MAOIST ASSAULT ON ATHENS ANARCHISTS EXPOSED A HIERARCHICAL POLITICAL CULTURE SHAPED BY PATRIARCHAL COMMAND HABITS ~ Blade Runner ~ Thousands took the streets across Greece on 17 November, in memory of those killed during the Polytechnic uprising of 1973, when students were gunned down as they rose against the colonial dictatorship. In Athens, more than 6,000 riot police were deployed for the demonstration and rally outside the US Embassy, with armoured vehicles cordoning off the march’s route in an attempt to deter mass participation. Forty-three people were arrested in police operations prior to the demonstration. Earlier, on the morning of 15 November, around 150 members of the Maoist group ARAS descended on the Polytechnic campus in Exarcheia during preparations for the annual commemorations of the 1973 revolt. They surrounded a small group of anarchist and anti-authoritarian students, launched a coordinated and sustained assault, and left more than a dozen hospitalised with concussions, broken bones, and severe head injuries—including people beaten while unconscious. The attackers operated behind a tight cordon, the campus gates were locked, and hundreds of other left organisations present were unable to intervene. The event was publicly condemned by the majority of the leftist and anarchist organisations in Greece. Far from being just another intra-left skirmish, the attack was a strategic attempt to stake out territory. Whoever holds the physical space of the Polytechnic does not just manage a campus; they lay claim to the meaning of its history, and with it to the future horizon of social struggle. ARAS has spent years imposing its dominance inside sections of the university student movement, reproducing an authoritarian posture analogous to the Greek Communist Party’s (KKE) hegemonic stance in the wider social-political field: the insistence on organisational control, the policing of dissent, and the decades-old line—embraced by both KKE and liberals—that rioters are ‘unity wreckers’ or undercover police agents. The assault belongs to a longer cycle of disillusionment, repression, and political decay. A generation came of age after the 2008 youth revolt—a moment that terrified the political class—only to watch the long disillusionment of the SYRIZA years unfold: hope evaporating, movement energy betrayed, and ‘left government’ shrinking into technocratic management. What followed was the right’s triumphant return, armed with a violently enforced TINA (‘there is no alternative’) and a counter-insurgency posture aimed squarely at the movements that shook the country in 2008 and during the memorandum years. In recent years, police authorities have increasingly attacked political squats—including inside university campuses with the cooperation of academic administrations. In this climate, authoritarian and patriarchal patterns have reasserted themselves not only from above but also inside the political field, with remnants of the left acting as buffers and internal counter-insurgency, absorbing anger and blocking the emergence of genuinely autonomous social alternatives. ARAS’s attack was a re-enactment of this broader tendency: the internalisation of state logic by a leftist formation desperate for recognition and power. The attempt to secure relevance and organisational survival in a landscape reshaped by the slow asphyxiation of the movements culminated in a grotesque rupture with the spirit of the Polytechnic—an authoritarian spectacle that mimicked the very forces the anniversary is meant to defy. Movements have a lot to fear when actors legitimise these formations in the name of ‘unity’ and thereby help them secure moral cover. Moreover, the attack’s brutality revealed more than a sectarian and authoritarian ambush; it exposed a hierarchical political culture shaped by patriarchal command habits—festering across parts of the Greek left (and the political spectrum more broadly)—and now emboldened under a government that fetishises discipline, punishment, and obedience. For decades, the Polytechnic has been held open by those who reject these narratives of order and inevitability. Very few of the political currents present have ever been ‘non-violent’ in the moralistic sense pushed by governments and liberals. They have defended occupations, confronted police, blocked mines, and built care