Thessaloniki, Greece: – Taking responsibility
Life in the metropolises is suffocating. In recent years, we have seen the urban beast grow larger sucking life into its path. Cops and snitches lurk around every corner, poverty and deprivation are reflected in every aspect of daily life, oppression (labour, sexual, racial) is a brutal reality, while the area of ‘freedoms’ and ‘breaths of life’ are narrowing more and more. In this suffocating grip, capitalism comes to remind us that we are expendable material for its machines, which produce endlessly and thirst for profit.
The gentrification projects are the blunt admission by the state that we exist simply to produce for them. Squares, parks, neighbourhoods that were once appropriable by their inhabitants are being gentrified by labour and handed over to tourists and urban bourgeois. Expensive cafes, airbnb, surveillance cameras, growing tourist population, overall increase in the cost of living are some of the consequences of redevelopment. Consequences that result in the displacement of people who once lived in these neighbourhoods as they can no longer cope with the new situation. So so-called ‘gentrification’ is thus creating ‘fortress’ (urban) areas with increased social control and repression while other urban areas are ghettoised and impoverished. The segregation of neighbourhoods within cities and their pronounced differentiations clearly facilitates the work of the cops in terms of mapping and surveillance.
We see such a project unfolding before us in the Pavlos Mela Camp. A huge space within the confined metropolitan prison, freely appropriable by all and sundry, has been included in the redevelopment plans of Mayor Dimitris Demourtzidis.
But to introduce ourselves to the “gentleman” in question.
This right-wing trash has been in politics since he was 25, which seems to have given him the opportunity to create “strong friendships”. For the “Antonis Tritsis” project concerning the redevelopment of the Pavlos Melas army Camp, he met with the then Deputy Minister of Interior Stelios Petsas, the Deputy Minister of Interior of Macedonia and Thrace Kalafatis Stavros and the Bishop of Stavroupolis-Neapolis Varnavas. A “successful” meeting, judging by the fact that the sum of 10 million Euros was approved for this project. In a poor district of the city, with residents deprived of basic needs (heating, electricity, etc.), Demourtzidis chooses to ask for and use 10 million euros for a place where he and his friends will set up festivals. In fact, this scum had the audacity to sue groups of residents who wanted to oppose his “grandiose” plans.
So for these reasons, at dawn on 27.03, we chose to set fire to Demourtzidis’ professional car, which was parked at the back of Stavroupoli’s town hall.
This attack is a small contribution within the framework of the spreading of direct actions in the deadly silence of the city. The boundaries are constantly narrowing. The state has launched a new witch hunt, with new cycles of prosecutions, new criminal codes, cops in universities, gentrification of areas, intensification of controls, and so on. But the noose they are weaving for us will become the gallows they find before them, and our hatred will become the rage that kicks away the stool, because our rage against what we hate is our weapon, and they would do well to fear it.
Solidarity and strength to those who are captives in the hands of the state
For anarchy
Nightriders of the Flame
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