Oggi proponiamo un articolo del New Statesman sulla situazione politica ad Atene, un soggetto che viene tuttora largamente ignorato dai nostri media. L'articolo racconta la crescita di Alba Dorata ed il significato politico e le radici sociali e culturali dell'avanzata del fascismo. E contrappone questo al "fenomeno|" Syriza e all'alternativa che questo rappresenta per l'Europa.
A warning from Athens
di Daniel Trilling
New Statesman
It’s Saturday morning in Athens and the players are taking up their
positions for a familiar ritual. Around the National Garden, behind the
Greek parliament, fortified police vans lie in wait, their occupants
playing cards or chatting on mobile phones. Along the streets that
stretch north from Syntagma Square, in front of the parliament building,
there are more police, standing on street corners in riot gear,
drinking iced coffee and idly watching groups of tourists or Athenians
running Saturday errands. Crisis or no, this is still a bustling capital
city.
Next door to the National Archaeological Museum, the courtyard of
which is peopled with ancient statues rescued from a shipwreck, limbs
eroded and faces barnacled, is the Athens Polytechnic. Inside the gates,
a crowd of people – elderly men, mothers with teenage children,
twentysomething couples – has gathered to lay red and white carnations
in front of a memorial stone. Around them, students are making banners,
leafleting and gathering into groups according to political affiliation.
Later, they will march noisily into the centre of Athens. For now,
however, the atmosphere is quiet, reverential, if a little tense.
Demonstrations have become commonplace in Athens, so much so that
people talk of “protest fatigue”. In the past month alone, there have
been two general strikes, plus another walkout on 14 November as part of
a pan-European day of action. On the night of 7 November, police
tear-gassed protesters in Syntagma Square, while inside the parliament
MPs debated a new wave of public spending cuts and privatisation
demanded by the troika – the EU, the IMF and the European Central Bank –
in return for another slice of bailout money. Opposition is such that
the measures are being implemented by ministerial decree –emergency
legislation reminiscent of Germany in the 1930s. And it’s hurting:
Eurostat reports that 31 per cent of the population, 3.5 million people,
are living near or below the poverty line and 15 per cent cannot afford
“basic commodities”. Greece is a laboratory for austerity, the most
extreme iteration of policies that are being imposed by governments from
London to Lisbon.
On Saturday 17 November, the protest is of a different kind. It is
the date on which Greece commemorates the fall of the military junta
that ruled the country from 1967 to 1974. On this day in 1973, a tank
burst through the gates of the Athens Polytechnic, which had been
occupied by students protesting against the military regime and
demanding the right to elect their leaders. This direct democracy had
been too much for the colonels to bear and 24 people were killed in the
crackdown that followed. The massacre spelled the beginning of the end
for their regime, which fell a year later. The 17th has long been a
symbolic date for the Greek left but in the past few years the ranks of
marchers have been swelled by a new generation.
As the students begin to form into blocs, stamping their feet in
unison, the old chant of those who fought the junta goes up: “Bread,
education, freedom!” Now, though, it comes with a reply: “The
dictatorship is not over!”
**
Manolis Glezos, white-haired and dressed in a sharp, powder- blue
jacket, leans forward across the desk and jabs a finger. “I want to
write an ‘I accuse’ to Britain. During the war, we stood by them as
allies. So where’s Britain now?”
At the age of 90, Glezos knows Greece’s recent history intimately. In
1941, he and a comrade tore down the swastika flag from the Acropolis,
at the height of the Nazi occupation. They were imprisoned and tortured.
When civil war erupted in 1946, between the communist- led resistance
partisans and a rightwing government propped up by Britain and the US,
he was sentenced to death. He was sent to prison camps twice more in the
years that followed – along with thousands of other leftists – and
eventually forced into exile when the junta came to power. Yet Glezos is
more than a symbol of resistance; he is back in front-line politics, as
an MP.
I meet Glezos in his office at the Greek parliament, which is staffed
by a couple of young assistants who are busy posting copies of his
speeches on Facebook. (The most recent one has been “liked” 680 times,
Glezos tells me.) He is an MP for Syriza, the coalition of radical
left-wing parties that has been the main bene - ficiary of public
discontent. In the past three years, it has gained momentum as support
has drained away from the centre-left Pasok, which once promised Greeks a
welfare state and national self-determination but now finds itself in
coalition with the right-wing New Democracy, administering the troika’s
demands. In May’s general election, Syriza won an unprecedented 17 per
cent of the vote. At a second election, called when the government
failed to hold a coalition together, its vote rose to 27 per cent and it
narrowly missed an outright victory. It is now the main opposition
party and most opinion polls put it on course to win power the next time
elections are held.
For the first time since 2008, Europe faces the real possibility of a
government whose stated aim is, as Glezos tells me, to “cancel” the
debt, halting the programme of spending cuts and demanding that the
troika renegotiate terms. “Two and a half thousand years ago, an ancient
writer, Menander, said: ‘Loans make people slaves.’ You can forgive
other people if they don’t know this but Greeks are not allowed not to
know this.”
According to Procopis Papastratis, a professor at Panteion University
in Athens, Syriza’s success has sent a shockwave through the Greek
political establishment. “The left terrifies a lot of people . . . They
say that if the left comes, they will slaughter us or they will take our
houses like Stalin did in the Soviet Union. The big businesses say that
they will leave Greece and they say to those who work for them that if
you vote Syriza, you will be unemployed because we will take our
companies and go.”
For Glezos, the division is “not between left and right. It is
between the Greek people and those who have subjected themselves to the
troika and the will of the powerful.” And the elite have good reason to
be scared. “We don’t just want to give a good make-up to the system. We
really want to change it.” Glezos sets out a range of measures – a
crackdown on Greece’s endemic tax evasion; forcing banks to loan the
government money at zero interest; investment in industry and
agriculture – that he believes would restore economic prosperity.
His pugnacious stance encapsulates the popular feeling that the
current government is not acting in the nation’s best interests. “The
crisis was not provoked by Greek people. Why should [we] pay for the
crisis? This is a basic question. I am never going to stop asking until
someone has an answer.”
**
Nationalism, however, always has its dark side. Like many other
Greeks I meet, 31-year-old Kelly feels deep anger at the way her country
was led into crisis. Greece only gained entry to the eurozone by
manipulating economic data – as did other countries, including Italy –
and was left exposed when the crash came. “I feel it was a lie all these
years. The way they told us how things will be – that you will have a
good career if you study. For our generation, we have learned one system
and now suddenly there is a big change.”
