[Comrade Ogilvy]

This morning, on a Greek news channel, I saw what I think was a news coverage concerning the arrests of the leaders of the 17N movement. However, due to my lack of knowledge of the Greek language I, regrettably, could not understand what was being said.
Does anyone here have information in English?

[LeftyCatholic03]

From what I saw on Google, the 17N movement is supposedly a Marxist terror organization formed by a Greek who was seen in good eyes by Trotsky

http://www.greece.gr/POLITICS/InternalAffairs/family_ties.stm

http://clamormagazine.org/features/issue17_three_1.html

[Putinist]

Basically 17N, or what's left of it (no pun intended), is a mixture of Marxist-Leninism and Greek nationalism:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/782451.stm

November 17

Small but deadly.



November 17, the left-wing Greek group suspected of murdering UK Defence Attache Stephen Saunders, has its roots in the resistance to the military junta which ruled Greece from 1967 to 1975.

The highly secretive, much feared group takes its name from the date of a 1973 student uprising, which was crushed when the army sent tanks to an Athens polytechnic, killing 20 students.

The group's first known attack came in December 1975, when American Richard Welch - the Central Intelligence Agency chief in Athens - was shot dead as he returned from a party.

The .45-calibre pistol used in the assassination became the trademark of the group.

The attack on the CIA boss was apparently motivated by US support for the Greek military dictatorship.

The group has admitted a total of 21 killings, including four US diplomats.

Anti-Western

It has maintained its anti-Western stance following the end of the Cold War, and its attacks appear to be aimed at discouraging US and Western European military and diplomatic ties with Greece.

Six years ago, the group is believed to have planned to blow up a British aircraft carrier, using anti-tank mines - an attack which was unsuccessful.

Last year, a bomb attack on the German embassy in Athens was attributed to November 17.

The attack on Brigadier Saunders came as he was on his way to a meeting about arms imports to Greece.

The group opposes Greek participation in Nato and the European Union.


It is firmly anti-capitalist, and has called for a popular uprising against the Greek middle and upper classes.

In 1994, a November 17 gunman killed a former governor of the Greek state bank.



Impunity

Anti-terrorism experts have estimated that the group has no more than 25 participants - many of them possibly family members.

The group's small size has enabled it to operate securely and with impunity - police are reported not to know the identity of a single November 17 member.

A Greek politician who survived a November 17 attack remarked that "Greece is the only country where it has been impossible to not only smoke out terrorism, but even to make a single substantial strike against it".

But some commentators believe that because the group emerged from the same resistance movement that gave rise to today's political establishment, there may be influential figures in Greece who do not want its members brought to book.

[LeftyCatholic03]

Marxist fascism....very interesting...in a way. I say the fasicsm because nationalism is mainly that. And no i'm not saying that Marxist are fascists. Goodness no.

[Putinist]

Marxist fascism....very interesting...in a way. I say the fascism because nationalism is mainly that. And no I'm not saying that Marxist are fascists. Goodness no.

No, no, no, no, no - not fascism at all! Marxists like myself, certainly across the European continent, regard fascism as the kind of chauvinistic ultra-nationalist imperialism that sent Europe plunging into the World War II and caused all of the wartime problems between the US and Japan. I define fascism by the Benito Mussolini/Giovanni Gentile definition - "straight from the horses mouth", you could say - which is on this page. Nationalism, on the other hand, is not necessarily fascism. I view fascism as working in three stages, stage 1 being moderate and stage 3 being the kind of ultra-national, imperialist ambitious regimes we have seen come to power in Germany and the US. 17N is, ultimately, more Left-leaning and is therefore more about the ideological side of it as opposed to the national side. 17N are anti-US, anti-Brit, anti-NATO, anti-Turkey, and fiercely anti-capitalist. That is basically radical leftism operating on a national level - as 17N are based essentially in Greece. Their Trotsky-like leader, Alexandros Giotopoulos, a former school professor in mathematics who is his 60s now, lives in a big house(!) on one of Greece's very many Mediterranean islands.

[Comrade Ogilvy]

To whom it may concern,

I don't think I ever requested information about the history or the political structure of the 17N group. Would you please take such discussion elsewhere?