A-Infos (en) Greece, Indignation turned into revolt - By Yannis Youlountas (ca, it) [machine translation]

Every day, all over the world, voices rise and barricades rise. Although our pockets of 
utopias are under attack and the Earth is dying, people are going out, some for the first 
time in many countries simultaneously ... ---- THE WHOLE WORLD IS A PRISON, LET US FREE! 
---- What the hell is going on? Alerts arrive in all directions, alarms are triggered 
every day from one continent to another, images circulate at full speed in confusion, 
causing an unprecedented chaos sensation, mixing fear and hope, horror and emotion. ---- 
The summer of 2019 had begun in despair while the new Greek government was preparing to 
"clean up Exarcheia in a month," the rebel and supportive neighborhood of Athens, while 
enclosing even more refugees in the squalid fields built by the European Union. Meanwhile, 
a few hundred kilometers further east, the American president extended the red carpet for 
the Turkish dictator to settle his debt with the feminist, ecological and 
anti-authoritarian enclave of Rojava, a true island of utopias in the Middle East. In 
France, another ZAD was devastated under the attack of a police army, this time in 
Aveyron. From one end of the planet to the other, gigantic forests burned in turn, from 
Siberia to Alaska and the crucial Amazon, the essential lung for our survival. Other 
symbols among these millions of decimated trees, 200,000 olive trees loaded with history 
were beginning to be demolished by excavators in the high Minoan plain of Kastelli, Crete, 
to make way for a completely useless new airport. It's all bad news!

The countdown was underway, both for our pockets of utopias and for the Earth itself. A 
steamroller seemed about to crush us. Any resistance seemed illusory at the time, since it 
could only provide a brief stay and, at best, a good example of dignity and perseverance. 
Everywhere meetings multiply, messages of support circulate and protests try to be heard, 
but they are of no use.

Then, surprisingly, the outrage turned into revolt and spread like wildfire.

A wind of revolt

With huge differences in both the causes and the media, millions of fists began to rise 
from one end of the world to the other. Whatever the alleged trigger here and there: the 
increase in the price of metro tickets in Chile or taxes on cigarettes and 
telecommunications in Lebanon, the judicial prosecution of the Spanish State in Catalonia 
or the Chinese State in Hong Kong, the precariousness in Indonesia and Colombia, 
corruption in Peru, Bolivia, Iraq, Algeria, Uruguay, Egypt, Guinea and Haiti, in recent 
weeks, the uprising against the government has not ceased to extend to the point that they 
have now registered riots on all continents. From Guinea to Chile and from Algeria to 
Ecuador, the revolt broke out in different ways, with the shared feeling of not being 
alone on the rise.

What we are also seeing everywhere, as in France in recent months, is that power is 
constantly hardening and is determined to commit all the atrocities to maintain its 
pedestal. It represses more and more violently, eviscerating, killing, torturing, raping, 
imprisoning hundreds of people without evidence, with some differences depending on the 
country and the intensity of the fighting.

The spirit of the times

What does this particularly dense period tell us or confirm?

First, that capitalism will go ahead if we fail to stop it in time. It will destroy Earth, 
life and humanity in their insatiable search for profit, that is, in their senseless logic 
of accumulation: a source of inequality, misery, deprivation of freedom, suffering and 
destruction. The massive disappearance of forests in 2019 is enough to diagnose the deadly 
scourge that is eating us away: capitalism is a pandemic, a lethal virus that monopolizes, 
transforms and destroys everything that exists on the face of the earth.

A second important thing that this historical sequence clearly shows us is that the power 
will not yield - if not a few crumbs that it will recover later - if we do not eliminate 
it once and for all. All power rests primarily on a carefully crafted symbolic 
representation and the ancestral conditioning of voluntary servitude. Therefore, this 
misery must be achieved both in our mind - in the social imagination - and in the way we 
organize ourselves, without ever allowing anyone else to govern us, except ourselves. 
Taking control of our lives is the key to success.

The third news that must be taken into account in these difficult times is that more and 
more of us want to cross this step, this bridge, this Rubicon to move decisively to 
something else.

The street lesson

Certainly, many protesters, troublemakers and insurgents may not be so ambitious at first 
sight. Probably But, as with yellow vests in France and many other popular movements 
around the world, it often happens that the initial demand is quickly exceeded (price of 
gasoline, subway, bread in the past, telephone, or even mixed residence at university, 
etc.) and that newcomers to the streets become politicized and explore the causes of their 
problems. Occupying the street and other places allows to find, exchange and open the real 
debate, that is, the horizontal discussion, from equal to equal, at the opposite end of 
the spectrum of the debate proposed by the media of power with room thinkers who Sometimes 
they pretend to be fighting when they essentially agree. Further, The violence of the 
government and its officials against protesters sometimes leads newcomers, shocked and 
even injured, to better understand the true nature of power and the servile complicity of 
those who receive a pay to protect it. It is facing the State on the street that we better 
understand its main vocation: to maintain and perpetuate the social order at the service 
of the ruling class, under the deceptive appearance of a society for all and for all.

From one end of the world to the other, from the banks of the Seine to those of the 
Euphrates and the Andes Mountains to the hills of the Attica, newcomers to us, sooner or 
later, understand that the challenge is not to get crumbs or a little consideration, but 
to put an end to exploitation and domination.

There is only one possible way out

Time is accelerating. The countdown indicates the threat of misery, the depletion of 
resources, the extinction of species, the expansion of war, the annihilation of our bags 
of utopias, stealthy fascism, omniscient totalitarianism and the destruction of the Earth.

We only have one possible way out: free ourselves. Around us, the whole world is a prison. 
Not the world as the planet we live in, but as a model of society that has spread 
throughout the planet. A society based on hierarchical organization, competition and 
accumulation at the expense of others. A completely outdated society, or rather, a society 
that must be overcome.

We have much to gain by choosing the query instead of domination, consensus instead of 
arbitrary decisions of past leaders, horizontality rather than verticality. And the first 
of these achievements will be collective intelligence. In the same way, we have everything 
to gain by choosing cooperation over competition, mutual help over exploitation, love of 
life over the morbid impulse to believe that we are superior to others. First, we will 
gain harmony, that is, a peaceful and shared happiness. We have much to gain by sawing 
together, as many as possible, motivated and tirelessly, the bars of the old world prison 
that is dying: suffocated, devastated and mutilated by this society. We have a lot to gain 
if we free ourselves and change the era.

What we are capable of

In this way, there is no reason for hope or despair. Hope and despair are two sides of the 
same coin. In both cases, it means conditioning our actions to prospects of results, 
borrowing them based on vain speculations about the future, instead of resolutely choosing 
our actions based on our ethical and political beliefs. Remember that hope means "wait" in 
many languages: wait for the moment, wait for the providential man, wait for everything to 
change ... To despair is to forget too quickly what we are capable of, each and every one 
of us together: the famous creativity of humanity that has already achieved so many 
magnificent things in the arts and techniques, the genius of life, the beauty of the world 
outside of This society that is necrotic.

It remains, then, to leave the prehistoric political history of mankind. End the hierarchy 
and the endless forward race. End voluntary servitude and the desire for comfort. End 
authoritarian society and capitalism. We are capable of this: history has proved it, even 
if those who pretend to govern us are determined to make all our past and present attempts 
disappear. We know that we are capable of it and, above all, that we have no other choice: 
it will be freedom or death.

https://grupoanarquistahc.wordpress.com/2019/10/24/la-indignacion-se-convirtio-en-revuelta/
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