Kelly is not doing too badly –when we meet, at a sandwich chain in a
southern suburb of Athens, she has just been promoted to sales manager
at the telemarketing firm where she works. But Kelly wants to “punish”
the politicians she believes have led Greece into crisis. She feels the
biggest shock she can inflict on the system is to give her vote to the
fascist Golden Dawn. To Kelly, the party’s main appeal is that it’s
“real”: “They say to you, ‘I am the devil,’ and they are devils. I
prefer someone that says the truth and says to me, ‘You know what, I am
the bad guy,’ rather than another one that says to me, ‘I am the good
guy and I will save you.’” She stops and asks, a little nervously, “Does
that make me crazy?”
Kelly is not alone. The first almost anyone outside Greece heard of
Golden Dawn was in May 2012, when the party swept into parliament with 7
per cent of the vote. Politics in Greece have polarised – and just as
Syriza’s support soared, so right-wing voters have been pushed further
and further to extremes, as a succession of right-wing parties have been
tainted by coalition.
Europe has become used to the slow, attritional progress of far-right
movements; those led by fascists such as Nick Griffin or the Le Pen
family, who have put on suits and concealed their real views in an
attempt to enter the mainstream. But from Golden Dawn’s Nazi-esque
imagery to the militaristic rallies and openly violent conduct of its
members, it was immediately apparent that this time was different.
Golden Dawn did not emerge from nowhere. As Dimitris Psarras, an
investigative journalist who has recently published
The Black Book of Golden Dawn,
explained to me, the party was founded in the early 1980s by Nikolaos
Michal - oliakos, a right-wing extremist with connections to the junta.
From the outset, the group’s core beliefs were “neo-Nazi” and
“pagan”, says Psarras, mixing the ideas of Adolf Hitler with a nostalgia
for ancient Greek culture – and the movement was structured along
quasi-military lines, modelled on the
Sturmabteilung, Hitler’s
stormtroopers. During its early years, Golden Dawn operated as a kind of
security service, doing bodyguard work and “the dirty jobs” for certain
members of Greece’s wealthy elite.
In the 1990s, explains Psarras, a series of changes in Greek society
enabled Golden Dawn to grow. First came a rise in nationalist sentiment
after disputes with the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia over its
name and with Turkey over ownership of islands in the Aegean Sea. Then
came a wave of immigrants following the collapse of the eastern bloc and
wars in the Balkans. Finally, with the advent of unregulated private
television channels –whose sensationalist output, says Psarras, is “like
your
Sun newspaper in Britain” – came a rise in antiimmigrant sentiment.
These feelings continued to grow throughout the 2000s, exacerbated by
mainstream politicians who pandered to xenophobia. Now, many Greeks
have come to see immigration as a cause of the country’s economic
turmoil. During my conversation with Kelly, she was at pains to stress
that she bore no animosity to foreigners. “I want you to know about
Greek people that we are very generous, very clever, very open-minded
and very hard-working,” she told me. “But at this time, it’s like a ship
– we have water [coming in] from one side and, on the other side,
sharks.”
For all its shocking brutality, Golden Dawn has consolidated its
support in a way typical of far-right parties across Europe. It follows a
theory of community politics derived, says Psarras, from the French
nouvelle droite
– a group of far-right intellectuals who set out the blueprint for the
Front National’s success in France and whose ideas Griffin tried to
emulate as leader of the British National Party.
The difference is in Golden Dawn’s relationship with the state.
Greece has a history of right-wing militias collaborating with the
police and there have been documented incidents in which Golden Dawn
members have appeared to work in tandem with officers in attacking
left-wing protesters. One study of voting patterns suggests that as much
as 50 per cent of Athens police officers voted for Golden Dawn at the
last election.
A Golden Dawn MP, Ilias Kasidiaris, physically attacked a female
opponent on live television but managed to evade arrest. Three others
were filmed smashing up market stalls belonging to immigrant vendors –
and posted the video on Golden Dawn’s website –yet have not been charged
with any crime.
The tide may be turning: in response to public outrage, all four have
now been stripped of parliamentary immunity to prosecution but Klio
Papapantoleon, a lawyer who has represented several victims of attacks
committed by Golden Dawn members, points out that the Greek justice
system, while slow at the best of times, has been “very lenient in
judging these members”. She points to the testimony of victims and
witnesses who say that they have been “obstructed and encumbered by
police officers while trying to sue members of Golden Dawn”.
For now, mainstream politicians follow the same logic as in other
countries when faced with a threat from the far right: they compete on
its territory. The government’s most recent move on immigration, for
instance, has been to suspend all applications for Greek citizenship.
Since August, a major police operation has been in progress to round up
undocumented migrants and put them in detention centres. Yet such moves
have only further legitimised Golden Dawn, which now positions itself as
the real defender of the Greek people against austerity, taking a
strong anti-bailout line and staging “Greeks-only” food distribution,
blood donations and soup kitchens.
Still, the same Nazi beliefs lie at its core, glimpsed on occasions
such as when one of its MPs read out a part of the anti-Semitic
Protocols of the Elders of Zion in parliament or in the anti-gay protests it organised that forced the closure of the play
Corpus Christi.
Through an intermediary, I contact “John”, a member of Golden Dawn
who would speak to me only on the condition of anonymity. Now 32 and
working for a banking group in Athens, he joined the movement at 16,
convinced that politicians had “betrayed” Greece over the territorial
dispute with Turkey. He tells me he was attracted by the “total
discipline” of the group. “There was mutual appreciation and, of course,
respect towards higher-ranking members.” There were frequent meetings
and talks aimed at “ideological orientation”, towards the ideas of what
John describes as “National Socialism”. His main task, he says, was to
spread these ideas among his friends and classmates, handing out fliers
and selling copies of the party newspaper.
Because of family and work commitments, John is no longer an active
member but he still votes for the party. What, I ask, would Golden Dawn
do if it got into government? “We’ll do what others don’t dare . . . I
think about how many times people have laughed at us [during election
counts] – and now half of them feel intimidated and half consider us the
only solution.”
Journalists, drawn as ever to a good story, have struggled to deal
with this. I do, too. Nobody wants to underplay the threat Golden Dawn
poses to Greek democracy and there’s a pressing need to expose its
underlying extremism. Yet the aggression, which may seem alarming to an
outsider, is exactly what attracted voters such as Kelly in the first
place. “They do bad things. I don’t agree with that I don’t want them to
be the government,” she tells me. “My intention is just to get them in
the parliament.”
