(Translation by: A.L.C. Teen Translators-Asturias, Spain)

• The shortage of petroleum has culminated in the search for non-conventional gas using fracking
• This technique used in The US for decades has been strongly criticized for its supposed effects from pollutants and the risks for health
• In Spain, opposition among citizens is growing while the Popular Party, CIU and UPD voted against a motion by Izquierda Plural to ban this controversial practice in Spain

What is fracking?

It is the technique used to extract gas from the earth by drilling down through a land well. It involves pumping water and toxic products more than 2500 meters below the surface. The water pressure used breaks the rock and the gas freezes. “The fluid used contains a mixture of 596 chemical products. It is possible to hydro-fracture a well up to 18 times. The well is drilled vertically, through aquifers, until reaching the rock layer where the gas is trapped. There, they continue drilling horizontally, reaching as far as 3 kilometers down from the earth´s surface. Then high-pressure water is injected along with additives (biocides with low concentrations that can easily kill fish, carcinogenic products…) to enlarge the cracks and allow the gas to gravitate towards the well,” explains Aitor Urresti, a professor at Universidad del País Vasco, spokeman for EQUO in this area and member of the Anti-Fracking Advocacy Group from Bizkaia.

Until now we have been using a resource which could be extracted in a more or less easy way. The gas or oil is never in a big grotto but rather in the rock´s pores, normally in sandstone or limestone. Rocks that have a lot of porosity don´t allow the hydrocarbons to pass very well: slate gas, schist, shale gas, slate oil, schist oil…we need to think about clay, a material that absorbs water very well but is very impermeable in the other direction. The fractures are created for this reason, to increase permeability, the connection between the pores, violently forcing water inside them, breaks them,” Urresti explains.

Workers using fracking in Gypsum Hills near Medicine Lodge, Kansas, USA (AP Photo)

Why now?

The U.S. is the only country that has been using this technique on a large scale: they have already drilled more than 50,000 wells. Samuel Martín-Sosa, the manager of the international area of Ecologists in Action, explains to Human Journalism that “American and Canadian companies are trying to get their foot in but for now, as far as we know, there isn´t any exploitation as such. In Poland, Germany and The UK there are wells being tested but not on a large scale.” He continues saying that “some weeks ago there was a conference in Vienna with representatives from the industry who saw that in The U.S. the technique came with simplified norms which has allowed them to spread very fast. Americans were exempted from the regulations concerning the quality of drinking water and clean air and they made fiscal incentives easier. They also don´t have to declare the substances which are used and thought they were going to find the same here. However, reality has been a very strong popular pressure which has obliged The European Commission to rethink if it has the right to legislate regulation frameworks for the development of this activity.”

The European Parliament was one of the first that produced quite a critical report in 2011 and The European Commission is ordering new studies which show that there are a lot of holes in the law. “The industry has it clear that Europe must agree that there is a special law to try to win the media battle. What everyone seemed to assume was that once the first 100 wells were built, it would be unstoppable since a lot of governments wouldn´t be able to turn down this tasty treat in terms of employment, and that if the industry invests in research there wouldn´t be any way back. That´s why the media battle is so important”, says Martín-Sosa. “ In Spain there have been drilling tests but they haven´t drilled yet because of the citizen and town council pressure. There are countries where they have passed some prohibitions to moratoriums that have been used politically to contain popular protest and that are trying to be broken up by the industry” he adds.

“We have reached the maximum limit of coal production. The forecast is that the use of non-conventional gas will grow very fast. Due to shortage, we will use the last thing we have: pressurized water and chemical products, “ affirms Aitor Urresti.

A truck on the highway from Bradford transporting between 3-8 thousand gallons of water, sand and chemical products to use in the fracking process.(Greenpeace)

Why in Spain?

“This comes from The U.S., who is the largest gas exporter only after Russia. Europe tries to copy but fortunately here the environmental laws are stricter, the owner of the natural resources isn´t the land-owner like in The U.S.-the environmental sensitivity of Europeans is a bit greater…Countries like France or Bulgaria have legislated against it”, Julio Barea, the manager of a residuals and energy campaign in Greenpeace, explains to Human Journalism.

The Ecologists in Action report “Fracking in Spain-Situation, Threats and Resistance”[pdf] shows how Aragón, Castilla-León and Andalucía are the most affected areas by the number of licenses. “The Basque Country is the one who most openly bets on fracking, with a public administration ready to change the law.”

In its study, Ecologists in Action protest that “there are especially problematic cases registered, like one of the licenses asked for in the Andalusian valley of Guadalquivir very near an aquifer. Also, there are notable threats to aquifers in the north of the peninsula (like that of Subijana), those from which hundreds of thousands of citizens depend on for their water supply. Other permits like those of Castilla-La Mancha could affect protected spaces like the Lagunas de Ruidera.”

Julio Barea says that in Spain there are requests for hundreds of authorizations to test-drill, in different provinces and autonomous communities, but only half are given and they still haven´t done any tests.“We are in the initial stages but there are four important business concerns that have formed a type of coalition and created Shell Gas Spain, which is coordinating the promotion of fracking since they have seen problems.”

In Congress this past February they voted on a motion presented by Izquierda Plural (IU-ICV-CHA) to ask for a fracking ban in Spain. The PP, CiU and UPyD voted in opposition to the ban, while the Izquierda Plural, PSOE and the rest of the Grupo Mixto were in favor of the ban…simultaneously, PNV, FAC, and UPN abstained.

What are the risks of fracking?

Gas pipelines in Bradford, where according to The Pittsburgh Tribune Review, the current 30,000 kilometers of lines could quadruple in the next 20 years. (Greenpeace)

NGOs like Ecologists in Action or Greenpeace, among others, for months have run a campaign warning about the risks of fracking: underground water table pollution and atmospheric greenhouse gas emissions (methane), earthquakes (seismic induction), noise pollution as well as landscape impacts. Moreover, we must contemplate truck traffic routes for transporting extracted gas, along with water and land use.

Martín-Sosa claims that “the industry is tired of saying that there aren´t any cases of pollution or that the gas is harmless…until the end of last year The EPA (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency) stated that in Wyoming chemical substances had appeared in aquifers that provide drinking water to the nearby population coming from one of the fracked wells. Drilling crosses the aquifer, and 80% of the fracture flow fluid stays there…nobody can guarantee what will happen. It is a risk so unassumable that there´s no way to create a good regulation because it would still be dangerous.”

Ecologists in Action protest that 80% of research permits applied for and given are found on aquifers. “In addition, more than half are bituminous and carbonate rock aquifers, that turn out to be especially sensitive to pollution from chemical products ussed in the fracking fluids,” the NGO points out. They explain that “currently more than 30% of the Spanish population (14 million people) get their drinking water from aquifers. Given that there exist numerous municipalities in areas where they intend to carry out gas extraction by fracking and who are supplied directly from these very aquifers, they can see irreversible pollution using this technique and would assume serious risks to people´s health. Also, some research permits directly affect natural spaces of great interest like the Lagunas de Ruidera, in Cuidad Real, or the Merindades in Burgos, with the subsequent environmental damage to aquatic ecosystems.”

“If what we do is pump in high-pressured water that causes large fractures, we haven´t got any control over how these cracks will proceed, we don´t know if they are going to hit a weak point and instead of extending 10 meters they may go for a 100, which in turn could arrive through a fault to an aquifer. What this implies is direct pollution, but in The States there are cases of it occuring with toxins from abandoned wells reaching through to drinking water aquifers. In Álava, which is the area of most interest now, we have a hundred abandoned wells. The risk more than likely”, says Aitor Urresti.

Protests against fracking in The U.S. (AP Photo)

Beyond polluting aquifers, the risk to the atmosphere stands out as a real possibility. Greenpeace shows in a report that “benzene, a highly-carcinogenic agent, has been registered in the vapors coming out of the “evaporation wells” where they usually store the fracking residual water. Leaks from the gas-wells and piping may also contribute to air pollution by increasing greenhouse gas emissions. The enormous number of vehicles needed (each well requires between 4,300 to 6,600 truck trips for transporting machinery, cleaning services, etc.) and the operations of the production plants may also cause significant atmospheric pollution if we consider the acidic gases, hydrocarbons and fine particles.”

Urresti corroborates that “the gas we extract is methane, and is several times more detrimental than CO2. In the gas wells there are always leaks because to operate machines we take advantage of those small stress leaks. When the wells are drilled, and the gas area is reached, its flume is burnt for months causing significant damage to the atmosphere. Also, in each well we are injecting between 9 and 30 thousand cubic meters of water containing toxic elements. There are many accidents as well on U.S. roads due to fracking.”

Urresti explains that we mustn´t forget risks like earthquakes. “If what we do is pump in pressurized water subterraneously, inevitably that is going to generate movements that may activate faults that were more or less latent, or reactivate seismic areas and set off earthquakes.”

What can we do?

In The United States opponents to fracking have made theatrical representations to getting declarations from known actors as well as writing songs.

However, without doubt the most impressive action taken was the documentary film, “Gasland” directed by Josh Fox and nominated for The Oscars in 2011. The film brought this issue out into the public opinion by denouncing slickwater fracking in 34 states, 450,000 wells, multiplied by 18 (the number of times a well can be fracked), times each occurrence by 28 million liters of water and getting a total of 40 billion liters of water with 596 chemical products. It showed not only the direct environmental harm, but also testimonies from people who had suffered problems with their drinking water and neurological health complications from the gas emissions following the drilling. There were even homes whose tap water was flammable. The film said that in Garfield (Colorado, USA) the first preliminary study was done on the effects of gas-wells on human health: seven researchers from The University of Colorado found alarming indices of pollutants in both air and water. They documented studies that confirm the repercussions from subsequent carcinogens and neurotoxins.

Carol French, from the Pennsylvania Landowner Group for Awareness and Solutions (PLGAS), shows a container with polluted water after fracking began near her house.

In Spain, there isn´t any protest yet but there are many citizens who have shown their opposition through advocacy groups like “Fracking Free Municipalities” formed by inhabitants from Araba, Guipúzkoa, Bizkaia, Burgos, Soria and Cantabria.

Some particular cases of struggle: Euskadi and Comunitat Valenciana.

The first group that was created, in December of 2011, was in Álava. The reality that the polls would be imminent caused people to gather from different areas. Their work was targeted at the municipal level: they wanted to create a stance of townships free of fracking. For that, they gave speeches and presented motions in their Town Halls.

“We want to present a Popular Legislative Initiative to ban not only fracking but also exploration and the exploitation of non-conventional hydro-carbon, in other words, not leave any door open” said Urresti. “In Euskadi, the expected research permits to drill 16 wells(one or two is the norm)aren´t for research but rather for production. They are a public company that uses tricks to evade taxes because the assessment is very different for research rather than production. They ask for a report from the water agency. Given that this specific report is near the well in Armendia and for some strange reason they decide that this area doesn´t need an environmental study. Then, they change it, in an area 100 meters away, in an area that is in the process of becoming a protected space. As this is not feasible, the same government changes the law to permit the hydro-carbon exploitation and mining activities. They´re looking for the support of the PNV party who are quite interested in mining in Euskadi. We want a total environmental impact study done but that hasn´t occurred. Rather, incomplete tests have been done in each of the wells, but as if they were all isolated cases. They have been able to stop the soundings that they were going to do in Álava and are giving work permits.”

Urresti explains that it isn´t known how many resources can be extracted but regardless “you damage all the territory. The funniest thing is that the company that wants to develop it is a public company, Hydro-Carbon Society of Euskadi. The same enterprise goes against the interests of their own citizens.”

In contrast to what the Basque group has done, there is the example of the Valencian Community where Comarques de Castelló is taking their first steps. They claim that 41 municipalities within an area of 1,950 square kilometres could be adversely affected-for the moment 16 municipalities have opposed the fracking. Sergi Alejos, one of the advocacy group members, says that “the Council hasn´t taken a stand yet and for the moment seem to respect us. We have been formed without any links to political parties. One of the problems is that the townships are really dispersed and is very difficult to organize. We are above the Maestrat aquifer, one of the biggest in the Mediterranean area, and it is completely exposed to three fracking projects. We say that there is a high risk and there are geologists that tell us the risk is inevitable. Half of the wells directly feed the Maestrat aquifer and therefore the drinking water of Castellón is in danger. The magnitude of this problem goes further than the 41 townships.”

Alejos asks for more information from the administration and says that on the 4th of February the Official Bulletin of the Generalitat published that the Proposition Bill to regulate fracking wasn’t admitted. “That means that it hasn´t even been debated. We believe this topic is serious enough to at least talk about. That´s what they´re trying to do, so that the citizenry knows the problem. We are focusing on putting pressure at all levels of government and giving information to the people because they have got no idea,” argues Sergi.

Are there alternatives?

Everybody agrees that the solution is a change in the energy plan. “The only justification that the hydraulic fracturing has is that we need a resource, and because we don´t want to change, we are capable of doing anything, even destroying our own environment and putting people´s health at risk”, says Aitor Urresti who mentions a report about the effects that the Barnett Shale working deposits in Texas have had on health and the environment.

(AP Photo)

Samuel Martín-Sosa explains that the percentage of land occupation has increased. “The wells have a very short life and extract from a very small area whose profitability is rather marginal. As technology has evolved we go for fossil fuels that before were unreachable, that are more costly to get and of lesser quality. It is an escape forward because industry sells it as a transitional fuel since gas combustion emits less CO2 than coal, but what must be done is an absolute turnaround in the energy model and the wager on fossil fuels only delays that change. Many things appear to suggest that gas will be shared with renewable. This is going to condition our future”.

