Somewhere between 28 and 29 August 2019, I smashed the windows of the honorary consulate of Greece, situated in Rue Léon Jost, and wrote in marker “STOP LAW AND ORDER IN EXARCHEIA”.
This is a non-violent act.
Its detractors will describe it as violent, as the dominant who like to be the only measure of the degree of violence always do. While “law and order”, transferring free living exiles to detention centres with the complicity of the fascists of Golden Dawn, would be but an operation to restore order, an application of democratically promulgated laws. Violent indeed, because a child that one takes the roof from over their head, that one separates from the faces that made a gigantic smile appear on theirs, from whom one takes away the toys that filled them with wonder, which they will remember all their life, is nothing but violence done to them.
But the monopoly of legitimate violence granted to the State, the accomplices of power could never use that term to refer to what Authority sets up to sacrifice freedom. Because according to these accomplices, violence is either popular and illegitimate, or police and legitimate. Never popular and legitimate at the same time.
This was just a shop window.
I decided to smash this window to show that it does not protect an invulnerable entity. Failing to fight directly against the forces wanting to destroy what is happening in the neighbourhood of Exarcheia, I do it from where I am, where I can reach one end of a tentacle of this Greek government, in order to make it move back by reflex, by fear, by survival instinct. If we want to abolish power, life forms such as those deployed in Exarcheia must be defended by direct action.
Defending Exarcheia, I consider this work a means and an end. An end because they are individuals over there who are hunted, expelled, atomized, who are ordered to obey, to whom they deny any dignity. A means because Exarcheia is one of the examples that allows me to imagine a world without Authority, solidary, open and critical about itself and others. But I needed other imaginaries to get out of the resignation that Authority has wanted to impose on me all my life.
And if this was not enough, then I shall return. Or another will return. Because this was just a warning. And it could be that failure to obtain what I want by a non-violent method this time, I can only then imagine a violent method, in the face of the violence deployed by Authority, manifesting itself there by the Greek government.
A wolf
[Translated by Act for freedom now!]
