“Make Total Destroy”
A brief and incomplete history of modern greek anarchism
On December 6th, 2008 Greek police shot and killed a 15-year-old Greek anarchist named Alexis Grigoropoulos. This outraged a broad swath of Greek society and fueled support for an escalating series of insurrectionary riots that ran for years and nearly brought down the state.
When Alexis was murdered there’d already been growing popular resistance across Greece to austerity measures imposed by the EU and international creditors (primarily Germany). This economic crisis was triggered by Greece defaulting on a shady “financial derivatives” debt deal arranged by Goldman Sachs. The militant response of Greek anarchists, autonomists and anti-state communists to Alexis’ murder helped catalyze a broader pushback against government itself.
A few years after the most intense period of this insurrection ebbed for reasons too complex to unpack here-- burnout, both literal and figurative-- Greek anarchists were subjected to a debilitating stretch of “soft-power” pressure from a neoliberal pseudo-socialist government, Syriza, that recuperated mutual aid to try and fold anarchists into a sort of volunteer/activist NGO framework while evicting militant squats.
While Syriza committed electoral suicide by sacrificing Greece’s economy to the troika, a new strand of fascism strengthened in the streets. Austerity pushed more residents of Greece into economic precarity, and the far right made generationally unprecedented inroads among youth. Golden Dawn, a neofascist group with heavy police support, ascended to the political mainstream. Golden Dawn eventually collapsed, but this newly energized far right was largely absorbed into Greece’s current ruling party, New Democracy, a technocratic neoconservative cadre (think lower-IQ Macron) which has continually and unabashedly pandered to the most extreme religious and political reactionaries in hopes of keeping them under its tent.
New Democracy hates anarchists, partly for the obvious reasons and partly because they are a convenient boogeyman against which to rally its base-- comparable to the U.S. Facebook boomer’s superstitious fixation on “antifa.” When the pandemic hit, New Democracy hired a billion new cops, enforced a round-the-clock lockdown, and began trying to purge anarchists from the historically anarchist central Athens.
-Jules Bently