Meet my Greek online pen pal, Johanis.
A long-time political organizer in the vibing anarchist scene of Athens, I met him in a long camping trip in Southern Greece, and I learned quite some stuff that are surprisingly obscure to the vast majority of other political people I have met anywhere else.
So I pulled up some old scrolls I have lying around from various trips, and tracked down our 2011-2018 correspondence, to find this grove of relevant information for the current German situation, I had long forgotten about.
Over the past weeks I tried to get ahold of Johanis, and get some more recent reflection on the aftermath of prosecuting the Greek Nazi Party, and the current situation of the Greek right-wing.
The insight come in spades.
This text took me significantly longer to compile, but it was extremely meaningful in understanding a country with a rich political history we now next to nothing about, except for Philosophers (500BC) -> Bankrupcy (2010AD).
Why I am writing this now? Political discourse on Lemmy turns to criticism of the classification of the German AfD right-wing party as right wing extremists, which will strengthen its surveillance. (Let's not forget that Nazism is outright banned in Germany already, in contrast with other countries).
This reminds me of a close parallel with the Greek situation especially before 2012, and the problems they faced there with the Greek neo-nazis "Golden Dawn".
This party was around since the 1990's, and was a deplorable minority, until the harsh austerity measures that followed the Greek bailout by the Eurozone and the IMF brought them to political prominence, with a modest win in Athens municipal elections, followed by an alarming 15% of the vote in national elections, and multiple seats in the parliament.
Its political power was accompanied by an increased street presence, to the effect that the fascists have overtaken the streets of a couple migrant and working class majority neighborhoods.
At this point, even people in the far left were making arguments against banning Golden Dawn, because that would make them supposedly look like the victim, and eventually strengthen them even more.
Furthermore, the faschists themselves were pushing the same narrative, threatening the left that "once they got there, there is nothing left to do" because they were confident they could absorb any censorship or attack into their victimization narrative ("The anti-racist laws are racist against Greeks", and similar.) The movement's response was to increase the antifascist action in the street, because this was where the fascist felt confident. But mind you, this approach has limits: The French have dealt with a different growing threat, that makes the street-fighting irrelevant. The trivialization of fascist talking points in the media, that gave rise to Lepen.
You can't bash those away, and we are talking about an era when TV was still the mainstream media, and conspiracy theories were the realm of chain-mails and the blogo-sphere.
Back in the day the Greek far-right scene was dominated by the fascist Karatzaferis (which according to Johanis is a name of Turkish origin, ironically), who was following the Lepen playbook to the letter: he softened the edges, and offered a palatable version of petit-burgeoise conservativism, while secretly catering to a number of extreme far-right personalities in his party.
At least three of this breed are now prominent members of the center right governing party New Democracy, Johanis has written in an email last year. As for the governing party itself, it is a terrible nepotist government, with most figures being descedants of Greek politician families. The Prime Minister's sister is part of the government, and her driver run over someone during the pandemic and not a single soul was prosecuted. The Prime Minister (K.Mitsotakis the 2nd) himself is implicated in a scandal about using Cambridge Analytica and the infamous Israeli spyware "Predator", which he used together with the secret service in which he presides, to spy on his political opponents.
Mitsotakis pretends to be LGBT-friendly, for show, and to the disdain of his own party he legalized gay marriage last year, with votes from the left and the opposition. Johanis believes he did so to counterbalance the abysmal human right ratings from handling the immigrant situation, and the terrible freedom of the press ratings. In my opinion, this is why human rights cannot be an average: it is an all-or-nothing situation. Finally, Mitsotakis was quick to attest "there are only two sexes" following the Trump executive order, and some fringe anarchist group claims there is a TERF propaganda operation developing in Greece, but Johanis only half-heartedly believes this is the case. In fact, a Greek gender recognition act was passed by a coalition government led by center-left Syriza in 2017, with the vocal disagreement of Mitsotakis.
The appeal of the far-right to Greeks is rooted back to a turbulent post-WW2 history: As Nazi occupiers were leaving the land, a violent civil war broke out. For the Greek anarchist movement, the Varkiza Treaty is considered the hallmark of the second-half of 20th century class-aware social contract, marking the ceasefire between the (British-backed) conservative branch of the liberation warfare, and the territorialy prevalent communists (who were supported at wartime by a broader demographic of democrats and commoner guerilla soldiers). This was followed by a right-wing police state, with the majority of left-wing people excluded from public life, and exiled in terrible prison-camps in various islands around Athens and Piraeus. This "post-civil war" state culminated in a CIA-backed, brutally anticommunist, military junta during the late sixties and early seventies.
Following a student revolt that was violently suppressed, the junta attempted a coup in Cyprus, which failed, leading to a Turkish invasion and occupation of Northern Cyprus. At this point the junta collapsed and Greece entered its modern era of constitutional presidential democracy, with extreme right ideas (police state, anticommunism, restitute monarchy, etc) becoming unpopular, and propagated only in the confines of extreme political and religious fanatic circles (about 6-7%). Nonetheless this was the pool Karatzaferis initially catered to, and this reflected his (and later Golden Dawn's) voter base statistics.
The IMF and EU bailouts were interpreted as "the end of the post-junta era", with popular rejection of the extremely corrupted and nepotist bipartisan system that prevailed in the 1980-2010 period. Among other popular grievance movements, that were ridden with opportunist and/or conspiracist groups, that was the context in which Golden Dawn broke out of the confines of the far-right chambers, and started absorbing these feelings into a nationalist, xenophobic front.
