Secret
voter survey prior to murder of popular Leftist Pavlos Fissas showed
Samaras vote split and Tsipras a shoe-in for Prime Minister
Golden Dawn….yobs, but in this case, victims
The Slog: The weird thing about aiming to tell the truth is that you can end up
defending some truly awful people. But just as not all disabled people
are paragons of virtue, so too not all gargoyles are guilty or ghastly
all the time. Hitler, for example, was unfailingly polite to women and
always stood up when they came into his presence. His military service
in the First World War was exemplary when it came to courage. Having
fathered a child by a French woman during a leave from action, after the
War and throughout his career he both protected and subsidised the
pair.
Golden Dawn members, in my view, tend to wear out carpets very
quickly on account of the knuckle marks they leave when perambulating.
But as C P Snow remarked, “Facts are sacred”.
Today I have been sent some poll data that very clearly point the fickle finger of guilt at Antonikis Samaras in the matter of the State neutering of Golden Dawn. I doubt very much if you will see this evidence in the Guardian, but either way it remains prima facie evidence and thus worth examining.
Today I have been sent some poll data that very clearly point the fickle finger of guilt at Antonikis Samaras in the matter of the State neutering of Golden Dawn. I doubt very much if you will see this evidence in the Guardian, but either way it remains prima facie evidence and thus worth examining.
Regular Sloggers will recall that the prevailing view in Greece
(whatever the Party affiliation) is that the ruling Samaras Coalition
cracked down on Golden Dawn in order to reduce the split among Greek
right-wing voters. It is also the overwhelming view of most journalists
and the intelligentsia that what pushed the Government into this
foolhardy action was growing evidence from its own polls about the
left-wing Syriza’s rise and a Golden Dawn surge in popularity.
The data I’ve been given confirms this view unequivocally. Alexis
Tsipras’s Syriza Party of the Left is shown to be ahead of Samaras’s New
Democracy by 6-8% nationwide. And (prior to the murder) Golden Dawn
weighs in at just under 18% – only 2-3% below ND. In popular vote terms,
the poll also suggested a significant percentage for other anti-Troika
Parties.
In short, in any future General Election the Left would cruise to
power under Alexis Tsipras. As even pea-brained Antonikis could work out
that an attack on Syriza would evoke Civil War, the stitching up of
Golden Dawn’s Nazi hordes seemed something of a no-brainer.
I must add a penultimate comment on this freak-show. If Samaras
really believed all the 2014 recovery bollocks was true – and given that
he isn’t facing an imminent election – why would he bother to employ
such a risky strategy against his opponents? Surely if he thought
economic winds were about to fill his sails, he would simple sit tight
and wait for the sea change? This is, I think, a telling question to
which the answer is pretty obvious.
And finally, my favourite Grecian interpreter points out that
referring to ‘Little Antonis’ Samaras as ‘Antoniki’ is genitively
incorrect. Whereas I was trying to suggest that the Greek Prime Minister
has a miniscule penis, by saying Atoniki I appear to be suggesting that
he might be some kind of transexual or cross-dresser. As I have no
desire to make such a scurrilous suggestion, I shall therefore
henceforth use the correct genitive case, ‘Antonikis. Mr Samaras may
well have a penis of even smaller mass than his brain, but Eddie Izzard
he very clearly isn’t.
Source
Additional:
GREECE: Anything could happen. And one day, it will happen here too
The Slog: I write today not to score a point so much a register the need for a full stop. As a Greek friend wrote to me recently, “Greece is entering dark days”. It is indeed: but had its elite never bribed its way into the eurozone, it would be basking in halcyon days. Hindsight is a great thing and all that, but the comparison between what Greece is in 2013 (and what it might have been) is so stark as to be tragic.
Last week, a man self-identified as the Greek oil-magnate Dimitris Melissanidis of Aegean Oil called from a number registered with the company (and from a building the company uses) to threaten the life of journalist Lefteris Charalampopoulos, after he’d published a report implicating Aegean in an oil smuggling scandal. Go here for the Greek and here for the English heads-up on the case.
This wasn’t an especially bright thing for Melissanidis to do, but then that’s not really the issue here: the issue is that the Big Cheese didn’t give a monkey’s who knew it was him. This is what happens when Mammon triumphs over the Rule of Law.
