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France – Solidarity with those accused of burning a police car in Paris

Wednesday 5 August 2015

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Following the hypermediatic attention around a police car set on fire under the eyes of dozens of cameras, five people were arrested in the evening or the next day, accused of an attack that all in all quite often happens, everybody hates the police, and almost every day the police come under attack in various ways over the whole territory, especially in this way!

After the arrests, one person was released, the other four stand accused of ‘attempted intentional homicide’, ‘wilfull violence in an organized gang against a public official’, ‘destruction of public property in an organized gang and belonging to an armed group’. One of them is also accused of the crime of having refused to submit to DNA sample-taking.

The four are currently being held on remand (three were released on bail conditions on 24th May).

While the clamorous charges against them (‘attempted murder’) and the consequent threat (life sentence) will not survive a trial, meantime these are useful to secure pre-trial detention with the blessing of some sadists in togas.

The media of democracy, obeying orders, did their job very well, their zeal equal only to their impeccable servility to extreme normalizing violence in the name of social peace.

Appeasing the police unions, which were demonstrating that day, seems to be the secondary objective of the ministry and the government.

Excitement for the average citizen, revenge for the police, deterrence for the rebels.

It is on the basis of this vile trinity that the State set to work against a few comrades, probably chosen at random from some lousy little file on the pseudo ‘ultra-left’, a category invented by the State which has already led to dozens of trials, imprisonments and spying of all kinds throughout the last decade up until now.

(Still today the infamous ‘deportation machine’ continues and many comrades are under investigation).

The same file was probably used recently to inflict prohibition orders and various kinds of charges with the excuse of the social emergency.

Today we believe it is necessary to rework three important points:

– As revolutionaries, we will be always on the side of those who defy, contaminate, attack order, therefore also its force, in a perspective of emancipation. For revolution will not happen in drawing rooms with power-point, militant folklore and bored philosophers, but in the streets with hatred, fire and hope.

– These comrades could have been any of the thousand demonstrators who descended upon the streets and repainted them with the colours of joy throughout the last months. It could have been us, or you, you or me. So this repression is an attack on all revolutionaries and against all those ‘who hate the police’ and hate work.

– The question of ‘guilt’ or innocence of the arrested comrades belongs only to power, and we leave these considerations, the vocabulary of the penal code, which are not and never will be ours, to those on the other side (be they policemen, judges, lawyers or journalists).

This gesture, irregardless of the perpetrators, is part of a long tradition of revolutionary practice, which we must defend as such. It’s not a question of legitimizing this kind of attack, justifying it or minimizing it, but of attacking all principles of legitimacy, any tendency to find justifications and any form of moderation in the anti-authoritarian attack on dominion and on the agents that protect their reign.

We reaffirm our solidarity with the accused, and above all with the gesture they are accused of, which we repeat is an act of daily life, an act necessary to anyone who desires freedom, and not a ‘terrible ‘ultra-violent’ or ‘exceptional’ event’, – the only exceptional event could be the omnipresent cameras, not just the State or even the journacops, contrary to what happens, for example, in so called ‘sensitive’ neighbourhoods, where everything takes place in silence, regularly, without media coverage or effusions. We repeat yet again that pictures are a problem against which we need to organize concretely. Otherwise the rebels will continue to fall, like apricots in summer.

In a city like Paris, which experienced indiscriminate violence in 2015, five minutes from Quai de Valmy, really terrible and unexpected, really violent, really terrorist, it is indecent to cry for the fate of a police car, whose role is precisely to be slapped in the face by everything that refuses global order as a consequence. Let’s not leave the comrades alone in the mediatic-repressive vortex, which depicts them as bloodthirsty individuals and ferocious cannibals, objects of sterile debates ‘against’ or ‘for’ ‘violence’.

No, in the face of the State and its servants, they are our comrades and we are theirs.

No truth no justice, complicity and revolution.

The best defence is attack.

Freedom for all.

A few anarchists, 24th May, Paris

[Translated by act for freedom now!]