For now, though, the door to power remains ajar. And it will be much harder to shut than it was to open.
**
Just north-west of the centre of Athens stands the grand Orthodox
church of Aghios Panteleimonas, dedicated to the fourth-century martyr
St Pantaleon. In the square outside is a children’s playground; it’s
locked shut and looks like it has been that way for some time. When I
visited with a friend early one weekday morning, our only companions
were stray cats that picked their way through the weeds sprouting
through the tarmac beneath the swings. Greek flags hung limply from
apartment balconies beyond the square and, on the ground in front of the
church steps, spray-painted in blue and white, was the message
“Foreigners out – Greece for the Greeks”.
A few blocks away, down a side street off one of the main boulevards,
is the office of Yonous Muhammadi, chair of the Greek Forum of
Refugees. I had trouble finding it: there is no sign outside and the
buzzer is unmarked. It’s for a good reason, Muhammadi tells me – he was
chased out of his previous office two years ago by fascist thugs, who
smashed the place and beat him up. For im migrants such as Muhammadi,
who came to Greece from Afghanistan in 2001, the rise of Golden Dawn has
merely brought an existing problem out into the open. “In 2010, when we
closed the office of the forum, we held a big press conference. We told
them, now it is our problem, migrants and refugees, but it will be a
problem for Greek people, also. For all of you.”
Like the rest of Europe, Greece experienced a further wave of
immigration from the late 1990s onwards. Refugees – from conflicts in
Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Somalia and elsewhere – were joined by
economic migrants from South Asia and Africa. Three things combined to
turn this into an acute crisis. The first was Greece’s lack of a
functioning immigration system. Applying for citizenship was – and is –
so difficult that the only way most migrants can get permission to stay
in the country is by presenting themselves as refugees. Temporary papers
are renewed every six months and it can take up to ten years for an
asylum application to be processed. The second was the removal of
landmines from the Evros region in northern Greece, on the Turkish
border. This opened up a safer route for migrants who previously had to
make dangerous journeys by boat across the Mediterranean.
The third, decisive factor was the construction of “fortress Europe” –
a pan-European immigration policy designed to make it harder for
migrants from poor countries to enter the EU. Spain and Italy
strengthened their border controls, making Greece an even more popular
point of entry for migrants crossing from Asia or the southern
Mediterranean. Along with this came the Dublin II Regulation, a 2003
agreement that asylum-seekers would be sent back to the country where
they first set foot in the EU.
It was a perfect storm: hundreds of migrants a day being “returned”
to a country they never intended to live in, with thousands more
arriving, unaware of what awaited them.
Many migrants, such as Muhammadi, have made successes of their lives
here: a trained doctor, he now works as a nurse in one of the capital’s
main hospitals. Tanzanian and Pakistani shopkeepers have businesses all
over the city. However, the failed policies have led to thousands of
people being trapped in Greece, vulnerable to people-smugglers and
crammed into apartments in once-smart citycentre neighbourhoods or
sleeping rough, without sanitation, work or food, in squares such as
Aghios Panteleimonas. At its peak, estimates Muhammadi, there were
perhaps 5,000 Afghans intending to stay in Greece but a constant
turnover of between 12,000 and 15,000 coming and leaving. Crime – theft,
drug-trafficking and prostitution – rose in Athens city centre, and at
one point around 500 people were sleeping rough in the playground
outside Aghios Panteleimonas. The local council’s response was to lock
it shut, forcing them on to the streets.
What came next, says Muhammadi, could have been avoided if the police
had done their job and kept order. Instead, feeling like they had been
abandoned, Greek residents in the area surrounding the church formed a
campaign group – the “angry citizens” –which was soon infiltrated by
members of Golden Dawn. The party encouraged Greeks to hang the national
flag from their windows to show opposition to immigration and began
carrying out “vigilante” patrols and covert attacks on immigrants. “The
violence was here before the crisis,” says Muhammadi. “And the police
were there, they were looking, but they were doing nothing. When I was
attacked, I was bleeding but when I went to the police station to
complain, the policemen who were standing in front told me, ‘If you
complain, we’ll put you in a detention centre for two nights.’”
Then, in May 2011, came the spark. A shocking murder – of a Greek man
as he fetched his car to take his pregnant wife to hospital – committed
by two illegal immigrants from Afghanistan, caused a national media
scandal. It provoked a two-week pogrom around Aghios Panteleimonas
orchestrated by Golden Dawn, with fascist gangs attacking non-whites in
broad daylight, dragging them off buses and destroying their shops. The
playground was closed, immigrants forced off the streets and the message
sent out: Golden Dawn is the group that knows how to sort out the
immigrant “problem”. We do what others don’t dare.
The difference now, Muhammadi tells me, is a much wider acceptance of
this violence as part of everyday life. “Before, the fascists would
attack a group of immigrants and leave straight away. Now, they are
there, they are waiting, they are attacking and the others look on. And
nobody can do anything.”
Later, after my meeting with Muhammadi, I visited Saxi and Hakima, an
Afghan couple in their late twenties with three young children. Kicking
off my shoes, I was welcomed into their small apartment, which they
share with four other refugees. We sat on carpets and cushions in their
living room, while Hakima brought tea and boiled sweets. When I asked if
their children had been born here, meaning in Greece, Hakima said,
“Yes, here,” and pointed to the floor just in front of me.
As their two-year-old daughter Zeinab climbed over me and drew in my
notebook, Saxi explained how he had been a policeman in Afghanistan but
fled, fearing for his life, over a decade ago. “I haven’t seen my
parents in 12 years,” he told me. “I would go back if it was safe.”
After travelling through Iran and Turkey, he arrived in Greece, where he
found work in the construction industry. Hakima joined him in 2008. It
was always hard, explained Saxi, but things started to get worse from
that year onwards. Two and a half years ago, he was beaten up so badly
that he spent a week in hospital. When he came out, he was attacked
again – and the time spent off work cost him his job. Saxi had recently
found another job but Hakima told me that the family struggles for money
and that she takes it in turns with other Afghan women to root through
rubbish bins by night to find goods to sell and food to eat. They can’t
go in large groups, because they’re scared of attracting attention and
being attacked. “We thought we would come here, that we would be safe,”
says Saxi, “but the people here don’t treat us like human beings.”