Their street presence was extended beyond pogroms and stormtrooping to "mutual aid" acts, for instance helping poor granmas and holding soup kitchens for Greeks only, while "pretecting from immigrant hoodlums" and pulling their old rhetoric tricks: "We are no fascist for being patriots. We are simply not traitors, because we fought communists who wanted to give up Northen Greece to Stalin. I am not saying I am a national socialist, (implied that this is the purest form of what I am), but I am simply a nationalist, and this is nothing to be ashamed of", according to Johanis was a party line for chatting up people in the gym, cafeteria, the taxi trip, and the internet, and it was very effective.
It is my understanding that some of these areas, despite the sharp decline in Golden Dawn's number after the events I will soon explain, were never completely taken back by left-wing powers. (Only last year a fascist was prosecuted there for having a hideous Youtube were he ridiculed and harassed migrant women and people with mental disabilities, whom he tricked with some ridiculous payment, to cater to an audience of heinous fascist losers.)
Nonetheless, the fascists became too confident, and they killed a Greek left-wing rapper, Pavlos Fissas, in a traditionally communist area of merchant shipping workers (beatings of migrants and the killing of Pakistani worker Shehzad Luqman were up to this point brought up only by the antifascist left). The New Democracy has long being afraid that the reliable voting pool on their right, they could easily manipulate by poaching the talking heads from the extremist-right TV cesspool, would usurp the power for its own, and seized the opportunity to round up the Golden Dawn and jail them, not for being Nazis, but for being a criminal organization whose hierarchical structure made them directly responsible for the murder of Fissas. The fascist's networking with the mob, brothels, and other nefarious activites came to light, together with footage of Nazi paganism rituals with their leaders all over the place, and photographs of para-military training.
These had the effect of denigrating Golden Dawn forever in the eyes of the Greeks, who suffered terribly under Nazi Occupation. No need to mention the Greek authorities could have done this at any point if they didn't want the Golden Dawn in the streets, to help equalize the vocal anarchist and left-wing movements, especially in a time of bankrupcy, and only years apart from a devastating anarchist and football hooligan uprising in 2008, that tested the limits of the populous Greek riot police.
Many people worldwide, but especially in Germany keep victim blaming the Greeks for the situation, which is an easy way to not have to think about the Greek ruling class which is comprised mainly by filthy rich ship-owners, deeply entangled with illegal activities and the various ethnic mobs, as well as an extremely corrupted police, who bleed the Greek population: Greek salaries where the lowest in Europe even before they went bankrupt, and inflation is endemic due to established supply-chain cartels. Austerity, extreme privatization, and financial supervision by European neoliberals have made both worse, and recently the Greeks faced "German prices with Bulgarian salaries", as well as a brutal housing crisis.
The degree of police militarization and political activity on the left, scaled for the small population, is insane. Finally, the country is 88th (87th last year) in Freedom of the Press, with journalists sued, and at least in a couple of cases murdered. Following a deadly train accident in Tempi two years ago, the New Democracy faced a growing protest movement and and resorted to a cabinet reshuffle. For the careful amongst the readers, this brought the far-right extremist G. Vorides to the ministry of immigration, in a period that Greece faces scrutiny for its Frontex operations, illegal pushbacks, and hellish concentration camps for migrants, called hot-spots, which are ordered by the EU to keep Global North and East refugees and migrants out of Europe. At this time, a fascist once known for stormtrooping in the 1980s, is now in charge of a situation already ridden with human rights violations and international law crimes.
As a final note, in the last elections, a new party "Spartans" showed up and took a 7% of the vote. It was revealed that the Golden Dawn's Number 2 (I. Kasidiaris) had managed to spread the word from inside prison for his supporters to vote for "Spartans". After causing a number of incidents in the parliament that paralleled the unruly Golden Dawn days, the ruse came to light and the Spartans were prosecuted for voter fraud. This is no relief for Greek leftists though: after a bankrupcy, an austerity period, and a pandemic, with a huge proportion of the population still on Facebook, it is estimated that 30% of the vote goes to some kind of far-right nutjob, including the parties of P. Kamenos (antivax conspiracy theorist and nationalist) and A. Latinopoulou (a religious transphobe woman and ultra-nationalist). Of course this does not include the 40% New Democracy takes, with the far-right personalities it now incorporates.
Anarchists monitoring the far-right scene claim that there is no group yet to parallel the momentum of the Golden Dawn, but the far-right is still evolving and regrouping. For the time being they are once again countered by anarchist forces in the streets, but the effect of right-wing populist propaganda in voting behavior is far more prevalent, mirroring the French situation, and every other place really.
In my opinion the lessons learned here is that the alarmist response claiming that banning Nazis will invigorate them is misleading. Greece saw no surge in Nazi support after jailing the Golden Dawn. The fascists were disbanded and started blaming each other, and dissolved back to million immaterial grupuscula, with just the familiar 7% support they have been having post-junta. Street fights against stormtroopers are effective, and even pre-emptively attacking fascist haunts and ideological epicenters was proved to be succesful, as the British 1970s antifaschist movement has shown. (We should never forget that Hitler's SAs were 3 million strong in the 1930s - you will need to prevent this.)
The one thing that left-wing forces have not nailed yet is how to combat the insidious fascist mind control that creeps into the petit-burgeoisie through TV and social media, especially in countries with media controlled by the oligarchy, as in most countries. For these aspects, consult my previous essay about banning social media algorithms and hate-speech in Europe.