Now Golden Dawn isn’t my favourite political Party, but they too have been given a taste over the last few days of what happens when an ignorant electorate is presented with lies, trumped up charges, mercenary police forces and gross interference in fair elections. The answer is, shrugging acceptance at best….and total swallowing of the entire fantasy about imminent military coups and “criminal gangs” at worst.
A Greek source wrote to me today, ‘The Government is trying to find ways to circumvent the constitution so that elections cannot be held without members of Golden Dawn surrendering their position in the parliament….. they’re trying to put under their control those two elements (army & Police) they believe that will untangle the issue of a “probable coup”.’
But other professionals with whom I spoke were more sanguine: said one, “Samaras is an idiot. In angering the hornet’s nest with false accusations, he will make it more poisonously violent than ever”.
Such are the depths of degenerate pretence to which the Hellenic Republic has been not so much reduced as forced – by a nasty melange of local political depravity and Brussels mania. For real Greeks, this profound level of humiliation is too much to bear.
But we must nevertheless accept that there is a dutiful dimension to Greek culture willing to undergo any number of days in the stocks being pelted with rotten fruit rather than stand accused of having let the side down. When my kids were small, I said to them “I don’t care if you come last, just so long as you try your best”. But the geopolitically commercial world doesn’t work like that: it wants to persuade every consumer, every Nation State, and every organisation that –armed only with effort – it can come first. The neoliberal globalist vision is like The American Dream writ larger: everyone can be a winner. But as the late George Carlin used to say, “The thing about the American dream is, you have to be asleep to believe in it”.
By definition, there can only ever be one winner in any competition. And when it comes to the eurozone, thus far Germany is very clearly the winner. Having traded in an expensive mark for a euro made weaker by the failure of others, it never tires of telling everyone else how well it has done. Deutschland uber alles is alive and well: but the truth is that all ways up, Berlin is gaining from the misfortune of others. Schadenfreude, lest we forget, is a German word.
In this context, Greece is like the lottery player convinced that next time, the rollover dice will fall in its favour. Nobody plays on this deluded optimism more than Antonis Samaras, but the dice can never be thrown to favour a Greece inside the eurozone: quintessential Hellenic culture is about living up to expectations, and – if you do well – sharing the excess with others less fortunate. Greece never can – and never should – try to live up to neoliberal US-influenced German expectations. This would be like me saying to my kids when they were small, “Come first or else”. The culture I passed on to them isn’t about winning at all costs, but rather about competing fairly, and accepting one’s limitations.
What might be a limitation to your Wall Street banker is the very quintessence of why Greek generosity is so valued by its visitors. When I say, “Greece should never have let itself join the eurozone”, what I mean is that traditional Greek culture is above the hubris of amoral whatever-it-takes capitalism, not beneath it.
But that traditional culture is being eroded by the lawlessness that came with austerity: remove a nation’s dignity for too long, and its sh*tty arsehole will make an unedifying appearance before too long. I have yet to visit a city in Greece where this isn’t painfully apparent. A once law-abiding and smiling country is now perilously close to being at war with itself.
It is in such a position for two obvious reasons: the unhealthy lust for money in the Greek elite, and the megalomanic desire for power in Brussels-am-Berlin. Specifically, the mad idea that one inflexible currency can work equally well for 17 often antithetical cultures is not too many steps away from producing Europe-wide anarchy on every level – fiscal, financial, economic, diplomatic – and yes, perhaps even military.
I fully accept that I have become something of a lone blogging voice of late when it comes to the demise of Greece. But just as when I am criticised for writing about the obscenity that is contemporary football, my answer remains exactly the same: such things are terrifying symptoms of a deadly malaise….and thus they deserve the same coverage as Simon Cowell’s sordid affairs, and Pippa Middleton’s bum. I don’t care if they seem at times to be yesterday’s news: yesterday’s news has a nasty habit of becoming tomorrow’s atrocity.
Source
Additional:
GREECE: Anything could happen. And one day, it will happen here too
The Slog: I write today not to score a point so much a register the need for a full stop. As a Greek friend wrote to me recently, “Greece is entering dark days”. It is indeed: but had its elite never bribed its way into the eurozone, it would be basking in halcyon days. Hindsight is a great thing and all that, but the comparison between what Greece is in 2013 (and what it might have been) is so stark as to be tragic.
