Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere

by Paul Mason

  Only crass errors by the country’s rulers could open up a path [for Hitler]. And only a blatant disregard by Germany’s power elites for safeguarding democracy—in fact, the hope that economic crisis could be used as a vehicle to bring about democracy’s demise and replace it by a form of authoritarianism—could induce such errors. Precisely this is what happened.2

  The names of Brüning, von Papen and Schleicher, troublesome though they are to remember, should be as famous as the words Stalingrad, Arnhem and Dunkirk. These were the men who tried and failed to use a mixture of economic austerity, authoritarianism and what we might now call ‘technocratic’ rule to avoid an outright fascist takeover. They thought the Nazis were malleable tools in the continued rule of the old elite, and they played to the gallery of Nazi populism on race and nation.

  And therein lies the parallel with Greece: a country committed to austerity, whose centrist parties are clustered into a coalition which represents all the remaining forces of conservatism and social democracy. The coalition, which sees itself as the last bulwark against a government of the far left, is trying to crack down on ‘extremism’ using a police force which has itself been criticized for extremist leanings.

  But despite these parallels, at time of writing Greece was not on the brink of a Weimar-style collapse. Nor was it ‘in civil war’ as claimed by Ilias Panagiotaros, the deputy leader of Golden Dawn, when I interviewed him for the BBC. If anything, Greece displayed—by the time of the passing of its third austerity memorandum in November 2012—levels of instability and political radicalization closer to the levels seen in Germany in early 1930, not late 1933. The problem was that Greece was approaching 1933 levels of economic collapse.

  Unemployment was 30 per cent in Germany when Hitler took power; it was 25.1 per cent and rising in Greece in late 2012. GDP collapsed by about 7 per cent in both 1931 and 1932 in Germany. Its current rate of collapse in Greece is roughly the same: 7 per cent per year. Germany’s banks had gone bust in 1931. Greek banks are effectively part nationalized already.

  You can see the physical impact of this on Stadiou Street in Athens. There was an arcade where, in the summer of 2011, I remember blogging about how its small specialist businesses in Greece were doomed: the pen shop, the coin collecting shop, the stationery store. They’re all gone now. So is much of the street itself. The Art Nouveau cinema was burned out last year; the Marfin Bank, next door, was torched with the death of three workers during a riot in 2010. On the walls somebody has spray-canned ‘Love or Nothing’. Right now there is a heck of a lot of nothing: shops closed, stripped, barred, graffitied, even the fascias chipped off as ammunition in riots.

  And nowhere is the human impact of this weird situation clearer than when you talk to young people.

  I met Yiannis and Maria in a bare flat in Exarcheia, the bohemian district of Athens. Despite their bruises and bandages they took some persuading to go on camera—anonymously and in their hoodies—to put on record their allegations of brutality in police custody. What struck me, beyond those allegations (denied by the police, but partially corroborated by a coroner’s report), was their detachment from regular life. They expected the police to be brutal fascists. They were outraged that they’d had to listen, they said, to Golden Dawn propaganda in the police cells. But they were reluctant to bring a complaint within the system.

  For tens of thousands of young people, life is already lived in a semi-underground way: squatting instead of renting; cadging food and roll-ups from their friends. Drifting back to their grandparents’ villages, sofa surfing. Yiannis is a sporadically employed technician in a cultural industry; Maria a highly qualified professional who waits tables. The British author Laurie Penny captured the situation in a recent memoir of a trip to Athens: ‘We came expecting … riots; instead we found ourselves looking at what happens when the riots die away and the horrified inertia sets in.’3

  Horrified inertia is now seeping from the world of the semi-outlawed young activists into the lives of ordinary people. What people do—whether black-hooded anarchists in Athens, or young farmers in Thessaly on their third or fourth bottle of beer by lunchtime—is retreat into the personal. It’s no longer ‘the personal is political’, it’s the personal instead of the political. True, demonstrators still turn out in large numbers, as in the October 2012 general strike. But they go through the motions—of demonstrating, of rioting even. ‘It’s just for show on both sides, the cops and the anarchists,’ I was told by my Greek fixer as we legged it through stampeding people and tear gas.

