Dave wrote:But just once, could we please get protestors who aren't fucking losers?
Listen, Greece historically has had an anarchist sub-culture. These guys were allowed to exist for the sake of democracy during Greece's transition in the 70's as a reactionary mechanism, protesting has been highly encouraged, as well as vindicated with the asylum laws, that prevented the state from entering uni's, which was put in the constitution after the dictatorship killed some protesters by storming the Athens Polytechnic. There is no Greek person alive that has not protested for something during his lifetime. It is part of the psyche, if you will.
Anarchists and various idiots in general were usually hijacking protests, and turning them into riots, whose steam always run out after a day.
However what we are witnessing now, is far different and involves a different kind of people as well, after the latest series of scandals, the media had severely radicalized the populus. To understand this, try to imagine a scandal being headlines in all TV stations and newspapers for 4 months in a row, naming people after people after people, taking down the governments slim majority of 15 members of the parliament, down to
1 at the present moment. Add to this, not the lack of employment per se(it was throughout 2007 until these days which turned into 7.5, at 6.7 which corresponds to 200,000 unemployed people in total throughout all of Greece, a very marginal number, that is not even 1/10 of the people on the streets the past week), but the nature of employment. Greek workforce approaches 30% of uni enrollment(with Greece figuring
8th in the world for tertiary enrollment as per the Economist Intelligence Unit for 2007), and more than half of this particular workforce, is away from its field into various irrelevancies, add to this the recession which has decimated the available income of this workforce, and you got a youth, that is angry, discontent and galvanized to externalize its discontent to protesting, fed up with a scandalous behavior, add to this the whole-hearty Greek narrative that exists decades now which is largely and extremely pro-protesting, and when i say this, you simply cannot fathom it.
One example was that lately during the riots a police-man trying to protect himself from molotov bombs, drew his gun and fired several shots on the air. This turned into the media, both right-wing and left-wing as "WOW, how could he?", people could not believe it, it was so outlandish, such a disrespect by the authorities, all the journalists wrote. You can imagine from this incident what sort of atmosphere exists in Greece regarding "human rights" and such. It is very hard to describe.
Now as i said in another thread, the government cannot use force, because she will be crucified inside this atmosphere.
What has been going on now, is not just the 500-1000 anarchists that used to hijack protests. It is a general thing going down, with all students, uni or otherwise at the spearhead, the children of the Greek people, not immigrants, but
all schools are closed and on the streets, luckily without rioting the past 3 days as the anarchists steam has run out, but not the others. If one of these others is injured, the gov. has said bye bye for the next 2 decades.
And also keep in mind, that after all these riots, and all this destruction caused by protesting which was being hijacked by these anarchists assholes, the protesters now feel that the gov will not grant their demands because of the havoc caused by the riots, and the only solution for them is either to abandon their demands, which would spell out all these efforts as having vanished, or accelerate them and turn the situation worse, until one "triumph" is achieved. That was the point of today's message on national television.
The government should give a certain triumph to all this protesting, because that is the only way that all these non-anarchists who have joined the havoc are going to go back to their normal lives.
There is no other venue. And at this point all these people, who like todays television incident showed, were not anarchists but ordinary university students, who will not let go until they get something, even the littlest thing.
From a tax-reduction to those making up to 20.000 a year, or a subsidy for heating gas, which the current government removed a couple of years, ago. Seriously, anything will do to satisfy a very angry crowd, that is no longer consisted of anarchists and other marginal elements of society, but is consisted by a very large crowd.
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Now to talk about the incident:
A group of 20 people, holding the message above, entered into the national television building, as guests, and they entered one by one, not as a team. And when the PM was announcing whatever it was he was announcing in the parliament, they went inside the studio, got control of the control panel, before police arrives, sent their message on top of the PM's speech and then walked out. No injuries or arrests reported.
- By Rancid
- By wat0n
- By Tainari88
- By litwin