infrastructures under fire. Their militancy is collective and grounded in mutual protection. ARAS’s violence was the opposite: authoritarian domination masquerading as discipline, a patriarchally inflected theatre of control posing as social struggle. This distinction is essential. Political formations that reproduce hierarchical and patriarchal command structures do not simply echo the state’s violence—they legitimise it. When a male-led sect storms the Polytechnic like a private riot squad, it functions as an unofficial extension of the repression the government has been escalating for years by suffocating movement spaces and expanding police powers under the banner of inevitability. In this context, ARAS’s attack reads less like sectarian madness and more like a grotesque amateur version of the state’s own narrative: ‘order must be restored; alternatives must be crushed.’ A violent echo of the TINA they claim to oppose. If movements want to survive this authoritarian phase—the criminalisation of dissent, the ‘good protester/bad protester’ theatre, the policing of youth politics—they must confront what enabled this attack. Not through vendetta or purges, which only recycle the same authoritarian circuitry, but by refusing to tolerate inside our own spaces the hierarchies, masculinities, and command habits that make such violence possible. Transformative justice is not a soft alternative to militancy; it is the only way militancy stays rooted in liberation rather than sliding into the logic of domination. The Polytechnic revolt remains powerful because it rejected hierarchy, patriarchal command, and the logic of inevitability. It was messy, plural, and contradictory—and therefore genuinely insurgent. What happened this year was a desecration of that memory by people faithfully reproducing the logic of the state more than its police. Our task now is not only to defend our spaces from external repression, but to defend our political cultures from internal rot. No movement that fails to uproot authoritarianism—whether carried by the state or by its imitators—can build the world it says it is fighting for. The post A left that carries the state inside it appeared first on Freedom News.

WIDE COALITION OF TEACHERS’ AND PARENTS’ GROUPS ORGANISED PROTEST OVER SCHOOL CONDITIONS ~ Kit Dimou ~ Six children required medical care at a nearby clinic and one 7-year-old boy ended up in hospital after police tear-gassed and attacked a protest at a primary school in Exarcheia, Athens last Thursday (23 October). MAT and OPKE riot police set on a demonstration of around 100 parents, teachers, union members and schoolchildren from the 36th Primary School with beatings, tear gas and flash bangs. The protest, outside of the regional Directorate of Primary Education, opposed plans to merge school classes and highlighted lack of care for children with disabilities.  The protest was called groups including the Parents Federation, all the teachers’ associations from this part of the city, as well as the parents’ associations of 15 separate schools. Nevertheless, the police and right-wing press blame the incidents exclusively on the presence of parents who are members of the two local collectives “NO metro in Exarcheia Square” and “Open Assembly for the Defence of Strefi Hill”, accusing them of trying to break police lines and force their way into the building. While anarchist parents and children may have been present, other workers and parents in the protest were anything but anti-authoritarian. As stated by the Strefi hill assembly, parents and collective members are not “horrible aliens from Andromeda” but “parents who fight for their children as they have learnt to fight for their neighbourhood, Hill, park and square“. This is not the first time the schoolchildren at 36th Primary face violence and tear gas. In April, following the eviction of the “Exostrefis” squat on its first birthday, a number of cultural and educational activities took place around Strefi hill, with the support of the School’s parents’ assocation. The climbing and tightrope walking activities were interrupted violently by riot police.  So far, the parents’ attempts to bring this up in the supposedly “progressive” Athens City Council have fallen on deaf ears. The post Athens: Police tear-gas schoolchildren, blame anarchist parents appeared first on Freedom News.

