Text of the political prisoner, member of Revolutionary Struggle Nikos Maziotis ( Greece)

NOT A STEP BACK
25/10/2021
The masks of hypocrisy are slowly falling apart and the real reasons for the rejection of my request for leave are being revealed.
According to the prison council, which rejected my request for leave for the third time, the reason was the very text I had published last June when my request was rejected for the second time.
Here is the whole rationale for the prison council’s decision: “As it is clear from recent public statements and views expressed via the internet in the public media through which he urges an indefinite number of persons to commit criminal offenses and which are taken into account as elements of his conduct and personality in general,
and of his general personality, it does not appear with certainty that there is no risk of committing new criminal acts (during his leave) occasioned by these statements.

It is therefore not reasonable to assume that the applicant will make good use of his leave. (See the publication of the letter from 8/6/21 «Nikos Maziotis: That’s why they do not give me the leave I am entitled to») ”. (Text by Maziotis https://epanastaticosagonas.wordpress.com/2021/06/08)
Apart from the blatant lie that there is in my text of 8/6/21 an incitement to commit criminal acts – which, if it existed, I could be prosecuted – the clear political message of the decision of the prison council is the following: Do not you express your political views publicly, do not criticize the system, renounce your political identity and then maybe you will be able to get permission. A clear attempt to impose political censorship and in return of a favor from a so-called “democracy” that is supposed to allow freedom of expression.
In the text of 8/6/2021 I stated the real reasons for the rejection of my request for leave. And these are the very nature of the cases for which I have been in prison for almost 9 years. That is, my action in the Revolutionary Struggle, the fact that I took political responsibility for my participation in the Revolutionary Struggle, my defense of the action of the organization, the fact that I remain politically consistent all these years, the fact that my comrade, Pola Roupa, and I did not reconsider and did not back down. Because we continue to believe in the same things, in the right of our Struggle, in the right of the Revolutionary Struggle.
And because the civil servants of the prisons cannot and do not have the courage to confront me with political arguments, to deconstruct me politically and consequently to recognize me as a political opponent, as I am, against the regime they represent, they invent pretexts to reject the request. Pretexts like the disciplinary measures in prison the last time and the invocation of the possible commission of new crimes as it happened the first time but also now. Only now the invocation of new crimes is based on the  freethinking political views that I have expressed in my political text in public.
There are many things that annoy them in the text of 8/6/2021. It is my criticism of the state’s “independent justice” for the way it treated me, which is an informal way of exclusion. It is the removal of parental care from comrade Roupa and me for our son by invoking political criteria, our condemnation as members of the Revolutionary Struggle, and his incarceration in the Psychiatric Department of the Children’s Hospital, a practice of fascist regimes. It is our recent  life sentence for the attack of the Revolutionary Struggle against the ECB-BoG and the IMF, without being charged with murder, applied for the first and last time by a law of 1969 imposed by the junta to deal with the then guerrilla city fight. Let me point out that, over time, such were the selective confrontations  by the current government that the political opponents of the regime have always had, their treatment being harsher than that of other categories of prisoners.
What annoyed them in my text is the criticism of the hypocrisy of the state’s “independent justice” that caresses its own regime agents, drug dealers (see NOOR 1) or rapists and pedophiles like N. Georgiadis of N.D who was just convicted to 28 months with suspension for paid sexual intercourse with minors in Moldova where he was on  diplomatic service.
It is the criticism of the state’s “independent justice” that caresses the paramilitary neo-Nazis of “Golden” Dawn who for so many years acted backed up by the “democratic” police, the “democratic” state and the political establishment, some of whom are now in jail and are allowed to be transferred to rural jails and the KAYF so that they can be released much earlier. On the contrary, those of us convicted of urban guerrilla warfare, the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights with the last bill of November 2020 deprives us of this possibility.
The discriminatory attitude of the state’s “independent” “antifascist” “justice” is shown by the fact that the 5-member Court of Appeal recently suspended the sentence of a convicted murderer of Pavlos Fyssas with only 2.5 years in prison.
They were also vexed most probably by the reference in my text -and in what we had published earlier, entitled “SUPPRESSION, LAW AND ORDER”-  that the escalation of criminal repression always begins and focuses on the regime’s dynamic political opponents and is evolving into an obliterating repressive policy against social reactions. Or the mention that the policies of the state itself, the memoranda and the measures to deal with the economic crisis, but also the intensification of state repression, resulted in the explosion of social delinquency and crime. My text of 8/6/2021 was a text of political criticism and did not contain any incitement to commit criminal acts. From the beginning, the prosecutor of the prison council, at the hearing on my request for permission on October 22, referred to the posting of my public positions without mentioning the said text of 8/6/2021, saying that such public positions are taken into account for the assessment of the conduct and personality of the detainees, for the granting of leave and also for the conditional release.
In fact, the prosecutor confirms what I said in the text on 8/6/202, that they want to keep me in prison as long as possible, beyond the limit of 3/5 of my sentence. The prosecutor then clearly raised the issue of refusing to express my political views and opinions in order to receive more favorable treatment and authorization in this case. And that, essentially, means renouncing my political identity.
I asked him directly if he demanded a statement of repentance from me and he replied, annoyed, that he did not mean repentance in the political sense of the word! I made it clear to him that there is no non-political repentance in my case because we are political figures with political action and therefore political prisoners and that we do not make such statements. I also told him that when laws are passed in Greece for the penitents and their criminal relief as those in Italy – clearely concerning the city guerrilla – then he will be more legally and politically covered to set such conditions on equal terms. It is ridiculous to see government agencies that are afraid to utter the word “repentance” even though they seek to extract it.
The state power in Greece, as everywhere, has a continuity and a consequence over time and despite the different conditions and the different forms it has, monarcho-fascist, dictatorial, bourgeois-parliamentary, it seeks the same thing: To break and crush the militants, to make them reconsider, to repent, to be silent so as not to express themselves politically, to lose their political identity and abandon the practice of struggle.
There is a historical thread between these state instruments, the military and general prosecutors, the gendarmes who demanded, in the time of Metaxas, in Makronisos, during the civil war, in the junta, a statement of repentance from the fighter to be allowed to go home to his family, and the instruments of the civil memorandum “democracy” who ask of me not to publish my political views in order to get permission to see my son. If once the stakes of repentance were the condemnation of communism, today the stakes are the condemnation of armed revolutionary action.
Since 2010 I have been the first political prisoner to be sentenced to 20 years in prison. I knew in advance that our treatment all these years would be special. And as long as we are not politically silent in prison, as long as we are not “negotiating”, as long as we are not “tactical”, “flexible” or “dialectical”, this will be the foregone approach. I also know that this text can be used against me one more time in my request for permission or for conditional dismissal. But I make it clear that I will not be silent, accept blackmail or censorship in order to take a breath of freedom and see my son, who has been deprived of his rebellious parents for 5.5 years. After all, what upbringing and example would I give to my son? That one can renounce oneself, sell one’s comrades and the struggle and be treated more favorably? It would be unacceptable and indecent. I will continue to speak politically from prison using the weapon of criticism. I urge the prosecutors before the next council in two months from now to search the internet and find the hundreds of political texts we have published since 2010 and our political positions in the courts of the Revolutionary Struggle to be more informed.
I also urge them to be more direct in the next council and not to garble their words when asking for statements of repentance. For my part, I make it clear to them: NOT A STEP BACK.
Nikos Maziotis member of the Revolutionary Struggle
Fourth wing of Domokos prison – Greece
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