The Resistible Rise of Golden Dawn Nikos Loudos The meteoric electoral ascension of the with what they called `Judeo-Christian tradi- Nazi party Golden Dawn in Greece sent tion'.1 Their sub-culture worships hate, `pure shockwaves all over Europe. Up from the blood', violence, guns, and martial arts. Their marginal 0.29% it polled in the elections of annual youth festival was called `Festival of 2009, Golden Dawn gathered just under 7% in Hate'. Their internal regime is not one of a the national elections of May and June 2012 political party; their para-military apparatus sending 18 Nazi MPs to the Greek parliament. with their members following orders from su- This, combined with the fact of Nazi squads periors up to the level of the `F¨uhrer,Nikos operating in neighbourhoods, with repeated Michaloliakos, has been much more important organized attacks, some of them murderous, than their political faade. Their public ap- on migrants, trade unionists, gays and ac- pearances echo the German Nazi Party with tivists of the Left, raised the spectra of the torches, dark uniforms, and goose stepping. threat of fascism in a way that had not been In their internal procedures and their publica- the case for decades. tions they have been using the swastika, while their members enjoy using the fascist salute. In their local chapters they have been prac- ticing street fighting, arms use, and stabbing. Apart from these details, the majority of their local chapters form part of local criminal net- works selling protection to bars, cabarets and brothels, and - most important of all- have been acting as local gangs attacking migrants in buses, in the streets, in their houses, steal- Golden Dawn; `straight out of the sewers of history' ing, beating up, humiliating and murdering. I felt forced to provide all this information, Golden Dawn does not resemble what not because in itself gives us any clue about used to be called Euro-fascism; they are not the factors leading to Golden Dawn's appear- fascists with `suits and ties', they are not ance nor about the way to defeat them. But ex-fascists masquerading as populists. They they are proof of the scale of the political crisis come straight out of the sewers of history; and the speed with which things can change their leadership have been consistent Hitler because of the acute economic crisis. This is admirers for decades. They are not Holo- the kind of party that that has intervened in caust deniers but Holocaust nostalgics, openly the political scene, and which, according to 2 racist, calling for the annihilation of the `infe- many polls , may be the third largest party rior races'. Their `alternative history' model after the next elections. The destabilizing ef- dreams of Greece having joined the Nazi Axis fects of the crisis are something that we all in World War 2 and ensured the establish- have to take into account, in whichever coun- ment of the Third Reich. In the `art' sec- try we may live. Greece is not an exception; tion of their publications, along with poems on the contrary it can be a warning. dedicated to the leaders of the German Nazi Actually, there have been many voices party, one could find also hymns to Satan inside Greece, even in the last years while and black-metal music targeting Jesus Christ, Golden Dawn was already developing as a po- the Virgin Mary and anything having to do litical phenomenon, saying that fascism would 1One of these black-metal `artists' is now a Golden Dawn MP, Giorgos Germenis. 2We should be sceptical of these polls, for reasons I will explain later. 17 never be able to get out of the margins in this ideological affiliations of the government. country. They put forward a number of ar- guments: the experience of Greece as an oc- After the German invasion, though, a big cupied country during the war; the important part of the Greek ruling class moved to col- anti-fascist tradition of the '40s (Greece ex- laborating with the occupation forces and do- perienced the most important general strike ing business with the Third Reich. During under the German occupation, a strike that this period of collaboration, the Greek govern- managed to stop the conscription of Greek ment created the `Security Battalions', armed workers as forced labour in Germany); the re- groups aiming to suppress the Resistance (by cent experience of the military dictatorship of far the most important organization of which 1967-1974, the living memory of mass emigra- was the National Liberation Front (EAM), tion which was supposed to make the Greeks controlled by the Communist Party). The immune to racism, etc. All these have been Security Battalions recruited what Trotsky important factors in the trajectory of fascism called `human dust': people who were ea- and anti-fascism, but as is now obvious they ger to kill and betray just for some pocket- didn't stop Golden Dawn from seizing the op- money provided by the government or the portunity of the economic crisis to make its Nazis. Along with them, in parts of the coun- mark on the political scene. try, more openly pro-German or clear Nazi or- In order to see how and why, we have to ganizations appear, having anti-communism examine the specific way the economic crisis as the central tenet of their `ideology'. In lo- made the political system implode in the last cal massacres committed by the occupation years, providing the space for Golden Dawn. forces around the country - in some cases en- Nevertheless, it's important to note that tra- tire villages were annihilated after some act dition does matter, and despite the `national of the Resistance - it was these fascist groups myths', fascists have been present in Greece who did the dirty work. The Germans in most for almost a century and in crucial periods of the cases were acting as soldiers. Tortur- they were not just `in the margins'. Any- ing, rape, burning or burying alive people was way, they were not born ex nihilo during the a `privilege' for the Greek fascists. present crisis. Even during the 1920s, there were cases However, the Resistance triumphed and of proto-fascist organizations, connected with while the Germans were evacuating the coun- politicians of the big parties of that period try, their Greek friends threw away their uni- who were looking to the example of Mussolini forms and tried to hide (many of them didn't as a way to cope with the rising radicalization have the chance), while a few of them fol- of the workers movement and of the Greek lowed the Nazi army into exile. For a short refugees who had come to Greece after the period after the Liberation and before the of- collapse of the allied intervention in Turkey. ficial outbreak of the Civil War (1946-1949), In 1936, a fascist politician, Ioannis Metaxas, the `collaborators' were prosecuted and vil- became prime minister and very quickly dicta- ified. The Greek ruling class, though, dis- tor, establishing a regime copying many of the covered very quickly that they were in need rituals of Nazism. Fascist organisations were of these people again. Fascist gangs started implanted among the youth and in the work- a campaign of terror against the Left round places while all the genuine workers organiza- the country, under the protection of the lo- tions and parties were disbanded. Ironically, cal police. During the Civil War, they were history brought that regime - with its open in- given free rein in the countryside. The collab- clination to German fascism - into World War orators in a few years were rebranded as `pa- 2 on the Allied side. This was because Greek triots' who saved the country from Commu- capitalism's integration in West European im- nism, gaining recognition and benefits from perialism was far more important than the the state, while the Left had to go under- 18 ground.3 of the dictatorship, Kostas Plevris5. Michalo- These groups survived as `clubs' in parts liakos was arrested and went to jail, but not of the country and were re-activated in the for long. He was to go to jail again some years early '60s, when the ruling class was surprised later, after being arrested for having explo- to see a new upsurge of the Left, student and sives. His connections with the secret services labor activism. Costa Gavras' film `Z ', de- (some of his fellow fascists who remained in picted the most famous case : the murder jail for years have spoken out) enabled him to of Grigoris Lambrakis, MP for the United go free again very quickly. Democratic Left (the electoral front of the The fascist terrorism of the first years of underground Communist Party) after one of the 3rd Greek Republic became an inisignif- his speeches in Salonica, in 1963. The fas- icant footnote for official history. But those cist groups were used by the police and the were the years when Michaloliakos and other Right to intimidate gatherings of the Left nostalgics were putting bombs in offices of and the unions, organizing counter demon- the left, in cinemas playing Russian movies strations, appearing as `concerned citizens'. and in bookshops. Retired officers compiled These fascist networks formed part of what personal arsenals, around which they built in Greek political vocabulary was called the neo-fascist groups. They were not just nos- `para-state', a nexus connecting the Palace, talgics. The recently opened British Foreign secret services, the gendarmerie, politicians Office files showed that the British Embassy and the fascist groups; at the service of the was afraid of a new military coup in Greece ruling class but running parallel to the official even until 1980.