http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=29890
Greece: fighting back against the Golden Dawn fascists
Nikos Loudos analyses what lies behind the rise of Golden
Dawn, and how the movement against racism and austerity can stop it
The rise of Golden Dawn in Greece has caused shivers across
Europe. It is an openly Nazi organisation that hails Adolf Hitler and the
Holocaust.
Its members systematically murder and wound migrants. They
throw petrol bombs at mosques and say that every woman’s place is at home.
Greece hasn’t become fascist, as some commentators are too
easily concluding. But support for Golden Dawn is growing.
It entered the Greek parliament with almost 7 percent of the
vote in elections this June. It grabbed around 425,000 votes and is the fifth
biggest party in parliament. Opinion polls show that it could become the third
party in the next parliament.
Economic crisis, austerity and cuts are the motor behind
Golden Dawn’s surge. But its rise wasn’t automatic. The racism of the Greek
ruling class and the mainstream parties has opened the way for the Nazis.
As the economic crisis has deepened, Greek governments have
increasingly used racism as a weapon against social movements and the left.
The mainstream parties blame migrants for rising
unemployment, crime and poor services. For them this is a way of deflecting
attention from their own damaging policies.
After a rebellion in December 2008, sparked by the police
murder of a school student, they ramped up the rhetoric. They blamed migrants
and the left for instability in Greece.
Refuge
The political by-product of this was the rise of the far
right party Laos. It didn’t build up fascist street gangs, but several Nazis
found refuge in it.
Greece’s mainstream parties dealt with the rise of Laos by
putting even more racism at the centre of their politics. This didn’t undermine
Laos—it legitimised racism even more.
But as Laos came under pressure to act as a serious
political party, the open Nazis of Golden Dawn were able to present themselves
as “the real thing”.
An important turning point came in late 2011. Laos joined
the “technocrat” government of Lucas Papademos, under pressure from the ruling
class. This was the government that tried to impose austerity after the
Labour-type Pasok government of George Papandreou collapsed.
After that Laos disappeared electorally. This collapse of
the official far right cleared the way for the rise of Golden Dawn.
The collapse of the mainstream parties is critical to
understanding the electoral rise of the Nazis. Pasok used to take more than 40
percent of the vote in every election.
Last June it took 12 percent—and opinion polls predict that
will fall to just 5.5 percent. The Tory-style New Democracy also got its lowest
ever result in June.
Millions of people who had only ever voted for these two
major parties were left floundering. The majority turned to the left, but the
Nazis were also able to capitalise.
Experiment
Their rise hasn’t simply been electoral. The Nazis had
already organised a successful experiment on the streets.
On the square of Aghios Panteleimonas, downtown Athens, they
had started organising through a “citizens committee”. This was nothing more
than Nazis along with racists from the neighbourhood. Its aim was to “cleanse”
the area of migrants.
The official anti-immigrant rhetoric encouraged them. Well
before Golden Dawn became a parliamentary party, Pasok’s public order minister
declared that he could start talks with it over dealing with illegal migrants.
It was well known that Golden Dawn was calling for the
annihilation of migrants. It started organising pogroms, terrorising migrants
and destroying their homes and shops. The media and the government presented
this as a citizens’ action.
The government’s response was to provide more police. But
many cops back Golden Dawn. One in two cops voted for the Nazis in June. Among
riot police the number is even higher.
When anti-fascist demonstrators were arrested recently, they
were tortured in the police headquarters. Police officers told them, “We are
all Golden-Dawners now. You should know it.”
So pogroms began to be organised by police and Golden Dawn.
Police arrested wounded migrants instead of the Nazi gangs.
Just last month police raided two migrants’ homes and
arrested them. A quarter of an hour later, Nazis raided the empty homes to
destroy and steal.
The government’s current response to all of this is to talk
of “the extremes” and to try and demonise the left and workers.
