Last September, I was in Piraeus visiting my mother; we went together to the open market in Nikaia to buy vegetables and whatever else people buy in such places. As we were purchasing carrots and lettuce from a middle-aged lady from Pakistan, suddenly two men dressed in black started pushing my mother back, shouting that it was unpatriotic to buy anything from immigrants.
My mother is eighty-years-old and if she had fallen down, her bones would have been broken. I said that to one of the beefed-up (fouskotoi in Greek); “You are acting against the nation,” he replied, “by supporting illegal immigrants.”
“And who appointed you,” I said, “the guardian of the nation? We have the police for this.” “No,” he shouted close to my face. “We are the nationalists and protect our society from the foreign vermin.” We started punching each other and ended up in the police station. There, the police officer, a lovely lady, told me with disdain that I provoked them and there was no reason to make any report about this because the case would be against me. Meanwhile they had punched me in the face and I had two broken teeth bleeding. She almost kicked us out of the building.
Given what we learned during the last few days, this incident is by no means special – indeed I must have been lucky that they didn’t pursue the issue further. A minor and insignificant story, of course; but look what happened with Pavlos Fyssas the other day. The dead are multiplying; as they killed last year a poor boy from Pakistan, they bashed two legal migrants from Egypt, who were living legally in the country for over ten years, and destroyed the property of so many people with the machismo and the arrogance of those who know that the police won’t touch them.
We avoid discussing the problem of the fascist mentality in Greece; we think that such things happen elsewhere but not at the birthplace of democracy and of the usual self-indulgent rhetoric. In reality, Greek society is permeated by a profound feeling of resentment against everybody – and in this resentment one can locate the deep inferiority complex that many young people feel because they are totally powerless, marginalised and irrelevant to what happens around them.
The problem with Greek society is that it never dealt successfully with the many traumas of its history: the Asia Minor catastrophe, the German Occupation, the Civil war, the political persecution, the 1967 Dictatorship, the Cyprus division, amongst others. Having no closure, indeed catharsis, to these lingering traumas, people feel drawn to false and deluded messiahs who present themselves as embodiments of power, purity and confidence. This has led to a complete confusion: the Golden Dawn people with their German ideology presented themselves as Greek nationalists. They adopted the Nazi salute which they presented as ancient Greek, confusing ancient Greece with ancient Rome, because it was a Roman salute and not Greek. They adopted the swastika thinking that this is another ancient Greek symbol which is also untrue as they have confused it with the ancient Greek cross, which was a symbol of harmony and not of power. They keep talking about Plato, Aristotle and other philosophers, the people who don’t know what philosophy is about and if they lived in ancient times they would have exterminated most of the philosophers.
Indeed for them, ancient Greece was in reality only Sparta, a militaristic and closed society, which despite its glorious armies left nothing behind except some ruins and lots of stories written down by its opponents, living in the Athenian democracy. You will tell me, how is it possible for such vulgar individuals to have read anything and be interested in anything produced by the ancient Greeks? They are the product of complete lack of education and utter ignorance; nihilistic desperados who pretend to bring hope and optimism, whereas they cause only destruction and havoc.
There is something more to be admitted: modern Greeks always feel left out by history. We haven’t contributed anything to modern culture, science or politics; for the Greeks to do something significant they must leave Greece. It is really sad, but the political system in the country creates the foundations for a fascist mentality based on xenophobia, social panic and a deep inferiority problem. The Golden Dawn leadership are not simply deluded: they want to destroy Greek culture, and replace it with the Roman cult of power and domination.
Demographically, most of them belong to the generation of entitlements, which thrived after 1980, without having worked a single day in their life. It is interesting that most of the leadership are unemployed while as the judicial investigation goes deeper it is revealed that, like a criminal mafia, they offered protection to night club owners, blackmailed people, received bribes, worked together with the Albanian mafia, amongst other achievements. Yet many people voted for them: feeling humiliated and frustrated with the political system they decided to punish everybody. In all countries where such feelings prevail, conspiracy theories thrive. No one will ever take responsibility in the country for what they have committed: there must be somebody else to blame.
The inability to do anything to change their political system makes them feel that black uniforms, torches and obscene language make them powerful again; and they attack powerless immigrants and poor people because they cannot do anything against those who create the problems. The only thing they repeat is a language of phallic obscenity: we will f*** you, you are f*****, you are all c**** – all these things are said in public. The profound hatred towards the female body and sexuality finds in such statements its most vulgar and horrible expression.
In a few years from now, when the truth about these dangerous clowns will be out, we will remember this time as one when a bunch of thugs, crooks and idiots tried to ridicule Greece. Who is to blame? All those who voted for them – economic crisis, insecurity and social problems are very feeble excuses to be taken seriously. All those who voted for them are the real criminals, the real culprits, who hate Greece and care only for their own interests. I am more than certain that the worst is not over and the thugs who voted for them, unrepented, will vote for them again. They want to humiliate and destroy Greece and they won’t stop until they are successful – forgetting of course that they themselves are Greece and whatever they do is against their own self and survival – but of course they will invent a conspiracy theory to solve this contradiction. The destructive climax of the actions of such psychopaths has not been reached yet. Another catastrophe is approaching – simply be prepared.
* Vrasidas Karalis is Professor of Modern Greek at the University of Sydney.