up with sticks and stones. A few banks down the same road were also attacked. Until yesterday night at least 100 schools in the country were occupied by their students. This number is expected to jump up today, when most students are supposed to return to their schools for the first time after Alexandros’ death. Whether they chose to do so or not could largely determine the future of the revolt. Luckily, they seem to have no intention to return to normalcy: For today, 11.12, the students are planning decentralised road blockades across Athens. For tomorrow, Friday, demonstrations are called by university students in Athens and Thessaloniki - universities are also expected to be occupied in large numbers today and tomorrow. The Economics University anarchist occupation has decided to reach out to the students; newspapers, posters and leaflets are being printed right now, to be distributed to schools across the city asap. The future of our struggle seems to be dependent on them and I am confident we are in good hands.

Murderer on Alexandros: “He had exhibited deviant behaviour”

Short abstracts from the testimony of Epaminondas Korkoneas, the murderer of Alexandros, which was released today. I cannot make a single comment on this piece of filth. All I can say is Alexandros, RIP: None of us have any intention of retreating from the streets before some sort of revenge, before some sort of justice is paid for your murder.

Parts of the 11-page long testimony of the murderer:

“The deceased and his gang attended the swimming pool of Chalandri in Athens and participated in the violent events that occurred there, injuring citizens and the coach of Olympiakos Club by using various objects, including a crowbar. Following this they joined in with the commonly-seen hordes that gather to attack the offices of the Socialist Party, a customary occurrence in Athens on a Saturday night”.

“As a matter of fact, I have been informed that these youths, while residing in the affluent suburb of Palaio Psychiko, tend to hang out in the area of Eksarhia which they chose as their recreational area together with various sports grounds where they cause trouble, not showing the attitude and personality expected to be seen in a 15-year old teenager”.

“The deceased had been expelled by the Moraitis private school in Athens and changed schools often, a fact proving his deviant behaviour”.

In regard to the act of murder, he said:

“As for the events of Saturday: Seeing a group of around 30 youths at a distance of 10-15 meters from me, not being able to intercept their aggressive move toward us and being in a state of fear for our own lives, we moved, turning our backs against them. At the same time, in order to secure our exit, being shocked and in fear and since the crowd did not stop moving toward us despite my colleague throwing them a “sound” grenade, I pulled out my gun and guided by the instinct of survival I shot two warning shots in the air, maybe a third one that I hadn’t noticed but my colleague reminded me of later”.

His lawyer, Alexis Kougias (remember this name) stated: “It is now only up to the Greek justice to decide whether the youth was justly killed, or not”.

taken from http://www.occupiedlondon.org/blog/

Better than guerrilla radio
Anarchists take over the tv station Super B in Patra. They went live at 21.37pm

Part of the broadcast is viewable on youtube here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-a1jCD9sk0

#18, 18:40: 13-year old girl brutally arrested; murderer’s lawyer’s office attacked; high school students keep up the struggle and get targeted

Just about when the demonstration today was reaching its end, riot cops attacked at Korai Str in Athens, arresting at least four students. One of the arrestees was a 13 year old girl; nearby journalists who reacted to her brutal arrest were also beaten up heavily. Earlier, the office of Alexis Kougias (the murderer’s lawyer) were trashed.

High school students also held fresh demos across the country and neighbourhoods in Athens. The attack of the state’s mechanism on them is in full swing: Earlier today, a car with unregistered license plates (i.e. belonging to the undercover police) drove into two students outside a high school in Ilioupolis, Athens, leaving them both injured.

A more detailed summary of today’s events, hopefully with some thoughts on where things can go from here, will follow once we’ve had some rest!

#17 15.34 ATHENS: Parliament demo ends, retreats to occupied universities

15.34 The demo has ended and we have retreated in the three occupied universities, waiting for the pigs. Outside the law school a jeep is burning. They should be here soon.

15.46 The riot cops approach the law school. They are pelted with stones and molotovs, and retreat. One jeep and one riot cop on fire.

18.01: Let me update you about today's demo in Athens.

A pupil and student demo was organized for 12 o clock today, starting from Propylaia as usual. More than 10000 attended, the vast majority of them school kids and teenagers. It was again an angry demo, the school kids have been proven to be the BEST demonstrators during these days, focused and determined, they really seem that they are on the streets FOR A REASON. During the last 2 days, 25 police departments have been attacked all by school kids and teenagers. This is the best answer to the system and the media, who only talk about "vandals with covered faces" ... Well NO pupil had a covered face at all the demos.

The police was provocative from the very beggining of the demo. Chemicals were continiously thrown during the whole demo, as well as a lot of clashes with the police. They were hitting visiously and throwing chemicals, although we are talking about young school kids....

In Korai str they arrested and visiously hit a 13 years old girl.. A lot of journalists and reporters that were there they were filming them and shouting at them to stop hitting the girl.. The result was chemicals against the reporters and they started beating them... One journalist got badly hit. At a small alley near Panepistimiou str the RIOT police went in, in order to wait for the demo and hit it from the side. The people who were on that alley (the alley is full of cafes) starting shouting at the police to get out of there and a lot starting throwing at them glasses, chairs and stones. They threw chemicals against them but they had to run out of there as they were being attacked a lot. They turned to Panepistimiou str again where people of the public (even random pedestrians) were shouting at them and throwing them stones. Some of them tried to arrest a boy (about 15 years old) who was on the demo (not throwing stones) because he had his head covered (not face just head)..... The public managed to rescue the boy as they pulled him from them. Four pupils were arrested.

A lot of tension started also at Syntagma square, where a lot of chemicals were also thrown as well as stunt grenades. These grenades have been used a lot throughout the week.

Some comrades broke in the office of Mr Kougias, the lawyer of the cop, and trashed it completely. Kougias told the press that these actions are not going to hold him back from defending the cop....

A petrol bomb was thrown against this cop outside the Law Department of the University of Athens as an answer to the "fuck you" gesture that he did a few seconds before, to the comrades that have taken over that building. The other cops around quickly put out the fire and the cop was not injured. This triggered violence around the area of the Law Department for quite enough time.

The demo finished when heavy rainfall started.

A "sit down" demonstration (if I am using this term correctly) was also taking place at Syntagma square. At the beggining the MAT (RIOT police) was there and were trying to create trouble with the demonstrators but it was a peacefull demo so they left. Normal police went to replace them, they stayed at that point for some time and when they realised that the guys were not "terrorists" they left. An another sit down demo has been organized for 10 o clock tonight but I dont know if it will happen because of the rain.

Also a bicycle demo is about to take place today, normally bicycle demos have a lot of crowd but today because of the rain I am not sure how many will be there.

NOTHING IS OVER YET.. WE ARE ONLY IN THE BEGINNING.

NO PEACE NO JUSTICE

#16, 14.13 Student Demonstration at Parliament

14.13 the student demonstration in Athens is large, at least 5-6,000. The high school kids block is an amazing spectacle to watch. They chant “shoot us too!”. We are approaching the parliament now.

14.30 we charge at the cops. They respond with a fuckload of tear gas. People hold. “MURDERERS!” More and more people arrive. There must be at least 10,000 of us.

#15, 12:17 Athens: Business unusual

The ballistic examination report is expected today. “Leaks” in the media the previous days have been suggesting that the report will claim Alexandros was killed by a ricochet and not a direct shot (which is against what every single eye witness says). They have already reached their verdict - but so have we: At the occupied Athens School of Economics and Business, an enormous banner is about to be hanged reading “Cougias” (the lawyer of the murderer), “go ricochet yourself”.

The student demonstration is starting now at Propylea. I’m heading there and will report from the street.

#14, 11:57: Video from Patras, report from besieged Athens police stations

Video from the demonstration in Patras. Just to put this into perspective: The demonstration was called by the (anarchist &leftist) occupation of the “parartima” (branch of the university in the city centre). This was their callout. Under “normal” circumstances, around 100-200 people would respond. These are not normal days we are living, though: 5-6,000 people took the streets in Patras yesterday…

In Athens, as reported yesterday, at least 25 police stations were under siege by school students. The police station of Petroupoli was besieged for more than seven hours and its facade was entirely burnt by molotov cocktails. 3 students were arrested but the crowd succeeded in demanding their release, as happened a bit later when another two students were arrested only to be released again, under the pressure of the people in solidarity outside (these are all according to indymedia reports).

In the early hours, anarchists occupied the mainstream radio station Flash FM, broadcasting their messages for more than half an hour.

“We are in Civil War: With the fascists, the bankers, the state, the media wishing to see an obedient society”

…you would be excused to think that the above extract comes from an anarchist statement; alas, no - it is from the statement issued by the association of employees of the suburb of Agios Dimitrios in Athens. Here’s a rough translation of the statement, as promised. Keep in mind that, as members of the association told some comrades, they tried to keep the style of the text as sober as possible, to ensure the maximum number of people take the streets with them.

STATEMENT

On Saturday night, the Greek police assassinated a 15 year old student.

His assassination was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

It was the continuation of a coordinated action, by state terrorism and the Golden Dawn, which aimed at university and high school students (with the private universities first), at migrants that continue to be persecuted for being born with the wrong colour, at the employees that must work to death without compensation.

The government of cover-ups with its praetors, having burnt the forests last summer, is responsible for all major cities burning now, too. It protected financial criminals, all those involved in the mobile phone interceptions scandal, those looting the employees’ insurance funds, those kidnapping migrants, those who protected the banks and the monasteries that steal from the ordinary people.

We are in Civil War: With the fascists, the bankers, the state, the media wishing to see an obedient society.

There are no excuses, yet they once again try to use conspiracy theories to calm spirits down.

The rage that had accumulated had to be expressed and should not, by any means, end.

Throughout the world we are making headlines, it was about time that people uprise everywhere.

The generation of the poor, the unemployed, the partially employed, the homeless, the migrants, the youth, is the generation that will smash every display window and will wake up the obedient citizens from their sleep of the ephemeral American dream.

Don’t watch the news, consciousness is born in the streets

When the youth is murdered, the old people should not sleep

Goodbye Alexandros, may your blood be the last of an innocent to run

We are here/ we are everywhere/ we are an image from the future

If I do not burn

If you do not burn

If we do not burn

How will darkness come to light?

(Nazim Hikmet, “Like Kerem”)

Clenching fear in their teeth the dogs howl: Return to normality – the fools’ feast is over. The philologists of assimilation have already started digging up their cut-sharp caresses: “We are ready to forget, to understand, to exchange the promiscuity of these few days, but now behave or we shall bring over our sociologists, our anthropologists, our psychiatrists! Like good fathers we have tolerated with restraint your emotional eruption – now look at how desks, offices and shop windows gape empty! The time has come for a return, and whoever refuses this holy duty shall be hit hard, shall be sociologised, shall be psychiatrised. An injunction hovers over the city: “Are you at your post?” Democracy, social harmony, national unity and all the other big hearths stinking of death have already stretched out their morbid arms.

Power (from the government to the family) aims not simply to repress the insurrection and its generalisation, but to produce a relation of subjectivation. A relation that defines bios, that is political life, as a sphere of cooperation, compromise and consensus. “Politics is the politics of consensus; the rest is gang-war, riots, chaos”. This is a true translation of what they are telling us, of their effort to deny the living core of every action, and to separate and isolate us from what we can do: not to unite the two into one, but to rupture again and again the one into two. The mandarins of harmony, the barons of peace and quiet, law and order, call on us to become dialectic. But those tricks are desperately old, and their misery is transparent in the fat bellies of the trade-union bosses, in the washed-out eyes of the intermediaries, who like vultures perch over every negation, over every passion for the real. We have seen them in May, we have seen them in LA and Brixton, and we have been watching them over decades licking the long now white bones of the 1973 Polytechnic. We saw them again yesterday when instead of calling for a permanent general strike, they bowed to legality and called off the strike protest march. Because they know all too well that the road to the generalisation of the insurrection is through the field of production – through the occupation of the means of production of this world that crushes us.

Tomorrow dawns a day when nothing is certain. And what could be more liberating than this after so many long years of certainty? A bullet was able to interrupt the brutal sequence all those identical days. The assassination of a 15 year old boy was the moment when a displacement took place strong enough to bring the world upside down. A displacement from the seeing through of yet another day, to the point that so many think simultaneously: “That was it, not one step further, all must change and we will change it”. The revenge for the death of Alex, has become the revenge for every day that we are forced to wake up in this world. And what seemed so hard proved to be so simple.

This is what has happened, what we have. If something scares us is the return to normality. For in the destroyed and pillaged streets of our cities of light we see not only the obvious results of our rage, but the possibility of starting to live. We have no longer anything to do than to install ourselves in this possibility transforming it into a living experience: by grounding on the field of everyday life, our creativity, our power to materialise our desires, our power not to contemplate but to construct the real. This is our vital space. All the rest is death.

Those who want to understand will understand. Now is the time to break the invisible cells that chain each and everyone to his or her pathetic little life. And this does not require solely or necessarily one to attack police stations and torch malls and banks. The time that one deserts his or her couch and the passive contemplation of his or her own life and takes to the streets to talk and to listen, leaving behind anything private, involves in the field of social relations the destabilising force of a nuclear bomb. And this is precisely because the (till now) fixation of everyone on his or her microcosm is tied to the traction forces of the atom. Those forces that make the (capitalist) world turn. This is the dilemma: with the insurgents or alone. And this is one of the really few times that a dilemma can be at the same time so absolute and real.

11/12/2008 Initiative from the occupation of the Athens School of Economics and Business

#13 What to expect tomorrow (12.12.2008)

Friends call from abroad. “Is it over?” we can only laugh at that idea - What do you mean, is it over? It’s just about to start. Some comrades come back to the Athens School of Economics (our base), carrying incredible stories from the occupation of the town hall of the suburb of Agios Dimitrios in Athens. In a previous post we reported that the town hall was occupied by anarchists. Wrong: The town hall was occupied by the locals, whose statements so far easily overcome the “toughest” of anarchist speech. “This is civil war”, they write. “Alexis, we hope that your blood is the last of an innocent to run”. We’ve got a copy of the entire statement published by the area’s employees committee, and will be translating it tomorrow. It is, quite simply, a historical document.

