As a frequent rioter in Athens I try to resist writing these sorts of english-language "reportbacks" — what's the point? Seems like an existential ego trip, a dog pissing on a fire hydrant: 'I was HERE! I EXIST!'
In this case, I feel there hasn't been much english-language anarchist coverage of the popular response to the Feb 28 2023 train collision in Greece. Now, almost two weeks in, the ongoing general uprising has been extraordinary. Some who lived through (and took part in) the insurrections here a decade or so ago have said the scope and feeling of this uprising is similar… and those insurrections back then nearly toppled the state.
There have been many days and nights of demos, riots, occupations and strikes across Greece since the train collision; what follows is the first installment of my personal experience. I am not a journalist, not a reporter or pundit– merely a partisan who writes.
I do have mixed feelings about the large, prevailingly personally inert online audience that consumes decontextualized snippets of anti-state violence originating in Greece. I shit on and condemn all "specialists," "researchers" or "experts" striving to build online brands; those that aren't literally CIA might as well be. On the other hand, I love and extend solidarity to anarchist fighters elsewhere who just want to know what fighters here are up to. I also send special love and encouragement to the (often younger) isolated individuals in places without militant movements, those beautiful wild suffering souls to whom these glimpses show it is indeed possible to lead a happy, satisfying life centered on war against the status quo.
Such are the ribbons with which I adorn this little diary: solidarity to the fighters, wishes of fire and violence to the parastatal vultures & foreign 'adventure journalists,' and boundless compassion for those budding extremists who feel like lone maniacs stranded in a complacent cornfield. I believe in you, as I believe in myself.
THE DAY OF THE DERAILMENT — WEDNESDAY 1 MARCH
On Feb 28, just before midnight, a northbound passenger train largely full of students returning from Greek carnival collided head-on with a southbound cargo freight train traveling on the same track. This disaster occurred in a relatively remote location, by the Tempe valley, and it took time for the seriousness of the accident to filter out. The remains of 57 people have been identified, but there are as many still "missing." Missing! They were on the train and now they're missing? This means, to me, that the death toll is over 100. Even at 57 dead, it's easily the worst train disaster in Greece's history. The insides of the derailed passenger cars burned at 1300 degrees celsius (~2400 degrees fahrenheit), the temperature used to melt glass in a kiln. Since the government and train company don't know how exactly how many tickets were sold for the train, and anyway there are always dozens of unticketed passengers, including immigrants without regional familial networks, the loss of human life will never be subject to a full technocratic forensic accounting. That is to say, the statisticians and numeraries won't be able to corral this disaster into their actuarial tables; it is simply a horror, a conflagration so intense that it erased specificity.
Greece is not a big country. Its total population is about the same as the state of Georgia in the USA, so a disaster of this magnitude makes a proportionally enormous impact. On the day of the train collision several groups, including anarchists, called for a "snap" or immediate demo at the Athens offices of Hellenic Train. Hellenic Train is the Italian-owned private company that bought most of Greece's train services from the Greek government back in 2017. The sale of Greece's national rail system to a private company was something the E.U. had demanded, a condition of Europe's central banks forgiving the Greek state's debts.
The overall mood on Wednesday seemed more like stunned grief than rage, so my companion and I weren't sure how many people would show up at the offices. Several hundred did, and the two of us arrived just in time to get teargassed. I'm often a cowboy about teargas but this was an extreme dousing; we were retching and staggering. The platoons of riot police guarding the Hellenic Train building were very aggressive, as were the squads guarding the pumps at nearby gas stations.
The road Hellenic Train HQ faces, Andrea Siggrou, is a major road of Athens. At six lanes with a little neutral ground, I wouldn't have thought it a bad place to get teargassed, but the sheer volume of gas deployed and the stillness of the air between the tall office buildings made it a debilitating nightmare. The crowd was all sorts of people of all ages and political stripes; the majority responded to the initial police onslaught by departing the area immediately. This was smart, because it was hellish.
Amid the chaos, our comrades didn't succeed in breaking any of the building's reinforced windows, but they threw paint on the police and the Train HQ's lower floor, including graffiti of the "MURDERERS" and "THE STATE KILLS, KILL THE STATE" type.
Those who weren't satisfied after that first clash scattered and reformed into smaller marches; a decent-sized group that seemed to be mostly communist eventually coalesced down Siggrou and marched again past the Hellenic Train building, flowing around the burning dumpsters. They chanted "Revenge," a nice sentiment, as well as the usual bromides about the incipient rise of the proletariat.
The largest and rowdiest of the smaller marches didn't hang around but proceeded — one might also say ran — up Siggrou towards the parliament building 3/4 of a mile away. A significant number of police pursued that splinter, continuing to bombard it with gas and flash grenades. At Syntagma (the greek parliament building, but also the large public square, the metro station and the street nearest it) there was even more teargas.
By that point I'd retreated into the genteel parklands around the Acropolis. Staggering with searing eyes, burning skin and wheezing post-covid lungs among the sedately strolling tourist families, I could still hear from Syntagma the BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! of the teargas grenades — a pounding, seemingly bottomless barrage. I felt immense anger.
THE DAY AFTER THE DERAILMENT — THURSDAY 2 MARCH
The Greek mainstream media is abysmal by any standard. The average Greek is far more educated and literate than the average American, but the news paradigm here starts at the Balkan equivalent of Rupert Murdoch and gets more right-wing and tabloid-y from there. It's an ideological spectrum that runs from "solemn regurgitation of ruling-party propaganda" to absolute wingnut conspiracy shit.