Saxi’s and Hakima’s story is typical. One recent study by the newly
formed Racist Violence Recording Network noted 87 attacks in Greece
between January and September 2012, 83 of which took place in public
spaces – in squares, streets or on public transport. Daphne Kapetanaki,
of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, tells me that
these statistics are “just the tip of the iceberg”. Many immigrants will
not report attacks, she says, because they lack papers and fear arrest
or abuse by police officers. The network’s report also highlighted an
almost total lack of prosecutions for racist attacks and identified 15
incidents in which police and racist violence were “interlinked”.
Many Greeks are shocked at the rise of fascism in their country but
there is disagreement on what to do about it. Until recently, Syriza
took the line that fighting austerity should be the focus. Anarchist
groups have organised night-time motorbike patrols in areas with large
immigrant populations. Yet Petros Constantinou of the Movement Against
Racism and Fascist Threat (KEERFA) is adamant that a successful campaign
will work only if it gives immigrants the courage to speak out, argue
for their place in Greek society and join the wider protest movement. He
looks to Britain’s history of successful anti-fascist movements; in
particular the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism of the late
1970s. A national demonstration against racism and fascism in Syntagma
Square has been called for 19 January.
For its part, the Racist Violence Recording Network hopes that its
work will bring pressure on the government to reform the justice system:
already, the minister of public order has promised to set up dedicated
police units to tackle racist crime and to provide training for all
officers in dealing with these issues. However, as Kapetanaki explains,
what’s needed is “an assurance that migrants will not be arrested and
detained if they report an attack”.
It will take hard work to lift the veil of fear. When I ask Saxi if
he has ever considered joining anti-fascist protests, his answer is
bleak. “Greek people, whoever they are, they hate us.”
**
By late afternoon on 17 November, the march from the Athens
Polytechnic has swelled in numbers. Now some 20,000 strong, the students
having been joined by various political groups, including the
still-powerful Greek Communist Party (KKE), it snakes its way through
central Athens, past the Academy, a neoclassical building from which
glares in red the graffiti “
Malakies [wankers] – you are the
refugees of Europe!”; past Syntagma and the parliament, guarded by lines
of police in gas masks; and up a palm tree-lined boulevard to its
target, the US embassy. Obeying cold war logic, the US backed the
colonels’ regime – just as Britain had backed the Greek right against
the partisans two decades earlier – and to many Greeks, the troika’s
bailout is just the latest instance of foreign interference.
By the time the march reaches the embassy, a looming Bauhaus edifice
emblazoned with a giant state seal, it is dark. Everyone expects a
confrontation with police. But this year, the marchers keep walking,
pushing on further up the road. It is the third day of Israel’s
bombardment of Gaza and the demonstrators have decided to take their
protest all the way to the Israeli embassy.
It’s a symbolic gesture but it mirrors the many acts of solidarity,
big or small, I see or hear about during my stay. One rainy evening
later that week, I take a taxi out to Elliniko, a suburb of Athens, to
visit a large medical clinic staffed entirely by volunteers. Set up to
provide medical care to the growing number of Greeks without health
insurance, it has dedicated rooms for a GP, for paediatricians,
gynaecologists, psychologists and more.
A dentist whose practice was closing gave the clinic his entire
surgery’s worth of equipment. There are arrangements to use the
radiology and chemotherapy departments of nearby hospitals out of hours.
Doctors come to work here for a few hours after doing a full day’s
work. A trained pharmacist co-ordinates the sorting out and cataloguing
of medicines. Cancer medication is particularly expensive and many
people donate unused courses of tablets when relatives die. Volunteers
without medical training spend their time doing clerical work or
building up the network of donors.
Showing me around, Elena – a freelance economist by day, she says
with an ironic laugh – tells me that since the summer the number of
people using the clinic has doubled. It treated 1,200 in August and
nearly 2,500 in October. As the number of people needing help soars, so,
too, does the number of people ready to step in to help. “It’s not why I
do it,” says Elena, “but every day I come here, I leave feeling just a
little bit taller.”
There are two rules, she says – “No money and leave your politics at
the door.” But its very existence raises an explicitly political
question: what if we could build a society that operated this way not
out of dire emergency, but by design?
It is this challenge that faces Syriza, should it fulfil expectations
and win the next election. In 2011, ordinary Greeks began occupying
public squares all over the country, in imitation of the
indignados movement
in Spain, and debating the changes they wanted to see in their country.
Now, Syriza is trying to harness this energy and since the summer has
been holding public meetings of its own to determine the party’s
programme for government.
Manolis Glezos tells me he is one of the few MPs to have visited
these meetings across eece and lists an array of proposals that the
movement has thrown up: local and regional autonomy to combat
corruption; a justice system free from political interference; giving
social institutions such as trade unions and medical associations a say
in proposing policies; the “socialisation” of banks, in which members of
civil society sit on corporate boards; the right to recall MPs when
they don’t implement the policies they have been elected to enact.
First, Syriza must transform itself from a broad coalition into a
unified party. This month, it will hold the first of several conferences
where delegates elected by each of the public meetings will discuss
what principles the party should adopt.
The left is further divided: the KKE, along with a few other parties,
remains aloof, convinced that Greece needs to exit the euro before any
social change can begin. (Syriza would rather stay and build a wider
European movement.) According to Glezos, the rise of grassroots
democracy is already affecting how Greeks think about their country: “By
taking these assemblies to industries, factories, workplaces,
communities, it’s changing the whole shape of society.” This time, he
says, there is a chance to avoid the past mistakes of the left, because
this movement aims to put “the people in power and the people in
government”.
Glezos recalls the slogan of the polytechnic uprising: “Bread, education, freedom. These questions are still current.”
A week after visiting the clinic in Elliniko, I go to see another
project, supported once again by donations and staffed by volunteers.
This time, it’s food, not medicine, to provide for those who are unable
to feed themselves or their families. Staff tell me that they have been
overwhelmed by donations from the local community: shoppers at the
nearby supermarket drop by with anything from a few tins of tomatoes to
whole carrier bags full of supplies.
However, this isn’t Greece. It’s London – just down the road from my
house. Some 13 million people live below the poverty line in Britain and
as austerity forces more out of work or on to part-time wages, a
growing number of people are struggling to cover the basic necessities.
Since 2008, when 26,000 people used food banks, the number has
soared: more than 100,000 used them between April and September this
year and the Trussell Trust, which operates the largest network of food
banks in the UK, estimates that 200,000 people will use them in the year
to come.
Greece’s crisis may be acute but it is not unique. In Britain, its
effects have so far been easier to hide, while outbreaks of dissent have
been more spasmodic: the student occupations of 2010; the 2011 summer
riots; last autumn’s Occupy movement. And fortunately, the far right is
in decline, even though victim-blaming and xenophobia are rife in our
media.
