Greece: bomb attack against Nazi office

An Anarchist organization, the Antifascist Front - Informal Anarchist Federation* has claimed the authorship of an attack against the offices of the infamous Nazi party Golden Dawn at Aspropyrgos, a suburb of Athens.

The armed Anarchist group issued a communication which may be read in its English translation at Contra Info. In it they claim having taken the greatest care possible to prevent human casualties and while they lament the collateral damages to a shop located under the Nazi offices, they suggest that next time they make everything on their hand not be housed with those Nazis and to ask them for damage compensation. 

They justify their action on grounds of zero tolerance against fascism:

We chose to strike the Golden Dawn’s offices because we believe that, when it comes to the fascists, one has to strike first and not wait for them to make the first move. We are not going to sit and wait and do nothing while the serpent is being hatched. We refuse to accept the passivity of public denunciations as well as the role of an eternal victim that cannot find the guts to openly confront the fascists. (...)

To us, it’s not even an issue whether the Golden Dawn is outlawed but that it should be extinct. (...)

(...) It’s time to end passivity and defeatism. We attack the fascists by any means — with beatings, knives, screwdrivers, fire, bombings and bullets.

We are cartographers charting the goldendawners’ moves, we ambush them, we trash them with punches and kicks, we burn their motorcycles, and we ‘withdraw’ them from their pretentious bullying. Better to cast some of them down to the ground now, before they start believing that they can lift their heads for good. It doesn’t take any militaristic specialization; it takes only consciousness, courage and determination… (...)

They also warned the pseudo-democratic establishment:

However, the most dangerous fascism is not the quaint shaven donuts of the Golden Dawn but the kind of fascism which is not visible to everyone; the fascism which is hidden behind the velvet courtesies of the democratic totalitarianism; the statutory fascism of bosses, multinational companies, courts, of the prison, the army, the police, the sterile knowledge of school, the church, of laws, advertisements, control in everyday life, boredom and loneliness that reign in the modern concentration camps of metropolises. As much as they may hide behind a wall of uniforms and firearms, all these tyrants of our lives will always be in the firing line of the Antifascist Front/Informal Anarchist Federation. (...)

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* The Informal Anarchist Federation (FAI), not to be confused with the Italian or Iberian Anarchist Federations, which have the same acronym but are much older and use different means, has been operative in Italy for many years now. Groups affiliated to it have acted in Britain, Russia, Argentina and now Greece as well. Italian military police believes it also has some presence in Spain, Chile and Mexico.

I understand that one of the main ideologues of this line of action is Alfredo Bonanno, with whom I had the strangest and most unexpected debate some 20 years ago in a Libertarian (Anarchist) occupied social center of Greece. I was defending the tactical validity of nonviolence as means of class struggle, regardless of the right to self-defense which we all agreed is fundamental, he of course made a passionate appeal of armed struggle. The debate was so intense that soon the translation was unable to keep up and much of the debate took place in English alone. 

That very day Bill Clinton ordered to bomb Iraq once again. The next day, in post-demonstration riots  an armored van was robbed in Athens. We were touring the region for information and hints on how to apply nonviolent resistance to the War of the Balcans, a most difficult task once the Serbian nationalist snippers began shooting against peaceful demonstrators on ethnic-hatred grounds.

All comes back now in the strangest ways: the difficulties of both nonviolence and also armed struggle. No easy answers but the imperative need to implement social justice once forever and to do it now.