Outlawing Golden Dawn is no solution: Next they will come for the left

[1]

Straighten up and fly right, boys, and you can join the coalition!

There are those who will be cheering the arrest on Saturday of Golden Dawn leader Nikolaos Michaloliakos and the Greek government’s crackdown on his neo-Nazi party after the political assassination of rapper and left-wing activist Pavlos Fyssas last week.

My Facebook and Twitter feeds have been filled with hosannas for the government’s moves against the neo-Nazi party.

Some feel that with the raids of branches, confiscation of some weapons, and arrest of leading cadre on charges of forming a criminal gang, the governing parties, New Democracy in particular, have finally, belatedly realised that the Golden Dawn now threatens their interests as much as it threatens the left and immigrants.

Perhaps this is the case. Perhaps the cabinet has indeed decided that enough is enough, however useful the fascists have proved until this week, and that the pitbulls now need to be muzzled. I have no access to the interior of the skull of Prime Minister Antonio Samaras or Nikos Dendias, his anti-immigrant minister of public order and citizen protection [sic]. So I do not know.

But I am sceptical.

Despite my revulsion at the party, I am afraid that I have to take my leave from this celebration, partially because I feel that the evidence suggests that the crackdown is at best little more than a piece of political theatre.

But also more fundamentally because I worry that in the context of the dominant but dishonest media and political discourse of “two extremes” of left and right – where the so-called ‘far left’ Syriza, trade-union strike action, and smaller left wing groups are spoken of in the same breath as the Golden Dawn – the moves against the nazis are a precursor to a similar but more thoroughgoing crackdown on sections of the left.

I would rather the ideas of the Golden Dawn be defeated in open political contest, and its militants sent scurrying, swept from the streets by popular antifascist mobilisation, than they be arrested by the very same men who not days before stood by approvingly while the blackshirts engaged in their pogroms.

Let’s be clear: Greece has existing laws to deal with those engaged in violence, such as party activists’ savage aggression towards immigrants, left-wingers and gays and lesbians, and certainly to deal with the murder of a hip-hop artist. But these laws are not being enforced. Repeatedly, the police have been seen to turn a blind eye to the party’s violence or actively work alongside its militants. It is by no means the ravings of conspiracists to claim collusion between the police and the fascists.

On the contrary, this collusion is well known, discussed by human rights groups, mainstream journalists and now leading politicians. This collusion is as much a fact, a certainty, a truth – as gravity, or that the decimal representation of pi never ends, or that it is a mistake to touch your pink bits after handling habanero peppers.

Here is a statement[2] from the Union of Hospital Doctors of Athens and Piraeus from 19 September following the murder of Fyssas:

“As doctors of the Tzanio general hospital, we express our strong concern, as yesterday night 18/09/13, after the protests against the murder of the young Pavlos Fyssas by a member of Golden Dawn, 31 protesters were brought to the surgical department, all with blows on the head. The injured people reported blows by batons, helmets, shields and kicks from Delta and Dias teams (motorcycle police), whereas there were reports of rocks being thrown from the side of the police towards the protesters, aiming for the head, from members of Golden Dawn.

“One of the people who was injured, after being operated upon, was hospitalized at the ophthalmological department of the hospital with a ruptured bulb [sic] from a stun canister. He reported being aimed directly on the head and is in danger of suffering a permanent loss of vision in one eye. We urge for a halt of the policy of intensification of the state and parastate repression in order not to mourn any more victims.”

In the wake of the arrests of Golden Dawn MPs, two senior police officers – the regional police commanders of southern and central Greece – stepped down while another seven were suspended. One officer was arrested, suspected of simultaneously working as security for the party. These are not small fry: five senior individuals were moved to other posts pending an investigation of collusion: the chiefs of the police special forces, internal affairs, organised crime division, firearms and explosives division, and the Dias motorcycle force.

The government said its simultaneous moves against the officers was to ensure “to ensure the absolute objectivity” of the inquiry into the Golden Dawn. Defence minister Dimitris Avramopoulos has also ordered an investigation into allegations that some members of the army’s elite special forces have trained the party’s militias.

But police collusion with the party is hardly a fresh revelation. In one internationally famous incident in 2012, police stood by while the party hurled rocks into an open-air auditorium where a play with gay content was being performed. The theatre manager made calls to the chief of police, begging him for protection from the mob as the fascists beat up journalists.