As for what to expect tomorrow (12.12). There is a callout for yet another mass demonstration in Athens, at noon. A “revolutionary alleycat race” is called for 21:30. Its tag: “Come contribute to the chaos!”. Most university students will be holding department assemblies to decide whether they will proceed with occupations (surely enough, most of them will do so); we expect high school students to keep rocking, as they have all these days (and if information received so far is confirmed, regarding their plans, they might have some awesome surprises for us tomorrow).

“Is this over?” How, exactly, could it be? The murderer if Alexandros shows no remorse and is about to get away with it. The pigs keep provoking. Their political leaders remain unpunished. What single argument, what single reason is there for us to return to normalcy, to forget, to retreat from the streets? None. There is no way back now.

compiled from the posts of Dimitris on urban 75 and from www.occupiedlondon.org/blog

23:15 Athens

-Clashes at this time in Exarhia. Molotov attacks a while ago at the police station of the area. The police pushed away the protesters with chemicals.

22:40 Athens
I was for a while down the street but had to come back, I cannot breath properly. People have got out of their houses and activelly tried with the comrades and pushed back the police down to Xar Trikoupi str, far from the square. There were also problems at Stournara str near the Polytechnic but it was not possible for me to approach.

I think I will log off and try to get to the polytechnic from Patission entrace.

I will come back to report later

21:31 Athens
Hello

I am in Athens since earlier today. I was in Syntagma sq as well, Stella reported quite enough of what was happening there.

I am in Exarchia now, the situation here is CHAOTIC. I had to leave from the streets because of breathing problems.

There was an attack of 1000 comrades against the police station of Exarchia. We met at the alley that Alexis was murdered and then headed down for the police department. Chaos was created, road blocks exist all over the place in Exarchia and riots against the police continue now.

Some comrades were in Psyri earlier, it is an area of Athens full of cafes, bars and tavernas. They were demonstrating there and distributing leaflets to the people at the cafes when they were visiously attacked by the police. Stun grenades were used, the public in the cafes freaked out, some people were fighting with the police, other were trying to flee, complete chaos

In Kypseli area, not very far from here, fascists were out on the streets tonight, warning that they will attack a free market that takes place there....

EVERYBODY ON THE STREETS, STATE AGGRESSION SHOULD NOT BE LEFT WITHOUT AN ANSWER

NOTHING IS OVER YET. THIS IS ONLY THE BEGGINING

#19, 21:31 Ministry offices burnt; demonstration from point of assassination of Alexandros is set to start
21:31 Around 300 anarchists attack the offices of the Ministry of Planning and Public Works in solidarity with the struggle of the people of the village of Leukimi in Corfu (a local woman was assassinated by the police there in the summer). Two banks are also smashed and burnt. High street shops are smashed. The police are nowhere to be seen.

Thousands of people have gathered at the point of assassination of Alexandros (at the corner of Messologiou and Tzavella Street in Eksarhia) and a demonstration is about to begin.

More to follow.

The longest week of our lives
Last night, I met a friend of Alexandros’ who was sitting close to him when he was assassinated. Standing there silently, listening to him describe the moments of the assassination (for the n-th time I imagine) I couldn’t help but think: How many years did this kid grow over these seven days? Listening to him explain exactly how the cop is now attempting to cover up the story, how the ricocheting scenario can’t possibly stand… Seeing him argue how we need to change our tactics to take our struggle forward. Joking with us about the incapacity of the indymedia servers to hold the incoming traffic in the first days of the revolt. How many years did he grow? I can’t help but think; they took 15 years from Alexandros, but years and years of life were transplanted into all of us who are here now. In these days of revolt, normalilty and normal time have been suspended - finally giving us ample time in which to live and grow. For this reason, as for a million others, there is simply no way back now: time can’t move backward, what we have lived cannot be unlived. “Remember this”, I heard the old man telling his grandson at the spontaneous mural for Alexandros at the spot of his assasination. “Remember that it is always authority killing the people, it is always the powerful who kill the powerless”. The kid will never forget this week, none of us will. This is the longest week of our lives.

Saturday, 5 pm. Four hours before a full week from the assassination. We are preparing to take the streets again. This night, too, is your night Alexandros.

“We don’t forget, we don’t forgive” - day of international action against state murders, 20.12.2008
Today (Friday), the assembly of the occupied Athens Polytechnic decided to make a callout for European and global-wide actions of resistance in the memory of all assassinated youth, migrants and all those who were struggling against the lackeys of the state. Carlo Juliani; the French suburb youths; Alexandros Grigoropoulos and the countless others, all around the world. Our lives do not belong to the states and their assassins! The memory of the assassinated brothers and sisters, friends and comrades stays alive through our struggles! We do not forget our brothers and sisters, we do not forgive their murderers. Please translate and spread around this message for a common day of coordinated actions of resistance in as many places around the world as possible.

Original callout: http://athens.indymedia.org/front.php3?lang=el&article_id=943356

compiled by libcom from reports on www.occupiedLondon.org/blog and www.urban75.net

19.33 Athens
Hello all, I am now back home

Today it was a "quiet" day with no big demos, a problem was the heavy rainfall that started at some places in Athens.

A few hours earlier (at 6:00 Greece time) there was a gathering at the murder point in Exarchia, organized by the inhabitans of Exarchia. Quite enough people attended, it is difficult to say number because a lot were coming for 10 minutes or so and then leaving. There was no police there, at least no police with uniforms, so the situation did not get any worse.

In an attempt to inform the public of what is happening, because the media have almost stopped reporting about the demos, 4 different radio stations were taken over today and the comrades broadcasted. The first was 9,84 this morning (a popular Athens radio station) and on 8:00 this afternoon 3 different radio stations were also taken over (virgin, best and en lefko).

On the morning broadcast, the mayor of Athens together with his bodyguards visited the offices of the station and had a verbal argument with the people that were broadcasting then.

All take overs started and ended peacefully.

In Thessaloniki, there was a motorbike and bicycle demo that lasted quite long. Comrades passed from various areas of Thessaloniki and were stopping on various places and reading announcements, also distributing leaflets to the public.

In Petroupoli, a suburb of Athens there should be now a demo called from the Anti Authoritarian Movement but I think it is raining now, I am not sure if it has started or not.

The occupations of Polytechnio and the Law dept of the Uni of Athens are still holding, as well as the take over at the town Hall of Ag Dimitrios and one more in Chalandri.

Tottally in whole Greece, 69 high schools and 103 university departments have been taken over by students and no classes are taking place.

Tomorrow morning there is a call for a demo outside Euelpidon, the courts of Athens, as a lot of arrested comrades are passing from court hearings. It is essentiall that a lot of people should be attending that.

The assembly of the occupied schools has decided that tommorrow the high school students of Athens will demonstrate outside the central police headquarters of Athens (GADA). On the same time, the school students of all Greece will be demonstrating outside the police departments of their area.

A DEMO HAS ALSO BEEN ORGANIZED TOMORROW AFTERNOON AT 6:00 AT PROPYLEA.

A week after the demo of last Monday, all of us and even more we should be again at the streets of Athens.

I will keep you inform if there is anything new

10.15 Athens
Hello from Exarchia, Athens

No matter how much they tried last night and throughout this last week the Polytechnic is still taken over by comrades and will continue to be. Yesterday RIOT police together with police special forces were in nearly every corner around the polytechinc and the nearby streets. Their aim was to try and draw out the comrades from the polytechnic area and arrest them (they are not allowed to enter the polytechnic without permission).

There was a call out for comrades to all meet at the alley that Alexis was murrdered and start demos from there. Some of the us went from there and attacked the Exarchia Police Department, others went for demos at the city centre. These are demos that were decided on the spot, dont look out for any announcements etc.

Chaos was created in front of the Exarchia police department when a car belonging to the undercover police was set on fire. Riots started, that continued to Exarchia square. Road blocks were formed, and the police was trying to push everybody out of the square. Members of the public, people who were in their houses, got out and demanded from the police to leave the area. ASSASINS OUT OF EXARCHIA were shouting. The police responded with chemicals, but comrades and public effectively managed to push them back and out of the square. People were throwing them flower pots from the balconys as well as water, everybody was trying to do whatever to get the police out of there. A 60 years old man that was on the square as well, had to be transfered by an ambulance to the hospital because of serious breathing problems. There was a rumour that passed from mouth to mouth in the area that he died but I cannot confirm that, I can only confirm that he got in the ambulance.

Clashes with the police also took place at Stournari str, is the small street that is on the corner of the polytechnic and Patision avenue. Petrol bombs were thrown towards the police who responded with chemicals. I have heard that from that live streaming camera from zougla.gr the petrol bombs were seen.. I dont like that camera very much to be honest.

At about 3:30 in the morning while trouble with the police still existed a comrade was hit on his head, from a stone that a police man threw... Throughout the week the police has the habit to return the stones that they are thrown at, a LOT of people have been injured because of this, even people that are just passing by. No ambulance took the comrade, I dont really know how he got to the hospital, maybe by a car with somebody.

I told you yesterday that the demo that went towards Psyri was attacked by the police there. An another demo that also started from Exarchia, did a circle around the centre, passing from Gazi and other areas. They attacked to various banks on their way and broke CCTV cameras. A portion of the demo was trapped though when reached the Omonia square, around 50 people were detained and with a blue police van were taken to GADA, the police headquarters in Athens. Some of them were beaten by police, especially girls and particularly if they were under 18. They were finally all left free at about 5 this morning.

I know that the sit down demo at Syntagma square was also attacked by the police, for no reason at all. Stella has allready told you about this, if any of you were watching the live streaming camera may have seen that. After the first police attack that took them out Syntagma square a second happened at about 3:30 in the morning and the demo was completely destroyed.

A bank at Pattision str, (branch of the National Bank) was set on fire.

The situation got calm late at night, and it is still calm now

I found out this info:
During all these days the police in Athens only has used about 4,5 TONS of chemicals. Because they run out they ordered new ones from Israel, we had a taste of them last night. It is the worst feeling that I have ever had from police chemicals, very very strong.

One thing is certain... Israeli police has managed nothing with these chemicals against Palestinians, so they are not going to stop us either.

#20, 04.20: Demo through Athens’ entertainment district, tens of arrests; streetfighting around the Polytechnic lasts until the early hours; sit-in protest at Syntagma square tear-gassed
04.20 am. A spontaneous demonstration that started off from the point of Alexandros’ assassination headed for the areas of Gazi and Psiri, i.e. Athens’ main entertainment district. On its way back to the Eksarhia area, at Omonia square, the demo was attacked and at least 25 (some claim as many as 40) people are now detained. The vast majority of those detained are underaged!

Meanwhile, there were heavy clashes between the police and demonstrators in the areas surrounding the Athens Polytechnic campus. Tens of molotovs were thrown at them and they seemed to have little space and materials with which to respond.

Earlier on in the night a peaceful gathering at Syntagma square that had been called by bloggers, was attacked by police at around 1.30am, with tear gas; their single aim being to disperse this tiny crowd of about 50.

It is very hard to keep up with the day’s events; I will mention some of Athens IMC’s article titles to give you an idea of the level of activity we are dealing with: “Banks smashed on Panormou street, Athens” | “Eksarhia residents kick out riot police from the neighborhood” | 700 high schools occupied by their students across the country | Eksarhia police station was attacked by approx. 100 people | barricades all over the Eksarhia neighbourhood on the night marking one week since the assassination of Alexandros.

More detailed descriptions of tonight’s events and the (much promised) summary of thoughts on what has happened so far, tomorrow.

-demo of 500-600 people at Pireos st, closed to traffic, people from the area are joining the spontaneous demo, they're shouting slogans, along the demo cameras from banks were smashed.

-the demo continues along Iera st (3.40 am),windows at a national bank branch were smashed.

- the demo is over. At Pireos st cameras and banks were smashed, and only those. Just before Omonoia square riot squads appeared at the end part of the demo from the alleys, running away followed that, and the demo broke into smaller parts. There are rumours about 2 possible arrests, but at the moment just rumours. (3.45 am)

-everything was peaceful, at some point there were even long discussions between protesters+passerbys and some from the riot squads, until there was order to shut up (0.18 am)-from the Syndagma square demo, in front of the parliament

-"they're surrounding the demo, a few minutes ago, they're pushing the protesters to go away from the Parliament "(1.33 am)

-the pigs pushed away the protesters that were participating in the sit down demo, from the monument of the unknown soldier all the way down the steps at Syndagma square! The protesters were shouting back at them "cops, pigs, murderers' and "burn,let it burn, the brothel of a parliament"

-arson attack against a Eurobank branch in Panormou st a few minutes ago, 2 fire trucks are trying to put out the fire(1.58 am)

-pigs are attacking at Syndagma (3.55 am)

-about 10(pm-sat) people that were at Messologiou st and a few more we started demonstrating towards Monastiraki, we passed through Psiri, Thisio,Gazi where a lot of people got up but most just looked down. We continued towards Iera st and before reaching Omonoia square the riot police attacked us and people started running in the alleys. There is a possibility that there were arrests. Cameras and banks were smashed.

-16 people. they have arrested 16 people - at the Omonoia police station - 2.44am

-more than 20 arrests, most under age, they took them at GADA(police head quarters)

-arrests at omonoia square -3.59 am

-tension and clashes at this time (1.48 am-sunday) between protesters and the police at the demo in front of the Parliament, Syndagma square

-A big fire erupted a short time ago at a branch of a bank in Panormou street. There are already fire trucks at the site ( 1.20 am sunday )

-Young men attacked with molotofs, a while ago from Polytechnic uni , a riot squad that was at George street (00.50.am)

Up against the wall motherfuckers! We’ve come for what’s ours…
In these days of rage, spectacle as a power-relation, as a relation that imprints memory onto objects and bodies, is faced with a diffuse counter-power which deterritorialises impressions allowing them to wonder away from the tyranny of the image and into the field of the senses. Senses are always felt antagonistically (they are always acted against something) – but under the current conditions they are driven towards an increasingly acute and radical polarisation.

