Fire is Photogenic: The Riots in Athens and the Illusion of Revolution

Here is the URL of an article to which the following posting is an answer:

http://www.counterpunch.org/petrou12182008.html


Would we not all want to relive the heady days of 68, smell the scent of rebellion and experience the feeling of endless possibility? Would we not all hope to look deep into the gaze of a youth full of idealism? Would we not hope for a stirring in the souls of young men and women all around the world, a stirring that would articulate, in a voice loud and clear, the discontent, no, the frustration and anger we all feel in the face of the current economic meltdown? These days the answer to this question is increasingly a resounding YES coming from all sorts of corners and in no way restricted to responses from the select readership of Counterpunch. Yet even as we may romantically long for this awakening, Athens is not the new Paris. The riots in the Greek capital are likely not the hopeful stirrings of something new. In a recent article by a contributor from Greece the readers of Counterpunch were presented with images of a motivated Greek youth, mad at the reality of unemployment and frustrated with the failures of Government. There were familiar villains in the piece, a Conservative government of neoliberal bent, a social democrat sellout, Le Pen-like reactionaries, and a communist party so flexible in its morality that it embraced the right wing in its condemnation of the Athenian uprising. There was also a hero, or a few heroes if you want. SYRIZA, the kaleidoscopic agglomeration of Euro-communists (its nobler component), ecologists, radical street fighters, and anti-globalization activists, along with allies from the broader left was rather unambiguously declared the main motive force behind this noble rebellion against police “oppression” and conservative privatization of education. Next to SYRIZA, the Greek youth was cast into the role of David slinging stones against a Goliath of globalized proportions. The story was simple: villains on the one side, clearly defined and recognizable heroes on the other. There was even a peppering of elite media bias at work vilifying the hooded looters and calling for law and order. Was it this way, however?

I have been trying to get an impression of developments in Greece from far away. Snowy Vancouver is a far cry from the grime of Athenian riots with their pungent smell of tear gas and burnt consumer goods. I talked to friends and family, I have read myriad newspaper editorials, followed TV newscasts and anarchist blogs. All I can say is that I still do not know why we saw what we saw. I can also say that the piece by Panos Petrou featured in Counterpunch the other day is exhibit A for wishful-thinking, deliberate self-delusion, and immoderate, if indirect, self-praise. The author of your piece would like you to believe that there are vibrant social movements alive in Greece. He would like to think that the groundwork for the explosion of the last few days should be sought in his actions as a member of a fringe leftist group and in the party activities of SYRIZA. He wants to see a mass movement of students fighting the government. I beg to differ. The riots of the last few days are interesting, not to say disconcerting, because they are difficult to categorize, because they do not seem to be motivated by such an easily defined cause. As for the actions of the students, they are still a mystery to me and to those Greeks who try to go beyond clichés about fear for a bleak future and the long-overdue politicization of our somnolent generation-ipod.

We begin then with what we know, first looking at the broader context and then examining the events. It is fair to say that Greece is led by the most inept government of the post-Junta period, the years after 1974 that we refer to as the Metapolitefsi. This government was elected with a promise to fight the corruption of the social democrats (don’t they all get elected this way) only to outdo the socialists in its capacity for graft and wide-spread corruption, eschewing on the way the redeeming attributes of the party and leader they replaced: relative competence, efficient stewardship of the economy, and actual, measurable, increase of living-standards (not to mention normalization of relations with Turkey, mass infrastructure improvements and purging of religion from national identity cards). In fact it is certain that the current Karamanlis government will go down in history as one of the worst in the two centuries life span of the Modern Greek state. This incompetence comes at the worst possible time on the world economic calendar even as the scandals keep lining up on the newspaper pages like unemployed workers at a depression-era soup-kitchen. The latest of those outrages involves a creative exchange of monastic farmland (allegedly held by the pious foundation on account of eleventh century Byzantine imperial decrees) with prime Athenian real-estate valued at roughly 100 million Euros. The prime-minister’s “brain,” the Greek Karl Rove, is involved in this affair and was, as a consequence, forced to resign, which may account for the chaos characterizing the government’s reaction to the events that followed the killing of the 15-year old Alexis Grigoropoulos. To top this all, not wishing to be outdone by the Americans, the Greek clones of Paulson and Bernake prepared a banking bailout plan, that would transfer 28 billion Euros to banking institutions that the media consistently portrays as financially healthy.

