One could easily be forgiven for thinking that we are back in the days of the Weimar Republic. All the hallmarks are there for the drawing of instructive parallels: a disintegrating and ineffectual state, crippled by reparations, or in Greece’s case, loan repayments, a complete polarisation between a neo-Nazi group whose thuggish members rampage on the streets like the Stormtroopers of old, beating up immigrants and murdering political opponents, and the extreme left, ineffectual, but no stranger to acts of political violence itself, acts that, it deserves to be mentioned, have gone uninvestigated and unpunished.
Finally, if that were not enough, we have the recent arrests of Golden Dawn leaders, in the aftermath of the death of rapper Pavlos Fyssas, leading many who place stock in the theory that history repeats itself in the fear that their ensuing trial will, like Adolf Hitler’s trial after the failed Munich Putsch, merely be used as a platform from which to garner sympathy, which it turn will lead the Golden Dawners to subvert democracy in Greece, seek Anschluss with Cyprus, annex southern Bulgaria and seek Lebensraum in the East.
Such fears placed in this context appear laughable until it is considered that as late as 1974, another bunch of Helleno-saviours did attempt an Anschluss, one which proved the catalyst for the long-planned invasion of the island by Turkey. The question then is not whether history will repeat itself, for the nuances and contingencies of every situation are invariably different, but why we as a people seem extremely reluctant to learn from such a history, or to take such lessons from history as are required to be drawn, seriously. Undoubtedly, all but the most demented would agree that Nazism, with all its hateful trappings, was a malevolent force in history and its legacy in Greece was a most horrific and destructive one, resulting in death, devastation and starvation. Nonetheless, eight per cent of Greek electors have voted for a party that apes the Nazi party and Orthodox hierarchs such the Metropolitan Paul of Siatista, who have endeavoured to condemn this phenomenon, have been reprimanded by their peers for “upsetting the many Greeks who voted for this party”. Similarly, despite the downfall of the socialist bloc, there remains in Greece a nucleus of people who, despite the depredations caused to societies and the environment during the Communist era, remain wedded to that ideology and, up until the rise of Golden Dawn, saw nothing wrong in committing acts of vandalism, destruction of property and even, in the case of the burning of the Marfin bank where three employees died, manslaughter for political purposes.
In an over-politicised country like Greece, where even the election for primary school ‘classroom president’ takes place on political party lines, political parties are supported with the same amount of emotion and having regard to the same connotations as apply to football teams. This is perilous, for political parties are not football teams. They are charged with the weighty responsibility of administering a country and planning for the future of a society. In treating their constituents as nothing more than football fans, Greek political parties have, since the downfall of the Junta, engendered an environment of political immaturity and lack of clear social thinking, where it becomes acceptable to vote for neo-Nazis, or leftists who immolate innocent people in the buildings that they set alight, simply because to the vast majority of Greek voters who have been reared thus, politics is a game or pastime that has few, if any, practical consequences.
The assassination of Pavlos Fyssas has not caused Greeks to suddenly sit up, pull the wool from over their eyes and realise that the extreme parties they are supporting are not only ridiculous, because they have no realisable strategy for steering Greece away from its current woes, but also dangerous and unsavoury. Instead, just as a group of children stop playing a particularly dangerous game because someone has just been hurt, so too have many adult Greek electors finally realised that the time to immaturely ‘play’ politics is finally over, because someone, namely Pavlos Fyssas, has suffered the ultimate hurt and the game, that of petulantly supporting extreme parties out of protest, whim or whimsy has finally been seen to have serious repercussions.
Retaining light-weight political convictions based on pique, in a polarised political and social landscape, is no longer tenable in Greece. The breakdown of the Greek political and social system has exposed the major fault line that runs beneath the foundations of Greek ‘democracy’ – that of a tendency to polarise. Whether it is the battle between the rival captains of 1821 which culminated in a series of civil wars, the social upheaval caused between the supporters of Trikoupis and Deligiannis, the clash between the monarchists and the Venizelists which actually saw Greece divided into two separate governments, or the Greek Civil War, between Royalists, Venizelists and Communists, strange forces unique to Greece lurk on the margins of normality, and these need to be understood and addressed if the Greek government as a whole, and society in general, is to combat the latest bout of extremism. After all, many of the current members of parliament and their families are products of this fault line themselves.
Whether or not mini-Fuhrer Michaloliakos attempts to convert his trial into a platform for propagating hate or not, his adherents’ actions, in murdering an opinionated left-leaning rapper, have compelled Greeks to stare into the abyss upon whose precipice they were precariously perched and shrink back from taking the plunge. Greece 2013 is not Weimar Germany. Granted Golden Dawn has supporters within the right-wing, the police and the army. Granted Golden Dawn espouses a form of neo-paganism akin to that advocated by the Nazi Alfred Rosenberg in the nineteen twenties and thirties. Unlike the Nazi Party, however, there are no significant industrialists willing to put decent money on such a compromised steed again. Unlike the Nazi Party, Golden Dawn will find the fact that the Greek people and the world at large can draw on historical precedent to judge the effects of elevating such a hate-filled organisation to power an insurmountable obstacle in their quest to assume total power.
Ultimately, it is for the Greek people to decide the form they wish their society to take. Weimar Germans who voted for the Nazis can in part be forgiven for their transgressions for, back in the thirties, fascism was a relatively new ideology that offered much and which had not yet been tested. Sixty years and a multitude of brutal and failed fascist regimes later, there is absolutely no excuse for voting for or supporting a political group that seeks to exclude others on the basis of their race and which advocates and practices forms of violence inspired by the perpetrators of the most heinous crime against humanity ever committed. It is a tragedy that it took the sacrificial murder of Pavlos Fyssas to permit the Greek mainstream to come to its senses. Whether this will translate into a more mature political culture of analysis rather than the grandstand, and whether this will encourage the left also to seek alternate forms of expression than futile pickets and street riots, remains to be seen.
For those for whom the brashness of Golden Dawn yet retains some lustre, a word from history, from the pen of ex-Nazi sympathiser Pastor Niemöller: “First they came for the communists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist. Then they came for the socialists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.”
* Dean Kalimniou is a Melbourne based solicitor and freelance journalist.