Against the supposedly peaceful caricatures of bourgeois media (“violence is unacceptable always, everywhere”), we can only cachinnate: their rule, the rule of gentle spirits and consent, of dialogue and harmony is nothing but a well calculated pleasure in beastliness: a promised carnage. The democratic regime in its peaceful façade doesn’t kill an Alex every day, precisely because it kills thousands of Ahmets, Fatimas, JorJes, Jin Tiaos and Benajirs: because it assassinates systematically, structurally and without remorse the entirety of the third world, that is the global proletariat. It is in this way, through this calm everyday slaughter, that the idea of freedom is born: freedom not as a supposedly panhuman good, nor as a natural right for all, but as the war cry of the damned, as the premise of civil war.

The history of the legal order and the bourgeois class brainwashes us with an image of gradual and stable progress of humanity within which violence stands as a sorry exception stemming from the economically, emotionally and culturally underdeveloped. Yet all of us who have been crushed between school desks, behind offices, in factories, know only too well that history is nothing but a succession of bestial acts installed upon a morbid system of rules. The cardinals of normality weep for the law that was violated from the bullet of the pig Korkoneas (the killer cop). But who doesn’t know that the force of the law is merely the force of the powerful? That it is law itself that allows for violence to be exercised on violence? The law is void from end to bitter end; it contains no meaning, no target other than the coded power of imposition.

At the same time, the dialectic of the left tries to codify conflict, battle and war, with the logic of the synthesis of opposites. In this way it constructs an order; a pacified condition within which everything has its proper little place. Yet, the destiny of conflict is not synthesis – as the destiny of war is not peace. Social insurrection comprises the condensation and explosion of thousands of negations, yet it does not contain even in a single one of its atoms, nor in a single one of its moments its own negation, its own end. This always comes heavy and gloomy like a certainty from the institutions of mediation and normalisation, from the left promising voting rights at 16, disarmament but preservation of the pigs, a welfare state, etc. Those, in other words, who wish to capitalise political gains upon the wounds of others. The sweetness of their compromise drips with blood.

Social anti-violence cannot be held accountable for what it does not assume: it is destructive from end to end. If the struggles of modernity have anything to teach us, it is not their sad adhesion upon the subject (class, party, group) but their systematic anti-dialectical process: the act of destruction does not necessarily ought to carry a dimension of creation. In other words, the destruction of the old world and the creation of a new comprise two discrete but continuous processes. The issue then is which methods of destruction of the given can be developed in different points and moments of the insurrection. Which methods cannot only preserve the level and the extent of the insurrection, but contribute to its qualitative upgrading. The attacks on police stations, the clashes and roadblocks, the barricades and street battles now comprise an everyday and socialised phenomenon in the metropolis and beyond. And they have contributed to a partial deregulation of the circle of production and consumption. And yet, they still comprise in a partial targeting of the enemy; direct and obvious to all, yet entrapped in one and only dimension of the attack against dominant social relations. However, the process of production and circulation of goods in itself, in other words, the capital-relation, is only indirectly hit by the mobilisations. A spectre hovers over the city torched: the indefinite wild general strike.

The global capitalist crisis has denied the bosses their most dynamic, most extorting response to the insurrection: “We offer you everything, for ever, while all they can offer is an uncertain present”. With one firm collapsing after the other, capitalism and its state are no longer in a position to offer anything other than worse days to come, tightened financial conditions, sacks, suspension of pensions, welfare cuts, crush of free education. Contrarily, in just seven days, the insurgents have proved in practice what they can do: to turn the city into a battlefield, to create enclaves of communes across the urban fabric, to abandon individuality and their pathetic security, seeking the composition of their collective power and the total destruction of this murderous system.

At this historical conjuncture of crisis, rage and the dismissal of institutions at which we finally stand, the only thing that can convert the systemic deregulation into a social revolution is the total rejection of work. When street fighting will be taking place in streets dark from the strike of the Electricity Company; when clashes will be taking place amidst tons of uncollected rubbish, when trolley-buses will be closing streets, blocking off the cops, when the striking teacher will be lighting up his revolted pupil’s molotov cocktail, then we will be finally able to say: “Ruffians, the days of your society are numbered; we weighted its joys and its justices and we found them all too short”. This, today, is no longer a mere fantasy but a concrete ability in everyone’s hand: the ability to act concretely on the concrete. The ability to charge the skies.

If all of these, namely the extension of the conflict into the sphere of production-circulation, with sabotages and wild strikes seem premature, it might just be because we haven’t quite realised how fast does power decomposes, how fast confrontational practices and counter-power forms of organising are socially diffused: from high school students pelting police stations with stones, to municipal employees and neighbours occupying town halls. The revolution does not take place with prayers towards and piety for historical conditions. It occurs by seizing whatever opportunity of insurrection in every aspect of the social; by transforming every reluctant gesture of condemnation of the cops into a definite strike to the foundations of this system.

Off the pigs!

14/12/2008 Initiative from the occupation of the Athens School of Economics and Business

compiled by libcom from reports on www.occupiedLondon.org/blog and www.urban75.net

21.16 Athens
Musicians had called for a demo starting from Propylea, before the demo at 18:00. A big number of musicians attended, and were demonstrating by dancing on the street. It was very good to see people dancing in Panepistimiou str....

A video that shows those lovely people that filled the Athens city centre with music today can be found here:

http://www.tvxs.gr/v1765

They say that their demo was not really planned, a sms message got the most of them only today calling them for a demo, so they just got their instruments and came down. No political party or movement was responsible for that call it was just the willing of that people that wanted to be on the streets to demonstrate together with the youth against police brutality, in their own unique way. Their petrol bombs was their music.

But the police decided they did not like it so they started spraying towards them with chemicals, at one guy directly to his eyes !! The musicians quickly left the area, they were not formed in a block anyway in order to try to defend from a police attack. Although comrades did also exist in the area, any action to try to stop the attack of the police could be dangerous, as there were a lot of people around watching at that point, and they could get injured.

The demo at 18:00 that was called from the comrades of the taken over Law Department, was relatively big, a few thousands appeared (difficult to estimate correct number). The demo did its normal route from Stadiou and Panepistimiou str, passing quite close from the parliament buidling. It was a passionate and peacefull demo with a lot of chanting. Tension was created outside a well known cafe at Panepistimiou str, when comrades started throwing paint and yoghurt at its entrace, and chanting towards the ones inside : "You that you are staring at the demo, wear bullet proof vests, the police is passing" and also "when the cops will start murdering your children, you will get out of your cages". The demo finished peacefully at Propylea.

4 people more went to prison today, waiting for trial. Also in prison waiting for trial, during the last days of the uprising, are 5 more people in Athens, 4 in Larisa and 3 in Kozani plus 25 immigrants from Athens for looting.

A very large number of demonstrators have been detained during the last week, it is not clear yet exactly how many of them are actually arrested and will pass from the public attorney and how many not.

In the most taken over university departments, general assembly meetings are taking place in order to vote for the forthcoming actions, in all up to now they have decided to continue their take overs. More general assembly meetings will take place tomorrow and in other departments.

In Larisa, a 250 people demo started at 19:00, the half of them being anarchists and the others people from radical left groups. It passed from the court building and the police station of Larisa, stones and fireworks were thrown, and the police responded with chemicals. Road blocks got formed and a riot started with the police but did not last long because there was a clear danger that the comrades would get trapped.

14.49 Athens

Yesterday I forgot to mention that the building "Galaxias" in N. Smirni (a suburb of Athens) is also taken over by comrades and it is used as a coordination centre for the actions that will take place.

At 12 o clock today a high school student demo was announced outside GADA, the Police Headquarters of Athens. A big number of school students attended as well as comrades, parents of the kids and other people. There was a heavy police presence, in all streets and alleys around GADA. The kids in a lot of occassions confronted the police, and there was tention during the whole demo. At the end, when the public had started leaving and the school kids remained there, there was an attack by the police to them. The kids responded with yoghurt, flour, fruit as well as stones, but the police managed to break the demo in three parts and send them to different directions. At least 2 kids have been arrested, one teenage boy was pent down by the police and was sprayed with chemicals although it was down arrested and not able to move.

On the same time, school students from other areas of Athens but also from all over Greece, demonstrated outside their police departments. Riots started and at Koridalos (a suburb of Athens) where also the biggest high security prison establishment of Greece exists. The school demo was leading towards that direction (the prison) but was stopped by police. A lot of chemicals were used, the demonstrators responded with stones and petrol bombs.

In Thessaloniki, the town hall of Sikeon was taken over, there will be an open public meeting there on 19:00 today.

In Mytilini (greek island) 3 different radio stations were taken over by comrades and broadcastes. Also an another one at Ioannina was also taken over. Finally a radio station was taken over in Rethimno, Crete, by anarchists and anti authoritarians and broadcasted live as well.

A big demonstration at 6 o clock will start today from Propylaia. My shift at work is allready over so I will head down for that demo as well, I will give you updates later on today.

NOTHING IS OVER YET, THIS IS ONLY THE BEGINNING

#22, 14:42 High school students brutally attacked by the cops; another four arrestees ordered in pre-trial detention
17.36 A musician’s protest at the Propylea was encircled and tear-gassed by riot police (!) The musicians were performing a track when attacked. There are rumours that this is the first time police use tear gas from their new stock; apparently this is some sort of paralytical tear gas…

14.52 Another four of last week’s arrestees appeared before the prosecutor today, who ordered their pre-trial detention (which can, and more often than not lasts one year in Greece). This, combined with the pre-trial detention of arrestees in small cities (i.e. in Kozani and Larissa) shows the greek “justice” will be following a zero tolerance approach with anyone suspected of participating in the revolt. As the prosecutor told the arrestees in Kozani, “the police can no longer deal with you - so we will”.

14.42 The peaceful student sit-in outside the police headquarters on Aleksandras Ave is unprovokenly attacked by police with tear gas. The crowd dispersed in three groups, all of which started fighting back with stones and spontaneous small barrickades. At least two arrests - one young male student was arrested, handcuffed and then teargassed and kicked in front of us. People tried to save him from the police but it was impossible. Indymedia reports that another young female student was injured in the head by the pigs. The anti-police sentiment on the streets is simply phenomenal.

#21, 11:47: High school students gather outside police headquarters; solidarity meeting outside the courts; fascist attacks Chalandri occupation with gun
In the next few minutes, high school students will be gathering outside the police headquarters on Alexandras Ave - an unprecedented move even for leftie/ anarchist groups. But the students have already overcome nearly all conventional forms of political action, so far.

A solidarity meeting is called for today outside the main courthouse in Athens, in solidarity with the arrestees - the pre-trial detention (or not) of many of them is to be decided today.

05.00 Athens
In the early hours of Monday morning, a well-know local fascist/mafia-type with two others, armed with a gun and a bat threatened the people inside the occupied building of the town hall of Chalandri in Athens. The people in the building were threatened with the firearm, one person was hit in injured with the bat and forcibly told to leave. So they departed, to prevent things from getting worse, and re-occupied it a few hours later as it was not locked.

The mayor of Chalandri denies that he has any connection with those people, it is clear though that we are talking about paid men who were there on a mission and not some "angry civillians".

The police helicopter is hovering over Athens for the ninth consequtive day. We are off to the police headquarters gathering; more reports to follow.

“These days are ours, too”
The following text was distributed at the student picket outside the police headquarters today by people from Athens’ Haunt of Albanian Migrants. I wanted to translate and upload it here because it shows something very important: that ties of solidarity are being formed and strengthened across different sectors of the Greek society - a wonderful thing!

These days are ours, too

Following the assassination of Alexis Grigoropoulos we have been living in an unprecedented condition of turmoil, an outflow of rage that doesn’t seem to end. Leading this uprising, it seems, are the students - who with an inexhaustible passion and hearty spontaneity have reversed the whole situation. You cannot stop something you don’t control, something that is organised spontaneously and under terms you do not comprehend. This is the beauty of the uprising. The high school students are making history and leave it to the others to write it up and to classify it ideologically. The streets, the incentive, the passion belongs to them.

In the framework of this wider mobilisation, with the student demonstrations being its steam-engine, there is a mass participation of the second generation of migrants and many refugees also. The refugees come to the streets in small numbers, with limited organisation, with the spontaneity and impetus describing their mobilisation. Right now, they are the most militant part of the foreigners living in Greece. Either way, they have very little to lose.

The children of migrants mobilise en mass and dynamically, primarily through high school and university actions as well as through the organisations of the left and the far left. They are the most integrated part of the migrant community, the most courageous. They are unlike their parents, who came with their head bowed, as if they were beging for a loaf of bread. They are a part of the Greek society, since they’ve lived in no other. They do not beg for something, they demand to be equal with their Greek classmates. Equal in rights, on the streets, in dreaming.

For us, the politically organised migrants, this is a second french November of 2005. We never had any illusions that when the peoples’ rage overflew we would be able to direct it in any way. Despite the struggles we have taken on during all these years we never managed to achieve such a mass response like this one. Now is time for the street to talk: The deafening scream heard is for the 18 years of violence, repression, exploitation and humiliation. These days are ours, too.

These days are for the hundreds of migrants and refugees who were murdered at the borders, in police stations, workplaces. They are for those murdered by cops or “concerned citizens.” They are for those murdered for daring to cross the border, working to death, for not bowing their head, or for nothing. They are for Gramos Palusi, Luan Bertelina, Edison Yahai, Tony Onuoha, Abdurahim Edriz, Modaser Mohamed Ashtraf and so many others that we haven’t forgotten.

These days are for the everyday police violence that remains unpunished and unanswered. They are for the humiliations at the border and at the migrant detention centres, which continue to date. They are for the crying injustice of the Greek courts, the migrants and refugees unjustly in prison, the justice we are denied. Even now, in the days and nights of the uprising, the migrants pay a heavy toil - what with the attacks of far-righters and cops, with deportations and imprisonment sentences that the courts hand out with Christian love to us infidels.