None of this has to happen; but to stop it, we need each other.It’s Saturday morning in Athens and the players are taking up their
positions for a familiar ritual. Around the National Garden, behind the
Greek parliament, fortified police vans lie in wait, their occupants
playing cards or chatting on mobile phones. Along the streets that
stretch north from Syntagma Square, in front of the parliament building,
there are more police, standing on street corners in riot gear,
drinking iced coffee and idly watching groups of tourists or Athenians
running Saturday errands. Crisis or no, this is still a bustling capital
city.
Next door to the National Archaeological Museum, the courtyard of
which is peopled with ancient statues rescued from a shipwreck, limbs
eroded and faces barnacled, is the Athens Polytechnic. Inside the gates,
a crowd of people – elderly men, mothers with teenage children,
twentysomething couples – has gathered to lay red and white carnations
in front of a memorial stone. Around them, students are making banners,
leafleting and gathering into groups according to political affiliation.
Later, they will march noisily into the centre of Athens. For now,
however, the atmosphere is quiet, reverential, if a little tense.
Demonstrations have become commonplace in Athens, so much so that
people talk of “protest fatigue”. In the past month alone, there have
been two general strikes, plus another walkout on 14 November as part of
a pan-European day of action. On the night of 7 November, police
tear-gassed protesters in Syntagma Square, while inside the parliament
MPs debated a new wave of public spending cuts and privatisation
demanded by the troika – the EU, the IMF and the European Central Bank –
in return for another slice of bailout money. Opposition is such that
the measures are being implemented by ministerial decree –emergency
legislation reminiscent of Germany in the 1930s. And it’s hurting:
Eurostat reports that 31 per cent of the population, 3.5 million people,
are living near or below the poverty line and 15 per cent cannot afford
“basic commodities”. Greece is a laboratory for austerity, the most
extreme iteration of policies that are being imposed by governments from
London to Lisbon.
On Saturday 17 November, the protest is of a different kind. It is
the date on which Greece commemorates the fall of the military junta
that ruled the country from 1967 to 1974. On this day in 1973, a tank
burst through the gates of the Athens Polytechnic, which had been
occupied by students protesting against the military regime and
demanding the right to elect their leaders. This direct democracy had
been too much for the colonels to bear and 24 people were killed in the
crackdown that followed. The massacre spelled the beginning of the end
for their regime, which fell a year later. The 17th has long been a
symbolic date for the Greek left but in the past few years the ranks of
marchers have been swelled by a new generation.
As the students begin to form into blocs, stamping their feet in
unison, the old chant of those who fought the junta goes up: “Bread,
education, freedom!” Now, though, it comes with a reply: “The
dictatorship is not over!”
**
Manolis Glezos, white-haired and dressed in a sharp, powder- blue
jacket, leans forward across the desk and jabs a finger. “I want to
write an ‘I accuse’ to Britain. During the war, we stood by them as
allies. So where’s Britain now?”
At the age of 90, Glezos knows Greece’s recent history intimately. In
1941, he and a comrade tore down the swastika flag from the Acropolis,
at the height of the Nazi occupation. They were imprisoned and tortured.
When civil war erupted in 1946, between the communist- led resistance
partisans and a rightwing government propped up by Britain and the US,
he was sentenced to death. He was sent to prison camps twice more in the
years that followed – along with thousands of other leftists – and
eventually forced into exile when the junta came to power. Yet Glezos is
more than a symbol of resistance; he is back in front-line politics, as
an MP.
I meet Glezos in his office at the Greek parliament, which is staffed
by a couple of young assistants who are busy posting copies of his
speeches on Facebook. (The most recent one has been “liked” 680 times,
Glezos tells me.) He is an MP for Syriza, the coalition of radical
left-wing parties that has been the main bene - ficiary of public
discontent. In the past three years, it has gained momentum as support
has drained away from the centre-left Pasok, which once promised Greeks a
welfare state and national self-determination but now finds itself in
coalition with the right-wing New Democracy, administering the troika’s
demands. In May’s general election, Syriza won an unprecedented 17 per
cent of the vote. At a second election, called when the government
failed to hold a coalition together, its vote rose to 27 per cent and it
narrowly missed an outright victory. It is now the main opposition
party and most opinion polls put it on course to win power the next time
elections are held.
For the first time since 2008, Europe faces the real possibility of a
government whose stated aim is, as Glezos tells me, to “cancel” the
debt, halting the programme of spending cuts and demanding that the
troika renegotiate terms. “Two and a half thousand years ago, an ancient
writer, Menander, said: ‘Loans make people slaves.’ You can forgive
other people if they don’t know this but Greeks are not allowed not to
know this.”
According to Procopis Papastratis, a professor at Panteion University
in Athens, Syriza’s success has sent a shockwave through the Greek
political establishment. “The left terrifies a lot of people . . . They
say that if the left comes, they will slaughter us or they will take our
houses like Stalin did in the Soviet Union. The big businesses say that
they will leave Greece and they say to those who work for them that if
you vote Syriza, you will be unemployed because we will take our
companies and go.”
For Glezos, the division is “not between left and right. It is
between the Greek people and those who have subjected themselves to the
troika and the will of the powerful.” And the elite have good reason to
be scared. “We don’t just want to give a good make-up to the system. We
really want to change it.” Glezos sets out a range of measures – a
crackdown on Greece’s endemic tax evasion; forcing banks to loan the
government money at zero interest; investment in industry and
agriculture – that he believes would restore economic prosperity.
His pugnacious stance encapsulates the popular feeling that the
current government is not acting in the nation’s best interests. “The
crisis was not provoked by Greek people. Why should [we] pay for the
crisis? This is a basic question. I am never going to stop asking until
someone has an answer.”
**
Nationalism, however, always has its dark side. Like many other
Greeks I meet, 31-year-old Kelly feels deep anger at the way her country
was led into crisis. Greece only gained entry to the eurozone by
manipulating economic data – as did other countries, including Italy –
and was left exposed when the crash came. “I feel it was a lie all these
years. The way they told us how things will be – that you will have a
good career if you study. For our generation, we have learned one system
and now suddenly there is a big change.”