“A year ago the Polish government had to deny that its gas reserves were as high as had been estimated. I think that there is hope. There may be speculative components that makes this collapse on its own, or strong regulations that force companies to retreat…and popular protest also does a lot. Shell Gas Spain has begun a media campaign and that is a sign. The advantage here is that the warning has arrived early. This can be stopped,” concludes Samuel.

Julio Barea opines that: “They sell it to you like `we are going to emit less CO2, this is an self-reliant form of energy, it´ll create jobs…´ As usual, they know they need to talk about employment although they aren´t certain. The scientists warn that we have to clean the atmosphere of CO2 now. How can they then propose we go for more? It would be a catastrophe on a planetary scale – climatic chaos. We are able to supply ourselves all the necessary energy with renewable ones. Let´s spend money directing policies towards them instead of planning for only a few to get very rich”.

• On Sunday night (24th of March) as the Cyprus authorities were choosing their doom from the troika’s menu, some two thousand protesters were shouting anti-European slogans in front of the European house in downtown Nicosia
• “What the troika is trying to impose has little to do with help. It is blackmail, plain and simple – they are trying to subjugate a nation by sheer force”, says professor Sypros Syprou
• “Any member of the eurozone should find the Eurogroup’s stance towards Cyprus offensive”, said Christopher Pissarides, the recipient of the 2010 Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences and Chair of Council of National Economy

(Bostjan Videmsek)

On Sunday night (24th of March) as the Cyprus authorities were choosing their doom from the troika’s menu, some two thousand protesters were shouting anti-European slogans in front of the European house in downtown Nicosia. Not so long ago, this edifice epitomised every positive civic and social value in the region; now its gate looked more than slightly dilapidated and was being guarded by the members of special police forces. On its front hung a plaque commemorating the European Union as the recipient of the last year’s Nobel peace prize. “Your prize, your peace,” it smugly stated.

“Europe, leave us be!”, “Keep your hands off Cyprus!” and “Angela Merkel, The Fourth Reich!” were some of the sentiments expressed by the protesters. Many of them went out of their way to inform me that Brussels and Berlin, in conjunction with the international financial institutions, have decided to start a financial war between Europe’s north and south. In their view, the ultimate aim of this conflict is to transform the south of the continent into a stagnant pool of cheap labour with no rights, as well as to form a number of so-called free economic zones that, perversely, would help the north fare better in its competition with China. And that, of course, would only be possible if a part of Europe, namely the south, became Little China – a part of Asia inside the European Union. Little wonder that the rhetoric from the Greek and Spanish streets had quickly spread over Nicosia, a city with very little experience with such open protest. Seemingly overnight, things had gotten unimaginably bad here. The crisis looked all too ready to become a permanent state, and the latest ‘deal’ offered by Brussels was about to plunge an entire country into modern day slavery.

(Bostjan Videmsek)

“What we’re seeing is something absolutely new! Ever since the Turkish invasion of 1974 when my generation realised it could lose everything, our quality of life has been improving. The younger people here have no real concept of loss: the very idea of a crisis leaves them shook up and bewildered. That is part of why our shock has been so great. It happened overnight, although there have been a number of signs of impending doom. But nothing could prepare us for a disaster of this magnitude. Fourteen days ago, when the president Nicos Anastasiades announced that all deposit-holders in Cyprian banks would lose a part of their savings, people went crazy. Quite rightly, they saw it as an announcement of blatant theft! In the end, the powers that be decided the small-time savers will be spared. But the rich will lose a great part of their wealth. Okay, so that could quite rightly be seen as a short-term co rrective measure, but it is also sure to wreck our banking sector and thus our entire economy! The major consequences are yet to be felt. Most people still have very little idea of what’s in store for them. Perhaps… Perhaps that is for the best,” claims dr. Sypros Syprou, a professor of anthropology at the European University in Nicosia.
The country may have been paralysed and its business life may have ground to a halt, but the sense of heavy despair hadn’t yet reached its streets and tavernas. Judging by the debates I overheard, it looked as if the residents of this tiny island state were still quietly hoping they would wake up from their nightmare, and that the slasher movie directed by Berlin and Brussels could somehow still have a happy ending.

They couldn’t have been more wrong.

(Bostjan Videmsek)

“For twenty years, we have been living a materialistic illusion. There was shamefully little self-reflection. Hardly anyone was asking the right questions! We all knew that our economy was based around low taxes and an overly inflated financial sector which only grew and grew. It was only a matter of time when the bubble would burst. Now, when it did, people are set to lose their jobs, money, real estate and future. We will be forced to begin from scratch. Which would have been hard yet not impossible, but the problem is that all faith in our politicians and the EU itself is gone, irretrievably and justifiably, I might add. The European idea, which has been built around the notion of solidarity, met a grisly end here in Cyprus. What the troika is trying to impose has little to do with help. It is blackmail, plain and simple: they are trying to subjugate a nation by sheer force. The Germans are acting like a teacher who believes he can whack any pupil with a cane just because he is the teacher and he has that privilege. This is not the Europe we wished for, it is a club of politicians with a carefully planned political and economic agenda.

The damage already done is immeasurable. Brussels and Berlin are sure to continue pursuing their politics of dominance through arrogance, and I’m afraid that the European idea will take a long time to recover, if it ever will!” said professor Syprou, who was deeply concerned with the future of his students. Those who had already graduated had found it increasingly hard to get jobs; now, the anthropologist believed, getting work would be almost impossible. “After many years, we will once again experience a brain drain scenario. This is bound to prove a huge loss for our society, which will have to return to a traditional way of life. I am also afraid that the crisis will soon create the conditions for the spread of extreme political movements, even fascist ones styled after the Golden Dawn in Greece. If that happens, the European Union will be very much responsible.” Or, as The Economist recently put it: “The economy in the Eurozone is stagnant. The parties, which support the protests, are growing. Euro was established as a manifestation of a grand political project. Now, it seems, it’s more a loveless marriage in which the price of getting divorced is higher than staying together.”

(Bostjan Videmsek)

A Lack of Self-reflection

“We have been asking ourselves far too few questions. All the time, we are seeking guilt abroad. But we must first admit a great part of the blame for this calamity can be placed with us!” dr. Sypros Syprou told me in his office at the European University. Despite the gravity of the situation, the entire university still seemed to be burbling with joy. In our conversation, professor Syprou was quick to note that the Cypriot society gladly looked the other way as the authorities made deals with Slobodan Milosević or the Russian mafia. The people of Cyprus also didn’t particularly mind when their country became an important part of the process of selling arms to the regime of the Syrian president Bashar al Assad (mind that Cyprus is the only EU country which borders Syria). Yet all this is far from being even close to the reason why Brussels and Berlin decided to ransack the Mediterranean island state.

…

“I’m badly afraid I’ll never wake up from this nightmare. The whole thing reminds me of 1974 and the Turkish occupation. Back then, my family was stripped of everything. Now, when our occupiers are the international financial institutions, much the same is bound to happen. Our savings are in danger, that is something people all over Europe should take note of! Apparently, there are no more rules. This is war! It is a horrible thing. I can’t seem to wrap my head around what’s happening. What a shock for each and every one of us! I don’t think any of us expected such disaster would strike overnight and rob us of our future! Look, the people of Cyprus, we’re all ready to contribute to save our country… But not like this, not under such a vicious dictate by the international financial elites! Not so long ago, the EU was an absolutely positive reference in our society. Now it is a horrible threat, an occupier, an aggressor! And exactly the same goes for Germany!” said Mrs. Despo Ioanou between tears. I spoke to her during the recent demonstrations. For the past 35 years, she has been working for the Laiki bank. She doesn’t have long before retirement, but – along with thousands of co-workers – she is now sure to lose her job.

(Bostjan Videmsek)

The Russian Bride

At a recent conference in Nicosia, the recipient of the 2010 Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences and Chair of Council of National Economy Christopher Pissarides remarked that he saw no good reason for Cyprus to follow the troika’s dictate. “I’m unable to comprehend why the Eurogroup blocked funding to Cyprus when the economy’s main weakness was its banking system, as opposed to the situation in Greece, a country which received a large amount of EU funding,” said professor Pissarides. “Luxembourg is even more dependent on financial services than us and I did not hear anybody talking about that. We are not seeking a loan from Germany but from the euro system, which should help our banks.Could Cyprus’ treatment by the Eurogroup really be explained by the fact that many Russians, who are not wanted by eurozone ministers, use Cypriot banks? Any member of the eurozone should find the Eurogroup’s stance towards Cyprus offensive. The source of the problem in Cyprus and Europe in general is the issue of banking supervision which was never solved, but simply left to each state, causing a crisis of confidence,” is an opinion of a Nobel laureate from Cyprus.

Pissarides also believes that Cyprus will be able to use the large stores of natural gas near its southern coast to bounce back. But under the best of scenarios, the gas will hit the international markets no sooner than 2019. By then, Cyprus is sure to turn into a third-world country seeking its new allies outside the EU. One prime candidate will be Russia, who has already turned the island into its financial and touristic colony. Russian citizens have an estimated 30 billion euros parked in the currently frozen Cypriot bank accounts. But so far, the Russian government has failed to offer much assistance. The Kremlin potentates are well aware that, even at the cost of heavy financial losses, it makes more sense to remain on good terms with Germany than to start solving the probably unsolvable mess in Cyprus. This, the matter’s basic insolvability, was roughly the view of Hermes Solomon, a commentator with the Cyprus Mail daily newspaper, which is being published in the English language. According to him, the Cypriot parliament voting such a resounding NO! to the trimming of the bank accounts was merely a tactical ruse to buy the local political elites more time and to let Russia know that, if properly motivated, Cyprus stands ready to protect its assets.

(Bostjan Videmsek)

“Voting no was just a show put on to quiet the little guy in the street and to retain as much of Russian money here as possible,” Solomon believes. He was quick to add that, days before the eruption of this latest episode of the financial blitzkrieg, a great deal of Russian money had already left the island and was now parked in Latvia, Malta, Zürich and London. Salomon also believed that the current austerity package was sure to fail, since it had been put together in such haste as to verge on panic. “Solidarity fund will prove an utter failure. No one will be crazy enough to entrust their money to our government. Robbing Petros in order to help Pavlos will not help. It will all end in tears. Now the shit has really hit the fan, and our trust in our banks and our authorities is gone for good.”

Salomon went on to explain that he was in no way supportive of the official EU policy, yet he also expressed the belief that his countrymen would do well to wake up and realise who the beggar was and who the master. “Here in Cyprus, no one is prepared to pay the price of our banking and political mistakes. I sense a great tragedy is brewing. ..”

(Bostjan Videmsek)

“They’re trying to turn us into their slaves!”

For a number of years, Manolis Mihalis has been working for the Bank of Cyprus. His position had afforded him a front-row seat for observing the rise and fall of the most overblown financial sector in Europe. Sure, he nodded at me cautiously, the global financial meltdown did make itself known here, but not even in his most frightening dreams did he expect the state would simply go bankrupt overnight. “It came completely out of left field. It was a total, utter shock. We were all surprised to say the least. Over the years, I’ve climbed to a quite high position in the bank, I ought to have heard something, or at least got an inkling. But I didn’t. True, we weren’t doing so good for a while now, but after these last ten days of international pressure, all that’s in store for us is a mass funeral!”

I talked to Mihalis at a café in downtown Nicosia. He seemed visibly shook up and angry, though he wasn’t all that worried for his personal future, since his father in law owns a huge hog farm. But he was very much concerned about the future of his friends, co-workers and the entire country. “We’ve been utterly stripped of our sovereignty. We have no other choice – we must bow to the troika’s dictate. If our politicians were better negotiators, we would have got a better deal than this unconditional surrender, but as it is… There’s a financial war going on in Europe. There’ll be plenty casualties, just like in a real war. But right now, we are defenceless. Our adversary is too strong. The situation is truly tragic.”

(Bostjan Videmsek)

Manolis cut our conversation short, since he was in a hurry to get to a protest. In parting, he said: “I believe that some 10 000 people are about to lose their jobs in the next few days. The Laiki bank is sure to go bust, my bank probably as well. And after that, the rest of them will gradually fall too. The domino effect will ruin our entire economy. Once trust is gone, it is impossible to recover. The offshore companies will leave our country. Social unrest is sure to break out, and that will lay waste to the third important branch of our economy – tourism. Before long, this entire island will be a wasteland. They have decided to destroy us. In my view, they didn’t so much do it because of the Russian money, they did it because of our natural gas. If we were allowed to tap it and sell it abroad, we would have become a strong country in our own right. They couldn’t let that happen, right? It is hard to imagine what Cyprus will look like in a year. But today is the first day of the rest of our lives. From today, for all of us, every euro counts!”

According to Mihalis, Berlin and Brussels are using Cyprus as a laboratory to test the limits of endurance of an entire society. “It is a grand-scale experiment, and our hands are tied. There is literally nothing we can do. We are about to become a so-called free enterprise zone, a tiny slice of Asia or Africa inside the European Union.” In stark contrast to the majority of his compatriots, Mihalis refused to place a shred of hope in Russia. “The Russians, too, are playing their own geo-strategic game. They’ll never take on the EU or Germany on our behalf. Why would they? It wasn’t the Russians who got us into this mess – it was our own politicians, both left and right, all of them lying through their teeth. We’ll pull through easily, they told us. There will be no cuts. Your savings are inviolable. The troika is really here to help. We are far too important to be left high and dry. Oh yeah? Well, look at us now – look at the situation a mere few weeks after the election!”

