Today's Topics:
1. Greece, vogliamo tutto, street newspaper AATTRIS #41: In the
battle of ASOEE's "pavement", we are with the oppressed [machine
translation] (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
2. Britain, AFED, Organize! - It's Capitalism, Stupid:
Extinction Rebellion Can't Do it with Flowers. (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
3. Greece, vogliamo tutto, street newspaper AATTRIS #41: Is
there life without a homeland [machine translation]
(a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
4. vrijebond: Climate protectors block supply of coal to the
Engie power station in Rotterdam (nl) (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
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Message: 1
On December 20th and 21st, ELAS operations are being carried out against immigrants in
Athens and Thessaloniki. Many arrests are made under immigrant homes, but also close to or
near the ASOEE building, a point known to be working with migrant salespeople. ----
Immediately, a scene is being set up, which talks about the dismantling of a large
criminal organization, with an impact on the country's economy selling from "monkey" to
drug-addicted drugs at Antoniadou Street (at the side of ASOEE). It has therefore been
attempted to create an inhospitable environment for every immigrant who sells his outfit
outside the building on the basis of a case that has involved many smaller cases, which
are not even linked.
Thus, school halls, comrades and solidarity who have stood alongside the vendors outside
ASOEE organized and supported actions on the issue and the course of solidarity to the 16
dealers who were arrested so as not to pass yet a repressive plan over them.
The suppression of the ASOEE's "pavement" has a long history, with plots of all sorts of
cops, either massively or individually, to immigrants departing from the point, to today's
repressive management, amid a pre-election period, with the inclusion of people in a
criminal organization and because of the sale of shoes.
More information on solidarity moves will be found here:
https://stekiasoee.espivblogs.net/2019/01/19/kaloyme-se-poreia-allileggyis-stoys-metanastes-mikropolites-tis-asoee-tin-paraskeyi
-25-1-stis-18-00 /
A broom business as a criminal organization. Pre-election stories from the SYRIZA government
The media spoke through police sources about the end of the crime after this successful
dismantling of the criminal organization that lists more than 210 members in Attica.
Within this news, all key points were introduced: Exarchia, immigrants, occupations,
historical center of Athens, crime.
More specifically, on February 28th, there is a business of the cops in Attica and they
invade the occupation of the building's immigrants in Arachovis 44. From there, 45 people
are captured and some of them actively participate in structures of other occupations such
as the learning of English or Greek.
We see that many small cases are united, without necessarily having any connection between
them, designed to create this treaty, that immigrants will be an easily manageable
population that the opposition will stop asking for more control and repression (even for
a little pre-election time), which will map out a population that is essentially enclosed
in neighborhoods that will pre-electionally operate the clean city plan, which NGOs and
the state apparatus will look like the only the guarantors. All this shuffle, together
with the fascists and the paratroopers, the cops murderers in the ATs, make us consolidate
the different faces of suppression and management.
Without the question of "innocence" or "guilt", the only thing that is sure is that when
such indictments are set up on the backs of subjects - only because of their status as
immigrants - then our answer must be outside the criteria of the above. To stand
solidarity with one another, against a state, NGOs, fascists along with the oppressed.
carossi
https://apatris.info/sti-machi-toy-pezodromioy-tis-asoee-e/
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Message: 2
I don't want to piss on anyone's parade, I really don't. But watching the protests by the
climate revolutionaries Extinction Rebellion, I feel uneasy. It's not their methods. I
know that direct action and street politics work; after all, I have done very similar
protests and street action. The uneasiness here is the hierarchy of worthiness. ----
Bridges and Getting Rid of the Rich ---- In 2015, just twenty class warriors stopped the
traffic and held Tower Bridge as we marched from the Aldgate East poor door over the Tower
Bridge with pitchforks and burning torches singing "We have got to get rid of the rich".
