SZG

  From the trial of the antifascists to a murder by the fascists

      The trial of Savvas Michael-Matsas, General Secretary of the EEK, and of Konstantinos Moutzouris, former Rector of the National Technical University of Athens, took place on September 3-4, 2013, after a lawsuit deposed by the Nazi party “Golden Dawn” on May 8, 2009, and promoted in 2013 by the Greek “democratic” State and its judiciary arm, after the entry of the “Golden Dawn” in the Greek parliament in June 2013. The trial had enormous repercussions and produced a huge outrage internationally and nationally.

        As many statements by many organizations, by well known or “unknown” individuals, and personalities of the cultural and political world, including in the mainstream international Press and media, from all parts of the planet had stressed, it was the first time after the end of the second world war, and the defeat of Nazism, that two antifascists, including a Jewish communist intellectual and leader of a Trotskyist Party, in the case of Savvas Michael-Matsas, were brought in court by Nazis, with the complicity of the official State institutions in a country –member of the European Union.

        It was this powerful tsunami of protests and solidarity that created a political dynamics permitting the victory of the “accused” in an initially very difficult trial. Parties of the Greek Left, many trade unions, anarcho-syndicalist and anarchist collectivities, cultural associations, dozens of artists and intellectuals, issued public statements of solidarity and/or sent witnesses of defense for Savvas Michael-Matsas.  About a thousand people gathered in and around the court in the two days trial. Finally, the unanimous ruling of the court was “not guilty” for both accused.

       The three interconnected aims of this outrageous persecution were, as Savvas Michael pointed out in his final “apology” to the court,

·        to illegalize  any antifascist discourse and action in conditions of social polarization and mass upheaval, in a country where the ruling class in  a state of emergency uses the fascist gangs as an instrument to re-impose its control;

·        to begin, starting from the Trotskyist party, the process of illegalization of the entire Left and the dismantlement of  democratic  popular rights in Greece ; 

·         last but not least,  to institutionalize the virulent anti-Semitism that accompanied from the start, the persecution of Savvas Michael-Matsas, an “instrument of the world Jewish conspiracy to impose a Judeo-Bolshevik regime in Greece in crisis”,  according to the Nazi non-stop hate campaign.

       The organizers of this witch hunt failed. For the first time, after its ascent, the Golden dawn lost a trial in Greek courts( which tells a lot about Greek Justice…) An important tactical victory was achieved, hailed by all the workers movement( particularly in general assemblies where strike action in the public sector was decided) and among the popular masses identifying this battle with their own struggles against the escalating social disaster and  barbaric repression by the bourgeois State forces and  fascist paramilitary gangs.

       But, as the EEK stressed in its first statement after the trial, a battle was won but the class warfare continues.  What followed proves the truth of the statement.

         Even minutes after the end of the trial, many youth participating in it in solidarity to the accused were stopped and bullied by the special DELTA police forces (the same DELTA force, which had attacked the EEK in a peaceful demonstration in December 2009 nearly killing comrade Angeliki Koutsoumbou and seriously injuring dozens of comrades) shouting to them “are you coming from the trial of the dirty Jew?”  A similar attitude took the police forces after the massive workers demonstration  in Thessalonica  on September  7, arresting 130 demonstrators including many comrades of the EEK who were insulted by the police as “dogs of the dirty Jew Matsas”… The same insult was used the next day against another comrade arrested in an antifascist demonstration in Larissa. Even more sinister it is the murderous attack, the next day of the trial, on September 5,  by a fascist gang in Pyrgos, Peloponnesus, against the 19 years old young son of a well known trade unionist cadre of the EEK, an attack  that led the young boy to the hospital with serious injuries.

          The fascist criminal activities escalated the last two weeks after the end of the trial: there was another murderous attack by dozens of Nazi storm troopers – a gang financed and supported by Greek ship-owners- in the Perama shipyards area against a group of members, trade unionists and supporters of the KKE (Communist Party of Greece) peacefully campaigning for the Festival of KNE (Communist Youth of Greece). 

        The climax of these activities was the murder, on September 18, of the 34 years old Pavlos Fyssas, a young left wing antifascist activist, musician and metal worker- a cold blood murder organized at the highest level by the Nazi Party and by its protectors in the bourgeois State, and executed by the “Golden Dawn” Nazi Mafia in the working class area of Nikaia, a historic stronghold of the communist movement. The murder produced a huge popular uproar and anger, and sharpened the political crisis of the bourgeois regime and the Samaras government. Nevertheless, and despite the hypocritical crocodile tears of the government and the announcement of “imposition of the rule of law”,  the mass antifascist demonstrations that followed the murder were savagely repressed by the riot police, sending dozens at the hospital seriously injured( one demonstrator lost his sight), and arresting hundreds of demonstrators.

        This on-going confrontation is insoluble tied to the new phase of the class struggle, the eruption of a powerful strike movement of the workers in the entire public sector, in Education, in the Health services, the struggle in three major industries( including the LARKO factory, one of the biggest in the country and in Europe) facing closures under the diktat of the hated troika, with the LARKO workers blocking the motor way Athens-Thessalonica, and brutally attacked by the hordes of the riot police sent by the government.

     The murder of comrade Pavlos Fyssas, the fight with the murderous Nazi gangs, and their protectors, the repressive State apparatus, the sharpening struggle against the social devastation imposed by the troika of the EU/ECB/IMF and the Samaras government deepen the regime crisis, and reveal the bankruptcy of bourgeois parliamentary democracy.

       The EEK fights all over the country to unite the struggles in an indefinite General Political Strike to bring down the government, to kick out the imperialist troika, to smash its catastrophic policies, to build a United Front of the workers and popular organizations, Workers Self Defense groups and workers militias against the Nazis and State repression, to open the road to workers power and a socialist way out from the crisis, for a socialist Greece in a United Socialist States of Europe.

                                                                        Savvas Michael, 24/9/2013