My visit to Prokopios’s office was a long one. For nearly four hours, he did most of the talking, though for Maria and me, it wasn’t too much. We listened as he expounded on his tripartite theory for how neo-Nazis were able to make it into the Greek parliament. First, he said, other politicians had created them by doing a poor job. “If Greece was Sweden, if Greece was Finland, we wouldn’t have Golden Dawn.” The second reason was anger and revenge. “In the past, people used to applaud the politicians because they were giving them money to live.” The politicians said, “ ‘Take the money! Take it! Take it! Because the machine is making it and handing it out.’ ” But now, he added, “People want someone to come and whip the politicians. To beat them. To make them eat wood.” The third reason for the party’s rise, he said, was that Greece had never punished those who had collaborated with the Nazis during the World War II occupation.
Prokopios had a point. Near the end of the war and after it, the Greek government—along with its British and American backers—was more concerned with neutralizing the large communist force that had fought the Germans than it was with punishing the collaborationist “security battalions” the Greek puppet government had sponsored to fight those same communists. The security battalions, outfitted in the traditional klephtic fighter garb of fustanellas and pom-pom shoes, thought of themselves as nationalists and were driven by a deep hatred of the communists. The wider population regarded them as criminal gangs, and they were violent and vicious toward civilians. The battalions’ crimes and collaboration were overlooked after the war, and in fact battalion members were seen by the Greek government and its backers as a useful counterweight to the communists’ strength. After the war, members of the security battalions easily found jobs in the newly formed National Guard or joined shadowy security organizations. When the communist resistance fighters initially laid down their weapons in 1945, the former collaborators, now sanctioned by the Greek state, took great satisfaction in going after them, and communists were subjected to a period of persecution known as the White Terror. The communist fighters eventually regrouped in the mountains and the country slid into civil war.
In 1947, when the broke British government declared it could no longer support the Greek government’s fight against the communist insurgents, U.S. president Harry S. Truman, fearful Greece and Turkey would fall under the Soviet sphere of influence, spoke to a joint session of Congress and asked lawmakers to approve 400 million dollars in economic and military aid for the two countries. In his speech, Truman acknowledged the extremism of the Greek right as well as that of the left. Yet the extremism on the right was clearly not of equal concern given the budding Cold War climate. Truman’s speech marked the beginning of the Truman Doctrine, the Cold War containment policy that often led the United States to prop up authoritarian governments in order to prevent the spread of communism. In Greece, this later meant the U.S. government backed the dictatorial Regime of the Colonels, which used the communist threat as a pretext to seize power, and tortured and imprisoned dissidents. Members of the regime had close connections to the occupation-era security battalions, and tellingly, one if its early acts was to grant battalion members pension benefits for their wartime service. The regime also banned long hair on men and short skirts on women, as well as literature deemed subversive, such as the works of Aristophanes and Chekhov. After the dictatorship’s fall, as Greece reestablished democratic governance, its leaders were put in prison. That was where the future Golden Dawn leader, Michaloliakos, imprisoned for his post-dictatorship political activities, met the head of the fallen regime, Georgios Papadopoulos; later, when the former dictator started an ultranationalist political party—National Political Union—from prison, Michaloliakos became head of its youth section.
During my conversation with Prokopios, I had a sense that perhaps he did not quite fit into the clerical establishment. The church in Greece is seen as an intrinsically right-wing institution—many point out its ties to the military dictatorship, which embraced the mantra “Greece of Christian Greeks”—and some of its clerics deliver nationalist, anti-Semitic sermons not entirely dissimilar to Golden Dawn political speeches. Prokopios, it seemed to me, may have paid a price for standing out. He was, by ecclesiastical standards, in his professional prime. Yet, despite his bishop’s rank, he seemed to have been relegated to the hierarchical backbench. When Prokopios was moved from Agios Panteleimonas and promoted to bishop in 2009, he was assigned to serve as an assistant to Bishop Amvrosios of Kalavryta and Aigialeia, a man with a white beard comparable in length to Prokopios’s. This coupling struck some people at the time as an odd choice, because Amvrosios was known for his nationalist views, and subsequently wrote what might be considered a defense of Golden Dawn on his personal blog: “I am not able to understand how and why the ideas of Golden Dawn are subversive and why the ideas of Syriza or the Communist Party of Greece are not similarly subversive or dangerous.” Michaloliakos returned the apparent sympathy, and once listed Amvrosios as one of the “worthy” bishops of the Greek Church, placing him in the company of prelates such as Bishop Seraphim of Piraeus, who once, on a popular television talk show, said Hitler was an “instrument of global Zionism” financed by the Rothschild family in order to make Jews leave Europe and “go to Israel to establish the new empire.”