Kelly is not doing too badly –when we meet, at a sandwich chain in a
southern suburb of Athens, she has just been promoted to sales manager
at the telemarketing firm where she works. But Kelly wants to “punish”
the politicians she believes have led Greece into crisis. She feels the
biggest shock she can inflict on the system is to give her vote to the
fascist Golden Dawn. To Kelly, the party’s main appeal is that it’s
“real”: “They say to you, ‘I am the devil,’ and they are devils. I
prefer someone that says the truth and says to me, ‘You know what, I am
the bad guy,’ rather than another one that says to me, ‘I am the good
guy and I will save you.’” She stops and asks, a little nervously, “Does
that make me crazy?”
Kelly is not alone. The first almost anyone outside Greece heard of
Golden Dawn was in May 2012, when the party swept into parliament with 7
per cent of the vote. Politics in Greece have polarised – and just as
Syriza’s support soared, so right-wing voters have been pushed further
and further to extremes, as a succession of right-wing parties have been
tainted by coalition.
Europe has become used to the slow, attritional progress of far-right
movements; those led by fascists such as Nick Griffin or the Le Pen
family, who have put on suits and concealed their real views in an
attempt to enter the mainstream. But from Golden Dawn’s Nazi-esque
imagery to the militaristic rallies and openly violent conduct of its
members, it was immediately apparent that this time was different.
Golden Dawn did not emerge from nowhere. As Dimitris Psarras, an
investigative journalist who has recently published
The Black Book of Golden Dawn,
explained to me, the party was founded in the early 1980s by Nikolaos
Michal - oliakos, a right-wing extremist with connections to the junta.
From the outset, the group’s core beliefs were “neo-Nazi” and
“pagan”, says Psarras, mixing the ideas of Adolf Hitler with a nostalgia
for ancient Greek culture – and the movement was structured along
quasi-military lines, modelled on the
Sturmabteilung, Hitler’s
stormtroopers. During its early years, Golden Dawn operated as a kind of
security service, doing bodyguard work and “the dirty jobs” for certain
members of Greece’s wealthy elite.
In the 1990s, explains Psarras, a series of changes in Greek society
enabled Golden Dawn to grow. First came a rise in nationalist sentiment
after disputes with the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia over its
name and with Turkey over ownership of islands in the Aegean Sea. Then
came a wave of immigrants following the collapse of the eastern bloc and
wars in the Balkans. Finally, with the advent of unregulated private
television channels –whose sensationalist output, says Psarras, is “like
your
Sun newspaper in Britain” – came a rise in antiimmigrant sentiment.
These feelings continued to grow throughout the 2000s, exacerbated by
mainstream politicians who pandered to xenophobia. Now, many Greeks
have come to see immigration as a cause of the country’s economic
turmoil. During my conversation with Kelly, she was at pains to stress
that she bore no animosity to foreigners. “I want you to know about
Greek people that we are very generous, very clever, very open-minded
and very hard-working,” she told me. “But at this time, it’s like a ship
– we have water [coming in] from one side and, on the other side,
sharks.”
For all its shocking brutality, Golden Dawn has consolidated its
support in a way typical of far-right parties across Europe. It follows a
theory of community politics derived, says Psarras, from the French
nouvelle droite
– a group of far-right intellectuals who set out the blueprint for the
Front National’s success in France and whose ideas Griffin tried to
emulate as leader of the British National Party.
The difference is in Golden Dawn’s relationship with the state.
Greece has a history of right-wing militias collaborating with the
police and there have been documented incidents in which Golden Dawn
members have appeared to work in tandem with officers in attacking
left-wing protesters. One study of voting patterns suggests that as much
as 50 per cent of Athens police officers voted for Golden Dawn at the
last election.
A Golden Dawn MP, Ilias Kasidiaris, physically attacked a female
opponent on live television but managed to evade arrest. Three others
were filmed smashing up market stalls belonging to immigrant vendors –
and posted the video on Golden Dawn’s website –yet have not been charged
with any crime.
The tide may be turning: in response to public outrage, all four have
now been stripped of parliamentary immunity to prosecution but Klio
Papapantoleon, a lawyer who has represented several victims of attacks
committed by Golden Dawn members, points out that the Greek justice
system, while slow at the best of times, has been “very lenient in
judging these members”. She points to the testimony of victims and
witnesses who say that they have been “obstructed and encumbered by
police officers while trying to sue members of Golden Dawn”.
For now, mainstream politicians follow the same logic as in other
countries when faced with a threat from the far right: they compete on
its territory. The government’s most recent move on immigration, for
instance, has been to suspend all applications for Greek citizenship.
Since August, a major police operation has been in progress to round up
undocumented migrants and put them in detention centres. Yet such moves
have only further legitimised Golden Dawn, which now positions itself as
the real defender of the Greek people against austerity, taking a
strong anti-bailout line and staging “Greeks-only” food distribution,
blood donations and soup kitchens.
Still, the same Nazi beliefs lie at its core, glimpsed on occasions
such as when one of its MPs read out a part of the anti-Semitic
Protocols of the Elders of Zion in parliament or in the anti-gay protests it organised that forced the closure of the play
Corpus Christi.
Through an intermediary, I contact “John”, a member of Golden Dawn
who would speak to me only on the condition of anonymity. Now 32 and
working for a banking group in Athens, he joined the movement at 16,
convinced that politicians had “betrayed” Greece over the territorial
dispute with Turkey. He tells me he was attracted by the “total
discipline” of the group. “There was mutual appreciation and, of course,
respect towards higher-ranking members.” There were frequent meetings
and talks aimed at “ideological orientation”, towards the ideas of what
John describes as “National Socialism”. His main task, he says, was to
spread these ideas among his friends and classmates, handing out fliers
and selling copies of the party newspaper.
Because of family and work commitments, John is no longer an active
member but he still votes for the party. What, I ask, would Golden Dawn
do if it got into government? “We’ll do what others don’t dare . . . I
think about how many times people have laughed at us [during election
counts] – and now half of them feel intimidated and half consider us the
only solution.”
Journalists, drawn as ever to a good story, have struggled to deal
with this. I do, too. Nobody wants to underplay the threat Golden Dawn
poses to Greek democracy and there’s a pressing need to expose its
underlying extremism. Yet the aggression, which may seem alarming to an
outsider, is exactly what attracted voters such as Kelly in the first
place. “They do bad things. I don’t agree with that I don’t want them to
be the government,” she tells me. “My intention is just to get them in
the parliament.”
For now, though, the door to power remains ajar. And it will be much harder to shut than it was to open.
