11 million reasons why Greece is about to explode
Posted: October 5, 2011 Filed under: Politics | Tags: social upheaval Leave a comment »By Jérôme E. Roos On October 5, 2011 http://www.roarmag.org
Mass wildcat strikes, occupations and protests will culminate into a 24-hour union-led strike on Wednesday. With tensions brewing, violence is inevitable.
Greece is being strangled — and like any organism struggling to survive while being suffocated, it will kick, scratch and fight until its very last breath. This is not an endorsement of the violence we are likely to see on Wednesday — it’s a dire warning to Europe and the IMF that their brutally inhumane policies are triggering a survival instinct that could turn nasty and brutal and run entirely out of control. Greece is about to convulse in flames and teargas once more.
“This is just the silence before the storm,” my friend Leonidas, a Greek PhD researcher on social movements at the European University Institute, told me the other day. “There is going to be an explosion,” said Markos, also a Greek PhD researcher on social movements at the same university. Soon, there will be at least 11 million reasons for Greece to explode into a violent popular uprising — one for every citizen. And what will happen then? What will the army do? Read the rest of this entry »
The Greek Laboratory: Shock Doctrine and Popular Resistance
Posted: July 13, 2010 Filed under: Activism, EU, Politics, Society | Tags: Academic article, Europe, Greek left, social Europe, social upheaval Leave a comment »by Stathis Kouvelakis*
“There is a shadow of something colossal and menacing that even now is beginning to fall across the land. Call it the shadow of an oligarchy, if you will; it is the nearest I dare approximate it. What its nature may be I refuse to imagine. But what I wanted to say was this: You are in a perilous position.”
Jack London, The Iron Heel
‘Shock and Awe on Greece’
One of the ways it that seems to me more relevant for the understanding of what is happening in Greece is to use the notion recently developed by Naomi Klein, in her book The Shock Doctrine. Seen from this perspective, the meaning of the Greek situation is simply that it’s the first time this so-called ‘shock’ doctrine, a constitutive element for any neoliberal purge, is put into practice in a Western European country, after having been tested, of course, many times in the past in other parts of the world and in the eastern part of the European continent, with results that are now very familiar to us. Read the rest of this entry »
The heresy of the Greeks offers hope
Posted: July 10, 2010 Filed under: International | Tags: Article, IMF, john pilger, shock therapy, social upheaval Leave a comment »by John Pilger*
Greece is a microcosm of a modern class war rarely reported as such.
As Britain’s political class pretends that its arranged marriage of Tweedledee to Tweedledum is democracy, the inspiration for the rest of us is Greece. It is hardly surprising that Greece is presented not as a beacon, but as a “junk country” getting its comeuppance for its “bloated public sector” and “culture of cutting corners” (Observer). The heresy of Greece is that the uprising of its ordinary people provides an authentic hope unlike that lavished upon the warlord in the White House.
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