Political statement of P.Masouras, in the special court martial of Koridallos prisons 21/6 (athens-greece)

Beginning I want to make it clear to everyone that today I stand in the dock as a political enemy of the regime in captivity and not as a
criminal.
Crime is a privilege of those who break the law legally. Given this situation therefore, I declare that I do not intend to plea. I do not plea because a fighter when confronted with the juridical mechanism, in no way could present an apologetic character. The term plea carries the meaning of repentance. I do not regret the fact that I am a revolutionary. Making therefore a well-aimed, but also politically correct replacement of the term plea I will place that of a political statement.
To begin I will say few words about the attitude I kept during the trial. Making therefore a small retrospection to the recent past in the frames of this political trial, we will realize that the measures that had been taken in order to carry out this procedure was nothing more than an effort of isolation of political prisoners, but also a clear message of polemics to the value of bidirectional solidarity. The four powers together, attempted to overwhelm their antiregime enemies. They tried to crush us morally, politically, substantially. This plan should be blocked. Whether they accomplished it, under what conditions and with which terms is something that using as a tool political education and conscience is left to be judged. The result of the move is known, and the conclusions belong also to those who watched it. For someone to claim that your strategy is based on repression and fear is certainly a point of view which however still floats as a cork on the surface of revolutionary conscience. What I realized is that beyond fear and repression there is also the choice.
If we look at little more carefully and attempt a short retrospection in the history of the subversive movement in the countries of the west during the period of the ’60s-’80s we will realize that the strategy that you have applied in your court martial is not some type of innovation in the sector of the repressive policy. Therefore today we experience conditions familiar from postwar Italy, federal Germany, post Franko Spain, France, Greece where anything before ’74* was called resistance while later was renamed terrorism. Then the antiregime enemies that were persecuted for participation in armed revolutionary organizations but also for a wider range of subversive practices, experienced and were tried in identical regimes of isolation and repression. Thus these are the times where we will face the registering and retaining of the id cards of those who wish to watch political trials. It is when they occasionally use as evidence the presence of someone in a court room, activating laws of emergency and the prosecutions take the form of a pogrom. Then the judges indiscriminately remove the public and occasionally the accused from the rooms. It is when the carabinieri, units of B.K.A. and guardia civil, flood well armed the perimeter of the court rooms and attend the detention rooms where the accused (whenever and if they have a possibility) communicate with their advocates and their family. It is the times where from the presentation of the proceedings result trials that have been carried out without spectators, lawyers even accused.
We will also meet in absentia trials and sentencing’s. Then as well as now however the conclusions remain the same. Such trials have a predicted result, since the juridical power acting for superior political figures, serving the interests of international and national capital but also the internal condition of legal order and safety, factually shows that the juridical body as an extension of the protection of the economic and political elite simply holds the role of a decorative puppet. Meetings of such type therefore, simply constitute a public ratification of an always political decision which has been taken beforehand. A sentence already cut to measure.
Within this condition therefore some of us attempted to build a barricade of refusal and factual dispute towards the policy of isolation and de-meaning. We placed our word and our practice, against the positions of the juridical mechanism and not only. To the well sharpened razor of blackmail we chose not to turn the other cheek but to also answer with a razor. It is a practice that leaves I think an important but also essential deposit in the history of the revolutionary community, a deposit that as common is placed to evaluation, is exposed to criticism, is susceptible of self-criticism and why not enrichment and development. I hope this fighting movement contributed in its way in an attempted recording of history with another language, that of refusal, with another attitude, that of factual dispute. Maybe there was no way we could win, maybe defeat was a given beforehand as a public opinion sais. I will answer with the words of a redbrigade member who said that such perceptions belong to those who believe in Virgin Maries that cry. To look again therefore at history with these terms as irreversible and acceptable, means that we accept them in their totality preventing at the same time the transmission of new political positions, perceptions and practices.
Continuing therefore, I must admit that the expiry of the 18month pre trial detention period and consequently my release hit me quick. With the new facts therefore that dictate my presence in this room I must clarify certain things. Attending therefore free, under conditions, this room, I do not want to give you the impression that I am here to caress your ears with words of repent and tearful evasions and explanations. It would a wrong estimation on your side that today I came up to the dock in order to rectify or to claim lenience or humanitarian sympathy. What I want from my political step is the creation of a new proposal, a new point of view, an answer which will create spaces of antiauthority independently of whether they are inside or outside the walls, contributing thus to the promotion of the necessity for the tenacious conduct of the subversive struggle. I honor therefore also with my turn those who with dare and unselfishness that characterizes the comrades, who are right now in prison, denying to present themselves in front of you spitting thus with political sobriety and courage your blackmail in your faces. Because the promotion of the word and practice of a revolutionary conscience cannot run out just in a juridical room.