We were protesting the new Qatari Royal family's development that aimed to build up market
millionaires' weekend pads right behind City Hall, where they would landscape gardens as
an oasis in Bermondsey -but the people that lived directly next to the Qatar oasis in the
council flats would be locked out.
Working class movements and protest during 2015 were leading the way in direct action and
street politics. We wanted to make sure that people understood and knew that class
inequality was getting out of hand, and working class people were being forced out of
London, and into homelessness, or forced into humiliating situations of accepting that
parts of London would no longer be accessible to them simply because of their class
status. This came to a head through several direct action, grass roots campaigns, like the
Focus E15 campaign that started because young and vulnerable working class mothers and
their families were being forced to accept properties hundreds of miles away from their
families, and if they refused, were being threatened by local officials that their
children would be taken into care.
The Poor Door development at One Aldgate East was the focus of a year-long picket by
working class activists that forced the disgusting practice into the public domain of
separating social housing tenants from private leaseholders, even when they shared the
same building . We called this social apartheid, and used every manner of direct action
tools that we could get away with. Even though some weeks there were only 6 or 7 of us at
the picket, there were often 30 or 40 police officers protecting that property, plus
private security guards. Over the year several of us were arrested on a range of charges,
from causing alarm and distress with a banner, to causing criminal damage with a credit
card sized sticker.
Life for working class people in London over the past five years has gotten harder. Women
and children are being cleansed out of the city at an unprecedented rate, and mothers'
fear of losing their children in the process of becoming homeless is real. I have met many
women who have been threatened with this, and, even more harrowing, some have actually
lost their children because of their homeless status. Social cleansing and social
apartheid has become normalised to the point that only a few weeks ago we learned that
working class children living in a social housing development in Lambeth were being denied
entry to a playground that their schoolfriends and neighbours in the private, for-profit
development adjoining had access to.
This is why I feel uneasy about Extinction Rebellion, because for years some of us have
been trying to bring attention to inequality, homelessness, and the rationale of a
neoliberal system that values nothing else but wealth. These are interconnected issues
around a capitalist system that uses up and discards any resource it needs to create
wealth for those winning the game.
For years I have watched climate and environmental campaigners show an utter lack of
empathy for the everyday issues that working class people face, and instead focus only on
one issue: stopping climate change. This is honourable and important and I have never met
anyone amongst ordinary working class people who doesn't see this as a major problem, but
they realise there is little they can do about this when their lives are already
precarious. As much as people don't want to see the planet being ruined, their immediate
needs will always take priority. This is how capitalism works. It forces us into its chains.
Therefore the uneasiness I have about this new incarnation of climate revolutionaries is
the same I have always had. They see everyone as their enemy, where you are with them or
against them, when life is so much more complicated than that. By focusing on carbon
emissions that come from cars without putting in place real solutions to how people get
around the place where they live, their protests become exclusive. I support lowering
carbon emissions; since I have moved to London my asthma has become much worse. But I also
realise that even though I would like to us live in a society where we all only work 3
days a week, that's not the reality.
London, like many cities, is being swamped by investment from international vulture
capitalists that are building in every single space they can fit in, and building only for
themselves and the profit they are addicted to, while local and national government
representatives are rolling out the red carpets for them. This is why the fight for
housing is central to the fight against inequality and against capitalism after all people
are also used and abused as nothing but resources for the rich, and the housing fight is
about property ownership and what is fetishised as wealth.
I want to support Extinction Rebellion, although their tactics of getting arrested are
really dangerous for anyone who is vulnerable to state violence. If you are black or
working class you really do not want to be tied into that system. Only the middle class
would think that playing games with the criminal justice system or the police is safe, or
fun, or useful.
Stopping public transport while trying to persuade people to get out of their cars is also
quite stupid, and it's winning no one over. You are not the enemy if you are a cabbie and
are now stuck with a diesel vehicle that is worth nothing. Cabbies are almost always sole
traders or family-run businesses. And you are not the enemy if you are disabled and need a
car to get around because public transport services are not public or affordable. You are
not the enemy if you live outside of London where public transport is virtually non existent.
