“Was the riot cop shooting orchestrated by the state?”

Rough translation of a posting on Athens indymedia, the day after a riot cop was shot in Eksarhia, Athens. The text below is important as it seems to reflect a sentiment shared with the majority of the people in the anarchist, and the wider antagonist social movement in the country: The greek state seems to be pulling out some of its oldest and dirtiest tricks in order to go, once again, on the offensive. Luckily, our movement does have one of the most valuable assets - collective memory. In the US they called it COINTELPRO, in Italy it was the strategy of tension, over here it is lonely gunmen shooting from (but really: shooting at) the very spaces we are trying to defend. We don’t forget, we don’t forgive, we won’t be intimidated…

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On the dawn of 5/1/08, at around 3 a.m, a riot police unit was shot at while guarding the ministry of culture in the Eksarhia district of Athens. They speak of more than 20 bullet shells and a hand grenade. The cop injured, they say, was saved only thanks to his mobile phone, which slowed down the bullet that hit him in the chest.

Our initial thought is that any individual that is part of our movement, no matter how enraged or in support of urban guerilla tactics they might be, would not chose the area of Eksarhia (literally under police occupation for the past few days) in order to launch an attack of this kind and manage to escape safely.

Therefore, we cannot consider coincidental the fact that mass media, politicians and their lackeys have been building up an atmosphere where some dynamic revenge action against the cops was imminent. We cannot rule out, of course, the possibility that such incidents could happen - but we are not foolish enough to believe that they would take place in Eksarhia, or in the case of the earlier incident (-the shooting against the police van a few days earlier - trans.) in the university campus of Zografou.
The state, via its mouthpiece media was preparing public opinion for some ‘imminent’ action against the police. The choice of the place of the attack (the ministry of culture in Eksarhia) somehow spoiled their recipe: An attack in such a heavily surveilled urban area clearly points at attackers that can only be directly linked to the state itself.
It goes without saying that these people would have no hesitation whatsoever to shoot one of their own - there’s no need for a second thought on that: Life means nothing to them.

Their action shows that they are trying to neutralise the climate for the shooting, in cold blood, of Alexis Grigoropoulos, and to create once again some sympathy for the police - who at the moment are spat at on the streets by pretty much everyone for anything they do. They are trying to create, at the same time, an atmosphere of violence and terrorism for all the rest who resist in any possible way.

The choice of Eksarhia, an area that no armed revolutionary group would ever chose under the given circumstances, builds all the necessary associations in the mind of the society; it frees the hands of cops and judges for violence and convictions against the social whole… this always in the face of the pending unemployment and financial crises.

Already there have been 75 detentions, many police attacks against residents and passers-by in Eksarhia, while there is also information on house raids - how handy for them.

There are strange days coming; the government has lost control a while ago and is now launching a full-scale violence, some violence in which it has a near-monopoly.

A disproportionate violence that faces stones and molotovs and responds with tons of chemical gases, bullets (plastic and regular), attacks of the wild revolted against fully equipped state units with military training.

The pre-planned right turn of the government (not that it wasn’t right-wing already, but having seen its conservative core moving to the far-right, it further hardens its rhetoric and repression tactics) can only be confronted with mass and unitary demonstrations and events against state terror. With answers and clashes on the streets; with mass barricades. With a political word that will talk of the people and their needs; of how they are masters of themselves, how they need to move away from the authoritarian leadership of political parties which ignore the pressing demand for liberation from the confines of the state, of homelands and capitalism.

Without rushed-up actions yet with our gaze in the immediate future, we need to produce ideas and proposals through our public assemblies so that the self-organisation of the people from below can become visible, viable and possible -precisely in the ways many of us witnessed during the days of the December revolt.

There is no other way - else, they’ll take us down, one after the other.

As they’ve proved one more time, they are ruthless.