In early April 2010, Greek anarchist prisoner Giorgos Voutsis-Vogiatzis (now released) wrote this text in solidarity with the people being charged in the Fire Cells Conspiracy case. Many thanks to the comrades who included it in their Spanish-language Fire Cells Conspiracy compendium entitled Blowing Up the Existent: Reflections on Minority Combat.

I’m no good at saying goodbye, especially final goodbyes. I get uncomfortable when the curtain goes down. Goodbyes are the worst, particularly when emotion gets in the way, causing a strange chill as it crashes into the obligatory “forced goodbyes.” Generally, I consider emotional hysteria useless when it has an expiration date, since it depends on timing. Most of the time it’s fake, happening at just the right moment by pure luck, like a scene from a movie whose director is responsible for cutting it into the story in a specific way—when a soldier boards his train, when a prisoner goes back to prison after being on leave, when a couple breaks up. At these moments, a small death is consummated, and only at such moments do people come into contact with the vastness of death.

I suppose that, on the contrary, I’m good at leaving bombs. I don’t mean “placing” them. That’s something anyone can do with great ease, more or less. The life of a bomb-thrower is a life filled with selflessness, pain, vengeance, justice, war, love, hate. We can find such elements in anyone’s heart, but in a bomb-thrower’s life, there is a particular weight and intensity to these concepts’ coexistence. You live with them every day. The deepest emotions overwhelm you. Like a philosopher of action, you flirt with death and freedom, but also with their negations. You prefer to say goodbye to bombs instead of people. A bomb-thrower is a most contradictory person, but not in the usual sense of contradiction. She is not contradictory as a result of the prevailing societal confusion. She is no chameleon changing colors at will.

Her love for life and contempt for death motivate her actions. She arms herself with a love of justice in order to hate injustice. She arms herself with a passion for life in order to kill.

The moment of leaving a bomb is occasion for an extraordinary goodbye. You don’t count down the minutes until you can see her again. You count down the minutes until she explodes. You never want to see her again, because if you do, it means your action has failed.

Saying goodbye to a bomb is like waiting for a metamorphosis. Success or failure. EXPLOSION OR SURRENDER. Orgasm or dysfunction. In the end, the most pleasant goodbyes involve those who sow chaos without loving chaos.

The act of taking part in radical struggle is a true rejection of dominant ideology and modern lifestyle. Through revolutionary violence and a deep belief in the righteousness of her actions and the defense of her ideals, a fighter walks a path where selflessness nullifies confusion and determination destroys cowardice. The act of participating in the struggle is a fighter’s demonstration of coherence and commitment to ideals as well as comrades. A demonstration that revolution is not a cause removed from everyday life, is not a hobby or an activity on which to while away the time we live under capitalism. It’s not a youthful indiscretion that, when repression escalates and the going gets tough, one abandons like a summer fling while alarm clocks start ringing again throughout the metropolis. Revolution says: “I was, I am, and I will be.”

—Giorgos Voutsis-Vogiatzis; from prison; April 5, 2010

*Said book still doesn’t exist.