These days are for the exploitation continuing unabatedly for 18 years now. They are for the struggles that are not forgotten: in the downs of Volos, the olympic works, the town of Amaliada. They are for the toil and the blood of our parents, for informal labour, for the endless shifts. They are for the deposits and the adhesive stamps, the welfare contributions we paid and will never have recognised. It is for the papers we will be chasing for the rest of our lives like a lottery ticket.

These days are for the price we have to pay simply in order to exist, to breathe. They are for all those times when we grit our teeth, for the insults we took, the defeats we were charged with. They are for all the times when we didn’t react even when having all the reasons in the world to do so. They are for all the times when we did react and we were alone because our deaths and our rage did not fit pre-existing shapes, didn’t bring votes in, didn’t sell in the prime-time news.

These days belong to all the marginalised, the excluded, the people with the difficult names and the unknown stories. They belong to all those who die every day in the Aegean sea and Evros river, to all those murdered at the border or at a central Athens street; the belong to the Roma in Zefyri, to the drug addicts in Eksarhia. These days belong to the kids of Mesollogiou street, to the unintegrated, the uncontrollable students. Thanks to Alexis, these days belong to us all.

18 years of silent rage are too many.

To the streets, for solidarity and dignity!

We haven’t forgotten, we won’t forget - these days are yours too

Luan, Tony, Mohamed, Alexis…

Haunt of Albanian Migrants

http://www.steki-am.blogspot.com

compiled by libcom from www.urban75.net and www.occupiedLondon.org/blog

22.20 On the fascist provocateurs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpkGxdfoTUM

This was broadcasted about half an hour ago at a big nationwide TV channel here in Greece. This TV show is one of the most popular shows in Greece, the man that you see is a comedian, but he is also serious when needed.

You may not understand Greek, but you must be blind if you cannot see and understand, that the subject here is that police seems to be cooperating with some unknwon men, who dress and look like anarchists. You can clearly see, men with covered faces and clubs, discussing with police men before the demonstrations. These are exactly the ones, that on Monday the 8th of December, were coming behind police lines, breaking up shops (only shops) and then returning back behind the police...

Our state is currently compensating the bussinessmen and shop owners for the damages made... the damages that the state themselves did but blamed others.

21.18 Other police brutality trial ends
Watch this video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgTREwHpsFA

This is old, it is from Thessaloniki, it happened on 17 of November 2007. The guy that is being hit by these police men is a student from Cyprus. This took place during a demonstration.

Before the release of this video, the police theory was that the young man tripped, and fell on a big flower pot, like the ones that normally exist on pavements and pedestrian areas. This video of course uncovered the truth.

Today in Thessaloniki was the trial of the police that were hitting this student. The outcome was a complete joke, 2 of them will be free if they pay around 5000 euro each, the others less as they did not hit him that much ... Let me inform you that this student still has a lot of health and psychological problems because of this attack.

A big number of comrades was outside the courts today in Thessaloniki waiting for the verdict. As you may undestand, after the recent events and what is happening, this trial has an even bigger importance and meaning.... When the court decision was announced, the comrades started attacking the police and riots took place for long outside the courts area but also on the surrounding streets.

In Athens there were demonstrations today in various suburbs, like Brahami, N Ionia, Dafni. Students, school kids, teenagers, various people and comrades attended all these peacefull demos. In Echarxia, a demo was announced outside the police department there, called by the residents of the area. More than 1000 people attended, residents, students and anarchists and demonstrated against the police. The residents demand the police department to close down, police to get disarmed and RIOT police and police "special guards" forces to be demolished. The demo finished peacefully.

At Ilisia, comrades attacked against the police department that exists there. The specific police department is the MAT (Riot police) camp. They threw petrol bombs to the building, and burned 4 police cars and a police bus. One police man was also injured. The police responded with chemicals and stund grenades.

In Syntagma square, as it is happening every day, sit down silent demonstrations are taking place every night.

General assembly meetings on various occupied university departments also took place today, in their vast majority they decided to continue the takeovers. Students belonging to right wing groups (DAP) have been trying to stop the take overs, some of them even moved from department to department and were voting against the occupation is, even if they did not belong to those departments.. Apart from one known occasion (Pantio dept) they did not really manage anything.

#23: Riot police headquarters attacked; state TV station occupied; anarcho-transportation actions continue
Yet another “anarcho-transportation” action took place on Tuesday. These actions, aiming at permanently disrupting the circle of “production-circulation-consumption” have been a huge sucess. Today, when people showed up at the Victoria Station of the Athens metro, passengers were largely receptive to our slogans (”the self-organising of the passengers will mean the end of the ticket inspectors”). The vending machines were glued; all cctv in the station was blocked off.

The riot police headquarters in Zografou, Athens were attacked earlier today, with one riot police van and a few cars burnt.

State-run TV station NET, the Greek equivalent of the BBC, was occupied for a few minutes during the 15:00 news broadcast: Students were shown holding a banner reading “STOP WATCHING - EVERYONE TO THE STREETS!”

The students also distributed a leaflet in the station stating:

IMMEDIATE RELEASE OF ALL DETAINED
STOP WATCHING AND COME ON THE STREETS (The big one)
FREEDOM FOR ALL

Before leaving they also left a text to the TV channel, which I am translating for you below :

Our action is the result of a concentrated pressure that is killing our lifes and not just an emotional "explosion" because of the murder of Alexis Grigoropoulos by the police. We are one more collective, a part of the uprising that is taking place.

Against to the propaganda of the Mass Media, we are interfering on the normal programme broadcast of ERT (Greek National Television Company). We believe that the Mass Media are systematically creating fear to the public. Instead of informing they are misinforming. They present this multiform uprising as blind hooliganism.

They try to explain this social explosion with penal and not social terms. They selectively hide real facts. They present an uprising as just one more spectacle before the start for the next soap opera. The mass media are daily transformed to means of oppression of free and creative thought.

We must organize ourselves. No authority can give solutions to our problems. We need to meet with more people. To turn all public places - streets, squares, parks, schools - to areas of free expression. To meet face to face in order to form together our speech and our actions.

We must not fear, we must shut down our TVs, get out of our houses, continue demanding, to take life in our own hands. We denounce police brutality - immediate release of all arrested demonstrators. For our emancipation and freedom

Planed for today: a meeting of the residents of Eksarhia outside the local police station, demanding that the cops leave the neighbourhood. Meetings &anti-police demonstrations in the neighbourhods of Brahami, Sepolia, Petralona, Nea Ionia and Dafni.

06.41 Arrests
An effort to gather information about the total arrests and convictions all over the country from 6/12. Information is by lawyers, comrades, and in some cases the local press/media. Every effort has been taken to include verified information.
ARRESTS SINCE DECEMBER 6th, COUNTRY-WIDE

ATHENS: 50 immigrants are sure to have been put in pre-trial custody for 18 months in trials where there was no translator/interpreter for them and will likely be deported (immigrant arrests are going on every day and the picture isn't clear yet). On December 11 another 5 were held in pre-trial custody [3 greeks and 2 immigrants] and on December 15 another 4 (according to the University of Economics [ASOEE] occupation blog and comrades).

THESSALONIKI: 21 arrests (3 minors will be tried on February 13th 2009 - the rest, mostly immigrants, were tried in flagrante delicto [in a police or Magistrate's court], convicted and likely no-one is in pre-trial custody, maybe the number of arrests in all the days past is greater -according to the ASOEE blog and comrades).

KOZANI: 34 arrests (3 in pre-trial custody at Grevena prisons - 15 of the 34 arrests were not announced by the cops, only verbally! - at keast 7 minors of which two are Albanian immigrants - an arrestee who was released, being seriously wounded in the face by a tear gas cartridge [he was arrested in the hospital, as were 2 others], was transferred to a hospital in Athens - according to lawyers, comrades and the ASOEE blog).

PTOLEMAIDA: 7 arrests (5 minors, the 2 adults were already tried, convicted and released on parole - no-one in pre-trial custody - according to lawyers and comrades).

LARISA: 19 arrests that will be prosecuted according to the counter-terrorism law (9 of which minors - 4 adults in pre-trial custody, in Korydallos and Avlona prisons - according to lawyers and comrades).

PATRAS: 21 arrests (6 and 15 - 9 minors, probably no-one in pre-trial custody - according to comrades).

CHANIA: 7 arrests (6 minors, 1 adult - no-one in pre-trial custody - according to comrades).

HERAKLION: 18 arrests (all released on bail and restrictive conditions - 4 are adults - the rest are minors who were arrested with their parents, the parents were accused of "neglecting a minor"! - according to comrades).

ZAKYNTHOS: 6 arrests (2 minors, 13 and 16 years old, who were released by orders from the DA - the remaining 4 are a young immigrant woman and 3 men, who will be tried March 19, 2009 for 5 misdemeanors - according to comrade and local press).

VOLOS: 6 arrests (5 minors, they were released and will be tried on a date to be set - the one adult was tried and convicted to 2 years and 10 months for 3 misdemeanors - according to local press and ERT).

Unknown as of yet: Kavala

No arrests were made (although in some, people were taken to the police station but not arrested) in the following town and cities, where marches, clashes or simple protests took place:

Serres, Chalkida, Ioannina, Veroia, Xanthi, Komotini, Alexandroupolis [according to comrades from there].

Drama, Trikala, Karditsa, Florina, Chios, Mytilini, Korinthos, Kefallonia, Lamia, Agrinio, Nafpaktos, Rhodos, Syros, Rethymnon, Leros, Kastoria [according to the media].

compiled by libcom from www.occupiedLondon.org/blog and www.urban75.net

#24, 15:18: General confederation of workers building occupied; Acropolis “solidarity” banner hanged; government calls TV occupation “attempt to overthrow democracy”
At 8 am today the building of GSEE (General Confederation of Workers in Greece) was occupied by insurgent workers, according to their own statement . An open workers assembly has been called for 6pm.

Huge banners were hanged in front of the Acropolis, calling for tomorrow’s mass demonstration…

A government spokesman called yesterday’s state-run TV station occupation “an attempt to overthrow democracy”. The action was also condemned by the communist party (kke).

#25, 17:50: bureaucrats attack the occupation of the workers confederation but are driven away; another riot police van burnt; rioting erupts in Patras
50 bureaucrats came along to the building of the insurgent workers. They came together with some “heavies” but disappeared in the sight of anarchist reinforcements from the Economics university, chanting slogans of solidarity.

In Patras, the lawyer of the assassin cop is holding a press conference in the Pampeloponisiako football ground, having just purchased the local football club. Around 500 people are gathered outside; the have set fire to bins and erected barricades. The first few tear gas canisters are being thrown by the cops.

More on the GSEE occupation
Another account of the confrontation:
The first attack against the GSEE taken over building happened earlier. Around 60 workers members of DASKE (right wing workers union) and PASKE ("socialist" workers union) started verbally arguying with the comrade workers and demanded them to leave. People from the occupied ASOEE (university department) realised that and went to the GSEE building as well so the bureaucrats and their friends had to leave... There was a lot of aggression and verbal arguments but no violence... up to now.

19.19: Athens
The people who occupied state-run TV station NET respond to the government’s slanderous comments here . Yet another riot police van was attacked and burnt in Athens. Open general assemblies right now at the occupied university of Economics and the occupied building of the general confederation of workers in greece. Things are building up for tomorrow, when the mass student demonstration will take place in Athens…

21.01: Athens
Some news updates from today...

You allready know about the GSEE take over so I will not repeat anything here.

This morning, in Euelpidon (the courts of Athens) young high school students were gathered in solidarity to some arrested school kids that were passing from the public attorney today. A group of these teenagers was attacked by the police with chemicals and stund grenades, although they were doing COMPLETELY nothing as a big number of eye witnesses - passing by public says. The people tried to stop the police but they started chasing the kids and made then run away to the streets around the area .... After the events in Chalandi a few days ago, when by miracle we did not have big injuries or even death of children, and after the brutal attack of the police against teenagers with their families at Echarxia, again today the police decides to attack even if they have not been provoced by anyone.. Police violence on the streets of Athens, and not only Athens, has increased a lot during the last days, they do not tolerate even peacefull demonstrations any more, as it happened when they attacked the COMPLETELY peacefull and silent sit down demonstration in Syntagma square a few days ago.

Demos were organized on various suburbs of Athens today. During the last days we see more demos on suburbs taking place rather than in the centre of Athens, in this way the local communities on those areas are also getting informed. In Byronas area, the demo was attacked by the police while it reached to the police department with the use of chemicals. Demonstrators who were on that demo also took over the Town Hall of Kesariani (a near by suburb). The take over lasted for a few hours and then a demo took place. An another demo in Byronas against police brutality is in progress right now as we speak, in a responce to the violent behaviour of the police to the previous one. A relatively big demo also took place at Chalandri, an another suburb of Athens, I there was also an attack against the police department there. The demonstrators firstly passed from the courts of Chalandri, throwing eggs against the building while various graffity were written. They then headed to the police department where eggs and paint was thrown against the police. There was a chain of normall police and at their back RIOT police existed. The demo continued and returned back to the spot, where eggs, paint and stones was thrown at the police again. The normal police left front there, leaving back the RIOT police (MAT), who started using chemicals and stund grenades against the demonstrators.

A photo from Kesariani : http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_kttNrkCNLW...ariani%2B1.jpg

A police bus has been attacked again today by anarchists and was set on fire. http://www.zougla.gr/news/data/upima....jpg&width=490

During the last few days, comrades are blocking the ticket checking machines in various tube stations in Athens, so the public does not need to buy a ticket (cannot validate - check it on the machine) and uses the tube for free. With this symbolic act, it is easier for the public also to access the demos, but it also gives a message about the economic problems that we all have.

