Patrice Riemens on Tue, 9 Dec 2008 00:57:44 +0100 (CET)


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<nettime> 'GRIOTS' - the situation in Greece


bwo Multitudes-infos. Earlier messgs on that list's archives.



Monday 8 December

The griots continue today all over Greece especially in Athens , the
city of Larisa and Thessaloniki.

The situation is completely out of control as after all it was
anticipated. What we face in Greece, it is not a simple reaction to
the murdering of the young student Alexis Grigoropoulos, but something
that we could describe as a general exegersis, somehow simular to what
happened in Los Angeles in 96 or in Brixton in the 80's.

For many years, a sterotype regarding the anarchist cycle was used to
cover the feelings and the reactions of the Greek people , towards the
forms of oppressions used by both socialists and right wing goverments
in order to exercise power. In the past years the official government
estimations and the main stream media were giving a number of few
hundred people that they were supposed to be the ones responsible for
the several riots that were taking place.

But what me and everyone else could easily see at the streets of
Athens tonight are scenes of thousand of desperate people of all ages
that they were expressing their anger and their desperation against a
govermentality that produces nothing else but a permanent scandal.

Poverty, precarity, nepotism and police repression that lasts for
years, wreak out after the killing of the adolescent. This riot, this
exegersis is a spontaneous expression of the Greek society. It takes
its course in the streets, where people break store windows, set up
fires everywhere especially to the ATM's and the banks and they're
looting the shops.

These banks that hold in hostage the two thirds of the Greek
population, by giving easy take loans so to promote consumerism in a
society in which no healthy economic production can be guaranteed.

Of course, it should be noticed that there is an absence of any kind
of political discourse or demand at this moment regarding the groups
of people (or should I describe them with the greek word ochlos).

Same goes for the government that proves itself -for one more time-
incapable of holding the situation, as well as for the political
parties that react by 'fits and starts' toward the events.

As it concerns the greek blogshpere and the alternative movements, the
situation is limited in efforts to keep in contact between each other,
and infrequently some try to organise a peaceful manifestation in the
center of Athens for the moment in vein. At 10.00pm, Monday night,
Athens is by no any means of exaggeration in state of war.

Tomorrow is the funeral of the student.....

http://www.flickr.com/photos/adeligia/3092693131/in/photostream/
http://picasaweb.google.gr/mbholgr/GRIOTS#

Ilias Marmaras
media artist
Athenes

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