This trial is a political trial in which revolutionaries are judged, who chose armed struggle to fight for the overthrow of capitalism and the State, the overthrow of the criminal regime that you, as judges, defend.

Your court is a special court set up under the orders of the American and British imperialists and custodians of the Greek State. They who enforced the lawmaking of special ‘anti-terrorism’ provisions which adjust more criminal charges and maximize sentences; they who enforced the establishment of special courts that sit inside prisons, within a suffocating security environment, and undermine the trial publicity to prevent the people from finding out on the revolutionaries’ political views; they who enforced the implementation of occasional special conditions of detention; and all these with the aim of imposing stricter repression against the armed resistance and the action of armed revolutionary organizations in Greece.

And that’s because the previous repressive regime—which lacked any special provision regarding the ‘formation of a terrorist organization’, and also still had the mixed jury courts with civilians jurors—was disqualified as insufficient and ineffective. By this way you prove that, although you do not recognize political opponents and political prisoners, you do recognize us indirectly as political enemies and dangerous for the economic and political regime that you serve, by applying in practice specific laws and special provisions against us, by putting us on trial in a special court, as opposed to the treatment of all those that your Power considers as ‘common criminal offenders’.

By this way you prove the timeless fierceness of Power towards its political enemies.

Besides, what authority ever officially acknowledged political opponents and political prisoners?

The guerrillas of the Greek People’s Liberation Army (ELAS) during the Axis occupation of World War II, as well as the Democratic Army of Greece (DSE) during the Greek Civil War were taunted and hunted down as ‘brigands’ (symmorites) by the collaborationist and postwar monarch-fascist regime, and were tried by emergency courts-martial.

Members of armed revolutionary organizations are prosecuted as ‘terrorists’ and tried by special courts, like yours. The label of ‘terrorist’ is applied to revolutionary fighters by every authority, whether in the form of military regimes and dictatorships, like the one during 1967–74, or the postwar constitutional oligarchy that by euphemism was named ‘democracy’, or the current junta of betrayers and quislings of the PASOK government that submitted the people to the Power of the international economic oligarchy by signing the treaty of the Memorandum.

All freedom fighters and armed combatants across the world were prosecuted under charges of ‘terrorism’: members of the Red Brigades in Italy, members of RAF, the Movement 2nd June and the Revolutionary Cells in West Germany, members of the Communist Combatant Cells in Belgium, members of Action Directe and GARI in France, the 1st May, as well as anarchists, autonomous fighters and members of MIL in the Francoist Spain and members of GRAPO in the post-Franco regime, Tupamaros fighters in Uruguay, Che Guevara, members of FARC in Colombia, Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) in El Salvador, Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) and Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) in Peru, fighters of revolutionary organizations in Turkey, members of PKK, IRA and ETA, and of course here, in Greece, the fighters of the 17 November (17N) and the Revolutionary People’s Struggle (ELA).

As for the charges: those who should sit in the dock today to apologize are the ones who have committed crimes against the people, the ones who have committed the biggest social robbery in history, namely the members of the PASOK government, the prime minister Giorgos Papandreou, the finance minister Evangelos Venizelos and the former finance minister Giorgos Papakonstantinou, the ministers Loverdos, Koutroumanis, Pangalos, Chrysochoidis, Papoutsis, Diamantopoulou, all of the ministers and their deputies, as well as the members of the political parties who enact laws for plundering the population, those who deprive people of primary needs, food, housing, work, health care, education, dignity, those who deprive people of their very own lives, those who signed the Memorandum of subservience to the IMF/ECB/EU Troika, those who signed the Medium-Term Program and approved the latest bailout loan contract, humiliating and turning the people into a serf of the supranational and domestic economic aristocracy.

All these individuals are the traitors of the people nowadays, just like Georgios Tsolakoglou (a military officer who became the first prime minister in the Greek collaborationist government during the Axis occupation) and Ioannis Rallis (the third prime minister of that Nazi-controlled government). Those who should also sit in the dock today to apologize are the members of the previous government of New Democracy (Nea Dimokratia), the former prime minister Kostas Karamanlis, the former finance ministers Giorgos Alogoskoufis, Petros Doukas, Giannis Papathanasiou, the ministers P.Panagiotopoulos, G.Voulgarakis, V.Polydoras, S.Tsitouridis, F.Palli-Petralia.