My last word to Extinction Rebellion is to ask why they are not focusing on those who
really are the enemy. This week parliament is closed and there are no politicians there.
The rich and wealthy have left London to go on their last skiing trip of the year. It is
the working class Londoners who are left.
http://organisemagazine.org.uk/2019/04/18/its-capitalism-stupid-extinction-rebellion-cant-do-it-with-flowers/
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Message: 3
Quotation marks... ---- The scrambling of the Macedonian issue in the last year has
prompted Greece's national torso to rally ideologically and re-enter the road massively.
This land was the most fertile ground for the fascists, as the most "combatant" part of
this era, to organize and carry out attacks on self-organized sites and squats, kinematic
ventures, attempting to re-organize their poison on neighborhoods, to organize attacks on
immigrants, to collide with the police; in short, to come back from their holes, not only
as individuals but at a political level. ---- The diffusion of nationalism to the inferior
social strata was the one that gave the necessary coherence to all this - the other
heterogeneous - crowd that in one way or another defended the Greekity of Macedonia. At
this point, there was a great political deficit of the competitive movement, which was
impressed by certain conditions on social competition: The war developed by the movement
did not exceed the limits of anti-fascism and opposition to the far-right retreat, leaving
to the irreplaceable great a portion of the world that was gathered in the rallies. The
result was parity, superficiality, or even the absence of any discussion and criticism
about the ideology of the nation.
For our part, we judge that it is time to divide the denial of the project against the
nations, and to socialize the enmity against what they profess. To demonstrate that
national ideology is the ideal vehicle on which, on the one hand, the moderate "healthy
patriotism" that the governmental agenda demands for itself, and on the other hand the
expansive "morbid nationalism" attributed to the -c right-wing opposition forces. And it
is crucial that we find the tools to degrade exactly this ideology if we aspire to
aggressively aggregate against the state and its timeless interests, and not just some of
its aspiring managers.
In the following sections we will try to develop the basic elements that make up the
national unity: Skills and beliefs that are reproduced by the state mechanisms with the
aim of homogenizing the citizens and building them into a national body (the Nation),
living / (the Homeland), and organizes his life under the auspices of a single political
entity (the State); all expressions of the same entity.
I: The present - The national ideology
"Every community that is larger than a village where people have personal contact (and
perhaps even in this case) is imaginary."
~ Benedict Anderson, "Imaginary Communities - Reflections on the origins and spread of
nationalism"
The nation is the prime example of a imaginary community. Where there is no personal
contact, consequent experience, relationships between members within the community can be
perceived by the members themselves initially based on the specific characteristics
attributed to the community (eg language, origin place of birth, religion, customs,
traditions, etc.). There is a common belief that they share these characteristics, which -
in the case of the nation - are mainly of a cultural nature, and are those that "allow",
for example, any Greek to expect to communicate in Greek with any Greek .
Beyond that, how the members of a community who are not familiar with each other are
related only to the imagination of their own, and by extension, to the imagination of all
members of the community. There is a collective imaginary, which states that the members
of this community share some common values and a delimited way of thinking (national
consciousness), share common interests (national interest), have similar psychosynthesis
and psychology (national feeling) .a.
Approaching the nation's community as a fictional one raises a question: What is the
purpose of fulfilling in the real world such a community? Indeed, with global scope and
universal power (since at least one national at any moment can be attributed to each person)?
The answer to the question (should be) is just as reasonable: The world we live in is
strictly hierarchical in many levels, from the economic (rich-poor), political
(government-peoples) gendarme (men to women), up to the sexual (straight-non straight) and
so on, with the existence of dominant patterns / identities for each of them. National
ideology, apart from the fact that it is an ideology of sovereignty, takes a clear
position on all the above in favor of the masters. It is promoted, reproduced, taught,
projected, disciplined to replace or even overshadow other communities that exist 1 . This
operation is obviously not neutral, but it serves a specific purposethe equation of whole
sections of the population under its unit (national unity), and respectively the leveling
of all other identities, ideologies and positions. Thus, class divisions and social
competition are concealed, but they do not cease to exist, and are therefore always kept
to the benefit of the sovereign and the powerful 2 . Similarly, a condition of hostility
towards each other is preserved, other than that defined by the national narrative 3 .
