what is daily life like in greece now? [Archive]

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ed miliband

13th February 2012, 20:32

[apologies for the way this post is written - having trouble with my keyboard so i'm trying to work around that]

i've heard various stuff:

- open-air heroin markets because certain areas are now completely unpoliced
- charities providing healthcare because of such massive cuts to health services
- areas were rioting is almost a daily occurrence
- lots of occupied buildings in cities

i hate to use to term but to what extent is greece a "failed state" - if i went to greece (and not athens or thessaloniki or whatever) would a) evidence of crisis be inescapable and b) there be a noticeable culture of resistance (fits in with a i guess)

eric922

13th February 2012, 21:59

RedAtheist

15th February 2012, 10:26

I've heard that malaria has spread to Greece. Can anyone verify that?

I guess this is what happens when it takes too long for the working class to realise that they need to seize power. I would like to see the workers restart the economy under their control (e.g. get back to work, but elect council to be in charge of them while they work, rather than working for their old boss.) If socialism had not been so discredited, that might have already happened.

Jimmie Higgins

15th February 2012, 12:14

I was in Greece in the fall of this year (in-between two general strikes and just when OWS became big news). It was my first time out of the US, so I don't have much of a frame of reference as to how relatively worse things were compared to before the recession but I can give you my impressions.

First thing I noticed was the shit-ton of graffiti everywhere. Most of it was not political, most looked like it was done by NYC artists from the 1980s though the political graf was very apparent and was usually just a single-color line of text. The KKE had their logo stenciled all over - usually someone crossed it out. The next thing that stuck out was that spontaneous public political arguments happened in random places and were heated. I've heard that this is sort or normal though in Greece. Second was there was a sort of "oh fuck it" attitude to things not working right. We took a boat an island one day and they took us to a completely different island and the management-type person on the ship literally told us after an hour into the Mediterranean, "Oh, what does your ticket say... hmm, no, we're not going there today" and tossed his hands in the air, "how about a different island or maybe you can just stay on the ship and stay in a cabin for free until we go back to Athens in three days?"

In Athens the thing you notice right away is that in the center there are buses parked in almost all the neighborhood that are mobile riot command vehicles - you notice them because of the people in full body armor and machine guns standing around them. I took a picture of a cop with a machine gun and riot gear standing in front of an Adidas shop in a fancy mall!

At the university near the parliament building there was a sort of flea market on the street (not unusual or that different than the ones in the US) where people sold "off the back of a truck" type goods. The Greek comrade I was with was saying this is basically the only place to get affordable socks and batteries and shit like that. But off the street and on the campus there was an open air black market (and a KKE campus building occupation) because police are not allowed onto universities (which the government was trying to change).

We walked through an immigrant-dominated area that looked incredibly depressed... it was like some of the more desolate industrial areas in Oakland but on a much larger scale. I see people smoke crack or who are on meth all the time, so maybe I'm used to it, but fuck me, walking past dozens of people sniffing glue and passing out on the street freaked me out.

When we got off the main street and got into the neighborhoods we walked through an ally that was just a huge brothel. That was the only time people looked at us sideways and we felt really like we stood out. But that whole area was just abandoned large apartment buildings that were now just squats. I'm not sure if you meant squats or political occupations in your OP, but there have been hundreds of political occupations according to my comrade and we saw a number of them.

It's funny, aside from the comrade I knew there, I ran into different radicals and activists while I was there and the younger ones really had this image of the US being full of Dawson's Creek-style living. You know big white families with huge McMansions where only the dad has to work, but never seems to actually go to work. I guess it makes sense that people see things that way if you only know conditions in the US through TV and tourists (and we were defiantly the poorest Americans whenever we ran into other ones). There were a lot of really fucking terrible Americans we saw. In the airport on the way home, these NYC yuppies were arguing over who got what section of the newspaper and when the one with the Kakhi shorts and hot pink polo shirt who looked like Tim Geinter ended up with the international section, he loudly proclaimed (in an international airport), "The WORLD section? What the fuck do I care about fucking Whateveristan!"

Anyway, back to the student activists - it's funny but I think we blew some of their minds about life in the US. First we talked about young people beginning to realize they have to fight in the US (this was just before we got news about Occupy, so I secretly hope that these Greeks think that we are the most insightful and in-touch people ever on the earth even though we actually didn't know about it becoming big news yet). Then I was talking about how schools have 30 kids in their classes in the US and they literally thought we were exaggerating or making it up - we talked about tuition for higher education and they were totally amazed. But most of all we talked about how similar things are and how this really is a global strategy by the rulers to fix capitalism on our backs. Although the pace and severity of things is much worse in Greece, no doubt at all, it's a similar thing that other populations in other countries are also going through.

Edit: didn't see any riots though. It was actually really peaceful compared to US cities although there was a strange energy and tension that you could really feel and was expressed by the random political arguments that would happen and just by the way people were used to walking down the street in front of an occupied building or a dozen riot cops with machine guns. We felt like people who entered an empty house right after or right before a huge crazy party.

Sasha

15th February 2012, 12:56

Greece's new normal:

Employees of the Organisation of Council Estates are threatening to commit suicide, jumbing from the Organisatin’s roofFeb 15th, 2012 @ 10:26 am › admin
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While dozens of demonstrators from Sunday’s demo still detained in police cells and more than 30 town halls and local government buildings are occupied by protesters, desperation continues.
2 workers of the Organisation for Council Estates (OEK), are at the moment on the roof of the Organisation’s building and are threatening to jump on the ground. The Organisation is scheduled to close down and all employees to be made redundant, since no council estates are going to be built. The building is occupied by its workers for several days now.
Greece used to be the country of EU with the lowest suicide rate, it has been doubled since the government got the IMF/EU/ECB loan. More news as they come.