The dictatorship of confinement is the mirror of democracy. It is the morbid representation of a tyranny that is not content with its military victories. It wants to see those who subjugate bend, sink into deprivation and decline. See in the faces of the captives that laughter disappears and misery occupies its place. Power builds common pits of souls to bury the voices of the invisibles in the concrete.
And yet some still scream. They shout strongly over injustice, inequality, arbitrariness. They shout for freedom and their voices break the concrete, cut the cables and travel free like birds in the sky. They contemplate the meanness of this world and from its proud height they fall as rays on the heads of the lords.
Comrade Giannis Michailidis belongs to these voices. A disobedient fighter both outside and within the walls. Uncompromising with the claim of confinement to this day. Humble as a personality as much as an enemy of exploitation, our comrade condenses in his journey the meanings that we are called today to defend collectively. Revolutionary conscience against submission, self-denial against self-interest, the sharpening of the fight against disarmament and generalized resignation.
Faced with the general decline that prevails around us, there are people who, with their faith and their dedication to revolutionary ideals, have left their own special mark on the combative struggle for total liberation. The lives of these people, whom we have the honor of calling comrades, weigh as mountains. Therefore, the struggles they take on are those of all of us. Giannis mortgaged his body to defend the collective current of those who chose to march, from the first to the last day, against the paths of intolerance through the walls.
Arriving today, the disparate personal paths of both were found in the common will to dare to fight for something better. Our captivity can suggest that we were defeated in some way, but we promised not to let the prison deprive us of our little daily struggles and dreams. Today we have to resume the thread of practical solidarity defending the community of political prisoners. As of today, June 11, we are going to make a one-week refusing prison food hunger strike, sending a minimum message of solidarity and adhesion to our comrade Giannis Michailidis. We have chosen June 11 as a reference point, the day that, after the sentence of Jeff Luers to 22 years in prison in 2001, is the point of reference to express solidarity with those accused of cases of “ecoterrorism” and the anarchists with long convictions.
When defending in practice the community of irreducible prisoners, we send our militant solidarity to those who do not bend before the ravages of imprisonment: to the comrades Claudio Lavazza and George Ibrahim Abdallah who do not submit to the long-term confinement of the French state; to comrade Marcelo Villarroel Sepúlveda who has faced an environment of constant change dictated by the dictatorial laws of Pinochet; to the hundreds of revolutionary companions who are imprisoned in the cells of Turkish fascism. To all, an inflexible heart that belongs to the streets of resistance.
Victory to the struggle of our comrade Giannis Michailidis
Breathe deeply until the death of the State and all power