**
Just north-west of the centre of Athens stands the grand Orthodox
church of Aghios Panteleimonas, dedicated to the fourth-century martyr
St Pantaleon. In the square outside is a children’s playground; it’s
locked shut and looks like it has been that way for some time. When I
visited with a friend early one weekday morning, our only companions
were stray cats that picked their way through the weeds sprouting
through the tarmac beneath the swings. Greek flags hung limply from
apartment balconies beyond the square and, on the ground in front of the
church steps, spray-painted in blue and white, was the message
“Foreigners out – Greece for the Greeks”.
A few blocks away, down a side street off one of the main boulevards,
is the office of Yonous Muhammadi, chair of the Greek Forum of
Refugees. I had trouble finding it: there is no sign outside and the
buzzer is unmarked. It’s for a good reason, Muhammadi tells me – he was
chased out of his previous office two years ago by fascist thugs, who
smashed the place and beat him up. For im migrants such as Muhammadi,
who came to Greece from Afghanistan in 2001, the rise of Golden Dawn has
merely brought an existing problem out into the open. “In 2010, when we
closed the office of the forum, we held a big press conference. We told
them, now it is our problem, migrants and refugees, but it will be a
problem for Greek people, also. For all of you.”
Like the rest of Europe, Greece experienced a further wave of
immigration from the late 1990s onwards. Refugees – from conflicts in
Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Somalia and elsewhere – were joined by
economic migrants from South Asia and Africa. Three things combined to
turn this into an acute crisis. The first was Greece’s lack of a
functioning immigration system. Applying for citizenship was – and is –
so difficult that the only way most migrants can get permission to stay
in the country is by presenting themselves as refugees. Temporary papers
are renewed every six months and it can take up to ten years for an
asylum application to be processed. The second was the removal of
landmines from the Evros region in northern Greece, on the Turkish
border. This opened up a safer route for migrants who previously had to
make dangerous journeys by boat across the Mediterranean.
The third, decisive factor was the construction of “fortress Europe” –
a pan-European immigration policy designed to make it harder for
migrants from poor countries to enter the EU. Spain and Italy
strengthened their border controls, making Greece an even more popular
point of entry for migrants crossing from Asia or the southern
Mediterranean. Along with this came the Dublin II Regulation, a 2003
agreement that asylum-seekers would be sent back to the country where
they first set foot in the EU.
It was a perfect storm: hundreds of migrants a day being “returned”
to a country they never intended to live in, with thousands more
arriving, unaware of what awaited them.
Many migrants, such as Muhammadi, have made successes of their lives
here: a trained doctor, he now works as a nurse in one of the capital’s
main hospitals. Tanzanian and Pakistani shopkeepers have businesses all
over the city. However, the failed policies have led to thousands of
people being trapped in Greece, vulnerable to people-smugglers and
crammed into apartments in once-smart citycentre neighbourhoods or
sleeping rough, without sanitation, work or food, in squares such as
Aghios Panteleimonas. At its peak, estimates Muhammadi, there were
perhaps 5,000 Afghans intending to stay in Greece but a constant
turnover of between 12,000 and 15,000 coming and leaving. Crime – theft,
drug-trafficking and prostitution – rose in Athens city centre, and at
one point around 500 people were sleeping rough in the playground
outside Aghios Panteleimonas. The local council’s response was to lock
it shut, forcing them on to the streets.
What came next, says Muhammadi, could have been avoided if the police
had done their job and kept order. Instead, feeling like they had been
abandoned, Greek residents in the area surrounding the church formed a
campaign group – the “angry citizens” –which was soon infiltrated by
members of Golden Dawn. The party encouraged Greeks to hang the national
flag from their windows to show opposition to immigration and began
carrying out “vigilante” patrols and covert attacks on immigrants. “The
violence was here before the crisis,” says Muhammadi. “And the police
were there, they were looking, but they were doing nothing. When I was
attacked, I was bleeding but when I went to the police station to
complain, the policemen who were standing in front told me, ‘If you
complain, we’ll put you in a detention centre for two nights.’”
Then, in May 2011, came the spark. A shocking murder – of a Greek man
as he fetched his car to take his pregnant wife to hospital – committed
by two illegal immigrants from Afghanistan, caused a national media
scandal. It provoked a two-week pogrom around Aghios Panteleimonas
orchestrated by Golden Dawn, with fascist gangs attacking non-whites in
broad daylight, dragging them off buses and destroying their shops. The
playground was closed, immigrants forced off the streets and the message
sent out: Golden Dawn is the group that knows how to sort out the
immigrant “problem”. We do what others don’t dare.
The difference now, Muhammadi tells me, is a much wider acceptance of
this violence as part of everyday life. “Before, the fascists would
attack a group of immigrants and leave straight away. Now, they are
there, they are waiting, they are attacking and the others look on. And
nobody can do anything.”
Later, after my meeting with Muhammadi, I visited Saxi and Hakima, an
Afghan couple in their late twenties with three young children. Kicking
off my shoes, I was welcomed into their small apartment, which they
share with four other refugees. We sat on carpets and cushions in their
living room, while Hakima brought tea and boiled sweets. When I asked if
their children had been born here, meaning in Greece, Hakima said,
“Yes, here,” and pointed to the floor just in front of me.
As their two-year-old daughter Zeinab climbed over me and drew in my
notebook, Saxi explained how he had been a policeman in Afghanistan but
fled, fearing for his life, over a decade ago. “I haven’t seen my
parents in 12 years,” he told me. “I would go back if it was safe.”
After travelling through Iran and Turkey, he arrived in Greece, where he
found work in the construction industry. Hakima joined him in 2008. It
was always hard, explained Saxi, but things started to get worse from
that year onwards. Two and a half years ago, he was beaten up so badly
that he spent a week in hospital. When he came out, he was attacked
again – and the time spent off work cost him his job. Saxi had recently
found another job but Hakima told me that the family struggles for money
and that she takes it in turns with other Afghan women to root through
rubbish bins by night to find goods to sell and food to eat. They can’t
go in large groups, because they’re scared of attracting attention and
being attacked. “We thought we would come here, that we would be safe,”
says Saxi, “but the people here don’t treat us like human beings.”
Saxi’s and Hakima’s story is typical. One recent study by the newly
formed Racist Violence Recording Network noted 87 attacks in Greece
between January and September 2012, 83 of which took place in public
spaces – in squares, streets or on public transport. Daphne Kapetanaki,
of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, tells me that
these statistics are “just the tip of the iceberg”. Many immigrants will
not report attacks, she says, because they lack papers and fear arrest
or abuse by police officers. The network’s report also highlighted an
almost total lack of prosecutions for racist attacks and identified 15
incidents in which police and racist violence were “interlinked”.