(Bostjan Videmsek)

“Disaster! I can hardly believe what’s happening! They want to destroy us and turn us into their slaves. All this time, they knew perfectly well what was going on in our banks! Both Europe and Germany gave their explicit assent! They let our politicians bleed us dry and then betray us horribly. All they can do now is bury us!” I was told this by a woman named Maria at a mass protest organised by the workers of the Cypriot banking sector. She had been employed with the Laiki bank; at the time I talked to her, it was a well-known fact that particular bank would never open its gates again. On account of Laiki’s fall, sure to be followed by the destruction of several other banks, some 8000 people were about to lose their jobs. “What happens to my family?” Maria implored: “I have no savings! Even if I had, I couldn’t get to them! I have a substantial loan, and the instant I’m sacked I’ll no longer be able to make the payments. My sister works for the Bank of Cyprus, her husband does as well. Both of them will lose their jobs sooner or later. The entire banking system is about to topple. We, the normal people, will be left with nothing. They have ruined our lives. What are we to do? There is no way for us to fight our financial occupiers!”

The Death of the European Idea

In Cyprus, the dictatorship of the international financial markets in conjunction with the political elites of certain core countries is shaping history. The idea of the European Union, which, even a few years ago, meant a beacon of hope for the so-called New Europe, has been dealt a blow that it may never recover from.

“This is the German Union, not the EU!” an angry man roared in Nicosia square on the Thursday the banks were ready to reopen. All of my Cypriot interlocutors had been quick to raise the question of where the much-vaunted European solidarity had gone. In the streets of Cyprus, just as previously in Spain and in Greece, the word Europe is now just a tad milder curseword than Germany or troika.

(Bostjan Videmsek)

Here in the beleaguered south, one conviction is daily gaining credence. It is that the rich of the Europe’s north have decided to yank the reins of debtocracy and turn a number of previously sovereign countries into their colonies so as to be able to better compete with China. It certainly seems as if the leading men and women of the European core have decided to get rid of a lot of what they perceive as dead weight. In this endavour, they are helped by the manipulative international financial institutions and a thoroughly corrupt press forever harping about ‘the lazy, hedonistic south‘, even though the official statistics tell a very different tale. The first step of this massive process has been taken on January 1, 2007, when both Romania and Bulgaria were admitted into the EU – two gigantic pools of dirt-cheap labour with a certain Asian looseness to their legislatures, especially concerning workers’ rights.

Ten years ago, the optimists were presuming the surge of economic growth would make China more like the EU politically. Now it is clear that exactly the opposite is taking place. In Greece, six years into its irreversible plunge into slavery, the process is nearing completion. The price of work, what little work is left, has plummeted. The young generations, in no way responsible for the sins of their corrupt political elites, have been robbed of their future. Everything they have been taught about Europe has proved a tawdry farce. The European south is being governed by a completely different set of rules than the north. But at least the north has now finally shown its true face, which is not at all democratic or compassionate. Rather, it is a cankerous maw which, among other things, is mainly responsible for the unstoppable rise of neo-nazism in Greece.

• Two years after the egyptian revolution, women have been forced to organize themselves in order to be able to demonstrate protected by bodyguardsand avoid sexual abuses.
  
• “The number of sexual agressions has increased hugely, and so the number of colective rapings”, says Heba Merayef, Humans Rights Watchs director in Egypt. 

“At that moment, I didn’t understand anything… I had no idea what was happening… All I knew was that there were hundreds of hands stripping me of my clothes and brutally violating my body. Who were those men? There was no way out. Everyone was saying that they were protecting me, saving me even, but all I felt was the finger-rape of my body, both from the front and back. Someone was even trying to kiss me. I was completely naked, the mass surrounding me was pushing me toward an alley close to Hardee’s restaurant… So I’m in the middle of this tightly knit circle, and every time I try to scream, to defend myself, to call for help, the violence is only increased.«
This is but one of the testimonials of many Egyptian women brutally sexually assaulted during the recent mass protests against the president Mohammed Mursi. Nineteen of the victims decided to contact the newly founded non-governmental organization OpAntiSH (Operation against sexual harassment). None of them wish to speak up in public. They know all too well that in Egypt’s patriarchal society, that would mean the gravest possible humiliation for them and for their families.

Another one of the assaulted women says that all happened frightfully fast. Suddenly, she was surrounded: six men were coming at her from one side, six from another. With glazed eyes, they started groping her, scratching at her, tearing her clothes off. In no time, she was stripped naked. It went beyond mere sexual assault. “It was an intentional attempt to hurt me on every possible level,” says the victim.

Systematic sexual and political violence

“Friday, January 25, was one of the worst days on record. All of the cases were really, really bad. The worst case we dealt with involved a bladed weapon being used on the private parts of an assaulted woman,” claims Leil-Zahra Mortada, a spokesperson for OpAntiSH. In November, this organization was founded by a group of men and women to help turn back the tide of sexual aggression all over Egypt.

From 2008 until the present date, a mind-boggling 83 percent of all Egyptian women had suffered some form of a sexual assault, verbal or physical. Inside or outside their homes. The violence against women here has become nothing less than a political agenda. The new Egyptian constitution, extorted by the Muslim brotherhood through the president Mohammed Mursi, contains many elements of the Sharia law and completely disregards the question of women’s rights. The national parliament, two thirds of which are controlled by the Islamists, consists of 500 male and 8 female MPs. True, all parties running in the last election were required to include at least one female candidate on their list. But it was exceedingly rare that the female candidates found their way anywhere near the top of those lists.

The new electoral legislature recently passed by the Shura Council (the lower house of the Egyptian parliament) failed to address the issue in any relevant form whatsoever. “The new legislature is merely an outgrowth of our new constitution,” I was told by the activists of The National Front for Egypt’s Women, who bitterly protested the passing of the new laws for weeks. “The constitution had been drafted by the Muslim Brotherhood,” they assured me: “And the passing of this new law means the end of female participation in Egyptian politics.”

Those same activists had also been enraged by the ministry of education, which recently ordered the removal of the renowned feminist Doria Shafik from the official schoolbooks. During the British occupation, this fearless lady has been at the forefront of the struggle for women’s rights as well as women’s active participation in politics. The Islamists freshly in charge of the ministry decided to remove her picture from the schoolbooks because, in those pictures, she does not wear a veil. “Removing Doria’s picture under the pretext of not wearing the Hijab is an unacceptable approach to dealing with Egyptians. Egypt’s women uphold their right to maintain their status and will not accept any deliberate attempts to falsify history and reduce women’s rights,” reads the joint statement by the Egyptian non-governmental organisations fighting for women’s rights.

We refuse to stay at home!

Engy Gozlan is a member of the Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment organisation and a veteran fighter for women’s rights. She claims the recent assaults will fail to stop the women here from fighting for their rights and a free Egypt. On the contrary: “No, we refuse to stay at home! Nothing can stop us from joining the protests! Those streets, they belong to us just as much as they belong to the men. This is our country, and we refuse to keep quiet! We are going to speak out about sexual harassment! There is no Egyptian revolution without female participation and safety!” According to Gozlan, every sordid assault had been pure politics. “The goal is to banish us women from public life and remove us from public space. The assaults have all been very similar in nature. We are talking about organised violence against women!”

Hers is far from the only voice speaking out against the oppression. “The number of sexual assaults has seen a sharp increase, the number of mass rapes too! But the authorities fail to respond. Their only response is silence.” says Heba Morayef, director of the Egyptian office of the Human Rights Watch. At HRW, they feel that most of the sexual violence is the responsibility of the Egyptian security forces – meaning both the army and the police. The scope of such violence is not limited to women: many male journalists and activists have also been assaulted. Without question, these crimes have been perpetrated in the interests of a ruthless political agenda.

“We refuse to let our freedom be taken away from us! We refuse to become a caliphate or a fascist-run country like Saudi Arabia. We will not stand for our women being humiliated! We will not stand for our youth’s future being dictated by demented old men! We, the women of Egypt, have a past we can be proud of! Now we are fighting so that the same can be said of our future! We have been marching in the streets for the past two years! Yes, we may be tired, but we will never back down!” During the recent march of the Egyptian liberals toward the Tahrir Square, I was told this by Mrs. Noor, which is Arabic for light.

On a normal day, Mrs. Noor teaches English at a local high school, but on that Friday she was marching at the head of the column and shouting for president Mursi to get lost. She spoke to me about the increase in the violence against women, the staggering level of unemployment, the hopelessness taking root among the younger generations, the twice-stolen revolution. “But worst of all,” she said: “is what we now see happening to the women! Two years ago, we flooded the Tahrir square. Now, many women won’t even show their face in public without a male escort. Every day, you see more veils in the streets. This is not the Cairo I grew up in. This is fast becoming something like certain Gulf countries or even Iran!”

Arrogance and Silence

Farah Shash, a psychologist in charge of helping the victims of sexual violence, agrees that the authorities are the first to blame. By not sanctioning and sometimes openly encouraging violence against women, they are conveying the message that such instances are normal behaviour. Mrs. Shash, who works in the Nadim centre in Cairo, is also concerned about the organisations that have sprung up with the aim of protecting the women from being assaulted in the streets. However pure and selfless their motives, her view is that such organisations are promoting the wrong message. “It is unrealistic to expect our women to have bodyguards available whenever they need them. We should be protected by the state, not local militias! What we are seeing here are some of the most alarming symptoms of a failed state. We need to know that our men see us as something more than mere sexual objects and targets.”
Shash’s employers keep alerting the relevant ministries. Yet so far, the new Islamic masters of Egypt have replied only with arrogance or silence. “Whenever we try to debate them in parliament, they tell us that women’s rights and women’s safety aren’t a priority. They also tell us they don’t believe such issues evershould be a priority!” Shash is deeply disturbed by the new Egyptian constitution, which has officially turned the women here into third-class citizens.

“You must not fall into the trap of assuming violence against women is a new phenomenon around here,” this brave psychologist told me: “In the last years of the Mubarak regime, the police started harassing women in a very organised fashion. Rapes, too, were a regular occurrence – rapes in public! Also, we had the so-called virginity tests being performed at police stations. The difference is that such bestialities used to be the domain of policemen, and now the army has joined in. Another difference is that such violence has now severely escalated in scope. The numbers are dramatic. And the worst part is that most of the assaults go unreported. If you get raped, are you going to report it to the perpetrator – the police?! In Arabic culture, a raped woman is automatically stripped of all pride and social status. She is quite literally bereft of her future. Her family casts her out. According to the dominant school of thought, she herself is to blame for the rape. I’m also sad to note many Egyptian men are now much more tolerant toward violence against women than they used to be. We can blame this on the Muslim Brotherhood and their sharia constitution. Make no mistake: they know exactly what they’re doing. It is all very very frightening.”

According to Mrs. Shash, most of basic human decency is slowly vanishing from the streets of Cairo. The comradeship and the solidarity so typical of the revolutionary days are but a bitter memory. In her view, the violence is a powerful tool of the current regime. “The women, we’re actually the revolution’s victims. We are it’s collateral damage”, says Farah Shash, but she adds that she hasn’t yet lost all hope. She is well aware that the revolutions are known to devour their own children, and that serious political and economic change always takes time. “Sexually, we have long become a highly repressed society, and the illusion of freedom provided many men with the license for abuse. This is its own warped interpretation of freedom and also a symbolic portrayal of the real state of our society. The islamists, using the army and the police, are constantly assaulting our way of life. They are forcing upon us their values and their morality. Their minds would feel most at home in the middle ages. The entire Egypt is hurtling into the darkness. The pressures are also mounting in our schools. Soon, every little girl will be forced to wear a veil. In Luxor, many girls’ hair had been cut off. And the community is sort of accepting it, drowning in apathy. But this is something we will fight to the last. No matter what the consequences, we are prepared to bleed for our freedom!”

The Need for a Sexual Revolution

Both in the time of Mubarak and during the last two years, the Egyptian women have mostly been left to fend for themselves. Few international organisations reached out to help them, and most of what help they got had been of a symbolical nature. Yet in the last few days, the international community finally began responding to the ever more desperate pleas for help. Michelle Bachelet, the executive director of UN Women,released a statement expressing her profound concern about the escalating violence: “As a vibrant force in civil society, women continue to press for their rights, equal participation in decision making, and the upholding of the principles of the revolution by the highest levels of leadership in Egypt. UN Women is deeply disturbed by the gravity of recent attacks against women, including the reports of sexual assault, many of which occurred in the same Tahrir Square in which women rallied to contribute to a better future for their country.”

Mrs. Bachelet called upon both the government and the people of Egypt to immediately stop all forms of violence against women and to start promoting human rights for all, including the rights of women to live free of violence and to participate fully in social, economic and political life. In particular, the UN official underlined that, in order to safeguard the fundamental rights of women, »the Egyptian government has to adopt new laws and take additional measures as to ensure their protection and ability to exercise their rights.«

Yet words remain words, and decisive action is far away. Especially if one relies on the UN to provide it.