THE SERIES OF RAIDS, WHICH TOOK PLACE OVER THE COURSE OF A SINGLE WEEK, HAVE BEEN LABELLED A DESPERATE RESPONSE AS STATE FORCES STRUGGLE TO CONTAIN PUBLIC ANGER OVER PERCIEVED CORRUPTION AND INCOMPETENCE. ~Kit Dimou~ On the morning of April 22nd, the historic Evangelismos squat in Heraklion, Crete, was evicted once again having been reoccupied on 1 December 2023. The brief announcement of the squat stated: “AS IT HAPPENED THEN, SO IT HAPPENS NOW, NOTHING WITHOUT A FIGHT. NOT ONE STEP BACK”. Six people who were inside the building have been held on charges of breaching the peace and possession of weapons (flags and makeshift shields), while the police refused them communication with their lawyers. Evangelismos was an abandoned hospital when leftists and anarchists first took the initiative to open it for the community in Heraklion in 2002. Since then, it has been at the forefront of anti-authoritarian struggle in Crete, particularly in recent solidarity actions with the Palestinian people.  On the same morning, April 22nd, police in Thessaloniki evicted a space at the Physics School of Aristotle University which had been squatted by students for a year, the ‘Steki Fysikou’. Upon the completion of the operation, university management provocatively announced that this space was “liberated from a group of anti-authoritarians and delivered to the university community for the use of the sensitive group of people with special needs”. Local comrades have denounced the hypocrisy and disableist language of this statement, especially given the general inaccessibility of the Aristotle University: “in the university, education, liberated spaces and accessibility only come through struggle”. Finally, on the morning of April 15th, cops raided and evicted the newly-founded ‘Rasprava’ squat in the centre of Exarcheia. Despite the hopes of the state, there were zero comrades inside, while the only ‘evidence’ found was some rubble and anarchist graffiti. ‘Rasprava’ was an abandoned orphanage, squatted by anarchists on March 28th following a public event about revolutionary memory where imprisoned anarchist Marianna M. spoke via the phone. The ‘Rasprava’ squat explicitly intended to promote a culture of revolutionary and insurrectionary direct action in Exarcheia: ‘to turn words into action, to move from defense to attack’ in the struggle to protect the collective memory of the neighbourhood from touristification and integration.  The squatters argued that the eviction was a desperate response of the State to the recent bombing attack on Hellenic Train, as well as clashes with the police at a Palestine solidarity concert in Exarcheia on Saturday 12 April. The collective noted:  “The governing circus […] incorrectly believes that the ideas and practices that Rasprava represents are limited to the walls of a building, and that with its eviction, they will disappear as if by magic. A tear runs down one cheek, but one of laughter. The revolutionary culture we promote and want to return to its predominance in the anarchist space, direct action, will haunt your dreams, as well as your subordinated reality.“ The post Three squat evictions in a week as Greek state ramps up attack on anarchist movement appeared first on Freedom News.

“STEEPED IN HISTORY AND STRUGGLES, THIS NEIGHBOURHOOD BELONGS TO ITS INHABITANTS AND OCCUPANTS”, SAY FOUNDERS EVA AND NICOLAS ~ Patrick Schindler, Le Monde Libertaire ~ Opening a new activist space in Exarcheia has a significant dimension. This historic district of resistance to the dictatorship, and today to gentrification, is particularly threatened by the Greek government and developers. Squats evicted and migrants controlled, permanent presence of police forces and muscular surveillance. It is against the current of the urban transformations underway in the centre of Athens that Eva and Nicolas decided to launch a new solidarity and activist initiative in this district, and have just opened a café-library, a meeting place open to people that the government wants to chase away from there: La Zone, at rue Soultani 17 in Athens. But let’s start with my meeting with Nicholas, thanks to two activists from the Nevers Anarchist Federation who came to Greece with a solidarity convoy. Drawing a portrait of Nicolas Richen is quite simple because it is made easier by the foreword of his book The Buds of Hope of a Terrible Greek Winter. He explains to us how when he was a student in Quebec, the Maple Spring in 2012 (the largest student movement in Quebec history) made him aware of “our collective strength”, the basis of his political commitment. This ultimately led him to Greece in 2016 “to learn, observe and participate in self-managed collectives”. It was in Ioannina (Epirus) that he met his accomplice, the photographer Antonia Gouma, and they decided to take portraits of some “victims of the austerity measures decreed in the early 2010s by European banks and the Troika “. A sulphurous context, aggravated by the rise of xenophobia, fascism and the extreme right in reaction to the influx of refugees in Greece. A series of