They say that the left, by organising militant demonstrations,
strikes and anti-racist action, is as much to blame for the violence as the
Nazis.
Panic
Greece hasn’t become fascist. But the rise of Golden Dawn
partly reflects the panic of the ruling class. It fears the growing resistance
to, and workers’ strikes against, austerity.
The anti-fascist and anti-racist movement is now at the
forefront of the struggle. The fight against austerity cannot be untangled from
the fight against racism and the Nazis.
Golden Dawn has the official prestige of a parliamentary
party and millions of euros in its coffers coming from the state. But it hasn’t
been able to reproduce its Aghios Panteleimonas experiment.
Its MPs and cadre can’t go anywhere without the cover of the
police. And trade unions, one by one, are voting to stop the fascists in their
workplaces.
Tens of thousands of migrants and others joined an
anti-racist demonstration in August. It proved that the anger is stronger than
the fear.
The newly-organised Movement Against Racism and the Fascist
Threat organised a successful event earlier this month to coordinate action
across Greece.
The slogan, “Fascists, bankers, troika—all you scum work
together” is chanted louder and louder during every strike. The stakes are high
in Greece. The future will depend on whether we can get rid of the scum
altogether.
A history of collaboration and resistance
The far right in Greece has a history of deep cooperation
with the state. The Greek government collaborated with the Nazi forces that
occupied Greece during the Second World War between 1940 and 1944.
It organised paramilitary forces known as the Security Battallions
to suppress anti-Nazi resistance. Greek fascists joined Nazi troops in
encircling working class neighbourhoods. They murdered Communists, Resistance
fighters and their families en masse.
When the Resistance won, most fascists went into hiding. But
they soon became useful to the state again. From 1946 to 1949 civil war raged
in Greece. The Greek government army, backed by British and US troops, fought
the Democratic Army of Greece, part of the Greek Communist Party.
Fascists became useful informers and torturers for the Greek
state in cities and villages across the country. They were rebranded as “Greek
patriots”. Some were even honoured as Resistance fighters.
The fascist networks were kept alive during the 1950s and
existed on the periphery of the police. In 1958 there was a sudden electoral
explosion for the left. Following this, fascists acted as infiltrators and
agent provocateurs in the labour movement.
In 1963 police looked on while a fascist gang murdered an MP
of the United Left, in which the Communist Party was active, during a rally.
A military dictatorship ran Greece between 1967 and 1974. It
outlawed, imprisoned and exiled left wingers. The junta started to crumble
after the Polytechnic Uprising in 1973.
Cleaning
After it collapsed the new labour and student unions
campaigned for the cleaning of fascists from all institutions. The fascists
were on the margins but they didn’t disappear.
Nikos Michaloliakos, the current leader of Golden Dawn, was
convicted in the 1970s for assaults and involvement in putting bombs in a
cinema. He had a very short stay in prison and became an informer for the
secret services.
The fascists became more irrelevant during the 1980s and
Golden Dawn reshaped itself into an openly Nazi organisation.
In the early 1990s the Greek government tried to impose
neoliberal attacks. It began a racist campaign against migrants and a
nationalist campaign against the Republic of Macedonia.
The government and the Orthodox church organised huge
nationalist rallies. They mobilised hundreds of thousands with Greek flags.
The Nazis of Golden Dawn tried to rebrand themselves as
“Greek Orthodox Nationalists”. They took part in the official rallies and
started building branches in some schools.
But the campaign backfired and the government fell. The
anti-racist movement won gains for migrants in the following year and blocked
the fascists.
In 1998 the vice-leader of Golden Dawn, in charge of an
armed gang, attacked and almost killed a student member of the Anticapitalist
Left.
With its vice-leader hiding, Golden Dawn made several
ineffective attempts to get out of the margins in the following years. In 2005
it even announced that it would suspend its own political activities
altogether.
Yet the devastating economic crisis, combined with the
racism of the state, has enabled it to make a comeback.
