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As Greek Nazis Go to Prison, Their Poison Runs Free

Oct 15, 2020 Yanis Varoufakis

The conviction of the leaders of the Golden Dawn – the only openly Nazi party to have won seats in any parliament since the 1940s – is a victory against far-right extremism in Europe. But while the party's leaders were being sent to prison, their ideas, manners, and hatred of parliamentary democracy were in police uniform, terrorizing the streets.

ATHENS – October 7 was a good day for democrats. The Greek Court of Appeals upheld the convictions of the leaders of Golden Dawn, the only openly Nazi party to have won seats in any parliament since the 1940s, on charges of murder, grievous bodily harm, and directing a criminal organization. A crowd of 20,000 Athenians celebrated outside the court.

Our celebration lasted precisely 40 seconds, before the police dispersed us with teargas. Gasping for air, my wife and I tried to join hundreds of others struggling to escape via a narrow street leading to the safety of nearby Mount Lycabettus. A dozen riot police were there, firing gas canisters into the fleeing crowd. I pleaded with their commanding officer to stop. “There is no purpose in gassing people trying to go home,” I told him calmly. He swore at me. When I produced my parliamentary ID card, his response startled me: “Yet another reason to fuck you.”

The conviction of Greece’s Nazi leaders is a decisive victory against the revival of far-right extremism in Europe. But while they were being sent to prison, their ideas, manners, and hatred of parliamentary democracy were in police uniform, terrorizing the streets.

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Paul Martin Oct 19, 2020

Well, suppression of those rejecting the system has never helped eradicate their ideologies. It only makes them more dangerous by giving them the aura of martyrs. The likes of Golden Dawn can only lose their popularity in large parts of the people if the government is putting an end to real people's sufferings. Whether this will be the cas is doubtable.
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j. von Hettlingen Oct 16, 2020

According to Yanis Varoufakis, the neo-Nazi leaders of Golden Dawn in Greece have each been sentenced to 13 years in prison by a court in Athen this week. All in all 57 defendants have been convicted of murder, assault, weapons possession and either running or participating in the criminal outfit. The court ruled that the party had operated a criminal organisation under the guise of being a democratically elected party.
From its inception in the early 1980s through to 2012, Golden Dawn rode a wave of economic anger and despair when Greece faced a government-debt crisis in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2007–08. The far-right group began its seven-year stint in parliament, and targeted leftists, anti-nationalist “traitors”, communist trade unionists, members of the LGBTQ community, migrants and refugees.
Their conviction has been a “decisive” victory against the political comeback of far-right extremism in Europe. Golden Dawn was the only self-procalimed fascist party to have won seats in any parliament since the 1940s. Even though the party's leaders were being sent to prison, “their ideas, manners, and hatred of parliamentary democracy were in police uniform, terrorizing the streets.” While celebrating the verdict the author has been told by a policeman: “Yet another reason to fuck you.”
He no longer can remember the policeman’s face, because he was crushed. But he can not forget “the look of calm loathing in his eyes” - a look that reminded him of Kapnias, a once trained Gestapo interrogator he met in 1991. During a visit at the Southern Peloponnesian farm, Kapnias put the author up and placed two books on his guest’s pillow: Memoirs of a Prime Minister by Adamantios Androutsopoulos, and Mein Kampf by Adolph Hitler.
The author says, Androutsopoulos was the last prime minister of the fascist dictatorship of his youth, a puppet appointed by the brigadier who took the neofascist junta further into neo-Nazi territory after the student massacre of November 17, 1973. Mein Kampf was a small leather-bound edition in “an advanced state of disrepair,” published in Germany in 1934. Perhaps the “semi-literate farmer”, who as a teenager joined a paramilitary unit assembled by the local Gestapo, wanted “to shock” his guest, a progressive left-winger. The author dedicated his book: The Serpent’s Greek Lair to Kapnias.
People like Kapnais could identify themselves with the convicted memers of Golden Dawn. Its founder, Nikolaos Michaloliakos, 62, masterminding the organisation’s criminal activities as its self-appointed führer but turning what was once a fringe Nazi movement into a political force whose modus operandi was the eradication of enemies by hit squads. His extremist views were formed during Greece’s 1967-74 Colonels’ regime.
Michaloliakos, a Holocaust denier and diehard Hitler apologist, has refused steadfastly to own up to any of the crimes, despite incriminating speeches, videos and Third Reich paraphernalia found in his home. Instead, he maintained the ultra-nationalist “patriotic” party has been a victim of political persecution, hounded for its ideology rather than its actions.
“We were condemned for our ideas,” he tweeted last week before his account was suspended. “When illegal immigrants are the majority in Greece, when [the government] hands over everything to Turkey, when millions of Greeks are unemployed on the street, they will remember Golden Dawn.” His wife had once described immigrants as being “subhuman”.
Ioannis Lagos, a member of the European Parliament, and one-time close confidante of Michaloliakos lost his political immunity. Both men received a prison term of over 13 years. The admission of a senior party operative, Giorgos Roupakias, that he had fatally stabbed Pavlos Fyssas, a popular anti-fascist hip-hop artist, triggered the party’s fall with the then conservative-led government, finally setting the wheels of Greek justice in motion. Roupakias was the only gang member to be given a life sentence.
The five-and-a-half-year trial has illuminated the extraordinary leniency shown towards the Nazi sympathisers by the Greek state. This is tragic. In a country that suffered so badly at the hands of occupying Nazi troops, many accept it has taken far too long to acknowledge crimes that were all too apparent long before Greece’s political class took action.
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vivek iyer Oct 16, 2020

