Conspiracy of Cells of Fire

About the attacks against State and Capital

9 November 2009

sysiphus-angrynewsfromaroundtheworld.blogspot.com

A huge storm of revolt raged through the streets of Greece in December 2008. After the young Andreas Grigoropoulos was murdered by a cop, riots spread throughout the whole country for several weeks. Hundreds of banks, shops, car dealers, offices,… were attacked, plundered and put on fire. Although it were anarchists and anti-authoritarians who took the lead in this storm during the first week after the murder, it spread itself fast and many people got involved in this revolt against miserable living conditions, against the authorities and against the hopelessness offered by this world to the exploited and oppressed.

But the revolt didn’t cease at the end of 2008, neither did it start on the day of the murder. The attacks against the structures of State and Capital went on and spread to several smaller towns in Greece. A lot of these attacks were claimed by anarchists and anti-authoritarians, containing mutual differences and accents. A lot of discussions about the perspectives of insurrection, city guerrilla, targets and spectres,… take place through communiqués.

On the 24th of September 2009, four people are arrested by the anti-terrorist unit. They are charged for “membership of the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire”, “possession of explosives”, “terrorism”… The arrests took place one day after an attack against the house of a socialist politician. The police claims to be in possession of fingerprints of the suspects they found on unexploded bombs; they claim as well to have found pressure cookers, material to make electronic delaying mechanisms, leftovers of explosive material,… during the two house searches (the comrades were arrested in two different houses). The four arrested were brought to the prosecutor. One person was released under the condition of remaining available for the investigation, while the other three were transferred to prison awaiting their trial. The prosecutor as well issued a warrant against six other comrades. All six of them are on the run, despite the elaborate manhunts of the police and the roadblocks that were put up in and around Athens for days.

About 180 fire attacks and, since a couple of moths, artisanal bombing attacks were carried out under the name of ‘Conspiracy of Cells of Fire’. The attacks targeted banks, car dealers, shopping centres, governmental institutions, police stations, offices of political parties, houses of politicians, judges, criminologists and journalists, private security firms, companies building prisons,… Several coordinated fire attacks took place: some tens of targets got attacked on a few days of time. The claims did not only criticize Capital, State and Authority (in all of their aspects), but as well the resignation of the exploited, their herd mentality, their collaboration with the system. They refuse to regard oppression and exploitation as simply being imposed by batons and blackmail, but understand it as a social relation in which all have their responsibility –and make or don’t make the choice to fight against it.

The communiqué beneath claims an attack against an election meeting of the previous first minister Karamanlis that took place at the eve of the elections. An artisanal bomb was put in a garbage container next to the building where the meeting took place. The meeting was evicted. The ‘Conspiracy’ talks about the recent attacks as well. On the 4th of October, the socialists of the PASOK win the elections. Together with the green party they form up the government. One of the first measures they took was sending an overwhelming police force to Exarchia, a neighbourhood in Athens where the anarchists and anti-authoritarians are very strong. This police force stayed for several days in order to pacify the situation. The socialists, in the best of their traditions, made the struggle against the anarchists and the spread of the attacks an important issue on their agenda…

By publishing this communiqué, which of course offers a limited view upon the activities and ideas of the ‘Conspiracy of Cells of Fire’, we want in the first place to offer comrades the possibility to learn about their ideas, to discuss them and to use them as a basis for recognition or critical solidarity. The first step in developing a revolutionary solidarity always has to be the examination of and discussion about the ideas, actions and reasons for acting of the arrested comrades. We hope the translation of this last communiqué of the Conspiracy contributes to this.

THIS IS HOW IT IS... IF THAT’S WHAT YOU THINK...