Last week, a man self-identified as the Greek oil-magnate Dimitris Melissanidis of Aegean Oil called from a number registered with the company (and from a building the company uses) to threaten the life of journalist Lefteris Charalampopoulos, after he’d published a report implicating Aegean in an oil smuggling scandal. Go here for the Greek and here for the English heads-up on the case.
This wasn’t an especially bright thing for Melissanidis to do, but then that’s not really the issue here: the issue is that the Big Cheese didn’t give a monkey’s who knew it was him. This is what happens when Mammon triumphs over the Rule of Law.
Now Golden Dawn isn’t my favourite political Party, but they too have been given a taste over the last few days of what happens when an ignorant electorate is presented with lies, trumped up charges, mercenary police forces and gross interference in fair elections. The answer is, shrugging acceptance at best….and total swallowing of the entire fantasy about imminent military coups and “criminal gangs” at worst.
A Greek source wrote to me today, ‘The Government is trying to find ways to circumvent the constitution so that elections cannot be held without members of Golden Dawn surrendering their position in the parliament….. they’re trying to put under their control those two elements (army & Police) they believe that will untangle the issue of a “probable coup”.’
But other professionals with whom I spoke were more sanguine: said one, “Samaras is an idiot. In angering the hornet’s nest with false accusations, he will make it more poisonously violent than ever”.
Such are the depths of degenerate pretence to which the Hellenic Republic has been not so much reduced as forced – by a nasty melange of local political depravity and Brussels mania. For real Greeks, this profound level of humiliation is too much to bear.
But we must nevertheless accept that there is a dutiful dimension to Greek culture willing to undergo any number of days in the stocks being pelted with rotten fruit rather than stand accused of having let the side down. When my kids were small, I said to them “I don’t care if you come last, just so long as you try your best”. But the geopolitically commercial world doesn’t work like that: it wants to persuade every consumer, every Nation State, and every organisation that –armed only with effort – it can come first. The neoliberal globalist vision is like The American Dream writ larger: everyone can be a winner. But as the late George Carlin used to say, “The thing about the American dream is, you have to be asleep to believe in it”.
By definition, there can only ever be one winner in any competition. And when it comes to the eurozone, thus far Germany is very clearly the winner. Having traded in an expensive mark for a euro made weaker by the failure of others, it never tires of telling everyone else how well it has done. Deutschland uber alles is alive and well: but the truth is that all ways up, Berlin is gaining from the misfortune of others. Schadenfreude, lest we forget, is a German word.
In this context, Greece is like the lottery player convinced that next time, the rollover dice will fall in its favour. Nobody plays on this deluded optimism more than Antonis Samaras, but the dice can never be thrown to favour a Greece inside the eurozone: quintessential Hellenic culture is about living up to expectations, and – if you do well – sharing the excess with others less fortunate. Greece never can – and never should – try to live up to neoliberal US-influenced German expectations. This would be like me saying to my kids when they were small, “Come first or else”. The culture I passed on to them isn’t about winning at all costs, but rather about competing fairly, and accepting one’s limitations.
What might be a limitation to your Wall Street banker is the very quintessence of why Greek generosity is so valued by its visitors. When I say, “Greece should never have let itself join the eurozone”, what I mean is that traditional Greek culture is above the hubris of amoral whatever-it-takes capitalism, not beneath it.
But that traditional culture is being eroded by the lawlessness that came with austerity: remove a nation’s dignity for too long, and its sh*tty arsehole will make an unedifying appearance before too long. I have yet to visit a city in Greece where this isn’t painfully apparent. A once law-abiding and smiling country is now perilously close to being at war with itself.
It is in such a position for two obvious reasons: the unhealthy lust for money in the Greek elite, and the megalomanic desire for power in Brussels-am-Berlin. Specifically, the mad idea that one inflexible currency can work equally well for 17 often antithetical cultures is not too many steps away from producing Europe-wide anarchy on every level – fiscal, financial, economic, diplomatic – and yes, perhaps even military.
I fully accept that I have become something of a lone blogging voice of late when it comes to the demise of Greece. But just as when I am criticised for writing about the obscenity that is contemporary football, my answer remains exactly the same: such things are terrifying symptoms of a deadly malaise….and thus they deserve the same coverage as Simon Cowell’s sordid affairs, and Pippa Middleton’s bum. I don’t care if they seem at times to be yesterday’s news: yesterday’s news has a nasty habit of becoming tomorrow’s atrocity.
Source
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