THE HIDDEN STRENGTH OF AN INSURRECTION IS THAT IT AROUSES THE IMAGINATION
It was late evening of December 5th, 2008 and I was reading the comic book ‘V for Vendetta’, when a phrase shook me: “Noise is relative to the silence preceding it. The more absolute the hush, the more shocking the thunderclap.” The economic crisis hadn’t yet unsettled the dominant narrative of capitalism as a one-way road, and a spontaneous insurrection in a country of the west world seemed like a utopia. I stood on this phrase, which I felt very believable, but there weren’t any facts to support it and I wondered a lot inside me..
A day later, a bullet struck the heart of feisty comrade Alexandros Grigoropoulos. The bullet came from the weapon of a cop, for whom Vyronas Polydoras, as minister of Public Order, had warned that had a sensitive nervous system and shoots. The same night, rage kicked off. At first, it was the anarchist/antiauthoritarian milieu, and the next day it expanded to school kids, students, immigrants and the excluded. Public buildings were occupied, from universities to city halls and the Opera house, in a background of hours-long clashes with the police, extensive destructions and looting of banks and department stores. Not only a message was sent to the impudent repressive mechanisms of the state, but now the vision of an anarchist insurrection was gaining ground. An inconceivable diversity of actions, opinions, persons, affinity groups, organizations, etc. composed the uprising of December.
The dynamic of the anarchist idea in the greek territory, brought back the forgotten project of a generalized insurrection, because, contrary to centralized structures and logics, it gave each person space to take initiatives and express oneself, precisely because there wasn’t any limitation of free expression.
In the aftermath, the insurrection had left its direct organizational heritage with a clear reflection on all kinds of actions, something that at the end, inevitably, led to upgraded state repression. It also left ineffaceable to us the ecstatic experience of generalized direct clash with the state and the authoritarian structures in all levels.
But this insurrection wasn’t defeated by repression. The insurrection faded gradually and didn’t achieve a leap forward to a direct application of our ideas in praxis, because the events had already outstripped the imagination of the people that participated. The insurrection faded because of the inherent weaknesses of our proposals. With the inability to continuously coordinate our actions as the most obvious reason for the fade-out, most criticism was pointed at the lack of central organization or ideology. The transformation of the milieu to a movement with a single structure, ideology and hierarchization of priorities was suggested.
Continue reading From the event “Words in remembrance by political prisoners” on June 9th. Text of comrade Giannis Michailidis read on the event(Athens,Greece) →
in the 17th arrondissement that same evening.