Many Greeks are shocked at the rise of fascism in their country but
there is disagreement on what to do about it. Until recently, Syriza
took the line that fighting austerity should be the focus. Anarchist
groups have organised night-time motorbike patrols in areas with large
immigrant populations. Yet Petros Constantinou of the Movement Against
Racism and Fascist Threat (KEERFA) is adamant that a successful campaign
will work only if it gives immigrants the courage to speak out, argue
for their place in Greek society and join the wider protest movement. He
looks to Britain’s history of successful anti-fascist movements; in
particular the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism of the late
1970s. A national demonstration against racism and fascism in Syntagma
Square has been called for 19 January.
For its part, the Racist Violence Recording Network hopes that its
work will bring pressure on the government to reform the justice system:
already, the minister of public order has promised to set up dedicated
police units to tackle racist crime and to provide training for all
officers in dealing with these issues. However, as Kapetanaki explains,
what’s needed is “an assurance that migrants will not be arrested and
detained if they report an attack”.
It will take hard work to lift the veil of fear. When I ask Saxi if
he has ever considered joining anti-fascist protests, his answer is
bleak. “Greek people, whoever they are, they hate us.”
**
By late afternoon on 17 November, the march from the Athens
Polytechnic has swelled in numbers. Now some 20,000 strong, the students
having been joined by various political groups, including the
still-powerful Greek Communist Party (KKE), it snakes its way through
central Athens, past the Academy, a neoclassical building from which
glares in red the graffiti “
Malakies [wankers] – you are the
refugees of Europe!”; past Syntagma and the parliament, guarded by lines
of police in gas masks; and up a palm tree-lined boulevard to its
target, the US embassy. Obeying cold war logic, the US backed the
colonels’ regime – just as Britain had backed the Greek right against
the partisans two decades earlier – and to many Greeks, the troika’s
bailout is just the latest instance of foreign interference.
By the time the march reaches the embassy, a looming Bauhaus edifice
emblazoned with a giant state seal, it is dark. Everyone expects a
confrontation with police. But this year, the marchers keep walking,
pushing on further up the road. It is the third day of Israel’s
bombardment of Gaza and the demonstrators have decided to take their
protest all the way to the Israeli embassy.
It’s a symbolic gesture but it mirrors the many acts of solidarity,
big or small, I see or hear about during my stay. One rainy evening
later that week, I take a taxi out to Elliniko, a suburb of Athens, to
visit a large medical clinic staffed entirely by volunteers. Set up to
provide medical care to the growing number of Greeks without health
insurance, it has dedicated rooms for a GP, for paediatricians,
gynaecologists, psychologists and more.
A dentist whose practice was closing gave the clinic his entire
surgery’s worth of equipment. There are arrangements to use the
radiology and chemotherapy departments of nearby hospitals out of hours.
Doctors come to work here for a few hours after doing a full day’s
work. A trained pharmacist co-ordinates the sorting out and cataloguing
of medicines. Cancer medication is particularly expensive and many
people donate unused courses of tablets when relatives die. Volunteers
without medical training spend their time doing clerical work or
building up the network of donors.
Showing me around, Elena – a freelance economist by day, she says
with an ironic laugh – tells me that since the summer the number of
people using the clinic has doubled. It treated 1,200 in August and
nearly 2,500 in October. As the number of people needing help soars, so,
too, does the number of people ready to step in to help. “It’s not why I
do it,” says Elena, “but every day I come here, I leave feeling just a
little bit taller.”
There are two rules, she says – “No money and leave your politics at
the door.” But its very existence raises an explicitly political
question: what if we could build a society that operated this way not
out of dire emergency, but by design?
It is this challenge that faces Syriza, should it fulfil expectations
and win the next election. In 2011, ordinary Greeks began occupying
public squares all over the country, in imitation of the
indignados movement
in Spain, and debating the changes they wanted to see in their country.
Now, Syriza is trying to harness this energy and since the summer has
been holding public meetings of its own to determine the party’s
programme for government.
Manolis Glezos tells me he is one of the few MPs to have visited
these meetings across eece and lists an array of proposals that the
movement has thrown up: local and regional autonomy to combat
corruption; a justice system free from political interference; giving
social institutions such as trade unions and medical associations a say
in proposing policies; the “socialisation” of banks, in which members of
civil society sit on corporate boards; the right to recall MPs when
they don’t implement the policies they have been elected to enact.
First, Syriza must transform itself from a broad coalition into a
unified party. This month, it will hold the first of several conferences
where delegates elected by each of the public meetings will discuss
what principles the party should adopt.
The left is further divided: the KKE, along with a few other parties,
remains aloof, convinced that Greece needs to exit the euro before any
social change can begin. (Syriza would rather stay and build a wider
European movement.) According to Glezos, the rise of grassroots
democracy is already affecting how Greeks think about their country: “By
taking these assemblies to industries, factories, workplaces,
communities, it’s changing the whole shape of society.” This time, he
says, there is a chance to avoid the past mistakes of the left, because
this movement aims to put “the people in power and the people in
government”.
Glezos recalls the slogan of the polytechnic uprising: “Bread, education, freedom. These questions are still current.”
A week after visiting the clinic in Elliniko, I go to see another
project, supported once again by donations and staffed by volunteers.
This time, it’s food, not medicine, to provide for those who are unable
to feed themselves or their families. Staff tell me that they have been
overwhelmed by donations from the local community: shoppers at the
nearby supermarket drop by with anything from a few tins of tomatoes to
whole carrier bags full of supplies.
However, this isn’t Greece. It’s London – just down the road from my
house. Some 13 million people live below the poverty line in Britain and
as austerity forces more out of work or on to part-time wages, a
growing number of people are struggling to cover the basic necessities.
Since 2008, when 26,000 people used food banks, the number has
soared: more than 100,000 used them between April and September this
year and the Trussell Trust, which operates the largest network of food
banks in the UK, estimates that 200,000 people will use them in the year
to come.
Greece’s crisis may be acute but it is not unique. In Britain, its
effects have so far been easier to hide, while outbreaks of dissent have
been more spasmodic: the student occupations of 2010; the 2011 summer
riots; last autumn’s Occupy movement. And fortunately, the far right is
in decline, even though victim-blaming and xenophobia are rife in our
media.
None of this has to happen; but to stop it, we need each other.
fonte: http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/politics/2012/12/warning-athens
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