Things predictably did not go well between Prokopios and Amvrosios, and in the falling-out, Amvrosios, on his blog, accused Prokopios of “wanting the title and the…money!” Prokopios was moved again, and became assistant to the bishop of Nikaia in the western suburb of Athens, but this appeared to be a ceremonial position. When I met Prokopios, he seemed a man underutilized, without a flock to shepherd, and trying to come to terms with this circumstance. Despite his charitable deeds at Agios Panteleimonas, he had gone from heading a large congregation to, as he put it to me, possessing “no power” and “no responsibility.” At his office on the ground floor of the dormitory, he seemed to cater primarily to four cats he’d taken in, one of which, by the time I left, had pissed on the floor.
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Following the playground’s closure, one of the next actions of the Committee of Residents was to publish its own newspaper every two months: The Voice of the Residents of Agios Panteleimonas, a self-funded venture, Giannatou told me, devoid of any party financing. The newspapers featured pictures of rickety ships overflowing with migrants, “ships that come and go from the depths of Asia and Africa” filled with the people that will “steal wages and will force you to lock your child inside the house, to live imprisoned.” The tone was exceedingly urgent. “The country is being driven to chaos,” ran the headline of the second edition. “The secret plan of Kissinger is being implemented. The ATHENIANS are PRISONERS of FOREIGNERS.” Underneath appeared a picture of the Germans entering Athens in 1941, and next to it, a picture of Muslims in the street holding up the Koran. The text urged Greeks to resist the migrants as they had resisted the Nazis: “Hellenes. The invader illegal immigrants are within Athens. Brothers! Keep well inside your souls the spirit of freedom. The invaders entered without resistance with the help of ethnic nihilists of our terrorized city. Hellenes! Your hearts high!” The time had come for a “counterattack,” declared the third edition, calling for “EVERYONE IN THE STREETS to defeat the tyrants of our people.” Underneath another picture of an overcrowded boat of migrants, it said: “They aren’t illegal immigrants. They are the fifth column. Among them are found trained commando-saboteurs that impersonate poor illegal immigrants, and at the right moment, they will take an order from the globalizers for enemy actions against our country.”
The Voice of the Residents of Agios Panteleimonas seemed to be preparing Greeks for war. It was for this reason among others that, during my conversation with Giannatou at the café, I found it odd when she told me the media had exaggerated the criminality of the area around the square, portraying it as “totally different from what it is.” I asked her to elaborate. “When you say you can’t walk around Agi
os Panteleimonas because they’re stabbing and the rest, the other becomes afraid,” she said. “Do you know how many apartments are unrented?” So, I asked, it wasn’t as dangerous as people were making it out to be? “Certainly not,” she said. “Those who were dangerous were those that came against us,” she added. “Against us simple residents.” I asked her who that was. “Anarcho-Syriza people,” she said, conjoining “anarchists” and “Syriza” into a compound word that was reminiscent of the way the military dictatorship in Greece once referred to leftists as “anarcho-communists.” These people weren’t real Greeks, Giannatou told me. They just happened to speak Greek.
It was noteworthy, I thought, that an apolitical organization like the Committee of Residents would have a particular problem with Syriza. Giannatou’s husband tried to explain the reason for the antagonism to me. “All of them are creating these problems and calling us racists and fascists, because they couldn’t enter these squares inside here to create a core group,” he said. “They couldn’t do it. Because there was resistance from us. They couldn’t enter, because wherever else you go, they go in and talk and make speeches, meetings. Here, they can’t do those things,” he said. “We won’t accept it and there’s no way we ever will.” Why, I asked, couldn’t they ever accept it? “Because we don’t accept them,” he said. “Because they are against the Greeks. It is racism against the Greeks. Can I make you understand? Someone hits an immigrant. They get together and make antifascist and antiracist chants and demonstrations. Greeks die, and no one demonstrates. We simply can’t tolerate something like that.”