Amira Mikhail, an activist, claims the Egyptian society needs to be changed in its entirety: »The very mentality of our men and women has to change,” she told journalists in Cairo: “Policies need to be revolutionized, assault need to be criminalized, women have to be respected and protected and not made into scapegoats. The police and the military need to start protecting them rather than harassing or violating them, and all instances of violence need to be dealt with harshly and swiftly. This can be done through laws and the media and the re-education of our police and military forces. However, such a project requires an educated, active, and motivated citizenry. And this we simply do not have.” In Mikhail’s opinion, Egypt is in acute need of another revolution. Above all, it would have to be a sexual revolution. Mikhail draws much optimism from the fact that, in the last few weeks, the Egyptian media finally started noticing the tide of violence against women. Egypt Independent, a Cairo-based daily newspaper, was the first to tear down the wall of silence and publish some very graphic descriptions of the sexual abuse at Tahrir Square. “A woman was sexually assaulted with a bladed weapon on Friday night, leaving cuts on her genitals,’ the local reporters wrote: ‘in central Cairo, in the midst of what was purportedly a revolutionary demonstration. She was one among at least 19 women sexually assaulted in and around Tahrir Square on Friday night, according to accounts collated by Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment, an activist group. Several women were stripped, and raped, publicly, as men pushed their fingers inside them. There were other attacks involving bladed weapons. Six women required medical attention. No doubt there were more assaults, uncounted.«

Tahrir’s Bodyguards

For the past two weeks, the women planning to take part in the protests can rely on the help of an organisation called Body Guard Tahrir. On the streets, its members are doing what should be the army and the police’s job. One spokeswoman for the organisation claims that the sexual violence has become an integral part of the Egyptian culture. “Such incidents are by no means confined only to the Tahrir Square. Abuses are taking place all over Cairo and all over Egypt. It is something we need to deal with, and we need to do it now! The perpetrators know very well that, as things stand, no one is going to prosecute them for their crimes. And that in itself is a powerful incentive for further assaults.”

During the Friday’s mass demonstrations against Mursi and the Muslim Brotherhood, the members of the Tahrir Body Guard were a welcome sight among the crowd, protecting the attending women from any sort of abuse. The group had been founded by an activist named Soraya Baghat. Making clever use of social networks, she distributed video footage of organised assaults on women and followed it up with a heartfelt call for help. The response to her plea was extraordinary.

Jehane Noujaim, the director of a documentary called The Square, is convinced that no force in this world will be able to stop the women of Egypt from picking up their struggle. According to her, the ever more prevalent sexual violence is a sort of social epidemic. “The women will continue to march to the Tahrir Square to protest as loudly as they can,” she believes: “That is something that will not change. The violence against women is counter-productive since it will only fuel our righteousness and motivate us to protest even harder!”

There are several recorded instances where, when on-lookers tried to intervene on the assaulted women’s behalf, the perpetrators fended them off with knives. A number of mass brawls have also been recorded. »Testimonies from victims and those attempting to save them paint a frightening picture. Tens if not hundreds of men surrounding the victims with countless hands tearing-off clothes and veils, unzipping trousers and groping breasts, nipples and backsides,« writes the local researcher for the Amnesty International Diana Eltahawy on her blog. Like most other activists, Elthaway blames the brunt of the violence on the police who mostly do nothing. Egypt has become the land of absolute impunity as far as violence against women is concerned.

In front of the Helvan art academy on the Zamalek island in the middle of the Nile, a group of co-eds are using their day off to debate the next stages of the revolution. They are angry and disappointed because first the generals and then the islamists tried to run them into the ground. Violence against women is something of a taboo topic, so it is hard to get anything out of them at first. The mood here in this bastion of art and urbanity is chillingly different than in those heady first weeks of the revolution. It is hard to escape the feeling one of the main causes of the downbeat atmosphere is the escalation of the sexual violence against women.

Omar, who calls himself ‘a real revolutionary’ and believes that Mohammed Mursi is sooner or later bound to get assassinated, is one of the founders of the OpAntiSH. During the last three Friday protests he was there to shield his female comrades and was injured in the process. “I am horrified,” he said to me: “Every day, it gets worse. The pressure from the Islamists is mounting. This is nowhere near the Egypt we were fighting for. The Muslim Brotherhood is doing everything it can to consolidate its power. The assaults on our women are carefully organised. The aim is to intimidate them and thus drive them from the streets. They say they’re doing it for religious reasons. But it has nothing, nothing to do with religion. It is pure violence.”
Omar assured me that he and his friends were determined to keep providing assistance to his city’s women. His female colleagues were quick to jump in the conversation. A girl named Farida told me she still went to the protests and would continue to do so for as long as it took. This didn’t mean she was not afraid, for every female protester was running a very real risk of getting assaulted. “Personally, I haven’t been assaulted yet – ‘yet’ being the key word here. Unfortunately, I believe things will get a lot worse. The Islamists are trying to make us cover our faces and get out of the streets. But no way. In spite of the pressure, we must go on. In the streets, I have already had a number of episodes where men were yelling at me, making threats about what they would do to me if I don’t cover myself up. Things are turning really nasty around here.”

( Translation by: A.L.C. Teen Translators – Asturias, Spain)

• Mexico is the country that consumes more soft drinks per person in the world and Chiapas one of the places where not only the most is drunk but also where malnutrition and obesity prevail.
• Experts warn, with 70% of Mexicans overweight, 30% of them obese, and diabetes the primary cause of death, that the health system will collapse by 2020.
• Any hopes? That Congress passes the initiative supported by The UN and 47 other organizations to increase beverage company taxes and that The PRI´s current “Crusade Against Hunger” is taken into account. 

[A road-sign marking the way to YITIC, in the Altos de Chiapas (Maria Verza)]

San Pedro Chenalhó (M.V) 

Next, some little kids go to center court where they dance around the Coca-Cola brand symbol drawn on the floor. If an extra-terrestrial arrived at this moment, surely they would think that Coke was something very important to the earthlings. Everyone is pleased that a woman is offering some cookies to accompany their soft drinks between performances. All the children are doing very well and today they will save their lunches, something important in a region where poverty affects eight out of ten people and malnutrition and hunger three out of ten.

The school in San Pedro Chenalhó is on the road that joins San Cristóbal de Las Casas with Pantelho, a bit further than 60 kilometers from the colonial city. During the trip, the red and white colors stand out against the green mountain landscape. Almost all the shops, but not the normal houses, are painted in these colors because this way the paint is free. Coca-Cola Femsa (the Mexican subsidiary that is Coca-Cola´s largest bottling plant in the world, with 2.6 billion cases produced in 2011 and which supplies all Latin America) knows that these indigenous and impoverished areas are an important market. Femsa opts for advertisements in native languages and have changed over the traditional welcoming billboards to villages into large publicity posters.

Ctra S Cristobal Pantelhó (M.V.)

The strategy comes from afar. As the social anthropologist Jaime Page Pliego explains, in research about to be published in the magazine, Liminar, soft drink companies looked for local party leaders who had been supported by the PRI and who were in charge of pox production (a type of clear brandy made from sugar cane and used in Mayan ceremonies) and gave them exclusivity for Coke and Pepsi. Soon they became rich. Page Pliego cites the example of the Lopez Tuxum family from San Juan Chamula – a village today known for a large Syncretist Church where Mayan ceremonies take place in front of its altars of various virgins and saints. This family was offered the exclusive selling rights in 1962 to both brands and later both companies wanted the sole rights which Coca-Cola ended up winning. The Lopez Tuxums established themselves as money-lenders, controlled all transportation, and handed down the businesses from one generation to another. “The social prestige that Coke and Pepsi acquired in Chamula, primarily for Coke, at the family festivities and patron events, spread all over the Altos de Chiapas”, writes Page.

Little by little these refreshments have become an important focus for the communities of los Altos. Nowadays, it´s not only a beverage but rather almost a currency to pay debts or dowries and in fact even part of Prehispanic ceremonies and religious rituals. Since Evangelical churches have proliferated in the area they have also encouraged the local natives to replace their alcoholic drink pox with Coke or other sodas.

Ctra S Cristobal Pantelhó (M.V.)

2-5 LITERS PER PERSON PER DAY

Mexico is the country where the most soft drinks are consumed worldwide and Coca-Cola Femsa are the leaders. When the heat bears down in some villages of northern Mexico´s Sonora Desert, a person can drink up to five liters of Coke, according to Page Pliego´s data. The average in the country, his research found, stands at 0.4 liters daily per Mexican, a figure that multiplies in Chiapas. In los Altos, each inhabitant drinks 2.25 liters daily and is the reason why the bottles there are extra-large and not sold anywhere else.

The Coca-Cola Femsa bottling plant in San Cristóbal de las Casas is, furthermore, one of the two largest in Mexico (the other is in Tlaxcala, near the capital) with guaranteed water access since it´s situated on the slopes of the Huitepec, known as the “volcano of water”. Page Pliego says that besides the actual well, which is used to supply all Chiapas and part of Oaxaca and Tabasco, another is being built. Various organizations have denounced agreementsbetween the company and officials for being able to access the water at a very low cost in a state where having rights to this resource causes major legal problems among communities.

Ctra S Cristóbal Pantelhó (M.V.)

That´s why Chiapas is the best example of what has become known as “Coca-Colization”,or the invasion of the soft drinks. While maybe not the only cause of what experts term as “the new war of the twenty-first century” or the obesity epidemic, it is clearly one of the main reasons why in Mexico, according to expert studies, 70% of the population is overweight and 30% of them are obese.

Yet for UN Food Program spokesperson Oliver de Schutter, the point where a marked change in the Mexicans´ food habits and also an increase in sugar and processed fats intake occurred, is when on the first of January 1994 The North American Free Trade Act was signed. Food imports soared and, in just a decade, Coke consumption doubled among children, according to Schutter.

School in Yitic (M.V.)

SOFT DRINKS + MALNOURISHMENT= ALARM

In Chiapas this makes for an explosive combination: high soft drink consumption and high levels of malnourishment. “Most Mexican adults were malnourished as children, so their bodies are programmed for less and when suddenly there is an excess of sugar the metabolic damage is terrible” explains Dr. Abelardo Avila, researcher for The National Institute for Health and Nutrition. The consequences range from diabetes to heart-disease, blindness, amputations and lower work output.

According to the 2012 Health and Nutrition Survey, diabetes is the primary cause of death in the country, with an estimated 13 million affected and only half diagnosed and treated. This survey found that 70% of households demonstrated some level of food imbalance.

Nutritionist Marisol Vega knows what the combination of these factors mean. She has spent more than ten years working in several communities in los Altos de Chiapas with university or NGO projects and has seen “how traditional diets have been replaced by soft drinks and junk-food that is cheaper and easier to prepare”.

Zinacantan´s Mrs. Petrona making tortillas (M.V.)

“For ten pesos (half a Euro) they can buy a large bottle of soda for the whole family to drink for breakfast, later another for lunch and perhaps even one more for dinner, because it´s cheap(less than bottled water)and thirst-quenching, especially when served with tortillas. In addition, it is also socially respected”, adds Vega. The researcher warns of the danger that this implies in some communities where there exists historically-inherited malnutrition. Breastfeeding is being given up early and soft drinks are even being served to infants. The result is that in the same family there are under-nourished children and obese adults. Not only has the rate of diabetes shot up, but Vega warns that the problem will multiply in the future.

CHEAPER AND MORE ACCESSIBLE THAN WATER

“Many schools, not only in Chiapas or Yucatan where the problem is more apparent, but also in the metropolitan area of the Mexican capital, haven´t got drinkable water and the children hydrate with soft drinks. This is a horrible problem”, points out Dr. Abelardo Avila. “I have even seen mothers who fill their baby bottles with Coca-Cola”, he adds. Also, schools have been converted into “junk-food paradises” even though their sale has already been prohibited. You only need to go to the schools´ entrances to see that what used to be sold inside, now has moved outside. “Right, during a few months we couldn´t sell” – says Señora Juana while she loads her small carriage with sweets at a centrally located school near the capital –“ but now there´s no problem”.

Ctra S Cristobal Pantelhó (M.V.)

All experts agree, that although in some places like the capital anti-obesity and some nutritional programs have been launched, in general the state has not done enough to control the overweight epidemic and the diseases related to these problems. With diabetes at the top, the problems have grown so much that “if continued at the current rate, in 2020 the financial and public health damage for México will be unsustainable, a catastrophe” predicts Dr. Ávila.

“Coca Cola and the rest of the soft drink companies has done everything that the government has let them do”, protests Alejandro Calvillo, Director of the NGO “The Power of the Consumer”.

On several occasions their group has denounced the excessive permissiveness of the authorities regarding the expansion of beverage industries who have operated with very low costs and taxes and even with unfair practices. “We can demonstrate that agreements between Coca-Cola and school directors from Chiapas permitted their exclusive beverage sales on school property and that they paid them with bottles of Coke that were later resold for their own personal gain”. Calvillo also remembers that the relationship that this company has with the powers to be is very strong. “You just have to recall that not long ago, from 2000 to 2006, Mexico had a president that was the director of Coca-Cola (Vicente Fox)”.

Ctra S Cristobal Pantelhó (M.V.)

Demands of the civil organizations and the UN itself to alleviate the problem have been the same for some years and they follow two directives: prohibiting soft drink and junk-food publicity aimed at children and raising taxes on the industry. But companies in the sector, very powerful and with double moral standards (some, for example, support nutritional programs developed by NGOs), have managed to skirt the measures by committing to self-regulation, stating that the problem isn’t soft drinks or some foods but rather nutritional habits, as Jaime Zabludovsky, President of ConMéxico and sector employer, explains. 