II: The Past - The construction of the nation's mechanism
"Nations as a natural, God-like way of classifying people as an inherited political
destiny that awaits its realization for a long time is a myth. Nationalism, which
sometimes takes pre-existing cultures and turns them into nations, sometimes devises them,
and often eliminates pre-existing cultures: this is a reality. "
~ Ernest Geller, "Nations and Nationalism"
The nation appears in the history of the human species immediately after the French
Revolution in 1789, thus forming an invention that lasts more than two centuries of life.
Starting with our study and bearing in mind the above, it would not be arbitrary to say
that nations seem to be constructions with application to society rather than timeless
social entities, as most - if not all - claim.
References to the "glorious national past, common blood of ancestors our , ancient
culture, our " no solid historical basis; most belong to the realm of mythology. A
mythology that nevertheless has a specific historical starting point: It appears in a
"world" environment where religion begins to lose ground as the basic guide to the world's
interpretation and perception. It is the time when the feudal production system is already
lost, while at the same time the massive capitalist mode of production is emerging, which
is spreading rapidly. At the same time that empires with their monarchs are slowly being
replaced by state or pro-governmental forms of government, with the help of all-out
revolutions.
Nationalism has proved to be the most appropriate tool that could explain the radical
changes that occurred in the world with adequacy, sphericality and efficiency. We could
say that it was the perfect vehicle on which the capitalist era was established in the
historical scene. The nation-state is the new model of organizing social life. Power is no
longer godly, but it is granted through more participatory processes, such as democratic
elections. Economic activity is now regulated and fed by the state.
The nations were not built in one night. In the pre-national era there was not what is now
called "national purity", that in that city live Greeks, and therefore their descendants,
Greeks, etc. will continue to live there. The way empires were built and their fluid
borders , resulted in the coexistence of people with different origins, different
languages and dialects, different religions. In this crowd, the construction of the nation
was not socialized incomprehensibly, but it was imposed from above, with the sovereigns
even employing violently, bloodyly against those parts that were unacceptable.
This process took on certain cultural features that already existed in each territory (eg
one language or religion), and made them national. He then tried to spread them across the
mass of the citizens. Strategies of mass national homogenization of populations included
- prohibiting the use of different languages, allowing only the "promoted" national
language. Correspondingly, entire regions, towns and villages changed names that were
related to other languages, with new names coming from fresh national checks 4
- population persecution (eg "aliens")
-social and institutional isolation of the Others, those that did not conform to national
imperatives, etc.
Since its social legitimacy, the nation has been ideologically constituted, and its
history is "rewritten" by state mechanisms, such as school and the army. It is presented
as if it existed forever, giving the feeling of an age-old entity "that always united
struggles against time". It is precisely in this sense that the common argument of common
origin, common blood, etc. among homosexuals is based, making the nation's imaginary
community seem real-time over time.
III: The Future - The (Greek) National Development
So far, we have seen how the imaginary community of the nation operates in the present,
and outlined the process through which it was born. In this section, we leave behind the
general characteristics of nationalism, and we focus more on the interests that the
revival of Greek ideology today encompasses.
The long-awaited national development of the country seems to define from now on the
conditions of exploitation accepted by the oppressed and the exploited. In previous years,
we were about to bend our head in a "state of emergency" where the public debt drank the
Greek state, and with it all and us all. Now, we are called to discipline just the name of
national development, which is formulated as the medium for the good of the (imaginary)
community, which should not be overturned. The results are:
-Multiple exit from the memorandums, to mean the inscription of working conditions and
living conditions imposed in the "Memorandum Period". The correlations of forces formed in
the piece of work, but also in a whole lot of other aspects of everyday life, have shifted
to the detriment of the oppressed, and are now being consolidated.
