Willem Van Spronsen - Always on the Offensive at the Border Crossings

From Athens Indymedia Via Anaquía English translation by Anarchist News

by Dimitris Chatzivasileiadis

*photo: Graffiti in memory of the anarchist Willem Van Spronsen on the facade of the Bouboulina Anacatelliana building (August 2019)

Three years ago, on July 13, 2019 in the state of Washington, the antifascist anarchist Willem Van Spronsen fought his last battle in an armed attentat against a migrant detention center.

«I didn't stay with my arms crossed.

No need to say more.

I'm putting my broken heart aside and healing the only way I know how, by being useful.».

Willem Van Spronsen

Officially, 700 dead migrants have been counted in the Mediterranean in the past six months. In the case of the North Aegean the number is almost null because no one is keeping track. Since the official tallying has decreased in recent years, ever since the leftist government sealed the Evros, the practice of drowning migrants has increased. The current government has systematized a method: the sabotage of boats and abandoning the maritime frontier. Additionally, the same method is applied to people who manage to arrive to the shore: they are forced to get back on the boats at gun-point, they are towed to the middle of the ocean, and they sabotage the boat. The accounted annihilation of the number of migrants that arrive equals to as many murders as the median number of arrivals before the start of the systematic repatriation. The daily mass extermination has continued and can continue without obstacles ever since the State, with the help of the fascists, turned the eastern coast of the islands of the North Sea into a «safe haven».

The Aegean, used exclusively as a military zone, inaccessible even to institutional organizations. Precisely in this way, in the borders of the E.U. and the Greek territory, a long-running class massacre is being carried out, no less political than the intra-imperialist war in the Russian-Ukrainian zone. A massacre that is met with indifference by the comfortable Europeans and Greeks, bipartisans and leftitsts, just like the Germans who «didn't know» about the nazi death camps.

Comrade Willem broke through an invisible border, blowing up the complicit silence, attacking the miserable class distinction, the antisocial cannibalism of those that don't risk their own skin while they inhabit the slaughterhouse, in the territories of the masters, with their own body. With gun at hand.

The martyrs of the revolution watch over the border crossings.

Willem Van Spronsen – Always onward on our path.

DIMITRIS CHATZIVASILEIADIS

Domokou Prison

July 12, 2022

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