You deny therefore to admit that we, surely not all, are political enemies of the regime in captivity or in a special hostage regime. You deny to judge us as political opponents even though you judge with antiterrorist laws that persecute political “crimes”. You judge us in a court martial that resembles more of a pigsty then a court room, from the asphyxiating presence of those acting for the legislative and juridical power. I am therefore guilty before your verdict is heard. Guilty because I am not peaceful, because I am not a slave, because I did not bow the head, because I do not accept social segregations, because I am a person and as a person I also have dignity. Guilty because i carry another proposal for life, another thirst for a different discovery.
You deny the political motives and criteria, attempting to entrench an alternative proposal, a political proposal, which if became acceptable as such then your own political system would come to the final form of self-reversal accepting that your democracy is not perfection regarding the culture, the relations, the political education. If you recognized our position therefore the absolute knowledge and truth of your neoliberal policy would collapse. Here are defendants that do not accept their role as such, but as the accuser. People that do not accept the dialogue between revolution and counterrevolution. Your values, your ideals as guards of social peace and legal order are not respected by the anarchists. I deny to give any explanation to you, I take a position of rupture, so that between us a rudimentary channel of communication can be de-activated. You therefore from the position you are have the advantage to practice permanent criticism and to produce dispute. In 1929 communist Rakoczy asked his judges:
Who are you? What do you represent? What is the historical reason of your existence? If I attempted today a posthumous dialogue, I would say that you are a gang of self-appointed executioners who function as a wall of protection for the political and economical elite, that you represent and guarantee, always guarding, the sick norms of capitalism in the lives of people, as you represent also the sold out consciences of subjugated and also weak-minded social beings. That the historical reason of your existence is no other than for burying revolutionaries in cement and steel, to drown in the spirit of terror and repression any anti-conventional, subversive social outburst, bloodsheding thus every breath that is not synchronized with the majoritarian social death rattle.
If we turn back the clock we will realize the standard tactic of extermination and isolation of political prisoners on an international level. Imprisonments, executions, attacks on revolutionaries, on the structures of subversion and the hearths of resistance around the world are basic conditions for the existence of capitalistic countries. The aim is to crush the world front of the revolution that works continuously for subversion. The policy of isolation and the internationalization of capitalistic repression are prompted with all means. With the inflexible line of imperialistic sovereignty, with the international co-ordination of military units, the upgrade of power of the secret services of the police from the technocratic education, from the brainwash via the media, religion, family, from the amputation of the conscience in school cells, the blackmail of wage slavery, the mass imprisonments and prosecutions of fighters. When someone speaks of exterminating conditions of imprisonment and murders of revolutionaries, the night of death in Stuttgart in the high security prisons of Stammheim comes to mind, when fighters of the R.A.F were found shot, stabbed and hanging in their cells. Stammheim therefore is not only in Germany. Stammheims unfold everywhere in the world. From Turkey with the F type cells where the political prisoners dropped dead one after the other during their transfers and where in the revolts and in the fights that they carried out in order to abolish this prison regime 122 of them were murdered. From the FIES regime in Spain where it is indicative that certain cement graves such as El Dueso, Okania 1, Puerto de Santa Maria and Erera de La Mancha were called by the prisoners nests of torturing, madness and extermination. From the prisons of isolation in Voghera, Rebibbia and the exile island for the red brigades in Asinara, Italy was indicative of the conditions of hospitality that were saved for political prisoners. And from there to Germany where some hellholes such as Ossendorf in Cologne and the prison of Hamburg were left at the mercy of psychiatric researches under the name SFB 115 (special field of research) under the monitoring of the main torturer psychiatrist Gian Kros and with the financing of the USA. From there to the special prisons in France to the H blocks for the IRA and for the INLA in England, to the underground dungeons of Latin America. And travelling again back to Greece we will meet the white cells where they hold the R.O. 17November and the special regime of imprisonment and isolation of the political prisoners.
In order for revolutionaries to not forget their position, they should never forget the continuous, relentless and first of all justified war. To the blackmail they answer with stubborness, action, integrity. To persecution and imprisonment, they answer with a grin and with a heart made of ice that holds thousands of promises, proposals of life and struggle. To the repression, assimilation, the alienated life, the charge of capitalism they answer with struggle. Tough, continuous, subversive struggle.
