via:athens.indymedia Translated by Act for freedom now!
Text by Giannis Dimitrakis at the event during the week of restoration of the Alexander Grigoropoulos monument
Good evening comrades, I am taking the opportunity to say a few words on the occasion of today’s event. It is a day to recall the past, to remember, as the value of historical collective memory is precious.
The conflict with the enemy unites. This is one of the most important lessons that December 2008 teaches us. At that time I was a prisoner in the Greek hellholes, and I still remember accounts of comrades who told me of their association on the barricades and the battles of those days alongside insurgents who until then had been in personal confrontations and fights with each other, having almost definitively cut off all communication, contact and cooperation. But it was the breath of the insurrection, the attack against the state and capital, that revived mutual aid, solidarity and cooperation on the battlefield. Differences, conflicts and enmities were put in the cupboard of time until all of them collectively launched the passion for revenge against the state violence that took the life of Alexander Grigoropoulos on December 6.
Regarding the choices of struggle that I considered correct and the influence they had, I will repeat what I wrote in an essay in May 2009 in the pamphlet “Tracing December”: “Locked up among the prisoners, on the evening of December 7 I lay empty and breathless in a prison’s discipline cell, trying to understand how I had ended up thrown into a dank stinking dungeon as a hunger striker demanding to be transferred to another hellhole, while outside the walls all my friends, acquaintances, comrades are living days of unique magic. The magic that life has when you arm yourself and together with others attempt the impossible, the ideal, the dreamlike. When you let a torrent of emotions overflow from within you that transmute into energy and action… Stuck under the weight of personal and other ties in immobility, adopting a spectator role without choice, while you yourself would sell your soul to the devil to be free, participating in an endless incendiary feast…”
That’s all for now, thanks for listening and remember – living memory is like a sharp blade, dead memory is like a lost toy.
Giannis Dimitrakis
9/6/22
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Notes of actforfree: On Thursday 9 June 2022, on the pedestrian street of Messologgiou at exarxeia area was Event – Discussion: “The speech in memory of political prisoners” will take place. This event is part of the Week of events held in the context of the restoration of the monument to the anarchist student Alexandros Grigoropoulos.
the event was include statements and interventions by political prisoners in Greece
Γιάννης Δημητράκης ( Giannis Dimitrakis Telephone communicate )
Ο απεργός πείνας Γιάννης Μιχαηλίδης (Giannis Michailidis Telephone communicate)
Πάνος Καλαϊτζής
Χάρης Μαντζουρίδης
Φώτης Δ.
Δημήτρης Χατζηβασιλειάδης
Θάνος Χατζηαγγέλου
for contribute with their words to the strengthening of our collective memory through their historical – political experience.
Anarchist initiative against state murders