The indignant residents therefore opened up a second battlefront against Syriza politicians. In October 2010, in the run-up to municipal elections, Alekos Alavanos, a former Syriza leader, visited Agios Panteleimonas with a group of supporters and an escort of riot police who didn’t do a particularly good job of protecting him from what was about to happen. Video and photos taken of the incident show what occurred. As Alavanos, a gray-haired economist, approaches the steps of the church, he and his supporters are pelted with yogurt, eggs, and tomatoes. Committee of Residents member Giannatos walks up the church steps and picks up a blue plastic bag already lying there. Inside are flyers advertising Michaloliakos’s mayoral candidacy as part of “Greek Dawn for Athens,” the name of Golden Dawn’s local ticket. As Alavanos is pelted in the face with yogurt, Giannatos begins throwing the flyers in the air over the leftists. His wife, Giannatou, arrives beside him and joins the leaflet tossing. Alavanos calmly wipes the yogurt off the left side of his face as his companions begin to shout. “Greeks, foreigners, and workers united!” In response, their opponents begin to chant: “Greece belongs to the Greeks,” and afterward a few people yell: “Blood, honor, Golden Dawn.”
Some of the people captured on camera protesting Alavanos’s presence would later become known as famed members of Golden Dawn. Among them, on the megaphone leading the indignant resident chants, was Ilias Panagiotaros, long a key Golden Dawn figure and a future parliamentarian for the party. Panagiotaros, a plump, bald man with a goatee, had the kind of fieldwork experience that could qualify him for this kind of action. He had long been the leader of Galazia Stratia, or Blue Army, an organization of nationalist football hooligans implicated in beatings of Albanians and other foreigners. The Blue Army was essentially a wing and recruitment tool of Golden Dawn, though Panagiotaros, in a 2004 interview, maintained they were two distinct organizations, albeit with a “very good” relationship. Giannatou, during our talk, had kind words for Panagiotaros, and smiled fondly when I mentioned his name. He was always there and on our side, she said. “He gave us courage.” Her endorsement of the man, however, did not mean an endorsement of the party. Giannatou told me her political allegiance was deeply New Democracy. Her husband, too, told me he was not affiliated with Golden Dawn—“Our party is Agios Panteleimonas,” he said. I later asked Giannatou why, then, if they didn’t support Golden Dawn, they were seen throwing Golden Dawn leaflets at Alavanos and his supporters that day. “I wasn’t holding any leaflets,” she said, though a photo of her holding the leaflets appeared in one prominent Greek newspaper. She also suggested the leftist visitors to the square that day had framed them by planting Golden Dawn leaflets on the steps. The leftists, she said, did this to make it seem like she and her husband were Golden Dawn supporters.
Shortly after the Alavanos incident, another then Syriza-affiliated politician, a mayoral candidate named Eleni Portaliou, also visited Agios Panteleimonas with a police escort and was greeted with a similar bombardment of edibles. Following the two pelting incidents, a series of Greek media reports wholly embraced the narrative that residents, propelled by their profound indignation, were behind the attacks. One television news report on a now-defunct channel began with a Committee of Residents member, Loukia Rizou, a woman in her late fifties who was a retired employee of the Hellenic Statistical Authority. “Residents threw it,” Rizou told the camera. “Indignant residents.” The reporter then summarized the meaning of the incidents: “The yogurt for Alekos Alavanos and the eggs for Eleni Portaliou pulled back the curtain and showed the depth of the problem at Agios Pantaleimonas.” On the screen again was Rizou. “We simply can’t live,” she said. A woman with a puffy face then appeared on camera. “There aren’t any extreme elements here,” she said. The reporter’s narrative continued: “Most of them were born in Agios Panteleimonas. They’ve had their homes here for decades. In the last years, however, their lives, as they say, have become insufferable due to criminality, the insecurity, and the degradation at their every step.” The woman with the puffy face reappeared. “Can’t they leave us in our pain?” she said of the leftist politicians who’d come to visit. “We can’t even go outside.”
