linksunten Archiv

And so, on the sunny autumn morning of September 28th – a quiet, almost tranquil morning – the state and media, inside and beyond the Greek territory, woke up anti-fascist. Were the days when the exact same culprits fueled Nazism, the days when authorities meticulously wovethe  institutional racism, totalitarianism and impoverishment just a bad dream?

Of course not.

 

In the time that has passed since the murder of Pavlos, they have scrambled to present a clean face, but for all their pretensions the anger is still there. Just under five swirling years after Alexis dropped dead on that Exarcheia street corner, we are still faced with the same power zombies that our revolt had attacked but did not manage, it seems, to finish off. During all these years, the number of our sisters and our brothers who died in the hands of the state or its offshoots only keeps growing. Katerina Goulioni, Nikolas Todi, Cheikh Ndiaye, Mohammad Atif Kamran and Shehzad Luqman…

 

Katerina died in the hands of her state captors; Nikolas, Cheikh and Mohammad were assassinated by the police; Shehzad was killed by the knives of Nazis, just like Pavlos did on September 17th. Along with who knows how many others, tortured and pulled off the streets, held in Amygdaleza and all the other concentration camps, sentenced to death and then to oblivion, too – for national homogeneity reserves no space even for the memory of most of its victims. These same people that have now supposedly turned anti-fascists are those who ordered the detention 70,000 migrants in a single year; who vilified supposedly HIV-positive women and rounded up drug addicts en masse; who lead women and men to despair and suicide daily… The list only keeps growing.

 

And now, after all these years, the same state power that bred the Nazis seems to have decided that it no longer needs them, that they must be discarded. Is this justice? Of course not: how can the perpetrators ever offer justice to their victims?

 

Whether or not it decides to keep its offshoots by its side, this is the same plexus of power that convicted all of our sisters and brothers to torture and death, in a myriad of ways. It is the one that has entrenched racism and fascism as an everyday condition, the one that has consolidated its perpetuated authority upon the bodies and the minds of migrants, lesbians and gays, anti-fascists, pariahs and dropouts from its system: one and all who do not fit into the suffocatingly tight frame of national unity and social order. It was not us who killed off the Golden Dawn; the system that bred it did. So don’t mistake this for justice; we will never see any delivered by those who breed injustice and exploitation.