Athens: Gathering-demonstration against fur-leather industry and every type of confinement Friday 9/6 17:00 monastiraki square
It is difficult to depict with words what “fur and leather industry” means. We have been used to repeat terms without combining them with physical reality,to replicate them like they are abstract concepts, to forget that they come with the body pain of many,too many, individuals.Maybe the best description of the violent dissociation of animals’ leather and fur industry are these animals’ screams, their silences full of despair, their horror stares. All these happen far away from the well-polished cities,many kilometres away from the shining showcases of the stores that trade what has been stolen from the animals.
They happen for example in Kastoria,Kozani,Ptolemaida,Florina and Grevena where factories-prisons are full of small,dirty cages with weak,scared animals that have not been given even one day of freedom, without having ever been able to run,to play, to find comrades, to explore the forest and sleep quietly under one of its shadows. They grow up in bare minimum,merciless spaces,either being unable to come in touch with other creatures,or being piled up all together without their inherent competitiveness and their need for personal space. For example, minks fight fiercely each other,get seriously injured and stay with their wounds open and infected.Foxes are subjected to generical modifications in order to “offer” more fur while being slaughtered, and as a result they have heavy bodies and auto-immunes diseases that cause them pain every day.
All creatures in confiment conditions experience systematic abuse and survive in conditions of panick/desperation, rackoons,snakes, crocodiles, chinchillas,beavers,rabbits… We don’t have to refer to every grouping of non-human animals.Besides,all non-human animals are considered as inferior beings by power structures, with the one named “human” being put at the top of a supposed value pyramid. A pyramid that not at all luckily, the dominant civilization has constructed and maintains in order to legalise the wide exploitation and everyday murder of not thousand, but millions of other creatures,normalizing their death and turning their sell just a transaction.
The fur and leather industry receives well protection and support from a state gang that is called Adonis Georgiadis, which as minister doesn’t stop distributing millions to these who murder animals for their wealth. The subsidies to that industry comes one after the other, with the most recent a pre-electoral spring relevant announcement of 8 million euros. Of course,power is not person-centred,but animal exploitation rules the state-capital machine. Animal exploitation is being associated with the homogenised construction of “greek nation”,since the ministry and the fur stores call on a supposed “greek” fur making tradition. Moreover, it is being related with the war, since the excuse for the subsidy waves is referred to be the Russian-Ukraine war and the relative export reduction. So,it is being revealed that behind the fake tears for the deceased and the refugees from the Russian-Ukraine battles, the capital sees a chance for profits maximize.
In addition, animals exploitation is associated with the spread of neoliberalism and specifically the touristization, since stores who trade fur and leathers are located mainly in touristized areas. Moreover,it causes nature destruction, since there have been detected dangerous concentrations oh chemical elements , such as chromium , many times around fur factories’ areas in Kastoria, since fur dissociation and somebody’s leather conversion to a product is not at all a “natural” process. Clearly, animals exploitation is associated with oligarchy and corruption,since all the fines that are imposed to these factories from time to time, are recalled in less than then days…with the toxic waste continuing to pollute close areas without obstacles and burden ecosystems even more. These waste are either being absorbed by the ground and end up to groundwaters, or run to similar streams and are transferred everywhere via water cycle.
Corruption is also found at the cooperation level between free animal hunters and owners of factories-prisons, since the first trap animals in forests (mining their natural habitats with millions of traps) and illegally sell them to the second, providing fur industry even with pelts of creatures that are threatened with extinction. According to data, at least 2 of the 3 trapped animals are eventually considered “trash” and are thrown away. Hundreds of animals are decimated, injured from the traps, deprived of their comrades, live under the danger of uneven death, just because it is considered “fashion” and wealth demonstration to wear murdered creatures.
Either as trash, or as trades animals are being deprived of their subjectivity and in practice of their own life just for their skin.
By extenction, lives that aim to survive outside the domestication mechanisms of the dominant western technoindustrial culture, are being pursued,prisoned or killed by it, bringing out the real face of the so called democracy. If prisons are the state core, then cages are the foundations of mass industries. The state limitates,controls and exploits lives “inferior” and buries them alive via confinement. We find a continuation, a direct connection between every type of confinement. Just like animals in cages are violently undivested of their personality and are deduced to raw materials for profits, correspondingly- as combatants against the prison system in the have appointed- prisons are systems that turn defined populations into something less than whole individuals. Prisoners are not considered to be “equivalent citizens”, are being deprived of their accessibility to participate in the political field,are being used for the wealth gathering of the oligarchs through the devaluation of their labour and their capability to oppose and resist is being inactivated.
So, we feel that we need to connect this protest with the hunger strike that is conducted this period of time by the captive of the state and our companion G. Mihailidis for his liberation.
Giannis stay strong until freedom
Animals are not food and clothing vegan fightback and antispeicism
Until the demolishment of every cell and cage
Breeders,fur traders, hunters- all wretchers work together