All these individuals must apologize for robbery at the expense of the people; for robbery at the expense of public social insurance funds, as has happened in the case of the so-called structured notes (a structured government bond issued in 2007) that certain social insurance funds bought and made big loses on; for robbery at the expense of public assets, as in the case of public sector land swap deal with the Greek Orthodox monastery of Vatopedi; for crimes against the people’s liberties, as in the case of wiretaps against hundreds of citizens during 2004–5 that were ordered by the US Embassy in Athens aiming at the security for the 2004 Olympic Games (the wiretapping was continued for at least a year after the event), a case that resulted in the death (now discussed as murder) of an employee of the Vodafone telecommunications company; for the abductions and the battering of Pakistanis in 2005 that were ordered by the British authorities; for the tortures against immigrants, such as those in the police department of Aghios Panteleimonas in Athens in 2005; for the deprivation of social security and medico-pharmaceutical care for thousands of workers after the insurance reform bill which was introduced by the employment minister Palli-Petralia in 2008; for physical assaults against protesters, as in the case of the student demonstrations in 2007; for the beatings and assassinations of immigrants at the Aliens Police Directorate in Petrou Ralli Street; for the murder of Alexis Grigoropoulos.

Those who should sit in the dock to apologize are the members of the ruling class, the principal criminals of the international and domestic financial elite, big businessmen and major shareholders, executives of multinational and multidisciplinary corporate groups, hedge funders and stock market gamblers, bankers and managers of central banks, shipping tycoons and industrialists, such as Vardinoyannis family members, Latsis family members, Kostopoulos, Lavrentiadis, Mytilineos, Bobolas, Vgenopoulos, Greek and foreign bondholders of the Greek debt, directors of international monetary financial institutions, such as the IMF former managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn and the current managing director Christine Lagarde, the ECB president Jean-Claude Trichet, the European Commission president J.M.Barroso and the vice-president Olli Rehn—all of them are the real bosses of this country—, all those that condemn populations to wretchedness, poverty, hunger and death, and when they don’t kill with imperialist invasions and wars, they kill through the violent imposition of programs of international monetary financial institutions like the IMF and the World Bank.

Those who should sit in the dock to apologize are you, the professional judges, because you are accomplices and servants of all those bastards and criminals; and the same goes for the regime’s protectors, the armed dogs of Power, the contemporary Chites (WWII military forces of Grivas’ Organization X) and Tagmatasfalites (WWII security battalions of collaborationists), the police and various security units, such as YAT, YMET, DELTA, DIAS, special guards, those who guard and protect the rich and the bosses and politicians, those who assault the people during demonstrations and strikes, those who kill youths, immigrants and fighters, those who torture detainees in police stations.

You are all members of a structured and extremely well-organized criminal and terrorist organization that is called the State, whose mission is to defend the interests of the rich.

Your mission is to defend the criminal regime that is called capitalism. All those that you serve should be held accountable for robbery and looting against the people, at the expense of the population’s income, at the expense of wages, pensions, public assets and public social insurance funds.

It is those you serve that should be held accountable to all who have nothing to eat and look for food in garbage bins, to all who are dying, or their life and health are exposed to danger because of deficiencies in hospitals and the healthcare system’s deterioration; to all who lose their life in so-called ‘occupational’ accidents, all who lose their jobs and are condemned to poverty and misery, all who lose their homes and find themselves on the streets, all who commit suicide because of debts, while those criminals live profusely.

You will judge us on behalf of all of those scumbags and criminals that the people would like to see hanged at Syntagma Square. This trial is a crime. Because our prosecution and imprisonment is a criminal and antisocial act.

Because you, as judges and prosecutors, are abettors to a criminal regime that terrorizes the people and the social majority every day.

Because we are needed by our actions for the people’s liberation from the totalitarianism of capitalism and the State.

Because the people not only have not been terrorized by the activity of Revolutionary Struggle (Epanastatikos Agonas), but there are many who endorsed the organization’s actions, as these aimed against the economic and political Power, against the regime which oppresses and exploits them on a daily basis.

Because terrorism is nothing less than the robbery and the looting committed by the State, the government and the financial elite at the expense of the people. Terrorism is the people’s condemnation to poverty and deprivation. Terrorism is the violence of police praetorians against protesting people.

As revolutionaries, members of Revolutionary Struggle, we have no reason to apologize for anything. It is you and the regime’s members whom you defend that have reasons to apologize.

On the contrary, we have reasons to be proud of our participation in Revolutionary Struggle. We are proud because it is always right to take to the arms against injustice, exploitation and oppression.

Armed struggle for the overthrow of capitalism and the State is more timely and needed than ever.

We are here to proclaim that only Social Revolution, which will overthrow your criminal regime, will serve justice.

Nikos Maziotis

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