Here’s a report by Konstantinos Georgousis on Golden Dawn’s profile. The story, which was showed by Channel 4 in the UK, follows a candidate MP in the downtown neighbourhood of Aghios Panteleimonas. The naive candidate speaks openly about his future vision of Greece and makes eerie jokes about ovens and soaps. A must watch for all those who tend to either believe the cheap excuses or have been reassured by diplomatic answers.
If the future historian will try to describe Golden Dawn’s course to mainstream politics and its attempt to consolidate its presence there, he will most probably be able to write about a very organized plan. He will have the luxury to connect the dots. These dots is what we are living these years, it’s the news coming from the far-right camp, digested easily one by one.
The racist attacks is a good example. A previously rare news item has almost become a daily thing. No one is surprised. The violence in public display (see the slapping of Communist MP Liana Kanelli on tv, the bullying outside Chyterio theatre, etc) is another example which, by now, has easily been digested by many. I remember Kanelli after an unsuccessful prank by some comedians who disguised like Golden Dawn thugs and “ambushed” her in a corridor of SKAI TV. She went back to the studio and, in tears, warned that if Golden Dawn’s violence becomes a joke, this will mean that we have accepted it as a new reality.
Dimitris Hantzopoulos – Ta Nea newspaper (28-02-13)
The next dot in the plan is the consolidation of last year’s gains. Golden Dawn has drawn all the centre-right and far-right voters it could attract. Now they must look into the future, the kids. Step 1: High Schools. Some weeks ago I started researching the story for an international documentary. I spoke with several teachers and they were all complaining about kids flirting with the far-right. Some for joke, others for bullying, in the end they would mention “patriotism”. A friend of mine, a teacher at an Athens High School, gave a lecture to his class about Golden Dawn’s attacks and practices. A kid stood up and told him: “You are not allowed to talk politics in here, sir!”. He was surprised. I asked him if he stopped and he told me: “Of course not! I simply started talking to them about Nazism” . Some weeks later one of his students described to him the good time he had when he went to Golden Dawn’s annual march.
By Kostas Koufogiorgos Eleftherotypia (28-02-13)
Last week, my very good colleague and friend, Yannis Papadopoulos, wrote for TA NEA newspaper a scathing report about Golden Dawn’s intrusion into Greek schools. I’m translating an excerpt from his article.
… Apostolis and his friends were waiting for me outside the school’s entrance. This is where he carried out his first attack. His hands are in his pockets, his face has that teenage touch. He is 15 years old and he beats immigrants. “Whenever we see a Pakistani, we hunt him down” he says. “If Golden Dawn has reasons to do so, so do we”. Right here the hunting begins as soon as the school ends.
“I’ve seen him standing over that pole. I ran and fell over him, together with another guy and we started beating him” says Apostolis. “I have beaten several of them. Ten, fifteen. Something like that. When the teachers at school find out I usually lie, saying that I was provoked… We are not Golden Dawn members, we do this as a hobby. Everyone without papers must be beaten” says George, 14 years old.
17 year old Dimitris, a Golden Dawn member from another Athens school says “Sooner or later these kids will too join Golden Dawn”.
Two days ago, Golden Dawn revealed Step 2. They posted on their official website a text and some photos that took things even further. To younger ages.
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The event was paradoxically called “Kids’ conformation”, after a famous 20th century magazine whose most famous editor in chief was Grigorios Xenopoulos, himself a socialist. According to Golden Dawn, the kids were taught by trained teachers who somehow managed to fit in one class topics like the ancient Greek Thought, the ancient Gods of Olympus and the Christian Faith. Whatever help this nation stay together.
“… and then Alexander the Great made the sign of the Cross and attacked the Turks by saying “I’ll f**ck you, you Albanian fag**ts!!!” by Panos Zacharis (October 2012)
I am living in the present. And these news stories are just dots. If you ask me “Do you know where all this is going at?”, I will say No. But it rings some bells.
I simply hope that the future historian will be living in an a country free enough to write about it.
At the beginning, the Greek crisis was interesting just for foreign correspondents, economists and political analysts. After the first year of the crisis, I started observing an increasing interest by scholars and post-grad students who would come to Athens for a week and try to speak with as many people involved & influenced as possible.