Pinche aquí para ver el vídeo

Up for debate, the next Mexican Congressional Sessions will answer to the demands of 47 organizations to raise the taxes on the soft drink companies and to try to counteract the consumption of sweetened beverages. These groups also know that it will be necessary to invest in nutritional education as much in rural areas as in the urban ones and also to recover traditional diets with produce grown in their own community when possible. 

Pinche aquí para ver el vídeo

UN Secretary Schutter agrees with this diagnosis. México must ”study the possibility of levying taxes to discourage energy-rich diets, especially soft drink consumption” he said this past March.

Mexico should also “grant subsidies so poorer communities are able to have water, fruit and vegetables” and work towards “agricultural and trade policies” which have a good effect on population diet, namely, policies supporting individual production in agricultural communities instead of imports.

As the experts agree, this should be one of the basic objectives of the “Crusade against Hunger“, which has just been set up by Enrique Peña Nieto’s government with 30,000 million pesos (about 1,800 million euros) focused on 400 highly marginalized towns in the country.

Welcome to Zinacantán 16km from San Cristobal (M.V)

• Gloria, early-retired from Iberia Airlines, keeps nine homeless men in her home with her pension and has created a business where they work.
• She has already taken in 160 people in thirteen years.

“Gloria, the journalist is already here!”  shouts Fede, looking up as he raises his voice. He leads me to the top floor of the thrift shop where Gloria appears to be waiting for me. I see her coming round sofas, lamps, picture frames, shelves and second-hand books.

We exchange glances and she smiles at me. “Hi, Monica” Gloria is a dark-haired cheerful woman around 60 years old with tiny bright eyes. From her early retirement pension from Iberia Airlines where she was an air-hostess, now live ten people – nine men without any family ties and herself. They are her only family and she loves them as if they were true family.

She has created two second-hand thrift shops with her pension and the earnings from people’s donations of their old furniture. “Her boys” as she likes to call them, go house to house with the van gathering items that later will be restored and sold. They also do odd-jobs at a good price, like painting if necessary, moving or whatever brings money home to where they all live – the home that Gloria rents for everyone. The place where they live, eat, sleep and are treated for both their physical and emotional illnesses – the latter ones being the ones that hurt the most. They dream about the crisis ending and that someday the world will be better. At the moment, since Gloria took them into her home, it already is.

Everything began 13 years ago when Gloria, who had been a volunteer helping children of prostitutes who had cancer or Down’s Syndrome, decided to set up her own NGO – Proyecto Gloria – taking in to her home drug-dependent homeless men from the street.

Why only men? “Because the streets are plagued with them… notice how there are very few women”, she told me.

She started giving them shelter in her rented flat where she pays 1500€ per month and where each person has their own bed in a shared room. She also helped them when they were sick with volunteer doctors and nurses. Living together wasn’t easy. “We all came in wild from the street” remembers Fede “without rules, upset by life´s hardships, people´s rejection… for me it was very difficult to adapt. When I arrived I weighed 118 pounds. The moment she saw me she put me in the shower and when I came out, she had thrown away all my clothes. I still recall the hardest part was letting her kiss me and hug me. She is a very loving person and at first I rejected her love. I wasn’t used to it…”

“When you come through that door and someone bathes and cares for you, it freaks you out. But as time passes you understand the reason why and that love transforms you. Those of us who make it help those who are where we once were. It has created a group spirit and we don’t let each other fall,” reflects Fede.
I am surprised to see mature and experienced men who have reached their fifties talk openly and straight-forwardly about love. They discuss it and value it because those who have been down and out know what is needed.

Gloria shows me the storage area where they have all the furniture. “I wish we had many like these. I could give work to dozens of people that ask me for it every day. This is where the money comes from, the money which I feed my boys with, all of it comes from the thrift shop. At first it was traumatic. I published a book, Mi vida con ellos (My Life With Them) where I tell how in the first years they even tried to kill me… Of course, you put up strangers in your house and don’t know what they are going to do, but now a very good group of people has emerged. I have some who are sick and others who are unemployed.”

“ What I offer them is a place to sleep and above all affection. I’ve had to send some of them to school. I often sign them up for every course available on Internet: language courses, etc… I take responsibility for their positive progress. For the last 13 years I have had 160 people living with me and all of them men. It is very uncommon for me to have available space.”
With the crisis, things are changing and Gloria has started to host unemployed and divorced men who are forced to beg and live in bad conditions because of the times. “Money causes problems in couples. When a family is unemployed and money isn’t coming in, problems living together arise and we are seeing more people getting divorced. There are men who leave home and end up in the street despite having been honest family men and tireless workers. Now I have two men at home who have ended up homeless because of the crisis -an economist and a building engineer´s assistant. Today they are helping a woman with four children move because tomorrow she and her family will be evicted. So they have gone there to help her with the furniture. We do it for free, we have to help each other…”.

Joaquin is another of these cases. I surprise him while he is restoring furniture on the upper floor of the shop. He shows me proudly what he is doing. “Look how good it´s coming out. Later, after being refinished, it sells well and at a low price.” He is 63 and an industrial engineering technician. “30 years working, he told me, and I end up unemployed. I had lots of arguments with my wife. In the end we divorced, but now we don’t have a bad relationship. I have two children over 30.” On account of unemployment and the divorce he ended up on the street. “My wife stayed at home and I left. I thought it would be easier, but later I had to beg for money. I went from working in construction to begging. At my age, they won´t call me for any job. Regardless of having travelled the world as a welder, working in nuclear power plants, from South Africa to Saudi Arabia. I started to work at 14 and never stopped. One day in the food bank I saw the guys in the van picking up furniture, I gave them my phone number and they called me. I went to meet Gloria, we chatted, and now I have been in the house for a year. “

“ I have paid Gloria with my efforts repairing furniture, I also go to pick up furniture at houses. Together we have to pay the rent, electricity and water for the flat. Between my housemates and me we make up The A Team and I feel useful. Thinking about the street and its loneliness makes me panic. I had never imagined I would find myself in this situation while having my house paid for and my children at university,” he told us.

“For me Gloria is a thread of hope, it´s her who gives me love because in the street you are very lonely and it is very hard. She is all heart and if she could put up a hundred people in her home or have several homes, she would do it. Society has become dehumanized. Eighty percent of the comments I´ve received in the street are “you are worth what you have” and if you´re dirty they look at you as if you were a drunk or a drug-addict. People have even told me “to get a job”.” Regarding his experience in the house he told us “Living together is difficult. We all know who we are and where we are, so we must be tolerant. Violence doesn´t get you anywhere. Of course there are arguments but we need each other. Besides, we´ve all got something in common, that before arriving to Gloria´s house we all wanted to die…but now we all want to live.”

Dinner time has arrived and we head towards the house, but not without taking a last look at the thrift shop and saying goodbye to the customers looking for furnishings at a good price. Here they also sell books and two look very appealing- Angel María and Elena Quiroga. Se vende un hombre and El Viento del Norte. How much are they? Fede, Joaquin and Gloria who are accompanying me home, tell me one Euro each because they are second-hand, but selling them to me isn´t going to pull them from poverty, so they give them to me as a gift. I resist at first but they convince me.
Very near the thrift shop, which is in the Madrid neighborhood of Arganzuela, we reach their home where Calcetines (“Socks”) welcomes us. He is a huge loving dog that lives with them all and who they pamper a lot. Pedro, who is cooking the dinner, greets us as well. Tonight we are having green beans and puree. There are also three other roommates:  one´s Polish, another Portuguese and Pi, who lives attached to his dialysis machine.

While Pedro finishes cooking, the rest are setting the table. Everyone pitches in but today not everybody´s here. Two are missing as they are helping to move the woman who is being evicted. The house here is big, they have two bathrooms and the bedrooms are doubles. Gloria has got her own living space and “Socks” seems pleased that all pay some attention to him.

“Has somebody already brought the plates? Do we have enough silverware? How many are we tonight?”  Through the house the comings and goings from the kitchen to the dining-room can be heard.

“Of course you are invited to dinner but we don´t want to keep you from other plans?”

“Gloria, why are you doing this?” I ask her while she is serving the puree. “What do you gain?”

“It probably sounds typical but I do it for love. I´m a believer and I know I´ll go to heaven with my duties done. I´m very proud of introducing myself in this way to God. I don´t have any family so they are my family. That´s the best part. The worst is that sometimes you believe that someone is something that later you discover they´re not and it deceives you. However, oftentimes it´s the contrary. I also feel bad when you fight for them, you get them up and then they leave you for a job you found them, and disappear as if they never knew you. Sometimes, if you´re not backing them up, they fail. And then maybe their employer calls you and those are doors that close for good…”

“ I make them respect me. They come emotionally distraught but when you fill in this void, they begin to consider you like a mother, a friend, a supporter…Have they ever insulted me? Only three out of one hundred sixty have. But the experience, above all, has been positive. “Now I´m very well-protected because “my strong men”, who I live with, know the new arrivals well and they warn me”.

“I’m very trusting. I haven’t got criteria to choose some over others. I give an opportunity to everyone. If later they don’t respond, then I was mistaken, but I never reject anybody. I select them in relation to their needs or illness. In the end I’ve been able to convert the NGO into a family and yes, we go everywhere together -on holidays too, with Socks as well! And if I pull together more thrift shops and we earn more money, maybe we could open another house…”

Pedro, Frederico, Joaquin and Pi are eating and now and again nod to what she’s saying. Everyone agrees that they adore her and that for them she’s an angel – their sister, mother, and confidante. She’s the one who has given them the strongest hugs in the worst moments –in drugged up states, out in the street and nowadays with this crisis.
I realize when I leave their home with two new books in my purse and a full stomach that Gloria has already given to me as well.

Photos Jure Erzen

Protests anti neo-Nazism 17.11.2012 Athens, Greece. (JURE ERZEN/Delo)

On November 7th, Athens was burning again. In front of the parliament, where another monstruous bargain had been struck, the special police units were hitting children and old women. The most brutal austerity package yet had just been rammed through. In the streets, molotov cocktails were crashing down, slogans were chanted, the teargas was making people weep openly. In this respect, Athens is now officially the weeping capital of Europe.

Again, all of it was probably to no avail. The vote behind the thick parliamentary walls had been fixed in advance. The public infrastructure is being dismantled back into the stone age, and these latest belt-tightening measures are only guaranteed to make things worse. The poor people in the giant laboratory called Greece have not been offered the luxury of choice. Their only option is to rant and protest. And that is so obviously not enough.

Protests anti neo-Nazism.17.11.2012 Athens, Greece (Jure Erzen / Delo)

A country without sovereignity is hardly a country. Greece is now a grotesque puppet of the global financial markets. The Greek political elite is the sub-contractor hired by foreign interests, principally by the corporation called EU. These interests’ most immediate goal is to turn the land into a pocket of Asia right here in the middle of Europe – to bring East and West a little closer, one could sardonically say. In the name of the holy grail called competiteveness, the people of Greece are being stripped of their way of life.

This, incidentally, is what the future holds in store for the rest of us. How long before the »free-enterprise zones« start sprouting around all of us as well? The »free-enterprise zone« is the production unit favoured by the disaster capitalism set loose upon the world. 400 Euros of monthly pay with no benefits and lots of unpaid overtime: this is what the European worker of tomorrow can reasonably hope to expect. If in this more modern, more competitive Europe someone revolts, fifty other eager slaves will leap up to take his place. At this moment, we might as well put a giant sticker Made In China over the entire continent. Health and education are already the privilege of the rich.

Nazism rears its ugly head

At this stage, is there anything that can stop the neo-liberal rampage? The old, impotent, arrogant, totalitarian and justly beaten ‘left’ no longer has the right to try. The new left seems bashful and without clear ideas of its own. Whom can an angry young man turn to when he wants to enter the political arena? Is there even such a thing as a political solution to this mess? Can the protesters ever transcend the level of street theatre and stand their ground for as long as it takes? Is there really no alternative to widescale bloodshed? 2012 = 1937?

Protests anti neo-Nazism. 17.11.2012 Athens, Greece (Jure Erzen / Delo)

These questions are now equally relevant in Greece as they are in the rest of Europe.

Who will come to Greece and stand with its people against both the financial occupiers and the heaving tide of neo-Nazism? The popular support for The Golden Dawn, the neo-Nazi party which has now sort of merged with the police to smash everything in its path, is rapidly growing. Syriza, the nexus of what some people like to call the new left, is strong at the polls, but politically running out of breath. To fight the neo-Nazis, it would need the clear unequivocal support of the European democratic institutions, but exactly the opposite is the case. In Brussels, the new left leader Alexis Tsipras is seen as an arch-enemy. Europe’s xenophobic policies may have done everything to facilitate the Greek immigration crisis, but that doesn’t mean the Eurocrats feel compelled to take much notice of the Greek neo-Nazis. But anyone who takes in the sheer speed of the dismantlement of the continent’s oldest democracy can grasp it is only a matter of time. The Greek neo-Nazis, after all, are the first children of the new Europe.

In the June election, The Golden Dawn won 18 parliament seats. According to the polls, it now has the support of 12 percent of the voters. The number is steadily rising. It is small wonder that the neo-Nazis are becoming ever bolder when it comes to dealing with the immigrants and all those who disagree with the party’s positions.

