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GREECE: Mapping Ultra-Right Extremism, Xenophobia and Racism within the Greek State Apparatus

03 April 2014

"As long as Greece continues as a stigmatized country along a socially painful path of neoliberal restructuring, the threat of fascistization cannot be considered to have been repulsed just because of the current effort to dismantle Golden Dawn. The Greek Republic degenerates along with the dismantlement of organized labour in a society that suffers. Let the following pages be read not just as evidence for mapping the ultra-right within the Greek State, but primarily as evidence of the pressing need to develop a different strategy for resetting the country."

Summary: This study was launched in October 2012, before the “turning point” when the Nazi Golden Dawn (GD) organisation was designated a criminal organisation in Greece following the murder of anti-fascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas (a.k.a. Killah P) by GD member Pavlos Roupakias in September 2013.

The report has five chapters, the first being a “short historical review of the continuities and discontinuities of fascism in Greece” by Dimitris Kousouris. The next four chapters consider the twenty-first century crisis and Golden Dawn’s infiltration of or collusion with various state institutions.

Chapter 2 (by Dimitris Christopoulos, who also writes the Introduction and Conclusion to the report), examines the Hellenic police which “represents the sector of the State that is by far the most exposed to ultra-right intrusion” and is “contaminated with Nazi enclaves”. However, the report optimistically finds that the police “can and should be, accountable, and... under administrative and disciplinary control” and if “the head of the executive decides to send a powerful message to the police branch... at some point, it will certainly reach its destination”.

To this end the report points to police officers who have been jailed or dismissed “because, rather than hunting down Nazi criminals, they have been busy making friends with [them] and hunting down immigrants along with their new friends”. He maintains that “many of their colleagues will refrain from doing the same, even if they actually wish they could” if “trained in a proper way by liberal-democratic standards”.

The chapter on the judiciary, by Clio Papapantoleon, is particularly scathing, noting “a constant and systematic reproduction of practices and judgments that are especially favourable to the consolidation of an ultra-right political culture and ideology”. The judiciary is described as having a “culture that may be convincingly shown to share most features of the ultra-right”, leading to the conclusion “that the judiciary poses an exceptional danger to democracy, that... reproduces judgments and views that consolidate a culture that may be convincingly shown to share most features of the ultra-right as the normative horizon (i.e., as the common view of what is just) of the Greek political community.”

Dimosthenis Papadatos-Anagnostopoulos considers the role of the military reminding us of the “coup d’état strategies of ultra-right inspiration and anti-communist ideology” that litter the late twentieth century history “of constitutional aberrations in Greece.” The ultra-right ethos of the military “never altogether disappeared or evaporated”, but was “covered up and ultra-right voices were hushed” leading the report to warn that: “we had better be on the alert, because, in conditions such as the ones lived in Greece today, democracy does not seem particularly appealing or particularly strong against its enemies”.

The report finds that that while the situation in these institutions is dangerous, the role played by the church (in the chapter by Alexandros Sakelariou) is equally so. It is “an inextricable participant in public power, a virtual State within the State, [which] never practically underwent a process of political cleansing during the Greek transition period after 1974”. As a result, “even senior Church officials... seem to lack any scruple about stating views that, under the strict standards of European anti-hate speech law, would be subject to prosecution”.

The authors conclude by asking that the report “be read not just as evidence for mapping the ultra-right within the Greek State, but primarily as evidence of the pressing need to develop a different strategy for resetting the country”.

See the full report: Mapping Ultra-Right Extremism, Xenophobia and Racism within the Greek State Apparatus (100 pages, link)