Golden Dawn and the deafening silence
of Europe
Posted on January 10, 2013 by irmedeaca
Normally I would be asking everybody to “spread the word” but at this precise moment I
don’t have to. Everybody understands the dangers semi- hidden behind the rise of a neo nazi “party”in the very cradle of democracy with a police backing them.As they have stated via their spokeperson,Golden Dawn is not self defined as a POLITICAL PARTY, which statement leads to a reasonable question.If they do not consider their “movement”as a political one,then why they are in the Greek Parliament?
don’t have to. Everybody understands the dangers semi- hidden behind the rise of a neo nazi “party”in the very cradle of democracy with a police backing them.As they have stated via their spokeperson,Golden Dawn is not self defined as a POLITICAL PARTY, which statement leads to a reasonable question.If they do not consider their “movement”as a political one,then why they are in the Greek Parliament?
The Greek nation is way too numb from the harsh austerity to react. I personally was expecting something more than team chanting in the Syntagma Sq. as the Governments always suppress the chants with tear gas and club hits on the head.But the outlook,the moves,the aspirations and the global expansion of this particular “party” that created so much fuss in Europe,is really worrying. If you don’t think so,then I am living in another world.They have expanded to Canada,Australia and the States,in those 3 continents the greek community is big and obviously they thought they’d encounter some kind of response.But those Greeks living abroad,are sons of immigrants.. once upon a time they were immigrants.
Finally,just to get it out of my chest,who is REALLY profiting from the NeoNazism rise not only in Greece but in the entire Europe? Don’t be so naive to think it’s just an austerity phenomenon. Someone [..] manifactured the austerity term and all the vultures rushed in.
Finally,what does HRW and the EU and whoever is in charge,what do they do? Did they ever declared this organization “as an outlaw one contradicting all democratic rights?We don’t need the UN to distribute common meals we sure need Amnesty Int’l to stand up against this bunch of lunatics beating up even Greek civilians.
I wish we could just quit using the pieces of paper called money and nobody would be oweing not a cent to anyone. Yet our society is so desperately far from that
Excuse the outburst but had enough and I wasn’t even foreseeing that
Yet it got real for many of us in the north,in the South in the East and in the west and the more voices joined the more forces we gather.
With a neo-Nazi party on the rise in Greece, it seems that even a Weimar-like scenario might be tolerable for EU leaders insisting on further austerity.
“For Peace, Freedom and Democracy. Never Again Fascism. Millions of Dead Remind Us”. Those are the words carved into a memorial stone underneath the Austrian house where Adolf Hitler was born in 1889. “Never Again”. Thus was the uniform slogan resounding across Europe after the full scale of Nazi horror became known in the wake of WWII. The cosmopolitan project of European integration was founded upon this promise. Never again would fascists and warmongers be allowed to tear the Old Continent and its people apart.
One day it may therefore be considered one of history’s greatest ironies that, as EU leaders were busy deciding who would collect its Nobel Prize for “the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights,” those same leaders remained woefully silent when a recent survey indicated that the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party now polls third in Greece, at 14 percent — a showing comparable to that of Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party in 1930, three years before rising to power and setting the world on course for WWII.
Image: Golden Dawn members with party leader Nikolaos Michaloliakos (front left)
Golden Dawn Backed By THe Police
Golden Dawn Backed By THe PoliceFor clarity’s sake: the comparison made between National Socialism and Golden Dawn is by no means an exaggeration. We are talking about an extreme-right organization whose emblem deliberately resembles a swastika; whose leader publicly gave the Nazi salute upon his election to Parliament; whose magazine regularly features articles and pictures of the Führer himself; whose spokesman recentlyassaulted two female rivals on a live TV show; whose manifesto pledges to raid all immigrants out of hospitals and all non-Greek children out of kindergartens; and whose MPs actively participate in racist pogroms against Greece’s immigrant population. (Oh, and by the way, Golden Dawn’s favourite band is called Pogrom, known for such hits as “Auschwitz” and “Speak Greek Or Die”. Incidentally, its former bassist is now one of Golden Dawn’s 18 MPs.)
No surprise, then, that even the mild-mannered BBC is now making eerie comparisonswith the early days of the austerity-stricken Weimar Republic. It is happening again. Fascism is once again on the rise in Europe. And what do EU leaders have to say about this? Nothing, it seems. As neo-Nazi militia run amok in the streets of Athens, Brussels and Berlin remain forever shrouded in a deafening silence. The only thing European leaders seem to care about is that Greece repays its debts. Democracy, human rights and the rule of law have all been relegated to secondary concerns — to serve financial interests, even a strong flavor of fascism now appears to be tolerable.
On Monday, a spokesman for the German Chancellor Angela Merkel told journalists that the cancellation of Greece’s debt would be “in violation” of German budget laws. But when The Guardian published a terrifying report on forty anti-fascist activists who had been tortured by police in prison — with some beaten up to the point of severe bruising and broken bones and others forced to strip naked, bend over and spread their buttcheeks while reciting fascist slogans to their comrades — no European official seemed to care enough to declare these acts to be “in violation” of the Third Article of the European Convention of Human Rights prohibiting torture.
