In the 5^th of July ’99 the trial of Nikos Maziotis will take place in Athens. Our comrade is imprisoned for the last 18 months, after his arrest for placing a bomb in the Ministry of Industry and Development in December of ’97.

From inside prison, N. Maziotis has personally taken the responsibility of this action, as a message of solidarity with the residents of Strymonikos’ villages, who were then dynamically fighting against the construction of a gold metallurgy unit by the multinational TVX Gold. The people were realizing demonstrations and assaults against the company’s installations and against the police forces sent to impose order in the area. During that period, the residents of Strymonikos were facing the repressive mechanisms that had declared a “marshal law” in the revolted villages, making arrests, begining several persecutions, forbiding all public gatherings and free transportation between the villages. The same period also, a wave of solidarity and counter-information was developing from anarchists in Athens, while there have also been various attacks against installations and properties of these state’s organizations that handle the specific investment or generally manage the strategy of restructuring and mondernizing of the state and the capital. Nikos Maziotis was the only one that the repressive mechanisms managed to capture from that moment of struggle, so now they are targeting in his face their revengefulness, aspiring his exemplary punishment.

In his face they want to enforce the policy of division among anarchists-revolutionaries and the social struggles exploding, to isolate their discourse and their practices from their natural milieu, which are the social conditions that create and strengthen this discourse and these practices. They want to strike against the specific choice of solidarity between these different struggles, the dynamic that this solidarity carries and the results it produces. They totally want to obstruct the attempt of anarchists to intervene in these struggles and radicalize them, because they want us alone and marginalized, and they want these struggles enervated, assimilated and limitted. Because in a period when the states attack in order to reform and re-share the world, and while their inner structures change, causing consecutive social reactions, it is imprortant for every state to criminalize and disarm the revolutionaries, to take revenge on them in an exemplary manner so as to hinder the dynamic of their action. It is important for them now to strike especially against any action which and brings together the people who fight. To exercise primarily on the revolutionaries new and reinforced forms of repression are prepared to be imposed after to entire social groups.

In that sense, this trial consists for us and also for the state a crucial point of the confrontation. A battle where a lot more than a lasting deprivation of our comrade’s freedom are ventured. A battle that has to do with the struggle in which he participated and in which he continues to consist an inseparable part.

If the state wants with this trial to present the necessity and the choice of resistance as vain and easily confronted, we, on the other hand, have every reason to face this process as a chance to promote this resistance against its plans, to raise the matter of the social conditions which render this resistance the unique and only real life that exists. If THEY want to impose socially such meanings as “legality” and “illegality”, “innocence” and “guilt” -values that belong to the ideological armoury, the morals and the penal code of a criminal system of power- and according to these they think they can measure, characterize and punish a prisoner of the social war, then WE have every reason to oppose against that the right and the values of this war, our war.

We have every reason to cancel in practice the perspective of an unobstructed jurisdiction of them on the life of fighters, just as we refuse their jurisdiction to govern the lives of humans, societies and peoples according to their interests and the “principles” extracted from these interests.

We have every reason to show the quality and the methods of an enemy who is responsible and exposed for slaughters of so many peoples, for the misery and the sufferings of entire populations that don’t fit in or do not submit to its plans, responsible for devastated lands and destroying the nature. An enemy whose “justice” -in the name of protecting “citizens” from “criminals”- is based on surveillance, control, extermination or enervation of whole societies. Within this context repression against the revolutionaries is an exclusive and basic element of this strategy for the submission of the entire planet.

If the state wants to take revenge on our comrade because through his action and by taking the responsibility of it he unvailed that behind such attacks are simple revolted people who experience the same oppression as others, then we have every reason to fight against the isolation of his case.

If they want to punish Nikos Maziotis because, by his history as a person through various experiences from many multiform struggles, he proved that the attack against the structures of an oppressive and exploiting system is possible and can be realized when there is the will to fight, and because this way he destroyed the scenarios of state’s propaganda that present this kind of activity as instigated by secret services (scenarios used in order to create and serve the image of an invulnerable beast which controls everything), then we have every reason to prove that they are neither all-mighty, nor capable to control the dynamic of resistance, to erase the passion for freedom and the power of self-organization.

If they want to create division, indifference and passivity by spreading terror and slander, we should turn against them the weapon of SOLIDARITY. If the mechanisms wish to present themselves as the only subject who writes its bloody history conducting the peoples’ lives, we have every reason to talk about all those struggles burst and still bursting in every place where the dictatorship of the states and the capitalists is imposed, about this eternal fight for freedom that goes on, in different ways and forms in time and space.

To talk about those people who themselves are the struggles... To talk about all those people who -being in different places on earth and under different conditions- have faught and still fight, to talk about all those who are far from each other but yet so close, beyond the borders drawn in the maps and beyond the time devided in “succesfully confronted and neutralized” periods. To talk about the strugglers who live in some capitalistic metropolis or in the Indian mountains, about the prisoners buried in underground jails or in the mondern cells of isolation and in the psychiatric institutions, about all those who are separate but still representing an “invisible” force communicating, where everyone gives a battle alone but also with the others and for the others...

To shout about all those who have paid and those paying now with their lives the price for not accepting dominion as indisputable and invulnerable, for daring, for themselves and for the others, inspiring with their life the struggles that followed and the struggles coming.

To talk and to become the fight that hasn’t been defeated, despite the systematic methods used to suppress it and to neutralize the strugglers.

To shout for all those who are kept hostages by the states, while the regime’s propaganda, when not presenting them as “dangerous criminals”, tries to present as “harmless and weak”, “depoliticized” and “marginalized” in order to disdain the choice of resistance. And say what is really ventured, why they are affraid of them and affraid of us. To talk about the ways that the criminal gangs of the states and the bosses have used in order to imprison the revolted people and about this spirit of revolt that they never managed to imprison...