Build a military and military (militaristic) climate by pressing on the already fertile
soil of macedonophobia. By focusing mainly on the "eternal enemy" of greece, turkey and
other neighboring countries (albania, northern macedonia), the Greek state aspires to
create a communicative and social environment that will support both the intensity of
sovereignty on the Balkan peninsula, as well as on its underwater aspirations in the
Mediterranean (see Greek-Cypriot-Israel gas pipelines), and the dispute over the EEZ with
Turkey. Riches for the rich, death for all the rest.
- Continue and evolve the raid in the natural environment, from studies on the extraction
of hydrocarbons in the continent, the installation of landfills in Lefkimi, Corfu, to the
destruction of the land in Crete for BAPA, and the construction of the airport in Kasteli;
and these examples are only minimal.
-To reshape the urban environment and hence our own lives, from the airbnb run-off with
the subsequent persecution of the apartments or even the districts we live in, to the
extreme expansionism of the tourism economy and the rehabilitation of entire cities. 5,6,7
... and a necessary closure
The nation can not exist outside the narrow frameworks of the state. He is taught at
school, disciplined in the army, screened and reproduced in the media, promoted to
all-time pre-election promises. As long as it does not de-struggle and do not express an
organized contradiction, the coveted (national) cohesion of the (sub) people will ensure
the necessary support for the perpetuation of state and capitalist interests.
The national community is one of the strongest foundations of a system of oppression and
exploitation, the driving force of which is only profit; nothing else. It remains to
create the necessary bruises and frictions so that this building collapses, illuminating
the prospect of a world where we will determine our lives together and based on our needs.
And no nation, no state, no government, no debt, no boss will impose on us how and with
whom we choose to live.
The national unity with blood is dyed, in the world of bosses we are all foreign
National ideas give birth to cemeteries
Leopard Para
Footnotes:
1) "There are" once objective criteria can be found, on the basis of which we can define
them, regardless of whether these communities recognize themselves. For example, the
"poor", the unemployed, the workers paid by the basic salary are defined objectively. Any
unemployed and ask why it integrates itself into the community of the "unemployed" will
answer us so that we can judge whether it can be considered a part of this whole or not.
If she does not work somewhere to get paid for her job, she is actually unemployed,
otherwise she does not. On the contrary, any person and ask why he integrates himself into
the Greek national community is sure that we will not receive adequate answers. This is
because neither the birth in Greece, the Greek citizenship, the use of the Greek language
and the origin are not sufficient, nor of course, anything else. In Greece, people who are
institutionally not considered "Greeks" have been born, Greek citizenship has been taken
by people who are not treated as "Greeks" by the rest of the Greeks (and thus not accepted
by the community itself), and if we look at the origin a long time we can see how it
reaches seasons when there were no nations, and the word greece had a totally different
geographic status and population composition in terms of different cultures, religions,
languages, etc. In other words it meant something completely different from what it is
presenting today ... In Greece, people who are institutionally not considered "Greeks"
have been born, Greek citizenship has been taken by people who are not treated as "Greeks"
by the rest of the Greeks (and thus not accepted by the community itself), and if we look
at the origin a long time we can see how it reaches seasons when there were no nations,
and the word greece had a totally different geographic status and population composition
in terms of different cultures, religions, languages, etc. In other words it meant
something completely different from what it is presenting today ... In Greece, people who
are institutionally not considered "Greeks" have been born, Greek citizenship has been
taken by people who are not treated as "Greeks" by the rest of the Greeks (and thus not
accepted by the community itself), and if we look at the origin a long time we can see how
it reaches seasons when there were no nations, and the word greece had a totally different
geographic status and population composition in terms of different cultures, religions,
languages, etc. In other words it meant something completely different from what it is
presenting today ...
