Guest post by Eve Garrard
I know very little about events in Greece, so what follows rests entirely on information provided by others. But if they’re right, there’s a lot to be worried about.
A British academic currently in Greece recently sent me some information about the Golden Dawn party and some of their supporters, in particular those involved in an online resource called Metapedia (metapedia.org). Here is a sample of the kind of information Metapedia contains, in its article about a Greek journalist called Maria Margaronis, who is among other things a contributor to The Guardian:
Maria Margaronis is a middle-class, anti-Greek, communist media propagandist, married to the Jew journalist D. D. Guttenplan.✡ They have a Jew son together, Alexander Guttenplan.✡ Margaronis operates between London, Greece and Vermont. A Europhobic agitator, she promotes the demographic genocide of Greeks and is an enemy of the people. She is a supporter of the extremist openly communist Synaspismós organisation. Along with her Jew husband, she is associated with the London branch of The Nation magazine, though her propaganda has also featured in The Guardian.
My correspondent came across this information about Metapedia in a post by Emmanuel Schizas on the blog LOL GREECE. Schizas points out that if you think the Metapedia article is bad, the comments behind the article are much, much worse. Here is a small sample of them (apologies for circulating such vile stuff):
Yes, the nose, the nose-mouth part, which is slightly ape-like, the eyes, her overall untidyness and uglyness, and the last indication is her style (and usage of presumably faked photos). If a person shows these indications, I automatically categorize her as a crypto Jew. Which Jew says openly, he is a Jew?
Further details are given in Schizas’s post, which calls for an attempt to stop Metapedia’s funding by complaining to Paypal and Facebook. Schizas is absolutely right in saying that the discussion is even worse than the article; it drips with Jew-hatred.
My correspondent also said the following to me:
Golden Dawn are very frightening. They have been around for years — typical neo-Nazi thugs despised by decent people — but the crisis and the consequent collapse of state services has allowed them to flourish. They have been taking on policing and social roles in deprived areas (“protecting” shopkeepers, giving out food parcels, etc), and promising hopeless people dignity and independence. There is so much disillusion and desperation here (Greece is in the sixth year of deep recession), and the mainstream political parties have failed so badly, that GD have found a ready audience and are doing well in the polls. They currently hold 18 seats in parliament (out of 300) and are regularly polling at 11%, making them comfortably the third party. (To put that in context, the centre-left Pasok, which won the 2009 election with around 44% of the vote, has now utterly collapsed and is currently polling at around 6%.) Attacks on immigrants are common, and people say the police turn a blind eye. The parallels with Germany in the early 30s are striking.
Why am I posting this, rather than my correspondent? The reason is that he would prefer to remain anonymous, at least while he’s in Greece. He’s frightened on behalf of his young children, who have already met a certain amount of unpleasantness on account of not being ‘pure-bred Greeks’. His fear is understandable, and the reason for it is chilling.
Eve Garrard adds: The comments made in the discussion tab of the metapedia entry on Maria Margaronis were made by metapedia admins, not just ‘ordinary’ readers. This is an important difference, especially as some commentators here have felt that Emmanuel’s call for reports to Facebook and Paypal was an attack on free speech. But Emmanuel isn’t objecting to people expressing their views (however vile) on the web; he’s objecting to Facebook and Paypal helping to host a site that violates their own terms of service – as evidenced by the attitudes of its admins.
