This morning 25.7.22,some anarchists interrupted a commuter train on the Docklands Light Railway, connecting the (rapidly transforming) ghettoised districts of Newham and Lewisham to London’s financial centre.

Words from the heart were sprayed on the exterior of the train, especially the name of Giannis Michailidis. A banner carrying a quotation from his public letter from 2013 (‘Tracking my journey in the world of insurrection resistance and solidarity’) was hung from the rail bridge over the central junction of Deptford.

The following text was distributed by throwing hundreds of flyers into the train carrige and off the railway bridge:

Freedom is not an array of consumer choices and ‘experiences’. It consists in the living choice to take your life into your own hands in the struggle.
We can see what happens when, for years, each project of power is left to expand its tentacles over us.
– Neighbourhoods are wrecked to construct vacuum-sealed palaces for the pleasure and profit of the beneficiaries.

– “Economic Strategies”, like raising the prices of food and fuel to discipline everyone back to work post-lockdown, are greeted meekly like a natural law and, accordingly, accumulate astronomical profits for global corporations.

– We are taught through the authority of ’emergencies’ to accept charity as a way-of-life, queuing patiently for ‘benefits’ or food banks, accepting the same blackmail of those the system still has room to exploit by the crime of ‘work’: blunt your edges, put on a fake smile and shut up, in order to keep receiving.

These projects of power, and many more, ensnare us because we allow them to. Because we have accepted the role of spectator over our own existence. We live in a technologically guilded prison, shuttled from place to place, from crisis to crisis, in the grip of noise and spectacle, of a panorama of screens, tracked and traced into oblivion.
For those who still make the choice to exit this dreamworld and conquer space and time in which to act for freedom, no punishment is sufficient. In Greece, the anarchist Giannis Michailidis is over 60 days into a hunger strike. He has been an intransigent enemy of the totalitarian-democratic regime for many years and carries that free spirit into this struggle now for his immediate release, as the state’s own laws demand. He has publicly stood by his choice of rebellion on countless occasions. This refusal to betray his ideals is being used to keep him captive indefinitely.

Today, Monday the 25th of July is the final day of the court’s deliberation. Continuing in the logic of their perverse structures, their deliberate death penalty will not end in tears but continue to ignite passions all over this defiled planet which is not yet totally pacified and sold out. The flames of life know no borders – and unlike the routine infernos of capitalist devastation, these liberating flames do not spare the fortified islands of privilege. They express a world without any precedent in – or deference to – this old regime, by and through their virulent spread.

Where there is dignity there is rebellion!

Giannis Michailidis to the streets!