Greece's far-right party, Golden Dawn, won 18 parliamentary seats in the June election with a campaign openly hostile to illegal immigrants and there are now allegations that some Greek police are supporting the party.
"There is already civil war," says Ilias Panagiotaros. If so, the shop he owns is set to do a roaring trade.
It sells camouflage gear, police riot gloves, face masks and T-shirts extolling football hooliganism.
On the walls are posters celebrating the last civil war in Greece, which ended in 1949.
"Greek society is ready - even though no-one likes this - to have a fight: a new type of civil war," he says.
"On the one side there will be nationalists like us, and Greeks who want our country to be as it used to be, and on the other side illegal immigrants, anarchists and all those who have destroyed Athens several times," he adds.
You hear comments like this a lot in Greece now but Ilias Panagiotaros is not some figure on the fringes: he is a member of the Greek parliament, one of 18 MPs elected for the far-right Golden Dawn in June's general election.
To read more click HERE
In talking to the people in Athens during the first round of program cuts I asked them about the police. Wouldn't their police suffer as well with budget cuts I asked? They told me that the police are not under the same laws as ordinary citizens. That they would not have their taxes raised or their pay cut. That would appear to me to be an open door to corruption. This is class warfare plain and simple only nobody will win in the end.
ReplyDeleteWe're seeing much the same things here in the U.S. with "papers please" laws and I've noticed police making up their own laws. It's only when they've been sued that justice was served. Our own city of Seattle had to be put under the direction of the federal government because police were beating up innocent citizens.
A good book to read on the history of the Greek Civil War 1943-1949 is Andre Gerolymatos' Red Acropolis, Black Terror. Both sides were extremely vicious and as usual the left lost because it also fought within itself. Golden Dawn and the police sound like a very good nucleus around which to build a solid extreme right. I am not surprised that the police are "above the law". didn't the governor of Wisconsin try the same thing?
Delete