In support of the battle of the Greek people and for the immediate release of the imprisoned demonstrators.

No: although dramatic, what’s taking place in Greece is not a catastrophe. It is a chance. Because the power of money has, for the first time, cheerfully surpassed the until-now progressive, meticulous and skillfully organized rhythm of the destruction of the public good and human dignity. And this [has taken place] in a land as well respected for its philosophy of life at the other side of the Anglo-Saxon world as for its tireless resistance to the many oppressions that have tried to bring it to heel. Greece doesn’t dance and will never dance to the goosestep nor submit, whatever the regimes that one imposes on it. It dances by raising its arms so as to fly towards the stars. It writes on the walls what it loves to read elsewhere. It burns a bank when it no longer has the means to cook its traditional grilled meats. Greece is as alive as the ideology that menaces it is dead. And Greece, even when thrashed by blows, always ends up on its feet.

Yes: financial Europe wants to make an example [of Greece]. But in its spiteful striking against the country that seems to it to be the weakest in the Euro Zone, in its unlimited violence, its mask has fallen away. More than ever, today is the moment to give the finger to its true face: that of totalitarianism. Because that’s what’s at issue. And there is only a single response to totalitarianism: struggle, tenacious and without concession, to the point of battle if necessary, because existence itself is at stake. We have a [whole] world, a life, of values to defend. Everywhere in the streets it is our brothers, our sisters, our children, and our parents who are beaten under our very eyes, even from afar. We are hungry, cold or ill when they are. All the blows that are struck injure us as well. Every Greek child who faints in her schoolyard calls us to indignation and revolt. For the Greeks, the hour has come to say “No,” and for all of us [the time has come] to support them.

Because today Greece is at the point of battle against the financial totalitarianism that, all over the world, is destroying the public good, menacing everyday survival, and propagating the despair, fear and cretinization of a war of all against all. Beyond the emotional anger that lets off steam by destroying the symbols of oppression, there develops a lucid anger, that of those resisters who refuse to let themselves be dispossessed of their own lives to the profit of the banking mafias and their logic of crazy money. With the assemblies of direct democracy, civil disobedience, the “We will no longer pay” movement, and the first experiments with self-management, a new Greece is in the process of being born, one that rejects market tyranny in the name of humanity. We do not know how many times it will be necessary for the people to liberate themselves from their voluntary servitude, but it is certain that, faced with the ridicule of political clientism, corrupt democracies and the grotesque cynicism of the bankster State, we only have the choice – opposed to all racketeering [affairism] – to handle our affairs ourselves.

Greece is our past. It is also our future. Let’s reinvent our future along with Greece!

In 2012, we are all Greeks!

(Published by L'altermondialiste and reprinted by Danactu. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! 10 March 2012.)