With the images of the Golden Dawn’s leadership driven to jail handcuffed, the future of the Greek neo-Nazi party looks uncertain since the crackdown against it in September, following the murder of antifascist Pavlos Fyssas. The murder forced the government’s hand, to act against the party, whose criminal activity had been well documented in the international media for over a year.
Golden Dawn's meteoric rise from 0,2% to 7% and then (as polls were suggesting during the summer) up to 12%, had raised alarms around the world. Of course the blame for this rise was easy to spot: Greece, since 2008, has been in decline, its economy in ruins. A society holding its breath, in deep depression, with no hope on the horizon. The rise of Golden Dawn was merely a product of Austerity Europe. But does that tell the whole story?
There is case to be made that were it not for the recession in Greece, and the presence of thousands of immigrants trapped in the country on their to way to Europe, something else would have served as an excuse for the mechanism that promoted the Golden Dawn to rise to the surface. The group, in various incarnations, has been an integral part of the Greek deep state for decades, going all the way back to the country's civil war in the late 1940s. Its funding was ensured way before they began to enter the political mainstream. When the time came, the Golden Dawn emerged not as a champion of the people (as they like to claim) but as the establishment's attempt to control public anger at a new reality: from now on, every institution in Greece would operate according to the demands of neoliberalism. An easily manipulated bunch of deluded meat-heads would help keep the people in check.
In “Why Nations Fail”, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson lay out how the fall of empires comes when its institutions grow exploitative and extractive. Usually, revolution of some sort follows. But what’s even scarier is the destruction of social trust and the inevitable collapse of these societies, that rarely (if ever) make a comeback. And this is precisely the reason why austerity may accelerate extremism, but it's not the root cause. If that was so, why are prosperous countries like Norway, Austria and Switzerland witnessing far-right rhetoric assimilated in the mainstream political discourse?
Under these highly extractive and exclusive financial institutions the immigrant, for instance, is an enemy. Racism manifests as a result of competition over ever-more limited resources available to the working classes and the middle class who is now joining them at the bottom of the incomes scale. The upper classes are of course more than willing to play along. It is under these same institutions that extremism elsewhere in the world has flourished. In a way, we’re living a global counter-revolution.
For these reasons, I disagree with those who believe that the Golden Dawn and other extremist organisations will go away once we solve the financial crisis. As long as the alternative to joining these extremes (who among other things promote a sense of solidarity and belonging to a community, even if a debased one) is a world that looks very much like a dead-end for you and your peers, these groups aren’t going anywhere. The only flicker of light in this dire situation, is the revival of a sense of camaraderie in social movements. As governments are doing their best to crack down against them, this might go away fast. Where does that leave people, in a world that seems determined to keep them down? And if the only way to solve a financial crisis is to destroy all remnants of civic identity, won’t the extremists win? These are the questions we should all be asking.
Yiannis Baboulias will be speaking at Soho Skeptics on Monday 28 October
