From Viannos to Keratsini
It’s been four years since the murder of rapper Pavlos Fyssas in Keratsini. The Golden Dawn trial, which has been marred by vulgar attacks inside the courtroom against Fyssas’s mother by defendants and their followers, has gone on for two-and-a-half years now.
Meanwhile, on Sunday, President Prokopis Pavlopoulos visited a memorial on Crete to the 401 victims of the Viannos massacres carried out by Nazi troops on the island on September 14 to 16, 1943.
Nevertheless, the latest polls continue to show that 7 percent of Greek support the neo-Nazi party. Are these things linked? Clearly they are. However, spiritually, emotionally and morally, their connection is not just impossible – it’s unthinkable.
How is it that we’ve gone from having thousands of Greeks being murdered by the Nazi occupiers during World War II to having thousands of Greeks today, with their black uniforms, battle slogans and, ultimately, their vote, justify this kind of deadly extremism? This is a dishonor to those Greeks who were killed by this same ideology in World War II. And it’s not just one time, in which case it could have been justified by the overused, hypocritical excuses of “We did not know,” or “We were angry.”
The link between Golden Dawn and Nazism is anything but arbitrary. It is confirmed by former members of this criminal organization, who despite threats of violence and extortion against them for doing so, have made it clear how this party operated; by the oaths they would take; by the training they would undergo like a paramilitary organization, like a special battalion, whose basic “job” was to “deal with” immigrants and “traitors” of all kinds.
Documents of all kinds have provided irrefutable evidence of this. Not to mention all the video evidence that will be presented in court as soon as the depositions are wrapped up. “Yes, we are fascists,” one member says on video, quoting the Third Reich’s Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels – his knowledge stretches this far – but not naming him and leaving it up to the imaginations of his followers.
“Yes, we are fascists, yes, we are Nazis, yes, we are whatever you want to call us, but we are not thieves,” one former Golden Dawn lawmaker once said. Only that their ideological forefathers, the German Nazis, were not only thieves, but barbaric looters, and this was part of their ideology. And it continues to be. Nazism, whether it’s the old version or the new, is an ideological system based on theft and murder.