2) We come to the point that the "Greeks are all", so we have nothing to divide between
us, even though those responsible for "the poor Greek or the homeless Greek" are "wealthy
Greeks".
3) In the basic doctrine of Greek ideology ("Patris-Religion-Family"), reference to the
family is an emphasis on the reproductive function of man, and hence the exaltation of the
sexualities of those who can "produce" people. This is a clear objection to any other
sexuality that does not serve this purpose.
4) An interesting text that highlights the multiculturalism of the wider region of
Macedonia, with the old village names, can be found here:
https://apatris.info/ta-onomata-pou-allazoun-ine-ta-apominaria-ton- iachon-tou-polemou /
5) The effort to liberate the first home and the auctions can not be seen outside the
framework of the development of the Greek tourism industry. Airbnb's bloom is indicative
of increased demand, not only from the visitor-tourists but also from the host-business
side. Auctioning is the basic measure that intends to release real estate, or parts
thereof, on a massive scale, placing them on the market. The "cheeses" that will attract
the welcoming investors are measures such as the golden visa (whoever invests in the
country more than 250,000 euros).
6) All of this is happening at this time, in the name of national development. All are
areas of profitability that the Greek state has engaged in. If one wants to understand
what the nation is, it must definitely be examined in the narrow context of the state. The
nation does not exist before or outside the state.
7) National development is projected by SYRIZA as the fruit of its patriotic policy, and
will certainly be used as a powerful electoral paper. The patriotism of the government, as
the "pure, unselfish love for our homeland," compared to "nationalism" of the right, as an
extreme departure from patriotism, is the two aspects of national ideology, the ideology
of nationalism. This ideology will be met in electoral confrontations, articulated by the
various left and right mouths respectively. Although the views may differ, we do not
forget that the purpose of the elections is the emergence of "national leadership". They
recall and re-emulate cohesion around the imaginary community. From our point of view, we
remind that abstention from the elections is the only coherent antinational proposal.
https://apatris.info/simeioseis-gia-tin-ethniki-ideologia/
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Message: 4
45 people from We Stop Coal occupied the conveyer belts at the Engie coalfired power
station this morning at 06.15, bringing operations there to a standstill. The group
demands urgently prioritised closure of all coalfired power stations in the Netherlands by
2020, and that all subsidies and tax breaks currently handed out to fossil fuel
corporations (€7.6 billion per annum in NL) be transferred to the renewables sector. ----
im Vos, a group founding member gave the following statement ‘Climate change is no longer
a problem of the future, people are already being hit hard across the globe - with floods,
fires, droughts and extreme weather events, from Saint Martin to Mozambique. We consider
it both necessary and legitimate to take this next step, from public protest to civil
disobedience. That means we put our bodies in the way, where the change is most urgently
needed.'
The CO2 emissions of the Netherlands have risen every year since the signing of the Paris
Climate Accord. The Dutch government has ignored its international obligations, and the
ruling of its own highest court on the Urgenda Climate case, mandating that it
significantly scale up its ambitions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In the same
period, new tax breaks and subsidies have been authorized for the biggest polluters. The
government's current proposals for emission reduction are wholly inadequate to the task.
The Engie facility currently in lock down has been promoting itself as ‘going green' by
incorporating biomass into its production mix. We Stop Coal points out that the burning of
wood pellets only leads to further deforestation and emits even more CO2 than does coal,
the dirtiest of all fossil fuels.
‘We are well organized and extremely determined' said Marianna Peters, ‘but many more
people need to step up, wherever they are, and take bold action. There is no time left for
little steps.'
bezetting, demonstratie, kolencentrale, lockon, rotterdam, Wij Stoppen Steenkool
Vrije Bond Secretariaat
https://www.vrijebond.org/rotterdam-klimaatbeschermers-houden-kolentransport-naar-de-engie-energiecentrale-in-rotterdam-tegen/
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