During my visit in the spring, one could already observe violent clashes between the more bellicose of the neo-Nazis and the hapless Asian and African immigrants. The fighting mostly took place at night. Racism is an integral part of Greek politics. Between 2006 and 2011, the authorities received 89 575 applications for an asylum. Only 929 were granted. The system for granting these requests is, and always was, controlled by the police.

Even as far back as this spring, the neo-Nazis were allowed to brutalize the immigrants without much hindrance. The police mostly just looked on and grinned. Today brutalisation is the official Greek policy. In the last four months, the authorities in Athens carried out a huge crackdown and cleansed the streets of about 50 000 immigrants. Most of them were taken to the so called detention centres, which are a publicly acceptable term for prisons. The police were targeting both legal and illegal immigrants. The members of The Golden Dawn were at the forefront of this giant undertaking, cleansing a number of neighbourhoods by themselves, smashing up immigrant shops and often being lauded by the local population.

Protests anti neo-Nazism. 17.11.2012 Athens, Greece. (Jure Erzen / Delo)

»They used to badmouth and insult us, but it was just words. Now we’re about to get to the point when they start killing people,« says Javed Aslam, the head of the Pakistani community in Athens. Aslam feels that Greece is now a country of two sets of laws. One set is applied to the neo-Nazis who are being coddled and abetted by the police. The other is applied to the immigrants, who’ve been stripped of any legal protection. Aslam blames the Greek authorities helmed by New Democracy, a party that won much support by toughening its anti-immigrant rhetoric. What the members of The Golden Dawn are doing in the streets is just a real-life actualisation of that rhetoric.

Dimitris Psaras, the author of The Black Bible, a book about The Golden Dawn, is convinced that the neo-Nazis’ influence is bound to grow. In his book, he documented the strong ties between The Golden Dawn, the Greek police and the Greek private security firms. »It is usual that a person is the member of all three organisations at the same time,« Psaras wrote: »They socialize in fitness clubs and certain caffés known to be owned by The Golden Dawn members or their sympathisers.« Psaras’ observations are backed up by those of Teodora Oikonomides, who works for the alternative radio station Radio Bubble. She believes that the xenophobic and chauvinistic discourse perfected by The Golden Dawn is now the official parlance of the reigning puppets. »By refusing to take action against The Golden Dawn,« Oikonomides feels: »the Greek politicians and their European backers have opened a Pandora’s box that will take forever to close again.«

A scene from the street. 9.11.2012 Athens, Greece. (Jure Erzen/Delo)

The Shadows of Dictatorship

Kristos Manouras, the Greek police’s public relations man, denied any links between The Golden Dawn and the police. Without any apparent irony, he explained that the police raids in the immigrant neighbourhoods have made the Greek capital into »a more humane place«.

Ilias Panagiotaros, a Golden Dawn MP, also cathegorically denies illegal immigrants are being targeted. Panagiotaros is the owner of a shop selling sports goods and nationalist paraphernalia in downtown Athens. Among other things, the shop merrily displays the portrait of the Serbian war criminal Želko Ražnatović Arkan. Like this exalted icon of butchery, Panagiotaros likes to blame the attacks on the victims.

»The only racist violence taking place in Greece is the attacks the immigrants are making on the local population!« he claims: »The methods adopted by our party are nothing else than legitimate political struggle – through the parliament and through the streets!« Talking to the press, Panagiotaros was hapy to confirm that about 60 percent of all policemen were supporters of The Golden Dawn. »And that number grows higher every day!« In this man’s opinion, a civil war is already taking place in Greece. »The Greek society is ready to fight. On one side, there is us – the Greek patriots who are prepared to take action to regain the country we once had. On the other side, there are the illegal immigrants and the anarchists who’ve tried to set Athens on fire several times already. We are fighting against the current political system, against both foreign and domestic bankers, and against the foreign invaders, the immigrants.«

A beggar on the street. 11.11.2012 Athens, Greece (J. E. / Delo)

Panagitaros is obviously someone who takes his role in this war very seriously. One month ago, he led the raid on the Chyterio theatre, where Terence Mc Nally’s Corpus Christi was being performed. Again, the police merely looked on as the raging neo-Nazis took took their anger out on the audience. The theatre’s managing director, Laertis Vasiliu, later said that this had been Greece’s own Kristalnacht.

Vasiliu told the journalists that his theatre’s employees and their families are being constantly threatened over the phone. These threats are of course not something the police feels at all obliged to investigate. »If the European commisionar fro the human rights, the European parliament and the Greek parliament fail to take decisive action – well, then I shudder to think what might happen,« Vasiliu said. »Europe must act straight away if it feels that The Third Reich isn’t something worth repeating.« The MPs of The Golden Dawn have already proposed the removal of all immigrant children from the Greek kindergardens.They also requested an official list of those kindergardens with an above-average ratio of immigrant children. The minister of education granted their request.

Dismantling the commons

On November 9, the Athens streets saw another strike – this one by the employees of various civil services.

They were right to strike, for they’re set to lose at least 7000 jobs. A few hundred people with visibly tired faces were dignifiedly marching down the avenues. They were cheered on by the warm autumn sun, but they were in a lousy mood. Riddled with anxiety, they were much too tired to shout and smash windows. Their lives have been too shattered for them to retain many illusions. The ranks were formed by both dustmen and high-placed civil servants. All of them were victims of wave after wave of austerity measures – the succession of packages which proved that for the international financial institutions help is just an empty lie. Greece is the site of a monumental experiment in modern-day slavery. In the words of Gianis Dragasakis of Syriza: »The first memorandum gave us Balkan-level wages. The second memorandum gave us the social services of Eastern Europe. The third memorandum will turn us into a third-world country.«

Makis Giamallis, an employee of the local communal service in Glyfada on the Athens seafront, readily agrees: »In the last two years, our lives have been transformed beyond repair. Everything has been stolen from us, not only money! The great privatisation of everything public is well underway. Even the most basic services like collecting the garbage are being privatised. They’re taking everything from us – everything! Every two months they lower our wages. Many of my friends have already lost their jobs. Many of them have spent their last reserves and are now unable to pay off their mortgages. Some of them have already ended up in the street. Hunger is now a resident of Athens – even in some of the swankier parts of town! Yesterday we were told that ten people from our department are sure to lose their job next year. One of them is a 28-year-old single mother. But no one cares about the workers’ situation. We’ve become numbers, nothing more. We are seen as dead weight, garbage. A long while ago, Greece stopped being a country: now it is merely a training ground for an all-out capitalist rampage. What we’re seeing here is only the beginning.«

Giorgos Vihas, a doctor and a founder of “social clinics”. 15.11.2012 Athens, Greece (J. E. /Delo)

Mr. Giamallis has 25 years of service to the public good. Yet he told me he’s getting prepared to be chucked out in the street with the rest. »My only option is to protest and to keep supporting my colleagues. Very soon, I’ll be in the same position, and then I’ll be desperate for solidarity myself.«

The Youth of a Defeated Nation

On November 14, twenty-three European countries held protests against the new austerity measures. In most of those countries, surprisingly few people showed up. Katarina Kanilopulu, a 29-year-old lawyer and activist from Athens, was someone who took it as a both personal and collective failure. As I talked to her, she sat down on the stairs leading from Syntagma square to the parliament. She looked harrowed and disenchanted, so there was no stopping the following monologue.

»Greece is defeated and humiliated. Both my nation and my entire generation have been completely defiled. And I define my generation broadly, somewhere between twenty and thirty-five. You want to know our greatest defeat? It is that, in spite of the complete and utter defilement of our way of life, we are still choosing to function as individuals, not as a collective. Actually, I believe there is no longer such a thing as Greek society. We are just a few million egoistic angry people who are pissed off about their own material problems! The sad lesson is that most of us don’t give a fuck about ‘society’! There are a few very motivated and well-organised groups of young people seeking alternatives, but how do you even get your point across to the selfish consumer majority? Around here, our entire community has been falling apart for at least twenty years. And we, the people, were blind to it. Which makes us guilty.«

The sun was shining again as we sat on those stairs, but no one cared. The young lawyer told me she used to be quite idealistic, but she sees nothing faintly resembling grounds for optimism. »The only kind of heartfelt optimism you hear around here is the kind built around ignorance or larceny.« Katarina was convinced politics as we know it has been defeated for quite some time. At this stage, she felt, it was criminally dumb to hope change could be brought about through the ballot box alone. I felt like quoting Noam Chomsky, so I said: »If you can vote and they don’t shoot on  you, you shouldn’t think that you live in a democracy.«

Young Bangladeshians and Indians sell cigarettes illegally, chased by Police patrols almost daily. 14.11.2012 Athens, Greece. (J. E. /Delo)

Katarina readily agreed. »We need an entire new platform for our class warfare,« she frowned: »Parliamentary democracy has long been bought by Big Bussiness – this happened all over Europe, there are very few exceptions. Okay, so this brand new platform I’m talking about, it certainly can’t be ideological. But to get to the platform, we need to discard the entire lot of our current social, economic and political concepts. As they come into contact with power, all of them are likely to get corrupted. Perhaps we need to discard politics as such. Syriza may be fronted by a few fresh young faces, but overall it’s still a clear-cut representative of old politics. You just need to look at their backers. Tsipras is already being turned into a cult, right? If he grabs power and gives everyone two slices of bread more than his predecessors, the people are ready to kneel before him. But what about critical thinking? What about democracy?! Even as a student, I realised there was something horribly wrong with our country. Now we can see the consequences. Today, Greece is a half-totalitarian state. And the ideological vacuum is quickly being filled by the vital young neo-nazis banging home their own radical interpretation of our economic disaster.«

The Death of Democracy

These days the Greek journalist D. speaks very quietly. In this country, the right to free speech has been heavily corroded. The infamous arrest of the journalist who published the list of the two thousand Greek citizens who transferred two billion Euros to the Geneva branch of the HSBC bank is just the tip of the iceberg. There are countless other examples, like the arrest of the two journalists who, on their social networks, published the image of the Greek policemen and the neo-Nazis merrily socialising. During the trial, the judge adopted the position that the two journalists’ action was tantamount to ‘inciting to riots’.

Evening protests in front of the Bank of Greece. 14.11.2012 Athens, Greece (J. E. / Delo)

The vast majority of the Greek media is financially dependent on the authorities or on private capital with close ties to the reigning New Democracy. The ramifications of the austerity policies are therefore mostly being ignored or at least sugar-coated. In place of rational analysis, the Greek viewers get talk-shows and an endless parade of complacent flunkies who are all of the opinion things are not so bad. The bravest among the journalists can count on very little public protection. The independent media are under savage pressure. The very air here reeks with the mounting totalitarianism – a stench much too powerful to be chased away with protests or anarchist sloganising. »Every month, the people of Greece get to live a little worse than the month before,« he told me: »First, many people had to move from nice apartments to much smaller ones. But these, too, are becoming much too dear even for our rapidly dwindling middle class. I know for a fact that some people have already moved into the cellars where the immigrants used to live before the authorities and the neo-Nazis chased them out and imprisoned them in the so-called detention centres.«

Petros Papakonstantinou, a columnist with the most influential Greek daily newspaper Kathimerini, agrees without reservations. Papakonstantinou is a respected writer, a reporter from trouble-spots all over the globe, a lucid analyst of Greek society and a physicist who at times reminded me of Albert Einstein and at times of Kurt Vonnegut. In this man’s opinion, the old political system is dead, and Greece is the first major battlefield in a global financial assault led by the international institutions and the Germans.

