[Translator's note] Fee Marie Meyer was arrested in the afternoon of Friday, January 14th by men of the anti-terrorist unit outside her home in Athens. The police have officially confirmed the only piece of “evidence” against her is her personal friendship with Christos Politis, another anarchist currently in prison for his alleged participation in an urban guerrilla group the police won't even bother to name.
Soon after Fee's arrest, police “leaked” to the media an astonishing, catchy and – as was soon to be proven – fabricated story: Fee was supposedly the daughter of former RAF member Barbara Meyer and her father was supposed to have been killed in a shoot-out with the police in Vienna, Austria.
“Meyer” is an extremely common surname in German; the Barbara Meyer who had joined RAF had nothing to do with Fee's mother whatsoever. An unimportant detail for mainstream media in Greece, which were quick to reproduce the police propaganda. Onward to Fee's own words...
Now that the lights of the show have switched off and the stage curtains have been shut, the time has come for me to talk. In the way that I want. About what happened, what kind of games I believe have been played on my own back but also beyond myself; to talk about all the things that should concern any thinking individual in the Greek territory.
Regarding my “case”: by now I am fairly certain that from the moment when my personal details were passed on to the well-known brainiacs of the anti-terrorist unit (which was completely justified of course – I had a drink, you see, with the wrong people) the game was all set. Let alone when they google'd my surname (as common as Papadopoulos in Greece [or Smith in UK/US – trans.]) and –imagine their joy – they discovered my rich “family” background. My father's different name was a minor detail (after all, “their lot sleep with everyone else”) as was my mother's different date of birth.
From the moment when reality didn't work for them, it had to be adjusted. I had to fit the role they had prepared for me. They abducted me on Friday [January 14] at 3pm, at the moment when I was leaving my home to go to the language school where I teach. At least ten people with balaclavas, after wearing one to me too, took me to the 12th floor of the Police HQ in Athens without saying a single word. There, after been interrogated by six people, I was shown a photograph depicting myself and my friend and comrade Christos Politis. They asked me if I knew him and after responding positively, saying that he is one more person they have sent to prison unjustly, their commander ordered boldly to “go ahead with the usual procedure”. They stripped me off my clothes, logged all my details, stole my shirt and my socks – obviously without telling me what I am accused of and of course without paying any attention to my demand to see a lawyer.
The time is important since from 5pm already the whole story of my supposed parents had broken out. This explains perfectly why while I was resisting them photographing me, they would photograph me with their mobile phones, to steal a picture. Otherwise their hot topic wouldn't sell as much...
For years now we know how these mechanisms operate, rotten to the bone; we know that the informants-journalists (with a handful yet important exceptions) switch between reproducing police lies or handing orders to them. Ready to shred any life that is thrown at their sharp teeth, ready to eat up truths and spit out lies. Vile creatures...
What I had not imagined, at least personally, is the completely shameless way in which this happens, here and now.
When the fiasco had started to become clear, and while I personally did not yet know any of filth that had come to light, some officer responsible for “international terrorism” invited me to his office. He started to engage in “friendly talk” about when exactly my father was killed in a shoot-out! In all truth, my jaw must have hit the floor at that moment, especially when he told me with a smiler that “well, I am more interested in your mother's international arrest warrant” … The only thing he didn't do was to charge me with covering up a criminal, since I didn't state my parents' names from the upstart...
But then again, I did a lot of things. As the attorney general said, “they confiscated a lot, unusually lots” of things in my house... brushes, clothes, tooth-brushes, pillow-cases and... printed material. Material that proves beyond any doubt that I am an anarchist, something that I hadn't thought for a moment to hide and so, - as this educated woman, the attorney general, so eloquently put- I am a terrorist and so allowing a possibility even for my freedom to be denied until the judge committee decides on my case!
If she wants to imprison me for this [for being an anarchist] yes I am guilty and I will always be. I will always stand on the side of the exploited, not the exploiters, for ever, until there is no longer any authority of human over any other human and of the humans over animals and nature. But I publicly and seriously demand that the charges against me change. That they write the real charges, so no-one can beat around the bush: They should turn the charge into “she is an anarchist and she reads. She has relationships with many people who still struggle and of this, she is proud”.
