Dimitrios' World

A quick weekend trip to Athens has brought to the limelight many of the traits/characteristics of what it is to be a Greek today. Political and ideological polarization undoubtedly prevails to the point that national symbols such as the flag and the commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the uprising at the Athens Polytechnic have become instruments of partisan design. Witnessing a small gathering of Golden Dawn stalwarts in front of Parliament on a Friday afternoon (15 November) made me reflexively cringe. More troubling was their taking for their own use of the national flag as an instrument for their protest; in a way soiling it for the rest of us proud citizens of a proud nation.  This past weekend also marked the honoring of the 24 fallen of the  Polytechnic uprising of 14-17 November 1973 that culminated in the eventual fall of the military junta and the return to democracy in Greece in 1974. The annual pilgrimage to the site and ...

Question: what does a frustrated and desperate citizen do when he realizes, as a horrified onlooker at the developments in his country, that not one of the parliamentary or extra-parliamentary parties (or constructs) expresses him? What does he do when the democracy he believes in and wants to constructively engage in is broke?  It has taken the murder of Pavlos Fissas by a member of Golden Dawn, Greece's brand of neo-Nazis, to shock society into action....a society that has been largely silent when the Nazis murder or rough up immigrants. Yet even this call for a higher calling that this ideology minimizes us and should have no place in mainstream politics or otherwise has brought us closer by awakening most to the danger of extremism but has polarized us further as other mainstream political and social actors seek to equate extremism on the right with extremism on the left. Roger Cohen correctly coins it when he writes that " [t] he perfect political storm for violent e...