October 02, 2013
Academy of Athens
Source: Shutterstock
In 1998, Golden Dawn’s Antonis Androutsopoulos viciously attacked a student named Dimitris Kousouris and was later convicted of attempted murder. According to Borderline Reports, classified documents eventually revealed that at the time, the police were providing Golden Dawn with radios and batons during popular demonstrations so that they could attack “leftists and anarchists.” Moreover, it was also revealed that members of Golden Dawn possessed illegal firearms that parliamentarians from New Democracy had given to them.
This raises the question among Greeks whether this crackdown will duly extend past Golden Dawn members to embrace those of other parties who may have not only colluded with fascist criminal groups but also engaged in financial transgressions, corruption, and other crimes associated with Greece’s gross mismanagement.
Golden Dawn is a magnet for the ill-bred and unhinged. The laudable prosecution of its members, though welcome and overdue, will not change the reality that propelled them into politics in the first place.
The consequences of illegal immigration for Greece affect more than just the country’s economic capacity. Rather, they manifest themselves in increases in crime, drugs, arms smuggling, and human trafficking, as well as the ghettoization of the Athens city center. All of these consequences threaten the social cohesion necessary for the country to pull through its financial crises.
Drunk as they were on borrowed money, no one listened in mid-2009 when the European Commission’s Vice President Jacques Barrot warned that “there is a grave danger of destabilization of the Hellenic Republic due to the completely uncontrollable waves of immigration.”
In the meantime, draconian austerity measures, however deserved, are failing to work on a nation that has long enjoyed a crypto-communist “entitlement democracy” and whose leaders and constituents are accustomed to exporting blame instead of goods and services. Lacking responsible leadership and civic culture, it is clear that Greece’s most crippling problem, and perhaps its most entrenched malaise, is a human-resources problem.
Neither Golden Dawn nor its alter ego and nemesis, Syriza, are offering viable solutions to the country’s financial woes. Yet they are Greece’s self-defeating response to the status quo: an attempt to replace a political, corrupt, criminal class with an outright crazy criminal class loosely connected by the hub of New Democracy-turned-EU overseer.
With “saviors” such as the unholy trinity of New Democracy, Syriza, and Golden Dawn, Greece certainly doesn”t need enemies. So forget the “Grecovery” and stand by for more soothsaying, pitchfork mobs, power plays, and bloodletting, both in the banks and in the streets.