Never did we stop struggling during difficult times, did hot breath touch us, not even when the dogs around us were barking. We looked at each other, self sure about the decisions we made. We checked our weapons, we interrogated our hatred: “Let’s go for it once again… this time ‘till the end…”

After our attack against the ministry of Macedonia-Thrace and the announcement of the national elections, two of our cells decided in cooperation with the comrades of the Nihilist Fraction to once again call for the strategy of social provocation by hitting the houses and offices of political personalities. The first blow in this series of bombing attacks was directed against the house of the PASOK-candidate (Greek social democratic party) Louka Katseli in Kolonaki. We decided to accomplish this attack in two days time. On the day of the attack itself we were surprised to hear the journalists celebrating the dismantlement of our organisation: raid in a hiding place in Halandri, several days of being followed by the cops, success for the EYP (National Agency for Information), localisation and identification of the fingerprints of previous attacks, scenarios about the logic of communicating vessels…

All of this while on the same day we attacked in Kolonaki without any disturbance, under the eye of the police, without worries. These events would provoke nothing but laughter were it not that some people are named to be members of our organisations and are being prosecuted. This is the perfect scenario to satisfy the cannibal instinct of the journalists and the society which has been demanding the arrest of terrorists for months now. Tricks for the elections… internal police affairs… fireworks that cause fear… we don’t understand their logic and will not follow it.

But all that was said remains aggravated in our memory and the solemn word we’ve spoken without any accompanying thought was: “REVENGE”.

Revenge for the party they have had in celebration of our so called arrests under the pretext of the 20th birthday of the execution of the terrible Bakogianni. [In September 1989 this politician of the right wing party Nea Demokratio was shot through the head by the armed group called the 17th of November] A feast at which its protagonist, the big pimp Karamanlis [Greek first minister, voted away on the 4th of October 2009], arrogantly declared his triumph over revolutionary terrorism.

Revenge for the journalist vermin who are pretending to be great writers and speak about the “terrorists of the cooking pots and the play station”, about chiefs and subordinated youngsters. Bur revenge as well for the sensitive mentors of the progressive press which worriedly talk about the good children next doors. Revenge as well for this fucking society which smiled maliciously, believing she had been freed from us, that she could go to bed safely. Revenge for the police bastards who play the tough ones in their bullet proof costumes and who show their machine guns in the time of their weak and fabricated victory but who were crying, running away and hiding under their desks when we attacked the police stations at night to burn them down.

Revenge against the bastard prosecutors and examining magistrates who think they can capture our hatred and our conscience, our feeling and our logic in the pages of their procedure, believing they can frighten us with it.

Revenge for everything we live, we loose, for everything which could have happened to us by choosing for the new urban guerrilla as a living condition.

Today the truth is known to us and our prosecutors. We know their spectacle doesn’t seduce the people who are able to think nor frighten those who chose a place which only few people dare to choose to be their country.

About all of the others, we don’t care too much.

By the way, a few months ago, in May to be precise, we wrote at the time we placed bombs at the police stations of Stavroupoli and Penteli: “The result is even poorer and more picturesque. The biggest part of the arrested is ‘being prosecuted for their ideas’ or for accidentally passing by the place of the attack. We, we don’t think that an arrest should result in the creation of martyrs… neither do we think that a prosecuted should be scarified for the good cause. But you should know that our choices bring responsibilities. The more we think about it, the more confident –and by consequence more demanding- we become towards ourselves and our comrades.”

In this way we want to make understood that we are people who live up to their word as if it was an engagement for life. That’s why we would at least be incoherent and cowardly if we would deny our principles and positions by declaring that we reject and judge every violent action or if we would declare to not be familiar with the organisation we are part of, as was according to the journalists done by two of the arrested. And that makes sense since those people have nothing to do with us.

On top of that we are proud of our choices and deeds and we have the courage, the privilege and the honour to look into the mirror without hiding our face out of shame. We would act the same way in case of an arrest, we would not hide our faces as was done by the two other supposed young members of the group. In short, if anyone should hide his face, it will be this denigrated society.