In Thessaloniki, comrades got in big supermarkets, expropriated groceries and other food stuff and then gave them for free to people who were shopping in an open grocery market. This is an act that has taken place on a number of occassions and in Athens during the past.

http://www.zougla.gr/news/data/upima....jpg&width=490

A "Smash Your TV" action was called for today at Monastiraki area, in the centre of Athens about 16:00. A lot of people attended bringing together their own TV set, the TV sets were all collected sprayed with paint and then smashed. Various media journalists that were there and wanted to cover the event were not allowed to, as it was an anti-media action. A photo can be seen here
http://athens.indymedia.org/local/we...s/dsc00144.jpg

Riots took place in Patras, because of a speech and press conference of Mr Kougias (the cop lawyer) there. Kougias apart from being a lawyer is also active in football, and he bought the 50% of the shares of a Patras football club called "Panahaiki". A big number of anarchists broke one of the gates of the football pitch that the press conference was given, and tried to enter but RIOT police was also there in heavy numbers. A MASSIVE ammount of chemicals was sprayed against the gathered anarchists, road blocks were made, litter bins were put on fire and riots against the police started. The extensive use of chemicals by the police continued, they even threw "gass bombs" inside houses !!!
Panahaiki as a club was originally made by anarchists and because of this the colors of the team are still red and black. A lot of Patras anarchists are also Panahaiki fans, with their biggest club being the "Navajo" club.

In Chania, Crete, comrades took over a local TV channel and for some time broadcasted messages to the public of that area.

The status of "High Alert" at the army camps of all Greece STILL exists. No soldiers are allowed to leave the camps for no reason, the number of patrols and watches has increased. Even in watches that they are not normally given bullets they are now given, they are also given baggots to put on their guns while being on watch. Hundreds of soldiers from 42 camps of all over Greece, have officially stated to their superiors that they will DISOBEY if there is ever a command to get on the streets.

A first meeting at the free workers area (former GSEE building) took place today, a good number of workers appeared. There is a call for a general strike for tomorrow, there is an announcement to be issued shorty, I will post a translation here. The workers union of delivery workers (pizza, courier deliveries etc) have allready called for a strike for tomorrow since this morning in order to be able and attend tomorrow's demo. Mr Panagopoulos (GSEE president) this morning on the news said that the people that took over the building are definately not workers "because workers now should be working". This clearly shows what is the "job" of Mr Panagopoulos, to keep the workers at their work and nowhere else.

During the last days though, the workers apart from being at their work they are also on the streets. This is something that Mr Panagopoulos and anyone else cannot hide, even if he manages to hide the sun that gives light to our steps and anger at the streets of this city.

We are workers, we are unemployed (because we get fired when attending the GSEE strikes, while the ones that call them take promotions instead), we are part time workers, we are non secured workers legaly or not at "stage" programmes and subsidised programmes of employment. We are a part of this world and we are here. Who ever wants to understand will understand.

We are workers in revolt. Period.

All our work hours have been won with blood, sweat, violence, broken waist, hands, knees, legs, heads.

All this world has been created by workers as us.

There WAS a big demo at the city centre tonight... With thousands of people, workers and students attending. It was the demo - walk on the streets - that KKE (the Greek Communist Party) had called with its front PAME (communist worker union). Obviously they did their demonstration tonight because they will not participate on tomorrow's big student and workers demonstration. I really dont know what happened on that one, although I can easilly guess, if Stella knows anything she can possibly inform us.

A big demo is organized for tomorrow starting at Propylea.

Statement of Solidarity with the Comrades in Greece, by the Disabled Far, Far Away
There is no Space that Separates Bodies in the Flow of the Passion for the Real: They do not individualize. What a horrible violence, the bourgeois media says, to burn this or that, to put your precious streets, buses and cars and buildings on fire, what a chaos on your sidewalks. What a smoke, every-one is blind; your deafening screams tear apart the social fabric of the latest healthy fashion and the City is paralyzed! Some of them even seem to like and thus, by definition, worry for you: as long as ‘you’ the delinquents are away and the bastards can enjoy the suppression of reaction to massacre with silent massacre. Yet, they are concerned, what is your immediate aim: i.e. when will the crazy “youth” stop for the sake of mental sanity? Please express yourself to their journalists! What a glorious solidarity of the global bourgeoisie and their States of medical sterility! The pursuit by each of their own projects of massacre, leads to an endless exchange and circulation process of murderers’ pitiful concerns –all the more so given their fear that they will not find anything else to exchange and circulate in the very near future.

We know this ‘paralysis’, ‘blindness’, ‘deafness’, ‘delinquency’, ‘madness’ that stamps our bodies based on the image of the reified solitary bourgeois: the most pathetic creature in history that is oh-so-pitiful for us. Comrades, do not stop! We the disabled salute you for exposing the everyday social truth imposed on us! And our passion is with you in your experiments with the creation of another one stamped with the passions and desires criss-crossing bodies of the common, through destruction.

The bourgeoisie has long created a world in but also for its own image; an image which tries to put on us the iron cage of its so-called perfect shape when it bothers to allegedly include us: that fictitious monster, called THE Human Body, the only true monster if there has ever been — and which had put its stamp on the buses, cars, streets and buildings that now ‘burn’, supported by its one and only inherent excess: the only acceptable type of cyborg that is the supra-monster-robocop-murderer-pigs (the true opposite of the cyborgs that are the disabled) who, facing the collective body of yours way beyond the imagination of the individual-fuckers-body of the bourgeoisie, now tremble with fear.

Yes, money can give the cripple 20 legs, if she accepts to give 19 of them to the capitalist State and join the spectacle with one wooden leg on its margins. The bourgeoisie, never having really believed in its own lies in the first place, wants us to confirm those for them by inscribing on us a pathetic pseudo-desire for to-us-ever-denied individuality. ‘Hail the Rehabilitation Camps of Normalization, Social Workers, Occupational Therapists, Lip-Reading, Leg Braces, Ear Implants, Military-Manufactured prostheses, stand-up, profit-making wheelchairs, support groups lead by professionals where a collectivity is divided under the objective of Individual Independence, supplants to cover “impairment”, supplementary phalluses, injectors and creams to “copulate appropriately” (tellingly, precisely the same ones dangerous when possessed by the queers!), “special education,” asylums with or without walls, and all the apparatuses of psychiatric, medical and social integration — if and only if they do their job properly’: Imposing on us the pathetic desire of the Monad: the juridical, civilized Subject, through, for, of power. (Can you believe that all these so-called representatives of Reason offer us is the promise of a unitary body that shits and pisses and makes a step, hear their idle talk and see their landscape of devastation and subtracts 1 from 2 “properly” to be then convinced that they extinguished our passion, exchanged our desire for the Real for that shit? And these are the same people that call us stupid!)

Yet, we as well as you know that the capitalist fictions are made for their own negation and thrive through their own inherent negation. This pathetic world is denied on us every day, every hour, every second. Do we need to mention the massacre and genocide (of the living, or “before the sad fact” through “reproductive technologies”), sterilization, beatings, shocks, starvation, incarceration, humiliation, unemployment, homelessness and poverty millions of us are subjected to permanently, us the debris of the world, the humanity and the human-form? The civilized (i.e., the emperors) tell that some of this will pass away. But we know all-too-well the holy hypocritical motivation of these sorry figures: all-failed Narcissuses they are, the bourgeois wants nothing but masturbate by suffocating us in the lake of normalization.

We do not suggest you anything. We certainly do not demand understanding (“god” forbid!) and we do not expect that what goes on behind the world-mirror of the bourgeoisie, the solidarity and collective passion the crips establish within and beyond the walls of normalizing institutions, our prosthetic fraternity, and our joyful struggles, and all these thanks to our exclusion from the human-form, will be apparent to everyone until that mirror is destroyed, as you are about to do. We do not believe that hopeless categories like able-bodied and the disabled have any meaning in the movement of the common and do salute all of you, including our lucky crip comrades with you on the streets of Greece or happily observing the destruction of the very social space that annihilates them every day. For now, let our words, and let the words of condemnation and curses that we utter every day on, in and to the streets, sidewalks, steps, buildings, cars, buses, offices and desks, and hospital and rehabilitation centers, the air, sound, smell and every molecule of normalization of the social space created by the bourgeoisie, concrete symbols of the patriarchal, heteronormative and racist abilism that, unfortunately, still stand firm in the landscape we live in, be a spark that ignites your Molotov cocktails, add force to your stones and fuse our hearts in the pursuit of that beautiful figure that every eruption of collective passion creates: The Inhuman.

Time for discussion will come; this world has stamped its disgusting reality on all of us and as we move beyond it in singular ways, we will listen to one another to negate it wholesale and create another one from scratch. But this we will do at the time of our collective dance on the ashes of this world: some of us on their own two feet, some of us on their wheelchairs, some of us with their crutches, without sound, with trembling bodies: but what a dance it will be when the music of revolution will go through bodies, and reconfigure their margins – margins that in this order have the same precise function as the borders of nation-state-capital.

http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dgmbtk2k_0g2954ccn

compiled by libcom from www.occupiedLondon.org/blog and www.urban75.net

08.54: Student shot in Peristeri, Athens; student demo set to start
Last night, a 16-year old school boy was shot and injured in the area of Peristeri, Athens, close to his school, which has been occupied for four days. The incident occurred yesterday around known but only emerged in the media today.

The 16-year old was sitting with about ten more students, discussing future mobilisations. The shot came from a person unknown, though it is near-certain that this would be either an undercover cop or a fascist. The police only issued a statement hours later. When the 16-year old’s co-students returned to the point of the assault to collect the bullet’s shell, another bullet was shot at them.

The bullet hit the kid in the rest, and he is now in hospital for surgery. The injury is not big and the kid is not in danger.

Athens student demonstration is set to start, under some heavy rain.

08.59: GSEE occupation, Athens
I promised you yesterday to give you more details of the open meeting at the GSEE taken over building.

As I told you a lot of workers attended, the decision was for a general strike today and a meeting at 11:00 at the Museum in order to take part in today's demo. A lot of workers unions have accepted that decision, and they are either on 1 day strike for today or for a 3 hours one, in order their workers to be able to attend the demonstration.

A new General Assembly has been organized for today at 17:00

I am off to Athens city centre for todays demo, I will be back online later today for updates.

NOTHING IS OVER YET, THIS IS ONLY THE BEGINNING

09.48 Athens
Greek police are saying it was an airgun which shot the boy. Apparently the kid is the child of one of the leaders of the teachers federation

13.31 Athens
Reuters reports 7000 demonstrators outside Parliament, with Molotov cocktails being thrown

Many riot police are defending the new Christmas tree which replaced the one torched by demonstrators last week.

16.49 Athens
Hello from Athens, I am at the usual pc from my friend's house, in Echarxia. I had to leave at the end of the demo and did not go to the taken over Law Department, because I would have big breathing problems if I stayed on the street for any longer.

A big student and workers demo took place in the centre of Athens today starting from Propylaia. It started rather late, because of heavy rainfall, but the rain did not stop the people from comming. Difficult to estimate the number, I am sure more than 10000 of protestors flooded the centre of Athens, maybe even 15000 ... From the start up to the parliament nothing happened, but also there was not really police present... Apart their absence nothing was broken during that period.

At the parliament at Syntagma square there was an attack against the police. A couple of petrol bombs were thrown as well as paint, fruits and stones towards the police. A part of the demo reached toward the police line and attacked.... The police responce was with these new chemicals and stud grenades that were thrown inside the demo directly to the people. Some petrol bombs were also thrown and to the new christmass tree at Syntagma square (the previous one was burned during riots) but the police came to ... protect it and the fire was put off by the fire brigade.

The demo was "pushed" by the police back towards propylaia and from there towards the taken over building of the Law Department. At propylaia, stones were again thrown against the police who responded with chemicals and grenades again. One person was definately arrested there.... An ambulance also appeared, I think one demonstrator suffered from breathing problems... I fully understand him.

The demo stopped there, the most people left but a lot also entered the taken over Law Department of the University of Athens. About 300 people were outside the department and were fighting against the police for quite a while. The police nearly surrounded the Law Department, I think one more arrest was also made there.

Inside the Law Department a general assembly took place, and a decision was made that the comrades will go to Peristeri, at a demo that must have allready started there now, for the injured kid from a gunshot. I had a phone conversation with a comrade who was at the assembly just a minute ago, they are now on the street forming a block and are heading towards Peristeri.

You can see a video of what happened at Syntagma here : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLEAEQUyWkI. It is from the live cam of zougla.gr website.

Some photos also here : http://athens.indymedia.org/front.php3?lang=el&article_id=949951

In Peristeri, a demo has been announced after the incident with the injury of the school pupil yesterday. It is called by the school pupils but also one more demo has been called on the same time from KKE (Greek Communist Party). The father of the kid is a teacher and a member of the teachers federation, and a member of PAME, the workers union of KKE. The kid is also a communist, member of SASA.

About that incident a bit more info : First of all I should correct a couple of mistakes on my earlier post on that matter. Firstly the incident happened last night around 11 and not noon ... Also the school was not taken over up to that point, this is exactly what the 8 kids were discussing about. All of them were members of the 15 membered student assembly of that school.

It is now confirmed, even by the police, that it was a normal gun that fired and not an airgun. This was the result after the examination of the bullet, that was taken out of his hand after the surgery. It is a 38 gun that fired, so it could also be a police gun, as they have the same type. The bullet shell has not been found yet, so the gunman should be on a distance and not close, this also explains the fact that the injury of the kid was not big enough.

Because of the political backround of the kid and his parents, and the nature of the conversation that they were having, the most of the people are assuming that this was not some kind of an accident, but an actual attack against the kid, an attempt to murder, but the murderer missed the target because he was not close enough... Of course nothing is certain yet, and an investigation from the police is taking place, after the recent events though not a lot of people trust the police so much ..... The fact that the police firstly said that it was an airgun, then a 22 mm gun and finally a 38 draws a lot of suspicions for an attempt to cover up the whole thing by them ...

There was tention again in Amalias str, a lot RIOT police was still there I dont know what is happening now, I think the situation must be more calm...

I will come back with more info, I think I will go down the road again.

#27, 16:55: Student demo heavily tear gased in Athens
The big student demo in Athens is being heavily tear gassed. The cops are using a new type of stronger gas. Most of us have retreated in the law school. A money transfer van is on fire. People have entered a nearby church, ringing its bells at every tear gas shot, adding a slightly surreal touch to the scene.