Another example of the Greek media’s embrace of the indignant residents’ story came when the egged mayoral candidate, Portaliou, a middle-aged woman, appeared on Mega, one of the main television channels in Greece, and was interviewed by two men in suits and ties of various shades of blue. The host of the program, Nikos Stravelakis, who appeared to be heavily caked with television makeup, asked Portaliou if she hadn’t been wary of going to Agios Panteleimonas given that Alavanos had just been egged before her. Portaliou told him that the attacks by “extreme racist elements” had not discouraged her from reaching out to her fellow citizens in the area. Stravelakis interrupted, displeased with her characterization of the attackers. “Why, Ms. Portaliou, are you talking about extreme racist elements?” he said. She answered: “They are extreme racist elements because they are in a time of crisis and poverty and real problems involving a large section of the working class trying to—” Stravelakis interrupted her, and read a statement from Syriza that called the attackers “thugs”; he took issue with this: “I don’t see thugs, or racists, I see retirees, old people, men and women,” and they say, “We are afraid to leave our homes, and people can’t come here to support the rights of the immigrants and not the rights of the residents.” He later added: “Is a retiree who is afraid to leave his house, who they’ve robbed three or four times, an extreme racist element? Or rather a resident who wants to disagree with the positions of the candidates?” It was “an issue of security,” Stravelakis told her, but Portaliou, it seemed, just didn’t get it.
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General fear of crime, a criminologist will tell you, does not necessarily correlate to actual crime levels. The perception of risk is greatly influenced by the information people receive from their neighbors or from the mass media. It is also influenced by faith in the competence of the police. (The Greek police rank near the bottom of the European Union when it comes to citizen faith in their job performance.) Fear of crime can also be caused by nebulous feelings of insecurity. It so happens that Greeks, when compared in surveys to their European Union peers, express a relatively high degree of insecurity and are among the most afflicted by fear of crime.
Despite the comparatively high level of fear, there is less reported crime in Greece th
an there is on average in the European Union, and compared with other European cities of its size, Athens is considerably less violent. That is not to say crime has not been a problem. Beginning in the mid-1990s, robberies in Greece began to increase, and there was a sharp rise in burglaries as the debt crisis set in. Drug trafficking has also been a growing scourge. In Athens, there are rough and seedy neighborhoods where, in the shade of abandoned buildings, one can find groups of junkies pricking the parts of their bodies they estimate will most efficiently ingest the contents of the syringe. While this has gotten worse of late, in great part due to the prevalence of new cheap drugs and cuts to social services, it’s largely been that way since the 1980s. Prostitution, technically legal within a licensed establishment, most often occurs in unlicensed establishments, and a few streets near Agios Panteleimonas Square are known as main drags for this kind of business.
In short, crime and seediness exist in Greece and in Athens, but not at levels that would justify not being able to leave your house, as the indignant residents and people on television often suggested. In fact, around the time the Committee of Residents began their struggle, Greece was experiencing a notable drop in the total number of reported penal crimes, with a reduction of about 28 percent from 2006 to 2010. For Golden Dawn, however, that didn’t matter much, because dangers can be exaggerated or imagined. The indignant residents fueled the fear, and the fear fed Golden Dawn.
In his Athens mayoral bid in November 2010, Michaloliakos, propelled by vows to undo the “reign of terror from the illegal immigrant criminals,” won 5.29 percent of the vote. Around the polling stations of Agios Panteleimonas, the party won around 20 percent of the vote. The result earned Michaloliakos a seat on the municipal council. In an interview with a Greek news website some months after the election, Michaloliakos credited his success in Agios Panteleimonas and nearby neighborhoods to his party’s “wholehearted support” for the residents’ committees—by then a plural phenomenon, as other such self-declared nonpartisan groups had emerged. The high level of support from those areas created an obligation for the party to stand with the committees in their struggle, he added. The struggle of the residents had reached Attica Square, down the block from Agios Panteleimonas Square. And very soon, he hoped, it would take off on Victoria Square.
The Full Catastrophe Page 26