Greece: Rise of the Golden Dawn Nazis
March 9th, 2013Via: Independent:
On a recent Thursday night, seven teenage boys in the central Greek city of Larissa decided to have what they described as “fun”. Armed with rocks and wooden batons, the group of 15-year-olds attacked the shop of a Pakistani resident. His son was treated for head injuries.
Attacks by children are rare, but there are fears that they are on the rise as a harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric with undercurrents of violence takes root in the malleable minds of patriotic youths as they watch their country’s sovereignty being eroded by foreign creditors.
The potential to tap into this dissatisfaction and win over Greece’s future voters has not been lost on the controversial Golden Dawn party: an investigation by The Independent found the neo-fascist party gaining ground among the country’s youth, aggressively spreading their anti-immigrant, far-right message through social media, the internet, and youth clubs.
The vigilante, truculent and anti-establishment features of Golden Dawn offer a seductive alternative to the radical left or anarchist movements that have traditionally appealed to Greece’s teenagers. Over 50 teachers, parents and teenage students from schools across Athens interviewed by The Independent agree that the party is slowly becoming fashionable, when three years ago it was barely known.
“It’s the feature of vitality: a need to show they’re strong, young and fresh and are creating something new: be it a new party, a new country,” explains Vassiliki Georgiadou, professor at Panteion University and an expert of far-Right wing radicalism who has studied Golden Dawn for years. “They discard the label of Nazism and instead play up the nationalist card. They use ancient Greek history as a camouflage to hide their true identity: that they’re fans of Hitler, anti-Semitism.”
