The following speech was delivered at a Jan. 19 demonstration of anti-fascists in front of the Greek consulate in Chicago, IL–
Greetings fellow anti-fascists and comrades. Welcome to this solidarity action with immigrant rights groups and anti-fascists in Athens, across Greece and around the world. We have a few speakers today who will talk about Greece’s critical struggle against the rising tide of fascism – and why we must take up this struggle in the United States today.
We know from history that in times of economic crisis and austerity, when the just rage of working people threatens the ruling class and its dictatorship of capital, those elites dispense with the pretense of democracy in favor of authoritarian rule designed to keep the working class in line and ensure steady profits. They try to convince us that we should turn our anger away from the failures of the system as a whole and direct it instead at scapegoats – immigrants, leftists, people of different religions or sexual orientations.
In Greece today, Golden Dawn thugs who claim to be bearers of Greek culture are instead perpetrating a wave of racist, repressive violence rooted in ignorance, fear, hate, and blind obedience to charismatic, manipulative leaders. Their true inspiration comes not from Aristotle or Democritus, but from the virulent Balkan nationalism that has claimed millions of lives and produced centuries of atrocities.
True Greek patriots risked – and even sacrificed – their lives to defend and ultimately liberate Greece from the fascist thugs who occupied her from 1941-1944. They include Konstantinos Koukidis, an honor guard at the Acropolis on April 27, 1941, who when German soldiers ordered him to raise the Nazi war flag, wrapped his country’s flag around his body and threw himself off the cliff to his death instead. That occupation flag flew over the Acropolis for barely a month – until two young anti-fascists, Apostolos Santas and Manolis Glezos, risked their lives to tear it down, an act of defiance that inspired not only the Greek people but occupied peoples across Europe. Glezos was later arrested more than once, including by a Greek collaborator – a traitorous precursor to today’s Golden Dawn party.
We’re here to tell Golden Dawn and their allies in today’s Greek government that they’re not welcome in America – that Greek Americans and their allies will drive them from our shores just as Greek patriots drove out the Nazis and their collaborationist lackeys in 1944. We’re inspired by Greek heroes like Koukidis, Santas, and Glezos – and by today’s modern-day antifascists in Greece – and we will not allow Golden Dawn to pervert and distort the Greek people’s proud anti-fascist history on American soil. Golden Dawn has appeared on our shores because they’re welcome here by fellow fascists. We say to these stooges of the elites that in these desperate times we will not be fooled by dishonest appeals to people’s fear and uncertainty. Instead, we stand up as one and tell them all YOU SHALL NOT PASS! NO PASARAN!
The following statement was read aloud by the comrades of the No Golden Dawn in Chicago Working Group in front of the Greek consulate—
The Honorable Ioanna Efthymiadou
Consul General in Chicago, The Hellenic Republic
650 North St.Clair St., Chicago Illinois 60611
Dear Madam Consul General:
We write as Greeks in Chicago, as the American-born children and grandchildren of Greeks, as workers, immigrants, artists, union members, human rights advocates and activists from a host of backgrounds. We write to condemn the Greek government’s use of police violence against virtually every protest on the streets of Greece — unless those protests are organized by fascists, who count police officers as members of their ranks.
We condemn your government’s sweeping use of chemical weapons against protesters, the wanton arrest of civilians who resist police violence, the torture of anti-fascist demonstrators, and your government’s naked abandonment of even the most fundamental principles of democracy.
Your government has used the police — including the fascists in their ranks — to squelch dissent and soften the ground for growing corruption and austerity, the evisceration of even the most basic economic safety net, and the ongoing transfer of wealth from ordinary Greeks to the elites your government serves. Your government has stood by idly while fascists maim and murder — including the murder in Athens on January 17 of Pakistani cyclist Shehzad Luqman, one more atrocity in a relentless series of attacks on immigrants, people of color, leftists, LGBT people and anyone who dares to speak out against fascism or the Greek government. Greek police routinely criminalize not the perpetrators of these crimes, but instead the people who speak out against these neo-Nazis — while your government sets those same Greek riot police upon the Greek people in a wave of violence that now rivals the worst practices of the dictatorship.
No people, no nation, no progressive impulse inspires us more than the example set by the people of Greece themselves — who are engaged in a daily, heroic struggle to resist not just Golden Dawn, fascism and right-wing extremism but the wider wave of state-sponsored repression that seeks to undermine their just struggle for jobs, education, housing and dignity. Greeks have withstood generations of repression. The Greek people endured WWII’s devastating Nazi occupation, which took the lives of tens of thousands of Greeks from starvation, assassination, Nazi death camps and extermination campaigns. Greeks have endured years of right wing dictatorship — a legacy of authoritarianism that your government increasingly parrots, particularly in your tacit embrace of the open neo-Nazi agenda that Golden Dawn and its fascist allies promote both within and outside of the government.
Chicago is a city of immigrants, including a large and well-established Greek American community — and the Golden Dawn party has declared its intentions to expand operations into this community. Your government’s tacit collusion with Golden Dawn and its murderous agenda opens the door for these fascists to not only continue to terrorize the people of Greece, but to expand that wave of terror to the United States, to the very city that hosts your consulate.
Golden Dawn members have a well-documented history of brutality, destruction and murder that targets Jews, Arabs, Muslims, immigrants, people of color, gays and lesbians, progressives and any Greeks who oppose their racist, xenophobic worldview. No civilized government would stand for this. The group’s open violence has sparked a growing international push-back that is increasingly — and rightly — putting responsibility for the impunity of Golden Dawn squarely at the feet of Greece’s ruling party.
We embrace the aspirations of Greek protesters in the streets on January 19 in Athens — and their opposition to austerity, government repression and the growth of neo-Nazism in Greece. We reject your government’s policies — including your government’s raids on the squats in Athens and the police campaign to crush dissent in a wave of state-sponsored violence against immigrants, workers, autonomous social centers, unions, leftists, the poor and any Greeks who oppose your government’s catastrophic austerity and privatization policies.
We join those anti-fascists in holding your ruling party and your government responsible for these predations and the lethal effects of austerity — and in demanding that they end. Finally, we have one simple response to any Golden Dawn plans to extend its reach anywhere in our city or on this planet: No Pasaran.
Yours,
The members and supporters of the No Golden Dawn in Chicago Working Group
[email protected] | www.facebook.com/NoFascistGoldenDawnPartyInChicago | @NoGoldenDawnChi | 312-446-4939