“This was the Greek Kristallnacht,” the play’s director, Laertis Vassiliou, told the BBC’s Paul Mason[3] at the time.

“People went home with broken bones. Every day they phone me now, they phone the theatre, saying: your days are numbered.”

Raids on immigrant market stalls by the party’s bully boys go unpunished[4], again under the watchful eyes of the police. Its offices are aggressively protected from protesters by riot police. Two weeks ago[5], seven members of the Communist Party of Greece were taken to hospital after some 50 men wielding crowbars and wooden bats[6] fastened with nails and spikes attacked them as they were putting up posters for a youth festival in the port district of Perama, a stronghold for the leftists. But nearby police were indifferent, according to witnesses. The government has long known what the party gets up to and how police give it a nudge and a wink, yet both the party and its police protectors have operated with complete impunity.

Either public order minister Dendias is utterly incompetent or has himself knowingly shut his eyes to the obvious.

But I rather think that the only conclusion that can be drawn is that the country’s leadership believed that the street thugs served a useful purpose against popular left-wing agitation against European austerity, or at least misdirected attention from the economic cataclysm by focussing on migrants, but now with the murder of Fyssas, the dogs must be brought to heel.

In recent months, some commentators such as Skai TV journalist Babis Papadimitriou have called for the Golden Dawn to be brought in from the cold and, so long as it can become a “serious party” and isolate the worst of its thugs, to join the governing coalition. The party was riding high before the murder – with most polls putting the party in third place on 12 or 13 percent, although one internal government poll in July gave the fascists a shocking 18 percent. It has lost a couple of percent nationally since the killing, but in its strongholds, polls suggest that it has easily shrugged off the murder.

A number of leading MPs have for some time now publicly mused about bring the party into government. Earlier this year, New Democracy MP Vyron Polydoras, said: “The Golden Dawn is no threat to Democracy.” Another MP and former leadership candidate, Panagiotis Psomiadis, said ahead of the 2012 elections: “We should join forces with all sister parties, such as X, Y, Z and Golden Dawn.”

The murder and crackdown, ironically, offers the party an opportunity to appear to rehabilitate itself should it choose to play its cards right in the court proceedings, and so far, with the voluntary surrender to police stations by many of its leading members, it’s making some of the right moves (although rhetorically, the party is as dyspeptic as ever).

Meanwhile the centre-left Pasok is one snap election away from oblivion. The latest numbers put it on around four percent, down from its election victory result of 44 percent four years ago. The threshold to get into parliament is three percent. Amongst young people in some major voting districts, the social democrats score zero percent. And with the final demise of the zombie Pasok, New Democracy would need a new ally.

In a previous iteration of the Athens crisis regime, New Democracy and Pasok did not blink when entering into a coalition with the far-right and religious conservative Laos party – a marriage publicly blessed, indeed encouraged, by Brussels. A tidied up Golden Dawn, post-show-trial, would be preferable in certain quarters to the eurozone Hades that they believe would be opened up by a government led by the left-wing Syriza.

Indeed, a day after the murder, it was not Golden Dawn that New Democracy MP and senior advisor to the prime minister Chrysanthos Lazaridis took to task, but the opposition Syriza and allied left groups, attacking the party for “undermining democracy”.

Under the Greek constitution, political parties cannot be banned, but the government now at least has set the precedent of exploiting laws intended for pursuing organised crime.

If you look at the policies of Syriza, it is clear they are a party of left social democrats at most, but the party has consistently been classed both by government-allied media domestically and in some of the foreign press [7]as the left-wing mirror image of the Golden Dawn, the ‘extremists’ of the left.

It would be too much of a provocation for the government to move against the opposition party, but watch for the coalition now to make similar moves against smaller allies of Syriza or independent left-wing activists and trade union militants, which it will describe as “criminal gangs” as well.

New Democracy and Pasok are no defenders of democracy. It is through their economic policies, imposed at the anti-democratic insistence of Brussels, Frankfurt and Berlin, as well as their collusion with the Golden Dawn, that have given birth to this 21st Century fascism of thick-necked gym rats in black golf shirts in Greece. So long as these policies and politicians remain in place, fascism will only grow.

The defeat of the Golden Dawn can only come through the defeat of the architects of austerity.