Saturday, August 31, 2013

Greece: Defend Savas Michael-Matsas! Drop all charges!

Defend Savas Michael-Matsas!  Drop all charges!
For international solidarity with workers, revolutionary militants and immigrants targeted by the fascists and the Greek state!

Savas Michael-Matas 

As Greece still reels from the capitalist crisis we see increasing racist attacks against immigrants and the left by the fascists and the state.[i]  The fascist Golden Dawn has brought bogus legal charges enforced by the Greek state against Greek Jewish Trotskyist Savas Michael-Matsas, for  “defamation”.  The “justification” for this was because the Workers’ Revolutionary Party (EEK) of Greece “issued a leaflet calling for participation in an antifascist demonstration protesting against a murderous attack by the Nazis against the immigrant communities in Athens that was made possible through the covert assistance of the local police in Greece” (see press release below).  

The CWG demands that all charges be dropped against Savas Michael-Matsas!  The international working class and left needs to come to the defense of all victims of fascist and state repression through labor actions! 

 On September 3rd Michael-Matsas will be called before the bosses courts to answer these preposterous charges.  To defend Michael-Matsas workers should  bring their organized power to bare against the Greek state and its accommodation of the fascist monsters.

The rise of the fascists is an ominous is a mortal threat and it is crucial that the working class and the left organize to smash the fascists.  It is likely that either the working class will crush the fascists as part of the fight to resolve the Greek crisis by overthrowing capitalism through a workers’ government, or the fascists will crush the organized labor movement, the leftist parties and organizations and unleash murderous genocidal terror against the immigrant community.  All workers’, immigrant and leftist organizations need to build united fronts, “march separately, strike together”, for actions to stop these racist attacks.  Worker/immigrant self-defense guards need to be organized to drive the fascists from the streets and the immigrant neighborhoods. These workers defense guards should be organized in every factory, workplace and neighborhood, along with workers committees to organize against the crisis.

It is astonishing that the Messrs. bourgeois democrats of post war Greece do not recognize the contempt they are held in by the Golden Dawn it is likewise unfathomable how they fail to realize that the Golden Dawn would put their own liberal heads on the chopping block even before they finish dealing with the left and those they victimize for being non-Greek.  Golden Dawn would be worse than the Reles regime and much more akin to the Nazi occupiers of 1941-1945.  The workers must know that Golden Dawn intends to place the entire burden and exact the entire cost of the capitalist crisis from workers lives.  To do this they will apply the courts today and terror tomorrow and in power they will have work camps and death camps to snuff out all resistance.  It is for this reason that we treat civil libertarianism on the fascist question as a mortal error.  The one thing the international working class cannot tolerate is a regime of intolerance.  Let liberals like Noam Chomsky defend the fascists right to free speech.   

We say smash fascism in the egg!  The light-minded Euro-bourgeoisie believes it can safely hold the Golden Dawn as a cudgel over the heads of the trade unionists and the left thus you can expect no move against Golden Dawn from the state which is interpenetrated with fascists up and down the police ranks.   Therefore class independent armed workers action to smash fascism is urgently required to defend any and all democratic rights.  The bourgeoisie is telling the Troika that it needs a third bailout and wants to renegotiate terms on the outstanding balances of the previous two loans.  It feels it has stabilized the situation  enough to take this position because the masses are demobilized.  It is in this situation that the state brings this monstrous anti-semetic case against  Savas Michael-Matsas.

All workers must defend Savas Michael-Matas.  Drop all charges now!
CWG(USA) August 27, 2013

Savas Michael-Matsas has appealed for solidarity in a statement:

As you know, the Nazi Golden Dawn in Greece has started a legal action against the EEK and myself, its general secretary.

I am accused of “defamation”, “instigation of violence” and “disruption of the civil peace”.
At the same time, the Nazis have intensified their non-stop, vicious, anti-Semitic and anti-communist campaign accusing me of being “the instrument of a world Jewish conspiracy to foment civil war, so as to impose a Judeo-Bolshevik regime in Greece”.

The Greek state has endorsed this action by Golden Dawn by bringing charges against myself, together with the former dean of the National Technical University of Athens, Mr Constantine Moutzouris (accused of permitting the operation of the alternative website, Athens Indymedia, from within the university).

 We want to ask you to kindly send messages of solidarity, signatures, motions, etc, to eek@eek.gr, in time to be presented both to the press and to the court.”[ii]

CWG also posts below an English translation of a press release that was posted at Permanent Revolution blog:
http://forum.permanent-revolution.org/2013/08/defend-savas-michael-against-golden.html

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