18.16 Athens:
A small update.... there is nearly no practical way to reach the occupied Law Department without finding police in front of you.. Groups of police men are everywhere ready to arrest who ever looks "suspicious" ....

This is going to be an "interesting" night ...

18.21 Athens
some updates from the demo and the anti-racist assembly and part of a demo:
I have just come back home, the amount of chemicals they threw today seemed to me like tones, but I could be wrong although at the time I was passing Panepistimiou str the stench in the air was still very uncomfortable. They were not throwing anything at that time (about 6.45 pm) but had thrown previously at the surrounding streets from the Law uni and maybe also Akadimias street, so a good hour and a half afterwards the chemicals were still floating in the atmosphere, and like I said, it was not the best place to be, especially if someone has breathing problems and I think the clashes between the riot squads and protesters is still going on and might continue (Haven't seen the news yet). Dimitris has mentioned what happened at the main assembly of the students/workers and the demo afterwards.(this is an addition to his post)
It was mainly peaceful (most of the time and the part of the demo that I attended) although by the time we reached in front of the Parliament there were chemicals thrown against us, and paint was thrown against the riot squads that were lined up in front of two police vans(-buses) that were parked across Vasilisis Sofia's avenue at the side of the parliament. I wasn't at the front of the demo when they started throwing chemicals, but by the time I reached they had thrown already at least a couple and i did not see any of the protesters attacking the police just throwing ballons filled with red paint, so I can not verify that the protesters started the clashes, but anyway paint and molotov cocktails from one side and chemicals on the other ...not the same thing I think,but anyway after some lovely abuse was shouted against the police and one of the balloons with paint hit one police man and made a complete red mess of his uniform and clapping and cheering from the crowd I left, so no actual knowledge about the rest, I heard though that the clashes started less than an hour after the demo was over, around Solonos and the surrounding str of the Law uni
As far as the anti-racist assembly at Syntagma it was peaceful and by the time I left (about 6.45 pm ) no chenicals from them or paint from our side, but I have to admitt this was a different crowd than this morning (not the throwing paint kind, maybe or maybe not, but we were definitely not as big as the crowd earlier). It was a decent enough gathering considering the accumulated tiredness of all these days and the fact that there was the bigger demo earlier. There were a nice group of students with drums that kept the beat, there were plenty of banners saying how we are all united in our fight, there were a couple of speakers and plenty of slogans shouted towards the direction of the parliament. By the time we started for our demo towards the building of European Union (I think, we never made it there) it was about 6.30 pm, we turned right to Vasilisis Sofia's ave but the same two vans were parked across the street and 3 rows of riot squads were lined up in front of them. We reached as close as they let us, shouted our slogans and there was an attempt of a negotiation with the chief there to let us through, they didn't but suggested a team of about 15 people with our written requests to pass through, at that we shouted back our slogans, some of which I thoroughly enjoyed and after that some people started to leave. So that's it from me, only I have to add there was another demo that started earlier -about 12.30 pm(organized by PAME and/or KKE), just after the rain stopped, it was not announced as far as I know, but even so it was big and also without any incidents with the police.

#28, 18:23: Student demo ends; stations occupied across the country; trade union building in Patras also occupied
We just came back from the demo in Athens. The cops were, once again, extremely provocative: Tens of tear gas cannisters and stun grenades were shot directly into the crowd. It seems like the newly ordered tear gas supply for the police is here.

People in Athens have been demonstrating and/or rioting for 13 consecutive days and nights.

Meanwhile, occupation of media outlets is spreading across the country: Today, the municipal radio of Tripoli, “Nea Tileorasi” TV in Chania, Politeia FM in Sparta and “Star FM” and “Imagine 897 FM” in Thessaloniki were occupied.

The “Labour Centre” (trade union building) of Patras was also occupied today, in protest against the sold-out leadership of the trade unions, demanding an indefinite general strike now.

18.38 Athens
A lot of chemicals were thrown today... but not the "usual" ones. It is not just breathing problems, I had to throw out twice up to now and I still have a burning feeling on my stomach. I was also dizzy earlier but I am better now. Aparently I am not the only one, others that I have also asked have similar effects from them.... These are definately not tear gasses they are chemicals that can suffocate you .. I dont know what kind, there are people saying that those are normally used in war and not demonstrations and that they are officially banned but I cannot confirm any of these info.
There is this "bomb" they are throwing and when it explodes, tiny little things are coming from inside (like batteries ?) and they spray massive amount of chemicals like white smoke.... these are very nasty

There were 2 petrol bombs thrown before the spraying, well actually more or less on the same time... The attack against the police lines followed, but spraying had allready started of course and paint thrown.

I completely forgot to mention the KKE demo earlier than ours, it was also big and peacefull...

Photos from today:
http://athens.indymedia.org/front.php3?lang=el&article_id=950002
http://athens.indymedia.org/front.php3?lang=el&article_id=950016
http://athens.indymedia.org/front.php3?lang=el&article_id=950107

WE DESTROY THE PRESENT BECAUSE WE COME FROM THE FUTURE - statement of proletarians from the occupied ASOEE

"Τhe first dawning light comes out of the deepest darkness"

Up until the Saturday night of 06/12/08 we could say that "jusqu' ici tout va bien", watching everyone's personal fall into the desert of the capitalist system. Then the crash came, and the destructive madness seized large parts of the youth of the country. At first, like so many times in history, it was the actions that did the talking. First the cop gun talked, shouting in the crudest manner the repulsion of Authority of every kind toward the phenomenon of life. The blood of a teenager was spilt, and immediately another cry instantly transmitted from Exarchia to the economic center of the metropolis and other big cities, a cry made out of collapsing glass and flames, transforming banks and malls into a raging cloud with the inscription: REVENGE.

Two days later the christmas centers of the cities looked as if they had been the targets of war bombing, while the already crisis-ridden economy took another deadly blow in its heart by hordes of "hooligans" looting commodities. "The Varkiza Treaty is broken, we are at war again". We are talking about the return of class struggle to the foreground, we are talking about the solution to the crisis: For us. And we're only getting started. Let's go…

We are part of the revolt of life against the daily death the existing social relations impose on us. With the destructive power that was latent in us we realize a wild (but contradictory) attack on the institution of private property. We occupy the streets, we breath freely despite the tear gas, attacking the most despiteful image of ourselves: the image of ourselves as the bosses' slaves, that in its most extreme, most repugnant form is the cop. We erect a steadfast barricade against the loathsome normality of the cycle of production and distribution. In the current conjunction, nothing is more important than consolidating this barricade against the class enemy. Even if we retreat under the pressure of the (para-) state scum and the insufficiency of the barricade, we all know that nothing will ever be the same in our lives.

We also position ourselves in the historical conjunction of the recomposition of a new class subject, that carries from long ago the promise of assuming the role of the gravedigger of the capitalist system. We believe that the proletariat was never a class because of its position, on the contrary, it constitutes itself as a class for itself on the ground of the clash with the bosses, first acting and only later gaining consciousness of its actions. The recomposition is taking place by groups of subjects that become aware that they have no control over their own lives, from groups that have been -or are getting- squeezed on the bottom of the barrel, and are now entering a contradictionary trajectory toward unification.

Wage work has always been a blackmail. Nowdays this holds even more, as the number of workers that are employed only circumstancially and precariously in sectors which, while necessary for the reproduction of capitalist domination have no social usefulness whatsoever, is also growing. In these sectors, class struggles, exiled from the field of self-management of production, move into the field of the generalized blocking and sabotage. Simultaneously, the automatization of production and the abandonment of the politics of full employment create whole reserve armies of jobless proletarians who are pushed to the fringes of society and resort to insecured labor or turn to crime economy in order to survive. Jobless, precarious workers, highschool and university students destined to become future wage slaves, migrant workers of the first and second generation that daily live the marginalization and the repression constituted along with radical workers' minorities the community of the insurgents of December, a community based on the common condition of alienation and exploitation that defines a society based on commodity-work. Let's remind ourselves that the eve of this feast-day was celebrated from those even lower, from those who have lost every joy in the places of torment of democracy, from the prisoners of the greek prisons.

The owners of the commodity labor-power who had it invested in the stock exchange of social security and in the hope of seeing their offspring exiting this condition through social ascension, continue to observe the insurrectionary party without taking part, but also without calling the police to dissolve it. Along with the substitution of social security with police security and the collapse of the stock market of class movability, many workers, under the burden of the collapsing universe of petit-bourgeois ideology and the state hybris, are moving toward a (socially important) moral justification of the youth outbreak, but without yet joining the attack against this murderous world.

They kept on dragging their corpse on three-month litanies of the professional unionists and on defending a sad sectional defeatism against the raging class aggressiveness that is rapidly coming to the fore. These two worlds met up on Monday, 8/12, on the streets, and the entire country caught on fire. The world of the sectional defeatism took the streets to defend the democratic right of the separated roles of the citizen, the worker, the consumer, to participate in demonstrations without getting shot at. Nearby, not that far away, the world of class aggresiveness took the streets in the form of small organized "gangs" that break, burn, loot, smash the pavements to throw stones onto the murderers. The first world (atleast as expressed in the politics of the professional unionists) was so scared by the presence of the second, that on Wednesday, 10/12, attempted to demonstrate without the annoying presence of the "riff-raff". The dilemma regarding how to be on the streets was already layed in: Either with the democratic safety of the citizen, or with the clash solidarity of the group, the aggressive block, the march that defends everyone's existence with sharp attacks and barricades.

The December events ("Dekemvriana") of 2008 in Greece are the latest link in a series of insurrections that are sweeping through the capitalist world. In its decadent phase, capitalist society neither can, nor does it aim at gaining the consent of the exploited through the integration of partial demands. All that remains is is repression. With the restructuring that began in the mid-seventies (to repel the proletarian mutiny that is known as "movement-68"), capital faced the following contradiction: while it had the ability to create a human mass of passive tv-viewers and commodity-consumers, it had to simultaneously refuse them (by lowering their wages) the possibility of buying these commodities. From this point of view, the looting of a mall in Stadiou str. by people who are daily sharing the promises of a false consumer happiness, while being refused the means to realize these promises, shouldn't come out as a surprise.

The insurrection of December didn't put out any concrete demands, exactly because the participating subjects daily experience, and therefore know the denial of the ruling class to meet any such demand. The wisperings of the left, that initially demanded the removal of the government were replaced by a mute terror and a desperate attempt to relieve the uncontrollable insurrectionary wave. The absence of any reformist demand whatsoever reflects an underground (but still unconscious) disposition toward a radical subversion and surpassing of the existing commodity relations and the creation of qualitatively now ones.

Everything begins and matures in violence – but nothing stops there. The destructive violence that unleashed in the events of December caused the blocking of the capitalist normality in the center of the metropolis, a necessary yet insufficient condition for the transforming of the insurrection into an attempt for social liberation. The destabilation of capitalist society is impossible without paralysing the economy – that is, without disrupting the function of the centers of production and distribution, through sabotage, occupations, strikes. The absence of a positive, creative proposal for a different form of organizing the social relations was –up until now– more than self-evident. Nevertheless, the insurrection of December must be understood within the historical context of an enlivement process of class struggle that takes place on the international level.

A series of struggle practices – some have surfaced in elementary form in many countries where significant class conflicts took place recently – propose and realize in a germinal level the human community that abolishes and creatively transcends the alienated commodity relations: occupied schools can be used as regrouping centers to reclaim the streets and the public space in general; public anti-lessons organized within the context of the recent movement of precarious workers/students in Italy, putting knowledge under the service of the forming community; collective appropriations of supermarkets and bookstores, and the collective life in the occupation as a self-fullfilment of the demands for free feeding, housing, books; the radical contestation of the property relations, cooperation instead of personal appropriation (and sometimes reselling) of the appropriated commodities; neighborhood assemblies linking up, starting from the local issues, prefiguring thus a society where decisions are taken and are executed without the mediation of any separated power whatsoever (sf. Oaxaca); free transportations with the public transportation, the déménages (invading into employment agencies and throwing all their stuff into the street) as were systematically made during the anti-CPE movement in France. These (and countless others, that can be born out of the personal and collective intelligence) are the practises that can enrich and fertilize the powers of negation, so that through the turmoil of insurrection, the free, communist society will start to take shape.

We do everything within our reach not to abandon the occupations and the streets, because we don't want to go home. We get miserable and unhappy with the "realistic" thought that sooner or later we will have to return to normality. We get full of joy with the thought that we are in the beginning of a historical process of enlivenment of class struggle, and that if we want to, if we fight for it, if we believe in it, it can lead us out of the crisis, into the revolutionary getaway from the system.

Proletarians from the occupied ASOEE

A note on solidarity
“Have you heard? There was a solidarity action in Moscow”. And Paris. And Berlin, Mexico City, London, Oaxaca, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, New York (when was a university there last occupied?) and Montreal. And -literally- hundreds of other cities. In the first few days of the revolt we were thinking of trying to put together all the solidarity actions somewhere - this was proven to be, quite simply, impossible: There are hundreds of actions around the globe, thousands of people that have taken to the streets. This is incredible and you can’t believe how important it is for us. Our struggle is common. On December 20th, on the international day of solidarity, let’s show them what we have started to feel here in Greece: That what we’ve seen so far is only the begining.

Update, 22:10 Someone already started putting together a map of solidarity actions around the world. Excellent stuff. Please report your solidarity action here: http://greeksolidaritymap.blogspot.com/

compiled by libcom from www.occupiedLondon.org/blog and www.urban75.net

16:19: Yet another TV station occupied; fresh demos in Athens and Thessaloniki; final build-up for international day of action against state murders
“Kydon TV” in Chania was occupied today, in order to expose the lies of the media covering the revolt. There have been tens of TV and radio station occupations in the past few days.

A large concert against state repression is set to start soon at the Propylea in Athens. More demos planned in Egaleo (Athens), Sintagma (outside parliament) and Thessaloniki. We are all building up for tomorrow, the day of international action against state murders.

