From: actforfree

We have no other path worth walking except the one of resistance. The path of Lambros, the path of life.

HONOUR FOREVER TO LAMBROS FOUNDAS

Four years ago, the breath of a great fighter went out, my comrade of the Revolutionary Struggle, Lambros Foundas. He was killed during a shoot out, when members of the organization were attempting to expropriate a vehicle in Dafni.
Lambros politically came of age in the late part of the political transition after the junta and joined the anti-authoritarian movement. He participated in social clashes of the period characterized by that special spirit after the junta through which was arising the militant tradition, the collective memory of a population thirsty for freedom.

He came of age politically at the dawn of the new century, there where the radical movement was gasping to find a connecting link with the past through the ruins of the post junta era in order to imprint its own way of walk in the new era of privatization and consumerism. Then when -like now- we struggle to understand the impressive changes in greek society, changes which compared to the present, were proven painless. Later he was integrated into the Revolutionary Struggle where from its lines gave the last battle of his life.

Lambros left together with a whole era. These four years of his absence, the land is experiencing a double bankruptcy, political and economic. The two-party system of authority which was the pillar of the state after the junta has collapsed together with whatever reliability of its political staff. Simultaneously, collapsed the whole economic structure founded with the entry of the country in the EC. The land is now in a procedure of colonization by the monetary-credit elite of the european north and the production wealth is sold out by its local cooperators. Today, fascism is not at the gates, it is already here. In the hungry children, the unemployed, in the desperation, in the raiding squads, in state terrorism….

Today, four years after the death of Lambros Foundas, the battle of the Revolutionary Struggle, the battle of the radical movement for freedom and social justice is more just than ever because we made sure we were where we were suppose to be before the storm broke out, before we entered the darkness, the lines of the struggle against the neo-liberal fascism.

And all that remains, Lambros, is to answer the eternal question, your last words, “And now what do we do?”. And I leave your deafening answer to root in the present and future, in the scared souls and teenager rooms. We have no other path worth walking except the one of resistance. The path of Lambros, the path of life.

*
From the introduction of Nikos Kazantzakis in “Captain Michalis”.

“…Many who read Captain Michalis think that such kids -such little men, as we say in Crete- never existed, neither men so physically and mentally strong, who love life so much and look at death with such contempt. How can the unfaithful believe what miracles faith can create? They forget that a person’s soul becomes omnipotent when swept away by a grand idea. Its scary when, after bitter trials, you realize that inside us is a force that can overcome the strength of a human. You’re scared, because from the moment you realize that this force exists you cannot find excuses any more for your meaningless or cowardly acts, about your lost life, putting the blame on others. You know now that you, not luck, not fate, not the people around you, only you have, no matter what you do, no matter what you become, the responsibility. And then you are embarrassed to laugh, you are embarrassed to mock if a flaming soul asks you for the impossible.

You realize very well now that this is the value of the human, to ask and to know that its asking for the impossible and be sure that it will reach it, because it knows that if it gives it all, if it does not listen to what logic commands, but holds its soul with its teeth and continues in faith, in stubbornness to chase the impossible, then the miracle will happen, which the wingless common mind could not guess: The impossible becomes possible.”

March 10th 2014

Kostas Gournas
Koridallos prisons