Fascism and Nazism arose only after a serious threat of Communist Revolution obtained. Where Communists were crushed completely, there was no scope for crazy nutters like Dimitrios Ioannidis to run amok. This is not to say that Greek foreign policy has ever been quite rational- but the same could be said of other small but very ancient nations. It is not the case that Greece had a noxious caste systems such that 'untouchables' were bound to turn into Fascists while well educated patricians would gravitate to Marxism.

The problem that faced Greece was that some on the Left equated NATO and then the EU with Nazism and Fascism and evil capitalist bastards determined to starve Greek babies while heaping all sorts of humiliations upon the country. Oddly, the Left believed 'free money' would be available for obstreperousness of this puerile sort. Why? Maybe too many of them were academics of a Trustafarian sort. Or perhaps they were just personally ambitious and didn't care what happened to the Greek economy.

It seems the Greek people have come together under conditions of adversity. They are determined to raise themselves up by their own hard work and in accordance with the principles of Political Economy first enunciated over two thousand years ago in their own homeland. Golden Dawn has been investigated and it has been judged as nothing but a criminal organization. It may be that there are 'bad apples' in the police and paramilitary just as there may still be some corrupt people in the Tax Department and so forth. Greece will purge or re-educate such elements. It won't refight the Civil War- a catastrophe for which Superpower politics must bear much of the blame. Neither an Ionannidis in military matters, nor a Varoufakis in Finance, will be permitted to damage a great and noble Nation.
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Michael Public Oct 16, 2020

There are two type of evil in this World, and it seems like your lot in life, Yanis, to meet both of them face to face. One evil tries to suffocate all people in the name of money - the finance ministers of Europe - refusing to let Greece quit its financial bondage of completely excessive debt. On the other hand, an evil that would release utter chaos on the World, one where laws or social progress no longer matter, but only the might of arms, wielded by them.
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stephan Edwards Oct 15, 2020

The result of getting rid of the leadership might not be what is being anticipated. The problems that created Golden Dawn aren't going away. More likely either a new Party based on the principles of the old or a new leadership cadre will emerge. The problem is the new leadership will likely be both smarter and more ruthless then ones just sent to prison. To use a comparison In Chicago US they put Al Capone in jail, in 1942 he was replaced by Tony Accardo a much smarter much more dangerous man because he was smarter. He would run the Chicago mob for over 30 years making it much more powerful much more wealthy, and much more dangerous. Did Greece get rid of a Capone and put in an Accardo. We don't know but it isn't a bad bet.
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