  In 2011 the buzzword was ‘anomie’: a listless rejection of the rule of law, with individuals beginning to make their own law, from lifting up the gates at road tolls to invading court hearings to disrupt house repossessions. There is not even much of that ‘anomie’ activism anymore; the movement that defied road tolls in 2011 is tiny in 2012. If anything captures the buzz of late 2012 in Greece, it is the person who sprayed the slogan ‘Love or Nothing’. It’s less about anomie, more about depression and fear. What has depressed and frightened much of Greek society—from the liberal centre-right to the liberal left—is the rapid rise of Golden Dawn.

  In the two elections of May/June 2012 this party scored between 6–7 per cent. That is nothing like a 1930-style breakthrough. But once its MPs were in parliament, while austerity gnawed away at the fabric of society, its support leapt to 14 per cent. Then, like the Nazis in the critical years, it began a low-level battle for control of the streets. It began to do DIY law enforcement against migrants, with no intervention from the police. At street markets in Messolonghi and Rafina its uniformed activists checked the permits of migrant stallholders, demonstratively kicking over the wares of those who lacked the right document.

  With electoral data showing—on one count—45 per cent of police personnel voting for Golden Dawn, there is rising concern that support for the far right has begun to skew the operational priorities of the police at the local level.

  I met the party’s second in command, Ilias Panagiotaros, in the back yard of the store he runs: a militaria shop, selling police uniforms to serving officers and Combat 18 t-shirts to football hooligans. In his opinion, ‘Greek society is ready—even though no-one likes this—to have a fight: a new type of civil war. On the one side there will be nationalists like us, and Greeks who want our country to be as it used to be, and on the other side illegal immigrants, anarchists and all those who have destroyed Athens several times. Golden Dawn is at war with the political system and those who represent it, with the domestic and international bankers, we are at war with these invaders—immigrants.’

  Panagiotaros, one of eighteen fascist MPs, was clear as to the sequencing of the Greek denouement. It would not be like Weimar: it would begin with a left-wing government, and end with the rule of his own party: ‘If Syriza wins the next election, we will win the one after that. It is not a dream that within one, two or three years we will be the first political party.’

  He claimed support within the police at ‘60 per cent or more’. And he gave a chilling explanation of how Golden Dawn’s extra-judicial actions were affecting the rule of law. Referring to the market stall attacks, he said:

  ‘With one incident, which was on camera, the problem was solved—in every open market all over Greece illegal immigrants disappeared. There was some pushing and some fighting—nothing extraordinary, nothing special—only with one phone call saying Golden Dawn is going to pass by the police in going there, meaning the brand name [of Golden Dawn] is very effective …’

  Greece has a massive and conspicuous problem with illegal migration. The centres of many cities are—or were, until the summer of 2012—full of young male migrants from Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan and increasingly Syria. Many Greeks do fear them, and perceive them as a threat to social order and a traditional lifestyle. This is a country that never had any colonies, and therefore did not experience high ethnic diversity until recently.

  The new policy, known as ‘Hospitable Zeus
’, is to round migrants up and put them in camps: police in plain clothes or uniforms visibly stopping every person of colour on the street, checking their papers, and if the papers are not in order processing them ultimately to a migrant detention camp. Even as human rights groups raise the alarm, demanding access to the camps, Golden Dawn has protested outside them on the grounds that conditions are too good there, and that deportations are not fast enough (about six thousand have been detained, with maybe three thousand deported). And even as the police round up the migrants, Golden Dawn’s policy is to terrorize them off the streets, and mount a legal campaign against companies who employ them.

  The Greek media, meanwhile, has taken its cue to reinforce the association of migrants with crime. For those seeking an alternative view there are only the newspapers of the far left, since the main liberal news-paper—Eleftherotypia, an equivalent to the Guardian—went bust and closed down.