Charge, aim and shoot us at the wall of Kesariani [a reference to the wall where Nazi soldiers would execute partisans in Athens – trans].
I want to comment for a while about the anti-terrorist unit's mangling mechanisms of my dignity. The cells where people are thrown inside have the size of 2.50m x 0.50m, with a yellow lamp switced on continuesly. It makes you lose the sense of time and space, you have to ask from them even about meeting your basical vital functions. I know that my co-accused comrades had much more hard times, being there since Thursday, while they were forbidden to communicate with any lawyer. They did not give them food that was brought there by comrades, while we were refusing to accept any food given by the cops, and finally they were letting them solve mental crosswords without giving a pencil. It seems they were afraid of breaking out ...
I read somewhere that the face of a political regime is shown by the way in which it treats its political opponents. The glory of Greece! [popular expression used to emphasise the arbitrariness of state power in Greece, untranslatable – trans].
The times we live in are fluid, strange, constantly changing. In times of institutional and financial crises authority will always play with the carrot and the stick, fear and security. They want no-one to react to anything, not to speak, not to look around them, not to think differently, or if possible not to think at all. Lobotomise us at birth, then, to get done with it!
They try to enforce everywhere their frightening and absolute homogeneity; their absolutely and thoroughly studied inhumanity.
In the Greek territories at this moment there are approximately 40 people held for political reasons. Most of these have not even stood trial and yet they are held in maximum security prisons; others are not tried in public or open trials; others are held without the tiniest bit of evidence against them, only based on their belief, on their solidarity-based life stance they take in their personal relationships.
Ever-conservatively and in an ever more fascist way, they want to impose isolation, loneliness, the logic of “each for their own”; they want us to only watch trash TV, to consume life substances, lies, spectacle. Not to talk to acquaintances, not to go or invite people to our homes, not to meet anyone or to ask them to inform us of the information police hold on them in advance, better not, we might get in trouble.
They want us to stop feeling, to act based on the lowest instincts of survival and self-preservation, based on sadism of the “spy-hole”, to snoop other peoples' lives, losing our own in the process.
They want us to hate, to condemn anything that is different, people from other places, co-workers from other sectors, anyone who thinks or lives differently.
All of them are dangerous [we are told] and we must hate them, since hatred breeds fear and vice-versa.
This is the fear that they step on in order to impose their mortal security, the dying sounds of a society denouncing the very last of the links that define it as such.
Only three words are enough, I believe, in order for the human element in humans to be defined. Dignity-Freedom-Solidarity. None can exist without the other two, none of them falls from the sky. They take virtue and dare. But these are the difficult meanings that give substance to the Human, which turn survival into life.
They can only control us, shred us into bits and isolate us for as long as we stand on our knees with our back bended over by the lash, chasing whatever carrot comes by.
Let's resist! When we raise our head and look ourselves in the eyes again, their shaky structure will collapse like a paper tower. Because the catastrophe at this moment might have fallen upon your neighbour's house, but tomorrow it will be at yours.
Let's resist! Because everywhere in the world there are people who dare to raise their heads. Everywhere and at all times, at every single tiny moment when someone raises their gaze to the sky and the limitless horizon they had forgotten from their childhood, the human element in the Human is reborn.
Enough, we have tolerated them for too long! Struggle for the entire earth and for freedom, struggle for our lives and our dignity.
The state and the Media are the only terrorists.
Solidarity to everyone who struggles is not just our weapon, it is a given.
Slightly altering the well-known poem [by Martin Niemoller – trans.]:
First they came for my neighbour,
and I didn't speak out because he was a foreigner.
When they came for the next one he was a Roma,
and I didn't speak out again.
Then they took the poor one, the tramp, the anarchist, the Leftist.
In the end they came for me.
… and it was only then I realised there was no-one left to react...
Fee Marie Meyer
