The arrests of deputies and members of the Nazi “Golden Dawn”, including of its farcical “Fuhrer” Nikos Michaloliakos, last weekend in Athens, following the murder of the young left wing antifascist hip hop artist and worker Pavlos Fyssas, is a clear sign of the deepening regime crisis in socially devastated Greece. Only a few days before the crime, leading government officials (like the secretary of the government itself Takis Baltakos) and journalists in pro-government bourgeois mass media (for ex. in the TV Channel Sky) advocated the possibility of a future coalition in power, after the next elections, between the ruling right wing “New Democracy” with a “more serious” (?!), “more moderate” version of the same ‘Golden Dawn’.
But the enormous popular anger following the murder of Pavlos by the Nazi gangsters operating under the eyes of the supervising local Police present in the site of the crime, as well as the international outrage with the role of the Samaras government and the Greek State, which left y unpunished 4 murders and 400 serious injuries in one year by attacks of Nazi storm troops assisted by the Police, produced a politically unbearable position for the capitalist government. They have to act not out of fear from the menace represented by the criminals of “Golden Dawn”, their extra-institutional instruments of rule. They were frightened that the explosion of popular hatred will make them to lose any control of the situation. As a matter of fact, the crime of September 18, the mass protest demonstrations that followed, and the arrests of September 28, are signs of a situation, where the ruling class is losing control of the situation and the working class still has not yet won control. The pre-revolutionary conditions in Greece are rapidly ripening.
The murder of Pavlos came one week after a first wave of a strong strike movement in the public sector, and while the troika is visiting again Greece to dictate new anti-working class and anti-popular measures. Only two weeks before the crime, took place the trial of two antifascists, the General Secretary of the EEK Savas Michael-Matsas and the former Rector of the National technical University of Athens Konstantinos Moutzouris after lawsuit of the Golden Dawn supported by the State repressive apparatuses. Thanks to a powerful international and national solidarity movement, the trial ended by declaring “not guilty” the two accused. It was the first trial that the “Godlen Dawn” had lost after its ascent! But from the first moment, afterwards, there was anew an escalating repression campaign by the Police against the Left and the anarchists, accompanied by death threats by the “Golden Dawn” against the EEK, its Secretary and against the antifascist movement as a whole. A series of new violent assaults by the storm troopers- has culminated to the killing of Pavlos Fyssas by a 50-man strong Nazi gang, including the killer itself Roupakias.
This time it was a Greek person who was killed by the Nazis, not an immigrant like the Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Afghans or Egyptians killed by the ‘Golden Dawn” and their supporters in the Police in the recent past, particularly after the 2012 elections of the Nazis in the Greek Parliament. So the entire people, including a conservative nationalistic part of the Greek population that stood quite when immigrants were killed or Jews were put on trial,, could not tolerate anymore the criminal role of the Greek government and State themselves, not just of its Nazi watchdogs.
The Samaras government had no other option than to act. But no illusions could be nurtured over a government where the ruling, closed circle of “advisors” around the Prime Minister is composed by well known far right nationalists, and vicious anti-Semites(T. Baltakos, Chr. Lazarides, Failos Kranidiotis etc.), even by former leading members of Greek Nazism( Makis Voridis, spokesperson of the parliamentary group of the New Democracy, the Health Minister Adonis Georgiadis, his close co-thinker and “adviser” Thanasis Plevris, son of the notorious guru of Greek Nazism Kostas Plevris, and now appointed by Samaras as Vice-Chairman of the National Organization on Pharmaceuticals et al.). Nobody can be secure or naïve enough knowing that the Nazis have important positions and strong influence inside the Police, the secret services, and the Army.
The government itself not only covers up for them but also it deliberately uses the current arrests of the most prominent elements of the gang to introduce new anti-democratic legislation and impose measures against the Left in the name of “the fight against extremism, both right and left”.
Above all, there are still here and are worsening the material social economic conditions that helped the ‘Golden Dawn” to become the third stronger bourgeois party in the country, according to the polls, even after the murder of Pavlos: the capitalist systemic bankruptcy, the measures of social cannibalism imposed by the troika of the EU/ECB/IMF, the decomposition of a discredited bourgeois parliamentary system.
The struggle against fascism cannot be separated from an uncompromising struggle against social devastation, to kick out the troika and its servants, the New Democracy-PASOK government; to smash the bankrupt capitalist system that generates hunger, and mass unemployment as well as the repressive State apparatus and their complement, the Nazi storm troops; to open the road for a socialist way out from the crisis with the workers and oppressed taking power, and re-reorganizing society on new social bases. Either Socialism or barbarism!
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Savas Michael,
30 September 2013