We will not play for detectives and judge about the how and why of the solid proof which supports this case, namely the existence of a bomb in a pressure cooker which they found in the apartment in Halandri. Having said this, we absolutely need to explicit the following: bombs are not certificated, especially not those with an easy detonator such as cooking pots and alarm clocks. These are commercialised materials which, in contrast to repressive claims, are not exclusively copyrighted by an organisation or a modus operandi. On top of that, the specific method of using cooking pots as objects strengthening the shock waves has been used ever since the 19th century by French terrorists and nihilists (Henri, Ravachol, Vaillant,…) and are even being used today by the anarchist organisation FAI in Italy, by ourselves and the organisation ENEDRA (anti-authoritarian group which placed several home made bombs in September 2007) in Greece. So, how can it be that the possible discovery of a bomb which is spread and made in different times and places can be considered to be the symbol-stamp of a specific group such as the Cells of Fire?

There is something rotten but it is not upto us to find out what it is all about. All of those who thought we would be hiding at the campus of the polytechnic school can wonder about the following question. At the moment the university buildings were surrounded by civil cops and journalists, we placed the bomb at Pedion tou Areos during a meeting of the fat ass [Karamanlis]. We don’t care about the asylum of the university; it has ever been a huge desire of the cops. We will not occupy ourselves with all of that, we are already looking for new targets.

At last, in order of preparing ourselves for the future so that we can face the present in a lucid spirit, we want to make clear that locking up one of us doesn’t imply a position of weakness. We own our codes of values that we will not dirty with revocation, incoherence and forgetfulness. In other words, may the hyenas of solidarity not touch us with their claws; may the people with their good intentions, the personae, the ‘elder’, those ‘who know all’, the mother Theresas and all of the scum keep themselves busy with easier and more servile victims because we, we are no easy preys and we will kick out their teeth. Even at the hardest times, a revolutionary needs to appreciate his friends and comrades and needs to despise the men of straw with their vulgar interests and fake humanism which decapitate the revolutionary conscience and practice by making compromises. Therefore we invite the new comrades to get rid of the mentality of the bars which became press rooms where the experts of solidarity proclaim their communiqués. We invite them to put life into their conspiring meetings and replace their small talk by projects and clear words.

May the fear and uncertainty make place for boldness and determination; may the anger cause storms of rage and make everyone ask to their heart: “If not now… then when? If not us… then who?”

After the last events took place, the comrades who hit Katseli proposed reconsidering the action plan. Because we believe that the reality of prison which surrounds us is not the result of a unitarian and compact leadership which delegates orders and runs the institutions; but that it is a social factory of behaviours, culture, tradition and customs, we want to attack every domain of this factory which produces everything we hate. At this moment we consider the plan to attack the houses of 5 or 6 politicians to be quite poor. It did not have the dynamic that we wanted to develop. We wanted to do something which could break the supposed limits and the alibi of the ‘innocent’ society which denies its responsibility by attributing to the role of the eternal victim. But victims do not cheer to their murderers, they don’t press charges against those who resisted against tyrants, they don’t support their oppressors, they don’t pine away in their fake cells. Because victims simply don’t have a choice.

But the people of the current society, they do have choices and by consequence responsibilities. Maybe we are all living –we and the society- the same shit, but let’s not forget that the prisoners and guards who live in the same prison are not allied.

We feel the same way about this society in which nothing sparkles and the disgusting cowardness reigns. So it didn’t take long for this idea to be born. We chose to hit an election meeting, a meeting where the dull mass of garbage-on-feet hurries to get out on the street and cheer to their leaders. The choice for a meeting of Nea Demokratia was purely esthetical. We couldn’t stand the spectacle of the fat idiot Karamanlis boasting about a non existent success against revolutionary terrorism. We want to remind him that a big mouth serves no-one.

As well we wanted to temper the ambitions of the clowns of the anti-terrorist service who wanted to take revenge for their agent that was knocked out by the organisation ‘Sect of Revolutionaries’ [this cop was executed in April 2009] and who play their game at the expense of people who have nothing in common with the new urban guerrilla. And at last we want to send a message to all.