»The German financial elites never had much good sense for politics.« he feels: »They always underestimated the political factors. They started two world wars because they overestimated their military might and underestimated the political realities. Now they have started another global financial war, but they’re again overestimating their economic prowess. At the end of the day, they’ll have to pay a terrible price. But not before large parts of Europe are absolutely devastated.«

Protests anti neo-Nazism. 17.11.2012 Athens, Greece (J. E. / Delo)

Papakonstantinou is convinced that we are poised on the cusp of a new political era certain to be dominated by new political forces. »In these last few months, the Greek left did much to consolidate its position. But I’m not talking about the traditional left like our communists, who are little more but threadbare stalinists. In their place, a new extreme left is rising. At the moment, it enjoys the support of about a third of the electorate. This could never have happened if the majority of the Greek people didn’t suffer under the disasterous consequences of the austerity measures. Greece is radically moving to the left, which means there’s a very real chance of it getting the first truly leftist government in Europe after World War II. If that happens, it will certainly be a big deal. One could even use the phrase ‘historical juncture’. Whatever happens here will greatly affect the future of the continent.«

Regardless of his basic optimism, Papakonstantinou warned that was not not at all certain Syriza was fit to lead the country. »It is a young party whose mentality hasn’t been able to keep up with its success, so it has retained much of its minority mindset. In the streets, Syriza still doesn’t have much real power or even credibility. The protests are still being helmed by the communists and syndicate-leaders. But I think that is about to change, too. To fully understand our country, we might employ the words of the famous Italian leftist thinker Antonio Gramsci who said the old world is already dead while the new world has not yet been born.«

One day before the great anti-Nazi demonstrations in Athens, I asked the writer and columnist Dimitris Konstandakopoulos about the real state of Greek democracy. »Democracy?!« he erupted: »What democracy? Our democracy has been murdered by the international financial elites, by the European institutions and by Angela Merkel. Our country has been chosen to become a laboratory of disaster capitalism. Until now, such experiments have only been conducted in third-world countries. Chile. Argentina. Iraq. Afghanistan. Today Greece. Tomorrow Spain and many others. If the capitalist manipulators succeed in Greece, they will also succeed in other parts of Europe.«

The Parlament house reflects up side down in the water of Syntagma Squere’s fountain (J. E. / Delo)

Konstandakopoulos is convinced we are witnessing the rise of an unopposed superpower called international capital. »Right now, it is attacking Europe – the continent is beseiged from all sides. We here in Greece are just the first victims. Right now, we are turning into Spain during its civil war. If the rest of Europe leaves us in the lurch, it is sure to crumble as well. What we are talking about here is a holistic, carefully coordinated process that has already pretty much destroyed the modern European middle class. At the moment, the continent is being ruled by semi-literate idiots. But these political faces we see each night on television – their power is but an illusion. They are the sub-contractors for the new king, the big bussiness which is creating its dominion with colonial methods. Occupation, enslavement, the rise of loyal local governors, massive theft of natural resources, the appropriation of young talent, the devaluation of everything local in the name of imperial growth. The main method is wholesale manipulation in every field. The aim is to create an atmosphere of fear and humiliation. One of the empire’s chief objectives is to unleash an epidemic of manic depression among the populace – with a heavy sideline in guilt and impotence. The occupiers are already training their own loyal local troops to help them dismantle everything public and social in our society. The middle class is now but a phantom, but some of its more non-comformistic members will still serve nicely as convenient targets for the nation’s pent-up rage. The truth is being castrated as we speak.«

Author of 21st Century Conflicts: Remnants of War(s)

(Ng Han Guan/ AP Photo)

We were standing in the memorial room of the elite University for political studies. For the past few decades, this illustrious institution served as a breeding ground for top party bigwigs. A small frail student with jerky motions, a waxy complexion and a Hitleresque parting in his hair was telling us a lot about the university’s glorious past and even more about China’s invincible future. The student was nineteen. Even though he looked completely lost – in time and space as well as in translation – he was positively smouldering with conviction.

The student’s terrifying earnestness, along with the image of his exhausted colleagues staring into their computer screens at the university’s library, offered a fascinating contrast to what one could see in the streets of downtown Beijing. In the past decade, these streets have been turned into a battlefield for the sort of architects who specialise in skyscrapers, classy shopping centres and other such palaces of robotised communication. In China, shopping has been transformed into a very basic human need. Both for the locals and for the visitors, it has been rendered all but obligatory.

But what happened to communism?

Perhaps we should simply call it something else – global-commo-capitalism, for example. Whatever it is, we at the very least need to name it correctly: after all, it seems it is what the future holds in store for all of us. Here and now. Or, if I may borrow the official slogan of Shanghai, the trade capital of the Universe: The Future Is Now.

The Dictatorship of Choice

I asked Li Jiahua, the university’s deputy dean, how his school, the nursery for the hardliner’s hardliner, managed to adapt to the radical socio-economical change of the last twenty years. »Oh,« he replied: »We simply went with the flow. We have indeed been facing countless challenges. The ever-increasing progress of our country posed many questions. So we opened courses in economics and financial management, though the brunt of our curriculum still consists of social and political studies. We discovered much of our technology was outdated. We had to answer many questions as we went along. Yet I would like to stress that moral education still represents the very core of our institution.«

Students ot Tsinghua University (AP)

In the last twenty years, the basic profile of the students at this ideological nest underwent a rapid change, too. What used to be the submissive party-liner with a fetishistic bent for military uniforms is now the digital consumer type entirely subservient to the dictatorship of choice. The army shirts have been exchanged for designer clothes, or at least the ‘original fakes’ of the world’s most prestigious brands. The bitter redguard face has been replaced by the cosmetic smile. Love more! is one of the jingles being peddled in Beijing by one of Europe’s most respected automobile makers. The behemoth called China may have been dormant for centuries, but now it is turning into every free-market guru’s wet dream.

The mood in Beijing is best described by evoking some classic futuristic movie. Think Blade Runner spliced with The Minority Report. Swarms of young people are chaotically racing in the streets, always on the go, always in a hurry. This is only to be expected. While they are growing up, time here in China is ticking by faster than anywhere else in the world. As you negotiate your way through the swarms, you quickly find out about the only remaining rule of the pedestrian flows in Beijing: ‘ME FIRST!’ Yet even with all this perilous commotion, the young always find the time to glance at their cameras, their laptops and post-modern mobile phones – a formidable army of gizmos dispassionately recording every moment, every face and every act in this consumerist hell. With an intelligence corps of this magnitude, why would the State even need security services? In their hectic surgings, the streets of China’s richest cities are now more uniform than they had ever been. There are also many more slogans – only this time around they are phrased in the aggressive lingo of the advertising agencies, designed to plow straight through your frontal lobe and start whispering about unmet needs.

Love more! indeed.

(AP)

Orwell’s Nightmare

The Chinese economy has been growing for the past thirty years. The obstacles fell by the roadside one by one. The period of growth has been so turbo-charged that, as it stands, only the United States are still in front of the rising kraken – and even the US can’t last that much longer. For thirty years, the genie of economic growth uprooted everything in its path, deftly taking advantage of all the perks of totalitarian communism. The party bosses have gotten used to posing as enlightened absolutists, but they have long become merely corporate executives in that sun-eclipsing mother of all corporations called The People’s Republic of China.

In such an environment, the workers’ rights and environmental standards are third-rate subjects at best. The human masses and what remans of nature are entirely subordinate to growth, which can be seen either as a cult or an obsessive-compulsive disorder. The future may be now, but it is also unspeakably frightening. Especially when the alluring female employees of the Center for Urban Planning in Shanghai, the capital of the future, show you 3D projections of what the city is destined to look like in a few years. In this science-fiction extravaganza, one can see all kinds of details – only the people are missing. But why be petty? The reigning Deus ex machina has a clear-cut Plan: the citizen of the future is someone who feels no pain, someone who has been socially engineered to lose both, his reflexes and his capacity for reflection.

As I ponder this, the alluring female employees are invoking carefully selected phrases. The future. Now. Harmony. A better city. A better life. The digital city. Happines. This is the newspeak of our times, which currently stands unopposed. So unopposed, in fact, that the Corporation may soon feel the need to create some flimsy enough adversary. 1984, it seems, has been delayed by about three decades, but it is coming nonetheless. The cheap classical music accompanying this breathtaking futuristic presentation couldn’t be more suitable to what is clearly an Orwellian nightmare waiting just around the corner.

Chinese fashion show (AP)

The End of History 2.0

The so-called western democracies are no longer in a position to boss China around and lecture it on anything, let alone human rights. The communist party has managed to invent the greatest corporation of all time – itself. This ultra-corporation is in fact so powerful it can actually afford self-reflection and even some mild self-criticism.

Yet on every step, this criticism is strictly limited to economical subjects. It was the party macro-economist Zhao Heng who put it best when he said: »Only when we have successfully solved the questions of economy will we be ready to tackle the political issues.« This sounded like a foretaste of the Party’s coming 18-th congress. There, the rulers will need to decide whether to rein in the forces of private capital that – through their sheer efficiency and know-how – have begun to encroach on the state-run Corporation itself. The other option available to the party kingpins is to take off the last of their communist undergarments and wholly submit themselves to the free market. It will not be easy for them: either way, they will be running a tremendous risk.

Smoke billows out of the chimneys at a chinese state own Petrochina plant in Shenyang in northeast China Liaoning province (AP)

Our diplomatic source, who worked in Russia, Ukraine and Democratic republic of Congo believes that the Party isn’t yet ready to cede control. It would mean a far too severe blow to stability. It would doubtlessly set off a surge of social unrest. Already, strikes and protests are taking place all over China. The week before our visit, ten thousand policemen brutally crushed a protest of factory-workers in the central part of the country, where the last model of the world’s most famous smart phone is being assembled. The net result? Due to ‘unfavourable tax policies’ and ever-dearer labour force, the western company has decided to relocate its operation to Vietnam and to Thailand. Every bottom has an additional bottom: there is always someone poorer and weaker to exploit. And so the fear of losing western clients is part of the reason why the numerous strikes and protests taking place all over China get almost no coverage at all – either here or abroad.

As I listened carefully to what the party macro-economist Heng had to say, I could slowly discern some of the other reasons for the Party’s powerplay. »We look healthy,« he told me: »But we have problems that, if unchecked, can prove very detrimental to our well-being. For a while now, our economic growth has been experiencing a slackening. The economic indicators are not as robust as they used to be. This year, the GDP will rise by about 7.6 percent. For the economy to grow in a fashion that would ensure enough new jobs, we should be growing at 8 percent. The times of double-digit growth are behind us. The greatest risk of the decline in growth is social instability and, in consequence, social unrest. This is something that needs to be avoided at all costs. You understand, this is of course something everybody, not only China, needs to worry about. Our goal is to offer additional ten million new jobs every year. In the last few years, that goal has proved to be not entirely possible. If the growth falls under the 7-percent mark, massive layoffs will be neccessary.«

I will say this about Zhao Heng: he is someone who has little use for platitudes. This sort of honesty, in China, is an entirely new phenomenon. Yet it shouldn’t lead us to unwarranted optimism. It is merely a sign of the party’s omnipotence, the unchallenged sway it holds over every aspect of Chinese society. To me, dr. Heng looked like the ideal spokesperson for the kind of brute force that can occasionally afford to show some weakness – purely for strategic reasons, of course.

»The thirty years of steep economic growth also caused a lot of collateral damage,« he continued: »We have seen a sharp increase in the difference between the rich and the poor. Most of the communal wealth is now in the hands of the upper twenty percent of the population. The working class earns – and spends – very little. The poor are desperately trying to save up some money. They are afraid that they will soon be forced to take care of their own pensions and health care, not to mention their children’s schooling. Rich people, on the other hand, are not great spenders, either. After all, most of their needs have already been met. Also, the Chinese population is rapidly growing older. Soon, our problems with a sustainable pension system will become no less acute than they are in Europe right now.«

Dr. Zhang struck me as someone who is all the time dancing his way between the basic precepts of neo-liberalism and social democracy. At the same time, he entertains no illusions about the current and future viability of the European model of the welfare state. After all, faced with their first serious crisis of identity, most of Europe’s social democracies happily jumped ship and started indulging in the sort of neo-liberal orgy they will never fully recover from.

»Trouble caused by progress can only be solved by progress!«

So: is the party finally ready to open the door for private capital – is the Great 18-th Congress primed for a spectacular surprise? Is China ready to officially adopt Inc. as part of its invincible true name?

(AP)

At times, Mr. Heng sounded like a prophet; at times, he sounded like Jeffrey Sachs – Mastermind of The Schock Doctrine – at the beginning of the nineties. »The sheer scale of the incentives our state gave to our economy greatly reduced the opportunities for private investors,« he said. »Private companies do not always find it easy to get loans. In the countryside, property prices are declining – but in the cities, they are still going up! The state is selling off its land; in places, it is forced to sell at half the price. At the same time, the sale of the state-owned land often brings in almost half of the entire local budget. All in all, the land deals have proved rather lucrative for the state. In this way, the role of our government has been strengthened, and the power of the markets has been weakened. Our export has its difficulties, too. Economic conservativism is on the rise. There is no realistic chance for China’s current economic model to survive. It would only lead to prices going up, as well as to social unrest and unchecked pollution. The inevitable reform is the key, but that reform is certain to upset a lot of people. Progress always brings its own set of problems – the sort of problems that can only be solved by further progress! As soon as the economic reform has been implemented, political reform is sure to follow. Above all else, we must raise our internal consumption and ensure we can survive by ourselves.«

On a plateau abova Bin Xian, a small city in central China, the local authorities planted a number of orchards and brough over some 7000 peasants from the surrounding villages. This all happened within the framework of the ‘project of the reconstruction of the countryside’, which is a part of the project officially called ‘fighting the poverty’. This was explained to us in painstaking detail in a gloomy boardroom by a trio of local party officials. Since China’s rapid urbanisation went a long way toward impoverishing the countryside where two thirds of the population still live, I asked the official how hard his local community had been hit by the exodus to the big cities. The trio exchanged a silent glance. Then their leader sort of barked the number: »5600!« After some additional queries, I learned this was the number of people who moved away from the neighbouring villages in the last few years.

We were then taken on a tour of one of the villages, apparently the nexus of the local fight against poverty. The architecture struck me as freakishly resembling that of the South-American colonial style – just with a few more bars on the windows. Another thing I noticed was that, for some reason, considerable effort had been made to help the new houses look even older than the ones they replaced. This reminded me of the famous words by the Montenegrin general Slobodan Praljak during the devastation of Dubrovnik in 1991: »We will rebuild Dubrovnik – we will make it even prettier and older than it was!«

Traffic jam in Beijing ((AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty)

The village – a theme park in the vein of The Truman Show – was practically deserted. So were the nearby fields and the orchards with their unusually pink apples. We were only allowed to enter one of the ‘residential units’. The hallway was adorned with a plastic bust of Mao, some plastic flowers, a plastic stereo and a photograph (in a plastic frame) of an extraordinarily happy-seeming young couple. I very much doubted that the bedroom, where the damp had already caused most of the plaster to peel away, had seen that many scenes of conjugal bliss. The bed was a double one, but it was made in the military style, and it has seen so little use that a number of spiders had spun their webs right across the covers. Yet in this house of ghosts, we were strongly encouraged to photograph the totalitarian still-life formed by a bunch of neatly stacked pink apples and a few stalks of corn.