22.06: Athens
http://www.tvxs.gr/v2043

Today it was a concert day for Athens... thousands attended at a big concert that took place at Propylaia, in the centre of Athens. More than 60 singers and groups played at a music demo that started from 15:00 and ended close to 22:00 ... The crowd was massive, Panepistimiou str had to be blocked because of too many people. You can see a video on the link above.

Personally I did not attend, I do not feel like I want to go to a concert after all this that has happened during the last 14 days ....

Tomorrow as you can see and on the polytechinc announcement, there is a gathering at the site of Alexis murder... I am going to attend that. A lot of solidarity demos pickets and actions are going to take place all over the world tomorrow as it is named global resistance day.

So people of the world...... GET ON THE STREETS !!!

Athens update
In the morning, the kids from the schools of Peristeri, where the second 16year old was shot 2 days ago, had a solidarity gathering and demonstration. Students also held a demonstration in Piraeus.
In the afternoon from 3pm till very late at night, a big open-air solidarity/benefit show at Propylea took place. A big number of artists and bands were playing and thousand of people attended.
Some photos of the show: http://athens.indymedia.org/front.php3?lang=el&article_id=950727#951302
Around midday, 20-40 people attacked the French Cultural Institute in Athens and a nearby bank and wrote slogan on the walls such as: "Spark in Athens. Fire in Paris. Insurrection is coming" and "France, Greece, uprising everywhere". This act was in solidarity with the arrestees there (accused for solidarity acts and sabotage of the railways) and the French students who are in the streets too these days.
In the evening, in Aigaleo, 100 anarchists demonstrated. They broke many bank windows and their surveillance cameras, wrote slogans on the walls and attacked the two riot squads in front of the local police station.
Moreover, during the premier of a play in a central theater, 40 people got on stage and unfolded a banner that read “Everyone on the streets, Free all the arrested now”. They left shortly after while some of the attendants applauded.

A demonstrations took place in Lamia and a gathering in Larissa.
In Chania, a group of 50 people occupied a local tv station and played a 20 minute long video about the killing and the events that are following and then left.
In Giannena a solidarity show took place. In the same city, during the small hours of Friday, two banks were attacked, one of which inside the university.
Arson attacks also happened in Kavala and Aigio. Two cars were set alight in Thessaloniki and two in Patras.

Some major news-websites today insist that one of the cars burnt in Patras is the car of Athanasios Melistas, the cop which shot in the back of the head and killed the 15 year Mihali Kalteza at Exarchia in 1985. The killing was followed by heavy riots and social revolt, just like today and the cop then was set free by the “justice” system. For 2 decades now rumors are going around about where Melistas is, some say that he had left the country. If the car was his and if he now lives in Patras is still unknown.

The students don't seem to plan to go back to the classrooms any time soon. According to OLME (the syndicate of school teachers), 800 schools across the country are occupied by the pupils.

The tactic that the police follows in every demonstration is the same: They throw large amounts of chemical gas and when the protesters and passersby try to escape from the gas, struggling to get some air, the riot squads attack and arrest anybody. Usually the ones who get arrested are not the fighting ones but those who stayed behind because they know that they've done nothing wrong. But the cops don't care about that. Later the cops agree with each other and give identical testifies against the arrestees, saying that they were caught while throwing rocks and molotov coctails. The charges held against the arrestees are very severe and are not based on any evidence, just on the false testifies by the cops. One of the victims of this tactic, was arrested after the demonstration in Athens that took place on Thursday. The 23 year old man was arrested and heavily beaten by the cops (he was carried to the hospital later) and he is now facing severe felony charges. This is one of the hundreds similar cases but the difference is that the man mentioned is doing his military (mandatory for every greek man). There are at least 3 eyewitnesses which are saying that he was just observing the fights and he was trying to get away from the chemicals that the cops threw when he was arrested and brutally beaten.

During the big demonstration on Thursday, photographers caught the riot police spraying with teargas an elderly passerby lady. The first photograph in the sequence is above, the second is this:

Photos of the big concert that took place in Thessaloniki on Thursday: http://katalipsisxolistheatrou.blogspot.com/2008/12/blog-post_952.html

23.59 Athens
The premiere of the national theatre in Athens was interrupted by around one hundred people tonight - they took the stage and held out a banner reading “everyone to the streets”. The text distributed to the audience and actors read, among others: “now that you’ve deactivated your mobile phones, it’s about time you activated your consciousness”. Once hitting the streets, the crowd quickly formed an impromptu demonstration through central Athens - by the time we had reached Omonoia Square, our number had doubled and seemed enough to scare off the ten or so Zeta force policemen (motorcyclists) who drove off at our sight. The cast and director refused to continue the play, in solidarity with our struggle. Yesterday, a similar action took place at the Athens concert hall.

Statement from the " occupation of the people" - an appeal to parents
The decision of the International collective occupation of the people::

Global call out to the parents of all 15 year olds.

In Greece we are all called Alexis and Michaelis ... The cops kill us... They kill us with bullets to the chest, they kill us by beating us to death.

Cops kill 15 year olds. Not only in Greece but throughout the world in the same way.
We call for the solidarity of our parents. We call for for the solidarity of all of you.
Students, workers, the unemployed, labourers, farmers and all who have children ...
Our teachers, our lecturers, our friends, our neighbors, all those people who resist the unjust and the unreasonable.
Because they definately have children too, if we're not mistaken. And if their children do not die from bullets to their chests, they die every day in explosions in nafpigoepiskefasthikes zones with industrial accidents, they drown en mass mass in dilapidated boats ...

A week has passed since the assassination of our brother, our friend, our comrade Alexis from the bullet of a cop; those guardians of the state, the ruling class and Greek 'democracy'. A democracy that you implore us not to forget.

Alexis said goodbye to us with few words «friends, they've hit me» ... he just managed to say, then his legs gave way, he fell to the ground and died.

We are full of rage and so we should be. We are enraged and we are destroying this shell of a society you would have us further.
No we are not of this society. We are 15 year olds and we think... differently.
.. Cops kill in the same way everywhere.
Some of them say batons and one bullet is enough. Others shoot 15 times for fun..
Do not become their accomplices.
Those who remain silent, those who condemn our rage because of the blatent lies of the corporate media, the police and the politicians you vote for, determine our future ... you are responsible and liable.
Because the future of Alexis was murdered on the 6th of December 2008 in Greece. Because the futures of 15 year olds are ended by the bullets of cops in each and every corner of this world.
One night in Exarhia with one bullet to the heart.
The place may change, but the situation remains the same.
We are all, each and every one of us an «Alexis» and a «Michaelis.
And we are not celebrating our birthdays because we were assassinated at the age of 15. Pigs.
I, Alexis Grigoropoulos - was killed by a cop on 6 -12-08 in Exarhia with a shot straight to the heart. I have became an anniversary.
I, Michael Kalteza was killed by a cop in 1985. I died on the anniversary of another uprising at the Polytechnic, an uprising against the military junta which left dozens dead and hundreds wounded.
What we share in common is that both of us were killed in a 'democracy' and that we were 15 years old...

We all have one thing in common. We are 15 years old in a society that you have made for us yet without us. You never asked us, nor did you ever listen. You choke us with the ideals of wealth, of the corporations, economic growth and power.
... The ideals of the broken window displays; of luxury cars, expensive clothes, jewelry watches. You flood us with rotten entertainment, food and culture saturated in convenience and stupidity and you condemn us for the broken windows of multinational chain stores who rob everyone of us..
We are accused of destruction and arson. Yes, we set fire to all that which burns up our lives, so we can endure the tons of chemical tear gas thrown upon us by the police and the army. Because we don't have any other weapons. Only our hands, tangerines, plastic water bottles and stones, the odd Molotov cocktail, but we must resist each one of us, however we can, in the face of the military machine of repression and armed murderers.
They shoot and kill us.
And when we protest
They curse us.
They beat mercilessly.
Cripple us.
They handcuff us.
They choke us with tear gas
They condemn us.
They lock us up in pre-trial custody.

We are on the streets and we are calling for our lives.
At the age of 15 because later it may be too late. Later we may have been killed by some cop, by ostracism.
We are calling it out but again you are not listening to us.
The shooting ... and the sound of the shot which killed Alexis if nothing else, let it disrupt your apathy.

Join us, come stand beside us.
We have the strength and power of our rage.
You have your own strength and it is not possible that you don't also have your own rage when they kill us with bullets when they beat us to death ... every day because we throw tangerines and plastic water bottles at them.
Let us unite our strenghts and let insurgency flare in every neighborhood in every street, in each doorstep, in every town square of this world.

We are not easily terrorised nor made afraid. We are agents of freedom.
We say to the cops ... when they hit us and swear at us with vulgarity, both at us and our mothers... when they put us in handcuffs ... «Cops you're weak» ... «Is that the best you can do, chickens, we've copped worse from our mothers and our fathers... »
Yeah right, we're not scared of them. We are not afraid of them nor their weapons.
We answer back, right in the face of the murderers .... «One of us is buried in the earth but thousands of us are in the struggle, on the streets...»
We shout to them «Cops! pigs! killers!» «weak cops you kill children».
For all those things which the windows of banks hide from you, open your ears and listen to us.
There's no way you can not feel rage ...
So come with us, if you're afraid, we'll protect you,
We offer our hands and our souls ... and if we have to, our lives.
But you are not beside us, despite the fact that you still tell us that «you gave birth to us and we mean more to you than your own lives ...»

And even more pertinent, just think, that in one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen years ... they could have very well kill your child.
- The cops killed him already. He was 15 years old. With ostracism because he was an 'untamed bum' anarchist, insubordinate, terrorist hooligan.

Think about it before you lose the opportunity to save your own child, but ...
think a little bit harder.
Because perhaps you have the opportunity to help save my life, mum, dad.
I ask of you to disarm the police, to disarm the murderers in uniform.

I'm not asking you to save me but to stand in solidarity with me ..
Because until now those that stand beside us are the ones who save us... strangers who share our rage.
They save us from those armed killers circulating everywhere ... those who purport to protect you ... you and your valuable property, killing 15 year olds in the process.

We, the minors, we the 'young scoundrels', the anarchist kids, the 'roughnecks', 'junkies', 'thieves', this countries own 'hooded terrorists', we extend to each and every parent, to all the people, we call on you all to join our protests and rallies and blockades and our insubordination.
We invite all you reading this text, to join the struggle to change our lives and to fight injustice, to overcome the inertia of apathetic acceptance.

We will be there ... every day, every night on the streets and we will be up in arms ... we will use our bodies as barricades against the MAT (riot cops) as barriers to stop them arresting and hitting those beside us. Our schoolmates.

We will wait for you... otherwise you may lose us... they may very wll kill us, the special guards of public security, the protectors of your "democracy".
We will put our bodies on the line as barricades against the MAT to prevent them beating and arresting those next to us. Our classmates.. All those beside us.

And because today a week after the cold-blooded murder of Alexis people are celebrating the day of St Elephtheris (Liberty) we say to you all think a little bit harder.
Do not kill our freedom.

Happy holidays will be on the streets which ever way you decide ...

Occupation of the people
15 year old potential victims of the ostracism of armed cops.

Global day of action against state terrorism - statement from the occupied Polytechnic in Athens
Two weeks after the state murder of comrade Alexandros Grigoropoulos, the social and class counter-attack continues.

University facilities and public buildings remain occupied, whilst mobilisations, demonstrations and confrontations with the uniformed guardians of order continue to take place on the streets, throughout Greece, on a daily basis.

Up until Wednesday 17 December, 16 of those arrested during the rebellious events of December have been imprisoned facing grave charges and 4 of them are persecuted according the "anti"terrorist law. Hundreds of people have been arrested all over the country. In Athens alone 184 people have been arrested, whilst more than 30 immigrants are being detained.

The events that took place following the murder of Alexandros Grigoropoulos started a wave of worldwide mobilisations in his memory and in solidarity with those rebels fighting in the streets against democratic totalitarianism. Gatherings, marches, symbolic attacks on Greek consulates, as well as confrontations with the police, have taken place in cities across Cyprus, Germany, Spain, Denmark, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Mexico, Belgium, the United States of America, Turkey, Ireland, Switzerland, Croatia, Australia, Russia, Bulgaria, Italy, France, Poland, Argentina, Chile, Canada, Uruguay, Austria, New Zealand, Portugal, South Korea, Basque Country and elsewhere.

We continue the occupation of the Athens Polytechnic School that started on the evening of December 6th, creating a space for everyone involved in the struggle and providing a steady point of resistance within the city of Athens.

Following a collective decision of the occupied Polytechnics general assembly on Saturday 13/12, we called for global actions against state terrorism on Saturday 20/12. Because we do not forget and we do not forgive. Because the use of murderous violence by the state and bosses against those that struggle is not a localized phenomenon but rather a universal suffocating reality. Because zero tolerance and repressive terrorism, wage slavery, poverty and social exclusion, exploitation, oppression and social control are not constrained by borders but neither is the struggle for freedom.

The rebellion that lit up this miserable world with its flames, continues!
Immediate release of all who are being detained by the police.
Solidarity with everyone facing persecution.
Solidarity with everyone around the world who uses any means to spread the message of rebellion!

Gathering at the site of Alexis Grigoropoulos murder.
Saturday 20/12, 9pm.

The Occupation of the Polytechnic University in Athens

(Self) destruction is creation
(collective translation of a leaflet circulated in the occupied Athens School of Economics and elsewhere, written by the “girls in revolt”)

We won’t forget the night of December 6th that easily. Not because the assassination of Alexis was incomprehensible. State violence, as much as it might try to construct itself into more productive formations of sovereignty, will endlessly return to dear and archetypal forms of violence. It will always retain within its structure a state disobeying the modernist command for discipline, surveillance and control of the body - opting, rather, for the extermination of the disobedient body and chosing to pay the political cost coming with this decision.