When it comes to high-schools and universities, the laboratories for the idealistic explosion so rosily presented by your Greek contributor, Greece is facing a major crisis and what has certainly been the greatest failure of consecutive governments. Both are under-funded. Increasingly unqualified and unmotivated young men and women become the new generations of teachers at the schools, while universities are "laboratories" indeed for the greatest conspiracy to produce mediocrity ever concocted. Political factions, mostly of the left and extreme left assisted by the main-stream parties and their representatives, participate in the senates of higher education institutions and work along with a demoralized professoriate to keep demands on students at a minimal level. Professors who demand harder work are stigmatized and occasionally even singled out for attack. Staff and professors’ offices are often broken into by “professional” students who abuse the lax time-to-degree regulations, allowing for life-enrollment in university in order to build careers as petty politicos in the world of academia.[1] The vast majority of those enrolled in universities do not vote in the elections for student representation. Year after year, the vast majority of students show no interest in expressing an opinion, be it about the structural problems of higher education in Greece, or about “privatization” schemes (which are not really privatization schemes but misguided plans for a constitutional amendment, which would allow for private non-profit universities next to the state run schools). The student body was, till a few days ago, apathetic. The demonstrations against privatization that we saw in the past few years were led by a politically mobilized minority with no real plan for reform of what is indeed a broken system.

Let us now move to the events that preceded the riots. We know that a kid was shot. We know that there are witnesses arguing that the policeman fired directly at him and we also know that the less than trustworthy, or competent, Greek police published a forensic report yesterday that the bullet ricocheted before it struck the kid. In any case, in the Greek political universe the shooting will most spell life in prison for the trigger happy Zorba-Rambo. The shooting took place in Exarcheia, an area with cool bars, student life, and a reputation as the center of Greek anarchism; a “movement” of ten or twenty dozen men, mostly known to the police, who despite ceremonially performing violent outbursts of annual punctuality remain free, serving as a convenient scarecrow for petit-bourgeois fears of unrest. It was inevitable then, that after the shooting the Anarchists would attack, furnished at last with a dead hero, a kid at that. Even as the Exarcheia crowd mobilized, the police were ordered to be extra careful in their response, the government fearing that a new shooting would be enough to bring it down under an avalanche of popular outrage. In addition the “elite media” outdid one another in declaring the policeman’s actions a crime and expressing outrage at the murder. It was in fact the media that enabled further escalation by creating a level of outrage that brought more people to the streets. Your Greek contributor was right to note that the worst of the troubles started when SYRIZA failed to properly police its rally and Molotov-cocktails rained on the Athenian police force and the city center around it. In that context many youths who were part of the demonstration and had previously had no affiliation with Anarchists, banded together with the violent protesters. It was at this point that the media discovered the angry and frustrated youth that they promptly elevate into a hero (a hero indeed given the ad revenue that hours upon hours of media punditry generated for the country’s TV channels). The narrative was simple: our children could no longer take the fact that they would be a generation of privation after years of economic growth. With the narrative developed for them more and more students, very young students, high-schoolers mostly, joined in the riots. There was however, more. As the situation started getting out of control, the riot police remaining on the defensive, the Anarchists themselves reported on their blogs the appearance of new faces in the occupied University buildings (in Greece it is illegal for the police to enter a University building. As a consequence the university buildings becomes a Molotov cocktail assembly line). They argued that hooligans and criminal characters joined in the riots, men who had never in the past been seen in the Athenian street fights. All in all some 1000 to 1500 people roamed in downtown Athens burning over 4 or 5 days some 30 shops and seriously damaging and looting 400. Banks, police stations and the occasional McDonalds suffered most, but the fire touched many businesses. Like the Santa Annas in a California wildfire, the media kept inflaming the passions of those in the streets and the leaders of SYRIZA, hoping to reap future electoral benefits by tapping on the discontent of future voters, kept talking of the idealistic youth that was expressing rage for the prospect of being the first generation to experience an actual decline of their living standards (an ironic admission on the part of this party of the left, that over the past decades Greeks have actually been getting richer). As the leader of SYRIZA, Alekos Alavanos picked the chords of his revolutionary harp, Athens burned.

I can see why the anarchists poured into the streets. They do this every year and Greeks have come to expect it. I know what led football hooligans to the streets. I know what led thousands of communists and other members of the left to the streets. Despite their electoral irrelevance they maintain good organizational skills and can stage a rally like Hugh Hefner does topless parties. But I do not presume to know what got the kids to the streets. I can offer an opinion though. I think it was happenstance. One of them was shot, so they went to the rally that the parties organized. Then some people threw fire at the police and the police doused everyone in teargas. The kids were now angry and counter-attacked. Society was behind them. They had an alibi as they were fighting for their future, so everyone was saying. And in the end even if they broke a shop, the anarchists would be blamed. It was exciting. For most of the teenagers who clashed with the police, this will likely be the highlight of their lives, as they slowly slide into petit-bourgeois complacency. But then again, maybe fire bakes conscience. Maybe being told you’re a rebel with a cause will actually make you find one. The world financial implosion could be a good anvil on which a new youth movement will be forged. Allow me to doubt that, I studied next to Greek youths.

[1] The crisis of the Greek university system is not easy to describe and is very uneven in the way it strikes different departments and different institutions. There are still departments in the Greek university system that produce top notch work and I have had inspiring and intellectually stimulating professors in my days as a student of Political Science at the University of Athens. This, however, all happens DESPITE the meltdown of the system.