[D66] The threat of dictatorship in Greece

[Antid Oto]

The threat of dictatorship in Greece
21 November 2011

The installation by the banks and major imperialist powers of a “national unity”
government in Greece that includes members of the fascistic LAOS party, as well
as the designation of the right-wing New Democracy party to head the defense
ministry, must be taken as a serious warning to the Greek and international
working class.

Thirty-eight years after student protests at the Polytechnic in Athens on
November 17, 1973, whose bloody suppression ultimately brought down the
US-backed junta of the colonels, finance capital is again considering the
imposition of military rule or fascist dictatorship to suppress the workers.

Ousted PASOK Prime Minister George Papandreou had mobilized the army to suppress
strikes against the austerity measures he was carrying out at the behest of the
banks and European institutions. In August 2010, soldiers broke the strike by
truckers against the deregulation of their profession. In October of this year,
the government placed striking refuse workers under military discipline and
forced them back to work.

On February 4, 2011, Athens News Agency reported that the army’s 71st airborne
brigade had staged a mock battle with anti-austerity protesters. The exercise
included methods for controlling “feuding parties” as well as “conflict
deterrence” and “crowd evacuation.”

There is a barely concealed debate within the ruling class over whether to scrap
all democratic procedures and move openly towards authoritarian rule. In May, a
CIA report declared that a coup in Greece was a possibility. In September,
retired army officers rioted, after which the Association of Support and
Cooperation of the State Armed Forces, the professional association of full-time
soldiers, warned Papandreou in a letter that the army was following his policies
“with increased concern.” Defense Minister Panos Beglitis denounced the officers
for acting as “a state within a state.”

Shortly before Papandreou resigned, he and Beglitis sacked the entire General
Staff of the armed forces, leading to widespread suspicions that a coup had been
narrowly averted. This followed a massive two-day general strike and new demands
from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund that Athens impose
even more sweeping layoffs and wage and pension cuts. It preceded the furious
reaction of the financial markets to Papandreou’s proposal for a popular
referendum on the new austerity measures.

All of the sacked military chiefs had been appointed by the previous New
Democracy government. Now New Democracy is once again in charge of defense, and
the new defense minister, Dimitris Avramopoulos, has pledged to reverse the
sackings.

The inclusion of LAOS in the government is particularly ominous. The move was
not strictly required to gain a majority and form a new government. But the new
regime’s backers among the international financial elite and the Greek
bourgeoisie decided to include LAOS in order to send a political signal.

Fascistic sentiment is being cultivated and made “respectable” again, because
xenophobia, nationalism and anti-Semitism are a basis for mobilizing the most
reactionary and diseased layers of society against the working class.

Founded in 2000, LAOS became a focal point of the Greek far right, unabashedly
appealing to the traditional themes of European fascism. At the founding
congress, LAOS leader George Karatzaferis stated: “They say that to get ahead
you have to be one of three things: a Jew, a homosexual or a communist. We are
none of these.” He called for a LAOS vote to obtain “a parliament without
Masons, without homosexuals, without those dependent on Zionism.”

LAOS has repeatedly called for military dictatorship. Its founding statement
proposes that political decisions be made by a council including military
officers and Church officials. It is an enthusiastic supporter of social cuts
and opposed the partial write-down of Greek debt agreed to by the European Union
in October.

One of LAOS’s ideologists is the anti-Semite and Holocaust denier Kostas
Pleveris, who was their leading candidate in the 2004 elections. His son,
Athanasios, became a member of parliament in 2007. In 2006, Kostas Pleveris
published the book Jews—The Whole Truth, in which he praises Adolf Hitler and
calls for the extermination of the Jews. He depicts Jews as sub-humans who
defame the Nazis. He describes himself as a “Nazi, fascist, racist,
anti-democrat, anti-Semite.”

Adonis Georgiadis, the new state secretary in the economy ministry, promoted the
book on television, highlighting its “wealth of arguments.”

The promotion of such forces is the financial aristocracy’s response to the
initial stages of the political reemergence of the working class and the growth
of popular protest—starting with the Egyptian revolution, through to the mass
demonstrations and strikes in Europe and the Occupy Wall Street movement in the
United States. As in Egypt, where the military junta jails, tortures and murders
oppositionists, and the US, where the police brutally attack Occupy protesters,
the ruling class in Europe is preparing violent repression and police-state rule.

These threats have a great political resonance, given the tragic experiences of
the Greek people. In 1967, the CIA and NATO backed the military coup led by
George Papadopoulos in a bid to preempt a movement by the working class against
capitalist rule throughout Europe. The colonels brutally suppressed every
expression of working class opposition. They arrested and tortured tens of
thousands of people and built concentration camps on the islands of Gyaros and
Leros.

By bringing to power the successors of the Greek junta, the financial
aristocracy is threatening the working class not only in Greece, but throughout
Europe and the world. “European leaders fear that the same protests and strikes
will take place in their own countries,” Dimitris Dimitriadis, a leading
European Union consultant, told the Turkish newspaper Hürriyet. This prospect
and how to prevent it, he said, was the subject of a November 16 meeting of the
European Economic and Social Committee. “This problem is not just related to
Greece,” he added.

The reemergence of the threat of dictatorship deals a shattering blow to the
claims—made after the fall of the Greek junta and the fascist regimes in
Portugal and Spain, and especially after the Stalinist liquidation of the Soviet
Union in 1991—that the institutions of the European Union, in alliance with
Washington, would oversee the triumph of democratic capitalism.

Instead, global capitalism is mired in crisis, the political system in every
Western country is threatened with collapse, and bourgeois democracy is
putrefying before the eyes of the world. The decision of international finance
capital to respond by promoting LAOS in Greece testifies to the collapse of
democratic sentiment in the international bourgeoisie.

In the fight against this threat, Greek workers face not only the ruling class,
but also the political treachery of the social democratic parties and their
satellites in the Stalinist, Pabloite and other pseudo-left organizations.
Inextricably tied to the state and the trade union bureaucracies, which reveal
themselves ever more nakedly to be agencies of the ruling class, these forces
have mounted no serious struggle against the new government.

The fight against the social attacks of the financial elite comes together with
the struggle against the growing assault on democratic rights. The only social
force that retains a commitment to democratic rights and is capable of defending
them is the working class. What is required is the forging of the unity of the
working class across Europe and its independent struggle for political power on
the basis of a socialist program.

Christoph Dreier

http://wsws.org/articles/2011/nov2011/pers-n21.shtml