When the cop shouts “hey, you”, the subject to which this command is directed and which turns its body in the direction of authority (in the direction of the call of the cop) is innocent by default since it responds to the voice reproaching it as a product of authority. The moment when the subject disobeys this call and defies it, no matter how low-key this moment of disobedience might be (even if it didn’t throw a molotov to the cop car but a water bottle) is a moment when authority loses its meaning and becomes something else: a breach that must be repaired. When the manly honour of the fascist-cop is insulted he may even kill in order to protect (as he himself will claim) his kids and his family. Moral order and male sovereignty - or else the most typical form of symbolic and material violence - made possible the assassination of Alexis; they proped the murder, produced its “truth” and made it a reality.

Along with this, at the tragic limit of a death that gives meaning to lives shaped by its shade, revolt became a reality: this incomprehensible, unpredictable convulsion of social rhythms, of the broken time/space, of the structures structured no more, of the border between what is and what is to come.

A moment of joy and play, of fear, passion and rage, of confusion and some consciousness that is grievous, dynamic and full of promises. A moment which, regardless, will either frighten itself and preserve the automations that created it or will deny itself constantly in order to become at each moment something different to what it was before: all in order to avoid ending up at the causalıty of revolts suffocated ın normalıty, revolts becoming another form of authority whilst defending themselves.

How did this revolt become possible? What right of the insurgents was vindicated, at what moment, for what murdered body? How was this symbol socialised? Alexis was “our Alexis”, he was no “other”, no foreigner, no migrant. High school students could identify with him; mothers feared losing their own child; establishment voices would turn him into a national hero. The body of the 15-year old mattered, his life was worth living, its ending was an assault against the public sphere - and for this reason mourning Alex was possible and nearly necessary. This sphere turned against a community us who revolted don’t identify with, exactly like Alexis did not identify. This is a community, regardless, in which many of us many have the priviledge to belong since the others recognise us as their own. The story of Alexis will be writen from its end. He was a good kid, they said. The revolt, which we would have been unable to predict, became possible through the cracks of authority itself: an authority deciding what bodies matter in the social network of relations of power. The revolt, this hymn to social non-regularity, is a product of regularity… It is the revolt for “our own” body that was exterminated, for our own social body. The bullet was shot against the society as a whole. It was a wound on every bourgeiois democrat who wants their own security to be reflected upon the state and its organs. The bullet was a declaration of war against society. The social contract was breached - there is no consensus. The moral and political act of resistance became possible, understandable, just, visible at the moment when it came under the terms and conditions of justice of the dominant symbolic order encompassing the social fabric.

This starting point does not cancel the righteousness of the uprising. Because the dominant Speech, the authority that gives name, shape and meaning to things, the range of dominant ideas from which the concept of social segmentation derives so as to control the hierarchical social relations have all already excluded the “hooded youths” from this community. They have cornered them at the community’s dangerous borderline in order to set the limits of disobedience.

They tell us to resist but not in this fashion, they say, because it is dangerous. What the social legitimation we came across at the beginning of all this has got to tell us is that even if we are tangled in the web of authority, even if we are its creations, we are inside and against it; we are what we do in order to change who we are. We want this historical moment to adopt the content we have set ourselves and not the meanings from which it can escape overnight.

It is not possible for this authority to bloodlessly cross the boundary between obedience and autonomous action, since if the rebels need to muster up their masculinity in order to fight the cop, they need to question it at the same time because it constitutes the authority they use to fight the cop. And this ambivalence lies at the heart of our subjectivity, it is a contradiction that tears us apart and forms the moral splendour that takes place in the margins of the rebellion, outside and inside us, on the quiet nights when we wonder what is going on now, what has gone wrong, and we can only hear silence.

Nothing exists without the meaning assigned to it. Resistance strategies can turn into strategies of authority: Chaos will recreate a hierarchy in social relationships unless we fight with ourselves while fighting the world, some selves that we formed as part of this world: we have grown within the moral and political limits this world sets, within the moral-political ties in which the self comes into being… It will recreate itself into a hierarchy, should we not bring off male macho behaviour that goes berzerk and gets carried away by emotion, should we adopt positions that densify in positions of authority.

girls in revolt

compiled by Libcom from www.occupiedLondon.org/blog and www.urban75.net

04:31: 800 schools and 200 university departments occupied; international solidarity day is here
On the dawn of December 20th, a full fortnight from the day of Alexandros’ murder, the mainstream media report that around 800 high schools and 200 university departments around the country are occupied by their students.

Today is the international day of action against state murders. Once again, we will be on the streets - yet today we won’t be alone… Thousands and thousands across the world are joining us.

19:12: Neighbourhood demonstrations across Athens; more anarcho-transportation actions and radio station occupations; demo at point of assassination set to start
The plan for today was for many small demonstrations to take place around the entire city of Athens, so that this decentralised action could bring the city to a standstill. There were demonstrations in the neighbourhoods of Gyzi, Peristeri (were the second student was shot), Chaidari, Petralona, Nea Smyrni, Victoria, Vyronas, Illion (that’s tomorrow) and in the cities of Thessaloniki, Heraclion and Larisa.

Fresh “anarcho-transportation” actions took place at the metro stations of Brahami and Ayios Antonios. In the last few days, many stations around the city have been visited by small anarchist groups that sabotage the vending machines, handing out leaflets (”the self-organisation of the passengers will bring the end of the ticket inspectors”…)

At least four more radio stations were occupied today (”Best,” “En Lefko”, “Athina 9.84″ and “Republic 100.3″; texts against state violence and in solidarity with the arrestees of the riots were read.

Responding to a callout by the Athens Polytechnic occupation, we will be gathering at the point of Alexis’ assassination in the next couple of hours. We’ve been reading the reports from the solidarity actions across the world. Keep them coming. The states murder the people but tonight, a night against state murders, is a night of the people. This is our night.

21.36
-Attacks against riot squads (MAT) at the Ministry of Culture/ They responded by drowning the area with chemicals
-from the Polytechnic University/ Cops have surrounded people that came down to the site where Alexis was murdered. At this time (11.15 pm) there are a lot of people inside the uni and the outside streets all the way up to Exarhia square. The cops are throwing often very strong chemicals. The comrades are responding with molotov cocktails / The clashes have reached Patission str
-From the assembly at Javela str & Messologgiou , the place where Alexis Grigoropoulos was murdered 15 days ago : There is a very big crowd shouting slogans against the cops - at the surrounding streets riot squads
-Fire / Arson attack at the Teiresias' building (Department of the Finance Ministry)-about 7.13 pm
From IndyMedia Athens http://athens.indymedia.org/front.php3?lang=el&cat=1&n_lang=1
-From the live stream of the taken over Polytechnic University :
"These are the days and nights of Alexis. The rage does not diminish. 15 days after Alexis murder fire everywhere sets light to the night and the surrounding streets from the murder site.
-Stournari street
-Kanniggos square
- Pattision str
-Solonos str
-Averof str
-Tositsa str
-George str and the surrounding streets all the way up to Exarhia square
from the balconies in Exarhia people are shouting at the cops and throwing things against them - from IndyMedia Athens
"... Self Organization.
Free all the comrades arrested during the riots "- from the live stream from the taken over Polytechnic http://147.102.219.129:8000/

at the end of the page there is a video from tonight's clashes (20/12) from the area where Alexis was murdered
http://athens.indymedia.org/front.php3?lang=el&article_id=951932

-From the live stream "... every 5 minutes the cops are throwing tear gas, flash grenades and very strong chemicals, the atmosphere is too heavy and misty from the chemicals, clashes all around the Polytechnic, At the Polytechnic the rabies met with consciousness "
-from the live stream "everyone inside the Polytechnic is fine, around it though there are many riot squads/ in Patission str there are at least 6 riot squads/ a lot of people have taken shelter inside the taken over building of GSEE in Patission st and at the taken over uni of ASOE a bit futher down in Patission st"

zougla.gr has put again its live feed from Patission str(in front of the Polytechnic uni)(it is out of focus, intentionally?maybe some other people are recording ?)
http://mfile.akamai.com/61609/live/reflector:32322.asx?prop=e

Assemblies, demonstrations and clashes around Greece
-Edessa assembly
-Naxos (Island) poster at central sites of the city http://athens.indymedia.org/front.php3?lang=el&article_id=951901
-Piraeus incidents ? between football fans /police arrives
-Brahami (Athens suburb) disruption and giving out leaflets
-Nea Smirni (Athens suburb) Demo,some pass-byers joined, slogans also written on banks along the demo, 1 ATM smashed, transport and bank's CCV painted
-Ioannina take over of radio station for about 30 minutes, at the street speeches + statements from taken over ASOE, GSEE and Polytechnic were read / different decoration of a xmas tree at Ioannina http://athens.indymedia.org/front.php3?lang=el&article_id=951866
-Agios Panteleimonas (area of Athens) incidents at a supermarket / police arrived
-Kamara (area in Thessaloniki) Assembly, banners, 2 different leaflets were given out + newspapers , speeches photos http://athens.indymedia.org/front.php3?lang=el&article_id=951724
-Kavala (area in the north of Greece) arson attack on a car
-Petralona (area in Athens) Demo, slogans also written along the demo, take over of the area around the Cultural Centre "Melina Merkouri", then temporary the radio station Athens 984 Photos http://athens.indymedia.org/front.php3?lang=el&article_id=951679
Syndagma incidents while protesters were placing rubbish on/around the new xmas tree , video http://athens.indymedia.org/local/webcast/uploads/mvi_0337.avi
/ riot squads arrive, tear gas thrown /video with the first arrests from Syndagma http://prezatv.blogspot.com/2008/12/video_5221.html
-Vironas (suburb of Athens) assembly, demo

Personal account from Athens
There was a gathering last night at the point that Alexis was murdered. Thousands attended, in order to pay a tribute to the murdered Alexis... Police presence was big, on a lot of streets around Exarchia, there were so many people on the streets and the balconies though, that it was difficult for them to be as active as they wanted.... Clashes against the police did start though, at various points in Exarchia and mainly around the taken over Polytechnic building... A lot of us got in the polytechnic, also a lot of people went to the taken over GSEE, Law Dept and ASOEE buildings. Clashes against the police around the polytechnic continued until late at night.

EVERYBODY in Exarchia were out in the streets or on the balconies, AGAINST the police.... You could see people from the balconies throwing things against them, public on the streets shouting at them... The cops used again massive ammounts of chemicals, especially around the polytechnic, some very very strong ones.. I have allready spoken about those on a previous post, I dont want to repeat again.... The only thing I can say is that I am not feeling so well for one more day.

There were rumors yesterday that the police surrounded us, that there was no access to Exarchia at all, to the square or the murder point etc... ALL THESE ARE PROPAGANDA. Yes there was police presence, yes there were riots especially after the end of the gathering around the polytechnic, but in no way all Exarchia were closed by police... The people of Exarchia would never leave this to happen and did not happen yesterday.

Who ever things that this uprising has finished, has no idea what is happening here. THIS IS ONLY THE BEGGINING

THESE ARE THE DAYS OF ALEXIS.

Sunday 03.38 Athens
Siege of the Athens Polytechnic grounds by the riot police is finally over. For hours, the pigs would throw their chemicals into the campus, to the people who had retreated there after gathering at the point of the assassination of Alexandros. There was heavy street fighting throughout the night. There were clashes all around the area of Eksarhia, Athens.

Just some of the international solidarity actions
some info about solidarity with the Greek uprising , 48+ events on global day of action. from indymedia athens, the page is translated
http://athens.indymedia.org/front.php3?lang=el&article_id=951373

solidarity from Germany (Hanover)
http://athens.indymedia.org/front.php3?lang=el&article_id=950985

solidarity from Seoul
http://athens.indymedia.org/front.php3?lang=el&article_id=950812

from yesterday French institute attacked, photo + page translated

http://athens.indymedia.org/front.php3?lang=el&article_id=951403

solidarity from San Francisco http://www.indybay.org/uploads/2008/12/18/greekdemo_1.jpg
http://athens.indymedia.org/front.php3?lang=el&article_id=950671

solidarity from Portugal
http://athens.indymedia.org/front.php3?lang=el&article_id=950804
http://anarcores.blogspot.com/ Photos

from New York to Greece solidarity
http://athens.indymedia.org/front.php3?lang=el&article_id=950757

Solidarity from Amsterdam Photos, page not translated
http://athens.indymedia.org/front.php3?lang=el&article_id=950745

solidarity from Helsinki Photos, page not translated
http://athens.indymedia.org/front.php3?lang=el&article_id=950666

from the committee of Greeks in Zurich for solidarity to the Greek uprising
Photos, page not translated
http://athens.indymedia.org/front.php3?lang=el&article_id=950646

solidarity from North America
http://athens.indymedia.org/front.php3?lang=el&article_id=950637

solidarity from Slovakia
http://athens.indymedia.org/front.php3?lang=el&article_id=950626
photos http://www.crimethinc.cz/g28-recko-solidarita.html

solidarity from Istanbul
http://athens.indymedia.org/front.php3?lang=el&article_id=950456
http://athens.indymedia.org/front.php3?lang=el&article_id=952127

solidarity from the Basque region
http://athens.indymedia.org/front.php3?lang=el&article_id=950276

Solidarity from Edinburg
http://athens.indymedia.org/front.php3?lang=el&article_id=950304

solidarity from Italy, March , Photos from the Greek consulate-Italy
http://athens.indymedia.org/front.php3?lang=el&article_id=951872

Solidarity from Turks and Kurds outside the Greek Consulate in Istanbul
http://athens.indymedia.org/front.php3?lang=el&article_id=951375

Solidarity from Hamburg, Munich, Copenhagen, Frankfurt and Brazil // Solidarity demo in Melburne http://athens.indymedia.org/front.php3?lang=el&article_id=952058
, Luxenburg, Mexico, Spain
and Reykjavik(Iceland) http://athens.indymedia.org/front.php3?lang=el&article_id=951946

All the links from Indy Media Athens
http://athens.indymedia.org/front.php3?lang=el&cat=2&n_lang=1

Compiled by Libcom from www.urban75.net and www.occupiedLondon.org/blog