photos, “The cry of the street“, introduces this series of live testimonies. One is one dedicated to Anastasia, a 56-year-old divorced woman, a former art teacher “with a broken life”. Then come those of young people who are part of the “exodus generation”, 4% of Greeks, many of whom emigrated between 2008 and 2016. So why did many of them—often students doing low-paid jobs to survive—decide to stay, to continue fighting and not to lose hope? This is what Sofia, the convinced, frank and passionate anarchist, or Fotini, a shy and anxious young girl, in solidarity with the refugees, will explain to us. Or Zografia, curious about the world but, unlike the others, still trusting the electoral process and the parties’ demonstrations. Between two series of photos, Nicolas tells us about his participation in the march of November 17, 2016, in memory of the student uprising against the dictatorship in 1973. An edifying insight into the presence and repression of the police in Athens. Then come the testimonies of Nikos, Manos, son of a worker, Ilirida, originally from Albania, or Rania, who joined after the police murder of 15-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos in 2008. All trying to finish their studies, forced into small makeshift jobs and often living with their family. But with what prospects for them? Escape the deadly circle of capitalism, reclaim language, build a new collective imagination? From the struggle can be born many popular initiatives, free without conditions and self-managed: from social kitchens to residential squats to health clinics. Finally, Nicolas takes stock of these testimonies “as so many echoes of a hope beyond generations and borders “. We can also discover a more intimate Nicolas Richen in Des nuits et des étoiles, feu et vagabondage dans la ville , his collection of poems dating from 2022, dedicated to all alley cats with the stated objective of “sharing certain fragments of emotions and aspirations”. The political commitment of Eva Betavatzi, the second person behind the La Zone space, dates back to 2015, when she joined the Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debts in Brussels, and then worked there from 2018 to 2021. The ‘Greek crisis’ was already well established. Her meeting with Mamadou Bah, a Guinean activist who had been attacked by Golden Dawn and had taken refuge in Belgium, was decisive and forged Eva’s conviction that the fight against illegitimate debt was an integral part of the anti-colonial and anti-fascist struggle. At that time, the last Nazi leader of Golden Dawn, a member of the European Parliament, also moved freely in Brussels with complete impunity. Eva then campaigned in Belgium in anti-eviction groups and for the cancellation of rents during the first lockdown and then for the reduction of rents in Brussels. These experiences led her to Athens in 2021, but above all made her think a lot about her first job as an architect. Today, she practices it voluntarily in the service of causes other than commercial ones, such as renovating in 2022, with Nicolas and other comrades, the ground floor of one of the oldest Athenian squats. Is opening a new place of exchange in Exarcheia, in the form of a café-library, an act of resistance to gentrification for you? Yes, but we would first like to point out that the Athenian anarchist movement is seriously lacking space. One could say that it is “too cramped” within the city walls. In addition, in recent years we have witnessed a deprivation of spaces since the election of Mitsotakis and the strengthening of gentrification. Many squats have been evicted since 2018-2019 and quite a few activist groups are struggling to find new buildings and even to rent premises with the skyrocketing prices of rent and electricity. From a more sociological perspective, the struggle and survival of squats in Athens necessarily raises the question of the multiplication of meeting spaces and conviviality, not only in Exarcheia, but everywhere in the city, in order to effectively combat the spread of all-out commercialisation. Opening such a place from scratch must represent a huge financial challenge, not to mention the paperwork? Yes, for La Zone , it is a bit of a “Do it yourself” challenge, because we initially only had a very small investment budget. But in DIY , we must include the real solidarity movement that was spontaneously established from the start of the work. Thanks to the support of many comrades and friends, we acquired skills in painting, carpentry, plumbing, electricity, etc. We were able to count on the help of the resourceful people used to squats, on our friendly relations, on getting by, on spontaneous support, especially from other cafés in the neighbourhood. For transporting materials and recycling: our arms, supermarket trolleys and a car from Brussels! We also had to learn how to use a coffee machine, do accounting and orders… other things that may seem like trinkets, but are nevertheless crucial. For the administrative side, yes, we can talk about a Kafkaesque journey, particularly in Greece. Getting