  Just after the June election I met a senior politician from New Democracy, the conservative party. When I asked what his party was going to do about Golden Dawn, the answer was: ‘Get an immigration policy. There hasn’t been one. All this Golden Dawn stuff is the product of that.’

  In the ensuing months Greece ‘got’ an immigration policy—albeit one where to claim asylum you have to queue overnight on a Friday, week after week, avoid being beaten by the gangs paid by the police to disrupt the queue, and then somehow bribe your way to the front. A policy where people of colour are shamelessly picked off the streets by plainclothes police and herded onto buses to be processed. One where previously buzzing immigrant neighbourhoods like Agias Pandelemonos in Athens have become, in a matter of months, quiet, orderly, and mostly white.

  But it has not stopped Golden Dawn. Theodora Oikonomides, a citizen journalist at the alternative radio network Radio Bubble, who has covered the rise of Golden Dawn, voices a fear common to many:

  ‘Golden Dawn’s favourite themes, such as xenophobia, homophobia and anti-Semitism have now become part of Greek public discourse, whether at the political or at the social level,’ she says. ‘By failing to take action against Golden Dawn while nodding and winking to its electorate at every opportunity, the Greek politicians—who are now in power with the support of European partners—have opened a Pandora’s box that will not close any time soon.’

  On 7 November the Greek coalition imposed its latest and, it promised, ‘last’ round of austerity: €13.5 billion a year in cuts and tax rises, in order to release €31 billion worth of bailout money. It went through by just three votes—more or less reducing the PASOK party in parliament to a handful of veteran leaders.

  Now the Coalition will just hold on, hoping that its own electoral support does not send it the way the German centrist parties went after 1932. But electoral support is slipping. While New Democracy has maintained its poll rating at 27 per cent (compared to 29 per cent in the election), PASOK—the former governing socialist party—was by November 2012 down to 5.5 per cent, neck and neck with coalition partner Democratic Left. The combined poll rating of the pro-austerity parties is now 38 per cent.

  In the meantime, for the majority of people who want the austerity to stop and who do not want to be gassed, truncheoned, menaced or even to go on strike, there is only the ‘love or nothing’ strategy. Anecdotally the use of anti-depressants is rising; Penny’s book tells numerous tales of former political activists simply stunned by drink and drugs.

  Which brings us back to The Silver Lake.

  The ‘love interest’ in Kurt Weill’s opera doesn’t start until the second half, with the arrival of Fennimore, a young woman trapped in a castle with the two losers and a scheming, reactionary aristocrat who has duped them out of their money. Once Fennimore appears, the music becomes mesmerized and lyrical; it focuses on the combined hopelessness of the two men and the girl. And the final sequence—a dream-like fifteen minutes during which the men set out to cross the castle’s lake, certain they will drown—is shot through with ecstasy and despair.

  ‘You escape from the horror,’ Fennimore sings, ‘that may destroy all we know. Yet the germ of creation will struggle to grow.’

  All this can be a beginning,

  And though time turns our day back to night

  Yet the hours of dark will lead onwards

  To the dawning of glorious light.

  I had always struggled to understand this ending. Why, in the last days of Weimar, did Kurt Weill not pen a sustained anthem of defiance against Nazism rather than a work that, ultimately, expresses resignation?

  On the streets of Athens there was, by the winter of 2012, an answer. You could feel what it is like when the political system—and even the rule of law—become paralyzed and atrophied. The ‘horrified inertia’ begins to grip even the middle classes, as the evidence of organized racist violence encroaches into their lives. Faced with an economic situation dictated by the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and a street atmosphere resembling Isherwood’s Berlin, the natural human urge is not fight but flight. Flight from danger into the cocoon of drugs, relationships, alternative lifestyles, one’s iPod. After the first-night disruption of The Silver Lake in Leipzig this is how its director, Douglas Sirk, described the scene at the theatre:

  The sturmabteilung filled a fairly large part of the theatre and there was a vast crowd of Nazi Party people outside with banners and God knows what, yelling and all the rest of it. But the majority of the public loved the play… And so I thought at first, well, things are going to be tough but perhaps it isn’t impossible to overcome … [But] no play, no song, could stop this gruesome trend towards inhumanity.4

  And this is how a Greek theatre director in 2012 describes the situation after his own theatre was disrupted by fascists. Laertis Vasiliou’s production of Corpus Christi—a play with a gay theme—was shut down by demonstrators from Golden Dawn after several nights of rock throwing, tear gas and the beating of audience members:

  ‘We went ahead with the performance, which started with two hours of delay because of the fight outside the theatre between the police against the Christian fundamentalists and the Nazis. It was like hell. The noise from outside was clear inside the theatre during the performance. People were beaten up by Nazis and Christian fanatics. This was the Greek Kristallnacht. Every day they phone me now, they phone the theatre, saying: your days are numbered.’

  His eyes redden and his face begins to tremble as he tells me: ‘They phoned my mother, Golden Dawn. They said we will deliver your son’s body to you in a box of little pieces. I want to be told if we are in a democracy or a dictatorship?’

  The differences between today’s Greece and the last days of Weimar, then, are clear. Under international pressure, the Greek state is still capable of upholding the rule of law; centrist parties, though atrophied, still hold the allegiance of more than one third of voters; there has been no decisive electoral breakthrough by the far right. Crucially, no major business or media groups, and no significant portion of the elite, have swung behind the far right as happened in Germany. But these conditions are eroding.

  And the flight to inertia, depression, to personal life may also be more pronounced than in Weimar. Weimar Germany was, after all, a society of intense political engagement; of hierarchical politics, lifelong commitment to social movements, trade unions for the left and centre, military veterans’ groups and churches for the right. So while the crisis may be on a scale weaker than the one that collapsed democracy in Greece, the forces holding democracy together may also be weaker.

  The leaders of the international community know what the stakes are. Greece is the test bed for an austerity programme dictated by international capital. It is being imposed so that globalization can go on existing: so that bankers will still be able to afford yachts, and banks will never have to write down the mountain of toxic debt hidden inside their balance sheets. Instead of debt, Greek people are being asked to write down their lives and see their society destroyed. It might
work: we might get to the exhausted end of it with ‘only’ pogroms, broken glass, cancelled plays and a severely curtailed democracy.

  If it fails, a whole generation of Greek young people will be left, like Weill’s protagonists in The Silver Lake, with a choice between love and nothing.

  Or to put it another way, they will be left with a choice between the politics of solidarity and what the director of The Silver Lake observed: a gruesome trend towards inhumanity.

  13

  Russia: ‘Putin Got Scared’—From the Football Riots to Pussy Riot

  To those who remember Russia straight after the collapse of communism, it is a country radically transformed. In Pushkin Square, twenty years ago, I remember the way forlorn Muscovite women would stand in a line, dazed, their cheap shoes disintegrating in the snow, to sell the last of their possessions. Today Pushkin Square is a monument to economic progress—and progress not just for the oligarchs and crooks who’ve flaunted their designer watches and girlfriends across the top hotels of Europe for the past two decades. Vladimir Putin’s Russia has delivered progress for large numbers of ordinary people.

  The raw figures tell the story. In ten years GDP per head grew from $7,000 to $20,000. Though economic growth went into reverse during the global crisis, it resumed afterwards: the Russian economy, which produced $250 billion ten years ago, is now closing in on $2 trillion GDP. In the same period, the value of the country’s exports increased fivefold. Unemployment in the Moscow district was down to 2.8 per cent at the start of 2011, and though it remained high in the south and east of Russia, in the politically crucial cities of the west it was below 8 per cent and falling. Russia has become an energy-exporting economy, with a conspicuous consumption sector attached. Its Internet market is second only to Germany’s in Europe. Its public finances are in massive surplus.