In fact, European leaders couldn’t care less. Back in May, José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, publicly questioned the neo-Nazi label of Golden Dawn, conveniently declining any form of responsibility by vaguely stating that “we have to define what a neo-Nazi party is, which can only be done at national level.” When a senior Greek police officer confirmed this weekend that the Greek government wilfully allowed “pockets of fascism” to infiltrate the police force so it could “use them for its own purposes”, Barroso — and with him the entire European establishment — preferred to play dumb and keep his head firmly in the sand.
So far, the only person who has pledged to investigate Golden Dawn is the Commissioner of Human Rights, Nils Muižnieks, but his commission is part of theCouncil of Europe, an independent Strasbourg-based paper tiger that is entirely separate from the EU. What’s more, the commission’s concern was entirely discredited when, on October 1, Golden Dawn MP Eleni Zaroulia joined the Committee on Equality and Non-Discrimination of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. A few weeks later, on October 18, Zaroulia made a declaration in Greek Parliament stating that “immigrants are subhuman”. So much for equality and non-discrimination.
But Golden Dawn’s sudden rise in the institutions is perhaps the least of Greece’s troubles. It’s its presence in the streets and its infiltration of the police force that is the greatest cause of concern. In August, following the racist murder of a 19-year-old Iraqi, the Migrant Workers Association reported over 500 hate attacks in the previous six months alone. A report last week confirmed that more than half of these attacks were perpetrated by gangs of men in paramilitary uniforms — one of the trademarks of Golden Dawn’s Sturmabteilung. The numbers are likely to be only the tip of the iceberg, as many victims are simply too terrified to report abuse and violence.
Greece’s Neo-Nazi Golden Dawn Party is Coming to Chicago
Identity Politics Thu Dec 13 2012
Not content to proselytizing in their homeland, Golden Dawn has started to expand worldwide.
High police support for Greece’s Golden Dawn
Europe
High police support for Greece’s Golden Dawn
What percentage of the Greek police voted for the far-right Golden Dawn (“Chrysi Avgi”) party in the general elections of May and June?
We will never know exactly, because ballots are cast in secret. But when we studied the results from individual polling stations, we noticed a strange pattern.
Golden Dawn’s share of the vote, which in central Athens (the electoral constituency known as “Athens A”) was 7.8 per cent, fluctuated wildly between polling stations, some of which are very close to each other.
Several months ago the Greek newspaper To Vima also noticed this pattern and matched the polling stations where Golden Dawn did very well in Athens with those where on-duty police officers are given special permission to vote on election day.
I was intrigued by this, but was reluctant to draw any conclusions until I could be absolutely sure that I knew where the police had voted. In theory, this is public information that should be provided by the Greek ministry of the interior.
Consistent match
In practice, it proved extremely hard to obtain. Eventually, we did receive this information, and were able to see a consistent match between polling stations where Golden Dawn did well, and the 88 polling stations in Athens where uniformed officers (not just the police, but also the military, the fire brigade and first-aid paramedics) were instructed to vote, alongside local residents.
This applied across a wide variety of neighbourhoods, of varying social and economic characteristics.
The most intriguing fluctuations came in polling stations around the Attica General Police Directorate (or GADA), where we know hundreds of police officers voted.
In 13 nearby polling stations, Golden Dawn averaged more than 20 per cent of the vote, whereas in the neighbouring “civilian only” polling stations it received 6 per cent of the vote, or below the Athenian average.
In other words, it seems that it is the police presence that is the variable, which is pushing the Golden Dawn vote upwards.
If we make this assumption (and yes, it is an assumption), we can conclude that the percentage of police who are voting for Golden Dawn is consistently higher than the actual result from the polling station.
To get a more accurate idea of the percentage of Greek policemen who voted for Golden Dawn, you’d have to know what proportion of the voters at any polling station were police, and also how many actually cast their ballots.
I did not have this information. Several Greek publications have come to their own startling conclusions in this regard.
I went to the Greek police, and asked them what they made of this evidence. A police spokesman said that any Greek citizen has the right to vote for any legally registered party.
Voting preferences, he said, are a private affair, provided an on-duty officer carries out his (or her) work with integrity, professionalism, and without discrimination towards any specific person or group of people.
Three theories
So why might so many policemen in Athens vote for an extremist party like Golden Dawn? Here are my own three theories, which are not mutually exclusive.
1) There is a tradition of authoritarianism in parts of the Greek police, which dates back to the time of the military Junta and beyond.
2) There is a feeling among some Greek policemen, working on the rundown streets of central Athens, that “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”. The police feel overwhelmed by the influx of immigrants, and they also feel hostility from anarchist and leftist groups. In some neighbourhoods, they will see Golden Dawn as a more sympathetic alternative.
3) The average Greek policeman, like many other Greek civil servants, is disillusioned and frightened. Morale is low. Pay has fallen by approximately 30 per cent in the past two years, and there are more cuts to come. The policeman voted for Golden Dawn as a protest, like hundreds of thousands of other Greeks.