It would be cheap of me to follow the false dilemma innocence or guilt. Even though you know that you do not have any evidence on me. I am therefore as guilty as the practice of revolutionary dispute in the eyes of the subversive movement and the fighters. What your missing is that by imprisoning and executing the reolutionaries, you cannot imprison and execute the revolution itself. This constitutes one of the convenient delusions of your mechanisms of power and your perceptions. You do not get that even if you bury us alive, you forgot to steal the sky, which anticipates our own stormnig. You believed that by sending armed EKAM (special forces) to smash our head with their gunstocks and scatter us to prisons, that you would manage to take from us the most precious things we have, the faith in ideas, values, the struggle. With surplus naivety you believed that our knees would love the floors of cells, corridors, isolation cells and the courtyards of every prison. Now two years later I present to you the results. You are not holding as a flag my political and moral defeat, only a pile of papers that is unable to imprison my soul.
I am not here to be liked in the eyes of any judge or public prosecutor. I am here as a political subject who my conscience compels me to give my point of view for the order of things. This is why I stand uncompromising.
The great importance today is closer to our integrity as fighters and less to the result. Its near this boldness and pride that are daily tested in the various types of galleys of this totalitarian regime.
Whether these are called prisons, work spaces, conventions, dead ideologies, false dilemmas.
The potential therefore of a sentence because I am not watching my language is not enough to deter me from to stand proudly for my quality as a person.
I don’t make discounts in my thought and my speach even though i know that I could be tried informally with law 509 from 1947.
The only difference is that i am not propagating communism but anarchy.
For some people the struggle is like a precious flower which in order for someone to acquire it they must walk and stand straight on the edge of the cliff. Those who walked on the edge or those who approached it, the establishment saves for them a unique scale of confrontation. All those who fight or those who are ready to fight, already know or on the course will realize that the state chases its enemies, like an enraged dog. Delusions in this do not fit.
It wouldn’t be a mistake for someone to admit that in periods of elation of the radical-subversive struggle, authority answers with a combination of sycofanty and repression to those who resist. In this deterministic frame prison is and should be considered as an extremely likely case.
The current greek experience has confirmed it in the most defining way. The regime today, more than ever decides to vanish the internal enemy. Dozens of imprisonments of fighters with non-existent evidence, D.N.A.samples, fingerprints in houses or portable objects, penalization of friendly and comrade relations, many comrades in illegality (a peculiar hostage regime), the terror-law is always being upgraded in order to targetize anyone, they create a climate so that they can exterminate the fighters and intimidate anyone who can potentialy go against the aims of the regime disturbing thus the order and social peace. Thus everyone who attacks the existing is called to conteplate for all they have to face, but also to act during their likely captivity in the modern dungeons of democracy.
Maybe some indeed believed or even continue to believe, that throwing us in the dungeons will make us regret that we want a different society. A world without states, exploitation and violence. Maybe they think that their correctional policy, that is staffed by its disciplinary extension that is called people-guard, is capable by locking us up our in the diciplinary room makes the courage of a person that fights to recede.
The prisons are presented as the institution that is called to re-establish and reform the social, according to the regime, carcinoma that constitutes their interior.
The disciplinary and repressive structures of the modern crematoriums, seek to isolate the individual from any social sequence. Mental isolation, intellectual, physical, psychological. Its this space that maintains and externalises the misprint of the human kind. And the revolutionaries being there we live in a mausoleum, in a world of dead from ideals and alienated existentials. This is the morbid micrography, of your modern totalitarian regimes. It is this micrography that reflects with clarity the cannibalism of capitalism in its supreme, condensed form. It is this microcosm where the human existence, realizes easier the quality of the majoritarian point of view of the society which it is included in. Snitching, selfishness, the plague of drugs, the conventions of suburban logic, the enslavement, but also the economic, intellectual and political destruction, are nothing more than itself the face of society, where alienation and exploitation engrave its cheeks as a razor, remind us that the moral and value carcinoma that it carries, should be destroyed. This is picture that is promoted by your systematic norm and is realised by your correctional policy, that aims basically to capture the struggle of the person against authority.
Prisons however are not only behind tall walls and dead areas. They are installed in the institution of family, education, in the interpersonal relations, in the army, in the flashy but always fake smiles that the people around you give you. Prisons are installed in religion, in quiting, in the passive acceptance. All this social cluster of the disciplinary mechanism, represents our stolen life, the lack of freedom, the oppression, the exploitation that each person suffers.
Prisons are not only at distant locations but live and exist inside us.
I therefore, an outlaw for the regime, I am judged today by the mainly legal-illegal and the modern collaborators.