Activists followed suit. Last February I met a 20-year old anarchist from US who came to Athens and got in touch with local comrades in an attempt to carry ideas back to the Occupy Wall Street movement. In December 2012, while working with a Norwegian team of journalists, we mingled with a rioting in the anarchist Exarchia district of Athens and witnessed tens of “riot tourists”. Some were here indeed out of sincere solidarity, consciously supporting the struggling Greeks but some were obviously kids on a European city escape who, rather than throwing a coin in Rome’s Fontana di Trevi, chose to throw a stone to a Greek policeman. Don’t ask me if they made a wish in advance.
In February 2012, a close relative who is now working in Middle East told me of a Ukrainian guy who visited Athens ahead of a general strike. His aim was to witness the foreseeable riots that usually accompany our strike demos. Right then I started to feel that Athens is slowly becoming a sort of a spectacle in the same way tourists visit Chernobyl for photo opportunities with radioactive plastic dolls, blood-thirsty Italians visited Bosnian trenches during the Yugoslav war or like Toshifumi Fujimoto, a Japanese truck driver who enjoys visiting war zones instead of dreamy beaches.
Tourism in Bosnia kept dealing with the war. Even now, almost 20 years after, one of the major sight-seeings of the capital Sarajevo is the so called War Tunnel. A quick google search will give you several companies organizing walking tours about the civil war there. Funky Tours, to name but one, is organizing the Sarajevo Total Siege Tour.
Soon humanity coined a neologism for this kind of tourism. You can look it up under the self-explicit War Tourism or even Dark Tourism, which involves travel to sites associated with death and tragedy. There is also the synonymous, but less popular in use, Thanatourism, which derives from the Ancient Greek word Thanatos.
Winged youth with a sword, probably Thanatos, personification of death. Detail of a sculptured marble column drum from the Temple of Artemis at Ephesos, ca. 325-300 BC.
Having all these in my mind I knew something like this was coming. Especially after last summer, when I came across the website of Political Tours, a London-based travel agency founded by former New York Times Balkans Correspondent Nicholas Wood. The travel agency’s motto was “Intelligent Travel for Inquiring Minds” and I read that they were organizing tours in North Korea, Libya, Turkey as well as a trip to the US during their elections. So guess what was their latest tour? “Greece and the Euro”, a 8-day phantasmagoria of Greek crisis, misery, unemployment, destruction and poverty. Among speeches with political analysts and journalists, their detailed programme included a “visit to Sydagma Square, where the demonstrations protesting austerity measures have culminated and where many riots have started. We see the damage done by the unrest and then move on to Ermou Street, a place were it was once impossible to find a shop to rent. Now many are empty and pawn shops are prevalent“.
Today I have found a second foreign travel company organizing such a tour. It’s Context. I copy from their website: Context is a network of scholars and specialists—in disciplines including archaeology, art history, cuisine, urban planning, history, environmental science, and classics—who, in addition to our normal work as professors and researchers, design and lead in-depth walking seminars for small groups of intellectually curious travellers. Their new Athens tour, titled Greek Crisis in Context is basically a walk in downtown Athens that ends up in a taverna where the intellectual tourists will fight their thirst with a sip of some Greek wine. This excerpt is from the tour’s description:
Depending on time and how our conversation unfolds we may end the walk in a local wine bar where we can conclude our discussion with the possible solutions and precautions for a brighter future in Greece. As we take a sip from the local Greek wine (not retsina), we will emerge with a much clearer understanding of the Greek economic crisis and its social elements.
The prices for the walking tours are 70 euros per person but there is a possibility to book a private tour for 300 euros.
Which, coincidentally, is a bit less than the much-talked new minimum monthly wage in this country.
Amidst the implementation of the latest round of austerity measures, which were voted last Autumn but are “felt” slowly only now, there is a further shrinking of the so-called “state sector”. Part of these measures dictate the merging of regional hospitals, tax offices and regional universities.
The citizens of Crete’s easternmost region, Lasithi, have found a creative way to protest this shrinking which will mean either less money circulating in the province or simply making their lives more difficult. So they issued this protest paper resembling a passport (even though it actually looks more like the old driving licences). Welcome to the newly-found Republic of Lasithistan or, as they call it “the Devil’s Mother” (a colloquial expression in Greek that means “an extremely remote place”).
On the right side they say:
The take from us the Universities, the hospitals, the public services, the marinas, the salaries, the pensions, the unemployment benefits.
They are bringing upon us Industrial Renewable Energy (a disputed plan to place wind powere generators in many parts of the island, including areas of ecological interest), special property taxes, unemployment, poverty, depression.