directions to the right procedure, the right office, and especially the right tips so as not to get lost indefinitely in the bureaucratic labyrinth, etc. Small and big hassles requiring a lot of energy. What does your stock include today in terms of books and magazines? For the moment, we have benefited from many donations, particularly from the anarchist and radical left in countries such as Belgium, France, Serbia, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, etc. But also spontaneous deposits from individuals, publications from local collectives, the press, literature, posters and even recipe books! Why did you choose the name La Zone ? The story began when we were looking for premises in the Kypseli district further west of the city where there is a street called “Sainte Zone”, hence the play on words. But for us, La Zone is also a snub to the spaces for the bourgeoisie. But we can also see it as “joyous mess” or even a reference to Zone à Défendre (ZAD) or a Zone without borders! We chose a French word because we wanted to be a place of primarily Greek and French-speaking expression (and at most multilingual in the longer term). Finally, La Zone fits well with the idea of DIY and the warm aspect of a lounge to hang out without having to consume. How did the inauguration go on September 7? There was a lot of joy and it was to our great surprise that we managed to bring together around 80 participants. It was, it must be said, a great sport. We had to improvise as bar tenders and animators. People had brought their favourite poems to read. It was very positive, we received gifts, people we didn’t know bought books, lots of exchanges and common desires, projects for rebetiko evenings or film screenings, poetry evenings or writing workshops, translation and collective learning… Athens is a very large city, for you, is the atomisation of the places of struggle a handicap or on the contrary an opportunity? And what do you think of the Greek anarchist movement? The atomisation of the anarchist movement can be seen in a positive way as an escape from centralisation. Given what happened in Exarcheia in recent years, it is not necessarily a bad thing. When you think that today some “tour operators” allow themselves to visit the neighbourhood as if it were an “alternative” zoo, not to mention the voyeurism of misery! But as for the Athenian movement, not all anarchist groups have the same conception of anarchy, far from it. Here we see criticism from both sides of various groups. Some have a pyramidal organisation, for others it is less the case. There is also a problem here with the machismo still very anchored in our circles. The same goes for racism. This is the feeling shared with many queer or non-queer comrades and those fighting with refugees. But what should be noted is the real solidarity during the strong mobilisations, as was the case in 2022 when thousands of people, comrades, assemblies and anarchist, autonomous and even left-wing groups took to the streets of the centre against the metro construction site on the only square in the Exarcheia neighbourhood and against the permanent presence of the cops. This is the most recent period of massive mobilisations for the defence of the neighbourhood. The barricades were set up at least one evening a week and nights of clashes took place. Today, the anarchists gather a little less massively, the movement has lost space but also energy, and the repression is stronger than before, in particular because of the recent revision of the penal code which authorises the cops to do almost anything. Athens remains a place where there is a lot of resistance from below: something happens every day. But let’s never idealise radical spheres, neither in Greece nor in France for that matter. One last question, what are your dreams, your hopes? Eva: it would be that the people from the last squats in the neighbourhood mix with other groups and activists, because since gentrification, Exarcheia is no longer very welcoming for migrants, especially with the constant police presence. For this, the multiplication of meeting places and also self-managed living spaces is more than necessary. Nicolas: I don’t like the term hope anymore, because it often locks us into a wait-and-see attitude. I would be happy if our new space contributed to creating new relationships of solidarity and anti-authoritarianism to build immediate actions, relationships of mutual care, beyond all forms of borders. Living in such a metropolis and in an often dystopian reality, it is this everyday neighborhood solidarity and internationalist relationships that allow us not to go “crazy”. Whether in Athens or elsewhere in the world, queer, feminist, decolonial, anti-racist/anti-fascist and ecological struggles are intertwined. This is what gives collective strength and a subversive joy to move forward. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Photos: Nicolas Richen. Machine translation edited by Uri Gordon. The post Athens: La Zone, a new libertarian space in Exarcheia appeared first on Freedom News.