From now on, the space of indifference has ceased to exist. The revolutionary terrorism and we, as Conspiracy of Cells of Fire, take the step towards social threat and nihilist aggression. The majority will remain to be in front of us as our enemy as long as she is hiding behind the psychology of the masses camouflaging their personal responsibilities; as long as she defines herself as the poor cheated people that are the victims of injustice. Zero tolerance for justifications. It is difficult to wake up in the morning in an unworthy world, in between stupefied smiles, exhausted bodies, fake gestures, apathic looks and in the middle of a dominating absence. We got rid of all luggage that stopped us: dead relationships, lustreless situations, regular opinions, hypocrisies, permanent repetitions and we take a wild path with our longs breathing on the torpedoing rhythm of an unpronounceable mutiny.

We shall play the Russian roulette, the revolver of life in our hands, instead of dying quietly and patiently, far away from what we’re looking for. We know that we are not alone. We know new comrades of the fire to be with us, and we are with them. Beyond all expectations, the new guerrilla has scratched her own razor notch on the face of this world. The new groups have been able to flourish and write their own history, even while they have been blackened and despised by the old ‘celebrities’, even while they have known the suspicion and the posterior advises of the illuminated.

We send our love and respect to all new guerillos and we call for them to join the battle against the small and big, the visible and invisible prisons of our life, and this until the end. To the others, those who burden us with their exhausting justifications and their so called experience, we don’t listen. The revolutionary hostilities will not cease, also not to temper the ease of the wormy voters. The supporters of the party, just like the football hooligans, are travelling from one city to another to take part in all meetings, they drag their living corpse and shout party slogans. Faces transformed by slogans such as “You are the first minister” parade on TV while representing the basis of the electorate, the quintessence of democracy. When the chief is coming to play his 2 hours of theatre, the mass gets struck by tears of emotion and numbness. This idiotic mass, reminding of movies with living deaths, can only be a target. The quantity of the mass does not touch us, neither does the presence of young and old, men and women. It is all about that moment on which the inertia of the people transforms into shouts and supports for democracy.

So we decided to make a bomb explode into their faces, to send a message during the last speech of the first minister, to provoke the authorities to panic and evacuate the place. Electors running away in panic while the clearers of mines start a race against the clock trying to neutralize the bomb. We crossed the Solomon street, merged into the white-azure (colours of Nea Demokratia) mass, passed next to civil cops and riot cops –believing we were part of the mass they wished us victory- and arrived at the spot where we wanted to place the bomb. We saw three civil cops and two riot cops in the 3th of September street and the Guilfordou street and as well a civil cop on the corner of these streets. We went into the alley, left the bomb and so we sent a message about the arrests, the dismantlement and the zero tolerance.

Now is the time for everyone to question themselves and find out if they continue or resign in a definite way from their decisions. We must show them individually and collectively that we don’t back the sails. We’ll stay until the end. If they go to extremes in trying to find us, let us go to our uttermost extremes in trying to be the first ones to attack. The one going home is the looser of this war. No step backwards, no postponement. From now on strategy will be replaced by hatred, intelligent projects by complete determination.

Let’s free our destructive instincts. May a new cycle of guerrilla begin, even harder and even more destructive. May every house become a hiding place and may all hiding places become fire that will burn them alive. Let’s show them that the new guerrilla is not a soap bubble, nor a teenage impulse, nor an explosion of artistic anxiety. The realisation and reanimation of our aggressive desires, our negations, our existence is attacking the status quo. You will always be right in front of us… and we’ll see who’s with his back against the wall.

Conspiracy of Cells of Fire – Nihilist Fraction

PS: We give our greetings to the anarchists and comrades Christos Stratigopoulos and Alfredo Bonanno who, despite his age, keeps treasuring his unaltered negation and continues walking on the way he choose to walk.