The reason i am here today here is a result of the governmental logic. Therefore the political spectrum takes an autistic approach, which fixes that the democratic regime is the ideal highest point of a civilization and that this could never be disputed. The regime has the hallucination that it can possess the monopoly of violence in the society of people. When therefore some come to bring them down to earth in the field of reality with the theory and action of dispute, the state tries to reppress and absorb them.
That I did not hide my ideas under the rug of incarceration, is surely something that you do not like. Even if in the beginning they threw me in prison because of political pressures and intentions, it was a given that after that if I took the role of the good prisoner and collaborative arrestee, the probabilities of me being out in society earlier once again would obviously be better.You did not achieve my political defeat. Your repressive structures turn to rubble when they attempt to absorb the revolutionaries.
The position of a revolutionary in prison, should be considered a starting point of attack. According to the above therefore, I published a number of political letters, overlooking the fact that I would worsen my position, since the non-existence of evidence incriminating me is clear to me and i was indeferent to the consequences, because I had debt towards the comrades and to the struggle to hold high the flag of the tenacious political position, even in these conditions. I considered and I consider therefore that my means of escape from a captivity that is characterized by the vengeance and non-existence of proof, is not the logic of hiding my political positions in order to get a more leniant treatment. On the contrary my position is next to those who which we share the same intense concerns and reflections, next to every insurrectional individuality that knows to dare.
I will not allow them to present me as a victim of the DAEEB. And I do not allow it because a revolutionary could never be a victim. Because a fighter is always a prospective winner.
If someone today is looking for victims, they should look at the alienated social cluster that is a prisoner in its majority of the suburban conventions that the establishment produces, but also of those who have raised submission and fear in their code of ethics. I could invoke my innocence and thus give a fake substance to the direction of my political statement. I will not tiptoe on such fake dilemmas.
Innocence and guilt, given the fluidity that characterizes them as meanings when they are divided between two worlds, are eminently variables.
Surely therefore theres no room for delusions that this special room is the juridical firing squad against free people.
The regime and suburban callings in the form of a Gospel reach our ears in their thousands. Look after yourself, defended your money, love your god, fall for your homeland, work, consume, live just like another number and die.
I do not fight and i do not love nothing from the above. I do not behave as a number but as a sum of my choices. This is where our vital difference is.
I am not hear today in order to I prove my “innocence”, but for the juridical and antiterrorist mechanism to prove my “guilt”.
It is not difficult for one to see that your democratic regime is just like in the past and present of the totalitarian regimes around the world. Whoever does not compromise and is not absorbed, is repressed and exterminated.
For you therefore i should become an active citizen, who via his vote will select his next dominator. A good christian who will pay his faith, with his coins in the box of your god. A proud Greek that will be enlisted and if needed will fall heroicly in favour of the homeland vindicating thus your economic and national interests.
Because therefore I do not have a dominator on my kneck, neither a god and homeland, because I did not walk with the dominating social ethics, I was subjugated and I did not bend I am the perfect model that you call a terrorist. If my values and principles do require a cracking down on, with pride I declare myself a “terrorist” overlooking any cost.
If you are waiting therefore for me to make statement of sincere repentance because I live with dignity, you must have the patience of Cicifus, because I do not regret for my ideas.
I will not allow the regime propaganda and the media cannibalism to continue classifying us as exclusively employed criminals. I won’t allow those who legally commit crimes against the many to think that they have the right to try us, judge us and ask us to apologize.
If someone can judge us this is only the memory of comrades in the event that i do not stand to the height of the occasions and worthy of the expectations and requirements of the struggle. If someone can judge us, this is ourselves. We on our side if we continue with courage to live against our era, the moment of total inversion will appear in front of us.
If some should be accountable, these are the same that staff this mechanism of authority of this totalitarian regime. The revolutionaries are the only ones that will not apologize today.
Finishing, i look at my enemy with courage and sobriety. Looking at you I recognize the executioners of freedom, the persecutors of the deniers of capitalism and authority, the torturers of dignity and inquisitors of the revolutionary conscience and the prospect of a postrevolutionary free society. Looking at you I become an accuser and I judge you guilty of the utmost treason against all free and fighting people.
Long live the Revolution. Long live the Radical – Subversive struggle.
… After the end of his political statement, the chairman of the court addressed P. Masouras asking him if he intends to answer the questions of the court, receiving the answer: “I clarified from the beginning that I am making political statement and i am not apologizing therefore obviously theres no field of dialectic between us.
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revloutionary solidarity comrade TAKH!

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