As the government scrambled to corral and redirect popular anger, the Greek people were offered carefully crafted explanations for why we shouldn't blame New Democracy, the right-wing cadre that's been in power since 2019 and for twelve of the past twenty years.
On the sober side, the media and government scapegoated a single 59-year-old stationmaster; the newscasters did a deep dive into his culpability, running pictures of his family members (why?), vilifying and anathematizing him while never mentioning the multiple automated fallback systems that should have prevented his supposed "human error."
On the conspiracy side, populist pundits and online trolls pushed a rumor that Roma (aka Gypsies, a perennial target of the right wing) had caused the crash by sabotaging the lines. There were also the first stirrings of Sandy-Hook type "questions" from online nationalists about e.g. whether what occurred might have actually been a mysterious explosion rather than a collision.
I don't enjoy relaying the above, but I think it's worth understanding the Greek media environment. What matters more is that in the wake of the train crash there was near-unanimous rejection of these lies. The obvious government & mass-media bullshit campaigns only seemed to make people angrier.
The Thursday evening demo was at Syntagma. As we walked there, it began to rain. A steady and increasing flow of people were walking the opposite way. I am a guest of the movement here in Greece, and to some degree a guest of the Greek people, so I try to tread carefully when I speak of "the Greeks" as a monolith, but there's no denying that Greeks abhor bad weather. The mildest sprinkle or rain shower spawns cancellation of everything imaginable; everyone runs indoors. It's a cultural characteristic. Thus the rain on Thursday meant, to me, that this demo wouldn't happen.
My demo partner was very angry about the train derailment and determined to at least try and march, and I wasn't going to be a party pooper, so we slogged to Syntagma in what had become a full, chilly downpour.
The streetlights around Syntagma were out, which gave things an even gloomier vibe. "Darkness is our ally," I assured my comrade– a sentiment I believe, but which didn't feel particularly true in the moment. It was quite dark and getting colder. Rivulets of water ran the contours of the street and sidewalks, and the only sounds besides the drumming rain were a lone woman screaming "Burn this government!" and an authoritarian communist sound van blaring tinny music. There in the dark boulevard outside parliament, a few hundred sodden but steely young communists stood in resolute formation with their symbolic cudgels (red flags on stout sticks — seldom if ever used as weapons).
For a few minutes we wandered the saturated situation, searching for other hooligans, but nobody looked the type. The metro lines were closed due to strike, but we went down the big stairs into Syntagma's square and sheltered under the overhang of the metro entrance. Despite conditions, it was kind of a cute scene: a random assortment of would-be protesters all standing jammed together in a stone archway, chatting and sharing cigarettes. Eventually, someone appeared at the top of the steps near our shelter: "C'mon, kids," he called, "It's moving!"
When we emerged from the tunnel shelter, we saw that a march was indeed underway, and it was shockingly large– it was thousands. I have never in my life seen so many Greeks stay out in such absolutely miserable weather. We tried to find a spot near people roughly in line with our own beliefs and ended up by a pretty macho anarcho-communist group. The best thing I can say about them is that at least when they chanted "Go ahead, people, don't bow your heads" they'd conclude with "The only path is gasoline and a bottle" instead of the more traditional "The only path is resistance."
Visibility was low. We kept getting jumbled around, but knew we were in the roughly correct piece of the march because we had a bunch of riot cops flanking us on either side. The march was enormous, slow-moving and uneventful, the kind of event I normally find dispiriting, but it was made powerful by its defiance of the rain.
Μεγάλη #συγκέντρωση διαμαρτυρίας στο Σύνταγμα και πορεία προς τον Σταθμό Λαρίσης παρά την αθηναϊκή μπόρα πριν από λίγο.
Κράτος και κεφάλαιο δολοφονούν!Στους 57 #Τέμπη #ΟΣΕ #Hellenictrains #antireport pic.twitter.com/sZn2lpEBww
— Αυτολεξεί (@aftoleksigr) March 2, 2023
We were followed by more riot cops and the Aura, Greece's iconic oversized water-cannon truck. The Aura, unlike most implements of state repression, inspires in me something bordering on kitschy affection. Make no mistake, it's genuinely terrifying when it's roaring directly on your heels and seems like it may run you over, but from a distance the armored beast looks so funny and old-fashioned, like a piece of Warhammer Ork technology. When you spot it lumbering across an intersection or laboriously maneuvering a 9-point turn there's a tinge of humor to the spectacle, like watching a clumsy old elephant.
The highlight of the demo was when we passed Rex, a theater recently occupied by striking artists and actors, and they cheered for us from behind their barricaded entryway. The bloc responded with a thunderous chant: "10, 100, 1000 squats, against the world of organized rot!" The riot cops sandwiched between the theater and the march began uneasily turning back and forth, and the spacing of their previously organized line bunched up and collapsed as they hurried to get clear of the theater.
Eventually we reached (and filled) Omonia square, still under steady rain. I was hoping the demo might visit the nearby police station, but instead it wended on towards the Athens train station. We stepped away and found that, hilariously, the pair of us had been marching the last little ways behind a banner for the political party of clownish neoliberal Varoufakis… but please keep that a secret. My credibility could never recover.
When I got home and dried off, I learned that there had been big marches all over Greece, many of them braving similar rainstorms. The comrades in Thessy had attacked a police station, I noted jealously– but there had been big, angry demos in Volos, Larissa, Patras, all sorts of different cities and towns, not just leftist or anarchist hotspots. There were photos online of massive demos in towns I'd never even heard of– and Greece is, as I've said, not that big. It reminded me a bit of the USA's George Floyd summer, in that there was action popping off in places one wouldn't normally expect to see it. It was beginning to resemble an uprising.