In an attempt to identify with the widespread anger in Greek society, targeted mainly against corrupt politicians, the country’s biggest porn production company has produced its latest gem, a politicized porn movie (!?!?!) where terrorists rape Ministers’ wives.
The “Impact” is already being sold at Athens’ kiosks for 14,90 € (Photo by Athensville)
The movie’s title is “Impact” (the rhyming Greek headline translates into something like “The people’s revolution upon the Minister’s wife”) and the plot, according to Sirina Productions’ website, is this.
2012. The dominant emotion of impoverished Greece is disappointment. With the movement of the indignants being blown off course, people are looking to find ways in order to defuse the anger they feel towards the politicians that betrayed them. The mode of punishment that everyone of us is dreaming varies, but we all want to it to be exemplary …
With this in mind, a group of young men create a terrorist cell and attack Ministers’ houses. They find their wives and give them a lesson they will never forget. A lesson that includes lots of spanking and even more sex. They also record their deeds and then blackmail the crook politicians. “Either you return the stolen money to the state funds or we post the videos online!”.
I recently watched this short animated video on Dishonesty.
I immediately started drawing parallelisms between the video and the whole Greek tax-evasion story. In many discussions with foreign journalists I have been asked to give my opinion on tax-evasion in Greece. It’s true that Greek citizens were inclined to evading as many taxes as they could and, to tell you the truth, they were feeling pretty fine with that. Why? Because the model was coming from above, from the political establishment and the business elite. They were and still are setting the example. The international press has only recently discovered the laters’ responsibility, hence the amount of articles and features on the lives of rich Greeks.
The RSA video gives an example of how the overall damage by numerous small cheaters can sometimes be bigger than the total damage of a handful of big cheaters. I sincerely believe that this is not the case for Greece. Credible data are not available to demonstrate that the amounts lost by the political establishment and the business elite’s practices are much bigger than the amounts lost by buying something without a receipt. And, in addition, many of the cases are much more complicated and at some point we are talking about a sort of a “double entry” to our tax-evasion database. For example, where do you categorize the damage of a lost public income from an unpaid tax fine? Under the citizen who did all he could to avoid paying (small cheater)? Under the tax officer who accepted the bribe (medium cheater)? Or under the politician who intervened to the local tax office so that the citizen, a friend (i.e. a potential voter) gets treated with preference (and yes, he is a big cheater because he is hoping for thousands of votes to get re-elected)?
In September 2010, the then vice-chairman of the Greek government, Theodoros Pangalos, has given the following speech at the Parliament.
Translation: The answer to the people’s angry question that is directed against the politicians of the country “how did you eat [spend] the money?” is this: We hired you. We ate [spent] them all together. In the framework of a relationship of political clientelism, corruption, buying and ridiculing the very sense of Politics itself.
Speaking about the responsibility of political clientelism in the Greek crisis, though true, he unashamedly blamed the small cheaters (i.e. voters) in order to cover the big cheaters’ (i.e. politicians) damage. Paradoxically he fell in his own trap by admitting that he is a big cheater. It was such an unashamed statement that he even created a website where people would input their own stories. And in the end he turned the whole story in a book which is sold on the website.
In what society do leaders depend on individuals to set a prudent example for the politicians?
It’s this unanswered puzzle, that will never be answered in consensus, that has prevented any move forward to be fully legitimised, especially when the move forward is driven by the same people who brought us here. Society was, is and will be strongly divided among these things, left or right, cheater or honest, public sector employees or private sector employees, clean or dirty means of accumulating wealth, what did you or your father do during the good years, etc (the duos’ list is almost infinte).
It seems that these divisions are here to stay. There are few attempts, and certainly not from the politicians’ side, to ease them (see the recent strike of the Athens Metro employees where it was attempted to turn passengers against strikers). They actually take advantage of these natural and artificial divisions, turning one part of society against another, which explains why the traditionally angry rioting Greeks have not been able to form a common front in order to create a “new page” as the video suggests. And we so desperately need a “new page” in order to re-start writing our history. Looking at some international examples, nations with a dirty past opened a “new page” with the creation of a Truth Commission (e.g. South Africa). We, in Greece, haven’t even dared to launch an independent audit about our public debt. The former-communist countries had another tactic. A process that was called “lustration“, i.e. a cleansing.
Well, we need one too in order to inspire people to become honest again. Like their politicians.
PS. Funnily the RSA video refers to the financial crisis at the end too.