»Where are the residents of this house?« I asked our party-issued tour guide: »Perhaps they’re working in the fields?«

»They’re home,« he blurted: »They are resting.«

But there were no people to be seen as far as the eye could see. That was the part about my visit to the Chinese countryside that surprised me the most. The emptiness. The resounding silence. What the planners of huge projects in Beijing offices like to call collateral damage. Then the European beaureaucrats, ever so concerned about human rights, usually give them a wry look, write their reports, and then everything is forgotten.

The show must go on.

Yet the images of dehumanisation failed to subside even after we returned down to the murky valley. The city of Bin Xian, current population 350 000, is being purposefully expanded. In the most coveted big cities, there is no more room for newcomers from the countryside. At the same time, the industry in the cities like Shanghai and Beijing has become much too expensive, so the authorities are rapidly relocating it to the countryside.

(AP)

This internal economic segregation is the cause of some rather bizarre developments. While the edge of Bin Xian has seen the rise of a gigantic, at least five kilometers long park crammed with cheap monuments, the downtown is filled with very young prostitutes and imported-liquor stores. In the evening hours, atrociously expensive cars kept arriving in front of the futuristic hotel where we were stationed – atrociously expensive cars inhabited by China’s entrepeneurial arrivistes. Most of them were accompanied by a certain type of ‘companion’. The rooms here offered their well-heeled guests an impressive selection of top-grade sex toys. The members of our small expedition were all wondering what precisely the party was trying to communicate to us by putting us here for the night. Love more?

To conclude this leg of the great theatrical production called our guided tour of China, our minders took us to see the great modern-looking building that served both as an orphanage and a nursing home for the elderly. Yet even this place was all but deserted. A few old men, their faces so brown they looked like they had just come in from a good week’s toil in the fields, were playing cards with a brand new deck and beaming at us as if we were a delegation of scantily clad young women come to whisk them straight to paradise. As befits a ghost building in a ghost town, the other rooms were inhabited only by silence.

I stared long and hard at the thousands of terra-cota warriors dug up some forty years ago in the vicinity of Xian. This ancient regional capital is now one of China’s fastest growing cities, a morbidly grey and unspeakably polluted ant farm where thousands of identical and identically soulless towers are springing up like mushrooms after the rain. Even here in the provinces, the future is now.

The Party – The Corporation – has its own terra-cota warriors now, it struck me: hordes and hordes and hordes of cheap labourers bringing about what the officials are so quick to dub a success-story. These new terra-cota legions are The Corporation’s most trusted shock troops on the global battlefield, both in the economic and in the political sense. Add in a brand new super-carrier or ten to shore up the security, and the future is indeed now.

• The Virtual Museum of Censorship promotes the knowledge of the cultural prohibitions in place in Lebanon to defend freedom of speech
• The organization in charge of banning works uses a law passed at the beginning of the 20th century during the French occupation
• “Politicians believe that declaring everything is taboo is the best way for them to remain in power”, explains Lea Baroudi, Museum manager

BEIRUT.- Some movies are never shown in Lebanese cinemas, even if they are available on the black market for one dollar. Some internationally-recognized artists never land in the country because the authorities have made out a link –close or far, real or imaginary- with Israel. Graffiti artists are arrested for expressing themselves on the walls, actors taken into custody for showing their underwear, singers jailed because one of their songs might refer to a politician…

In Lebanon, which until the regional revolts prided itself for being the only Arab democracy, freedom of speech is a vague concept and censorship an everyday problem. Cartoonist Mazen Karbaj said it best when he designed the cartoon that has become the flag of the MARCH movement, focused on promoting the citizens’ rights and obligations. In the drawing, a politician, a soldier and two clerics –one Sunni and one Shiite- hug each other smiling as they chant “yes to freedom of speech”. The small print reads: “Unless you talk about the State, Allah, the prophet, Jesus Christ, the president of the Republic, good manners, the Church, the Bible, the Koran, the Martyrs, the Resistance, the Army and its chief, the Pope, the Saudi King, the prophets, national unity, the civil war, confessionalism, friend countries and brother countries, the mufti, the patriarch, the prime minister, the Government, history books, the Palestinian refugee camps, and the origin of hummus”.

“It is one of our contradictions”, Lea Baroudi, MARCH founder, smiles broadly as she shrugs. Lebanese society is made up of a variety that can only be understood through huge amounts of tolerance and coexistence. “However, taboos are one of its most noticeable characteristics”, adds Lea. Anything that might disturb the status quo –not the stability, which is always absent- is seen by its leaders as a threat. And that includes from sex or domestic abuse to religion and politics.

MARCH’s fight is based precisely on promoting freedom of speech as a means to aspire to other fundamental freedoms. And also to live in peace. “We are a plural society, with people who think differently and we need to accept what others say”, Baroudi insists. However, the way the State has of dealing with these differences is hiding them. To that end, it has the Directorate for General Security’s Media and Theater Department, better known as the censorship office. They ban artistic works that, in this organization’s opinion, “threaten the peace”. Sometimes they make use of the armed forces, and too often, even if it is just for a few days, daring artists end up in a dark prison cell.

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This summer, Khoder Salameh and Ali Fakhry were arrested when they were finishing a graffiti that read “Syria, the revolution continues”, along with a recycling sign. Ahmed Attar could perform On the importance of being an Arab in Beirut because he refused to take out references to the fall of Hosni Mubarak from the original script when Lebanese authorities asked him to. Musician Ziad Hamdan was even arrested a year ago for having written a song, General Suleiman, which according to the Media and Theater Department, slandered the president. The song in question was from 2008 and, as Hamdan explained to this journalist, was not inspired by anyone in particular but, in any case, it might have been inspired by general Omar Suleiman, former chief of the Egyptian intelligence system during the overthrown dictatorship.

To many, the worst is not the fact that the censorship office is working at full capacity thanks to laws that run back to the French occupation –between the 20s and 40s and, therefore, passed by an authority that no longer exists- but the lack of knowledge about the constant attack on freedom of speech by the political and religious authorities. That is why the MARCH association, created to “educate citizens about their civil rights” and behind the Facebook page Stop Cultural Terrorism, has set up the Virtual Museum of Censorship. It is a detailed review of all the cultural works that have been boycotted by Lebanese Security since the 40s.

Lea Baroudi got started by going to the Department in question to ask for help. “We asked them for the list of forbidden Works and they refused to give it to us. We understood that they leave no trace of censorship, in fact they deny censoring anything. They know it is illegal so they prefer not to leave proof of their work”. Which is why the members of MARCH took to the libraries, video archives and the archives of radio stations to create a database that is constantly being renovated thanks to its Report section, through which anyone can inform about the censoring of an artistic work.

Screenshot of the Virtual Museum of Censorship’s website (MARCH)

A team of 12 people has worked in this Project for six months, and they have found “thousands of banned works”, says Baroudi. Some remain forbidden, others saw their ban lifted days, weeks or months after the initial veto. The criteria seem vague at best; judging from the ones consulted, they are non-existent and respond to whims and sheer chance.

The albums of bands such as Kiss, Nirvana, Metallica or Iron Maiden are not sold in Lebanon due to “witchcraft” or “offense to Christianity”. Music videos such as the one for Najwa Karam’s song Why do you emigrate?,  dedicated to the local brain drain, were banned because they were “controversial”. The movie Independence Day was forbidden for a while because of the scene where Arab and Jewish troops join to celebrate the end of the aliens. Schindler’s List went through the same for showing a positive image of the Jewish people. In Showgirls’ case, the reason was its sexual content, while James Cameron’s True Lies underwent a temporary boycott because of its depiction of Arabs as terrorists…

A sort of intellectual guidance over the Lebanese people, denounces Nadim Lahoud, producer of Mamnou3, an online parody that makes fun of censorship by recreating life at the General Security offices. “Politicians patronize us, they treat the country as if we were children who were going to fight over anything. They do not believe people are capable of acting correctly”, says this young entrepreneur, convinced that irony is the best weapon against the Lebanese reality. “They have always been condescending, they think the country will be fine as long as we do not talk about its problems. They believe that if everything is taboo, if instead of talking about our differences and trying to overcome them, we hide them, it will be the best for their stay in power”, agrees Baroudi.

One of the actors that play an official censor in the online comedy Mamnou3 (MAMNOU3.com)

Khoder Salameh, known for participating often in civil initiatives and arrested for a graffiti, is even harsher. “Lebanon cannot be considered a democracy, it is a decentralized dictatorship. In other countries there is one dictator, here we have 18, one for each religious cult, and each one of them has his own military force”. His arrest, along with that of his partner Ali Fakhry, set off an unprecedented social mobilization. The case was unfounded since, in theory, graffiti is not forbidden in Lebanon, but they could be accused of altering public property. To keep them under arrest, the soldiers –who have been in charge for years of maintaining social order thanks to the virtual state of emergency that rules the country since the Israeli offensive in 2006- brought forth the finding of a philosophy book and a CD with the face of Che Guevara on the cover as irrefutable proof of their subversive activities.

The “threat to civil peace” is usually what the General Security argues to censor contents, but it is not the only one. “Obscenity, for sexual contents, issues that affect religious sensibilities, Israel…”, says Lea Baroudi. In the Jewish neighbor’s case, the cases of censorship are legion. Every Israeli artist, writer or author is automatically censored in a country officially at war with Tel Aviv, and nobody who shows an Israeli visa in their passport is authorized to land in Lebanon, including Palestinian artists. But this hostility often goes beyond that. Francis Ford Coppola was forbidden from landing in Lebanon hours before his scheduled arrival at Beirut, where he was supposed to inaugurate a film festival, because part of his private jet’s engine had been made in Israel, in one of the most extreme cases of local paranoia.

“His presence would have been quite an event in Lebanon, and it would have meant a good backing for the country”, regrets the MARCH manager. “The biggest irony is that he ended up landing in Syria”. For Khoder Salameh, the problem begins when the artist or the activist does not defend a particular political or religious group. If someone pronounces themselves in favor of a Lebanese personality, everything is fine, but if they push for for non-conformity towards the system, they are considered dangerous insurgents.

“If we had written about any other subject, if it had been in favor of a certain political party, there would have been no problem. Lebanese censorship acts out of fear of young people”, he explained to this media days after he was let go, towards the end of last April. His partner Ali Fakrhy agreed with him. “We cannot criticize Saudi Arabia, or Syria, or complain about the hike in bread prices. I mean, you can, but you’ll go to jail for it. If you break the wall of censorship in which we have been born and raised, you go to jail”.

Cartoon about the odd Lebanese freedom of speech, by Mazen Karbaj (F.R.E.E.)

Which is why MARCH is focused on breaking that wall. “Now you know, and knowing is half the battle”, announces the Virtual Museum of Censorship’s website. “Our goal is that people know what is happening. In MARCH we are focused on freedom of speech as the necessary step to reclaim every other right”. The next step will be action. “We need to be well informed to work on changing the censorship law”, explains Baroudi. “This law goes back to the French occupation and it should be illegal, since that authority no longer exists”.

The funny thing is that anything, from Frank Sinatra to Metallica can be censored. “In the 60s and 70s, it was anything that sounded leftist; in the 80s and 90s, everything related to the civil war, in spite of the fact that we were at war, and since 2000, anything that is related to politics or religion. They have gone so far as to censor sports books. But the Internet provides access to censored information, and that is unstoppable”, argues the MARCH manager.

The Virtual Museum of Censorship takes shelter on the Internet, just like Mamnou3, to avoid problems with the law. It is one of the system’s tricks. Lebanese rapper Rayess Bek can give live shows in Lebanon, but he can’t sell his music. “Every work of art must be approved by National Security before coming out. And they never tell you that they are going to ban your song, but they warn you that you are going to be in trouble if you sing something like that”, explained Rayess to this journalist. “And in the end, you are: the songs on the last album I recorded in Lebanon, Hazardous to Health, were full of beeeeps camouflaging censored words.

Mashrou3Leila, during a concert in Baalbeck (Mashrou3Leila)

The members of the group Mashrou3Leila, or Leila’s Project, have not had problems with local censorship yet, despite the fact that their lyrics talk openly about sex, denounce social problems such as domestic violence, use foul language and tackle taboos such as homosexuality.  “I’m sure that they don’t know we exist”, laughs Hamed Sinno, singer and author of the lyrics that appeal massively to the Arab youth. “We haven’t tried to export our music either”, points out Haig Papazian, violinist, reminding us that censorship acts mostly upon creative material imported into the country. “Our albums usually run out in concerts, instead of in stores”. The rest are purchased through their website.

Mashrou3Leila is considered Lebanon’s best new act: formed in 2008 by a group of architecture students and music lovers “as a way to vent the stress caused by politics and college”, explains keyboard player Omaya Malaeb, their music and lyrics ended up captivating and representing an entire generation. Thanks to the Internet, their product has crossed borders, and they have already played in Dubai and Jordan, with even prime ministers attending their shows. They work, however, with the weight of censorship on their shoulders. “The contract we were sent from Dubai already included that we could not use foul language. In Jordan, agents came to ask the same 20 minutes before the concert. But we did not have time to react”. So Senno’s trick was to stay silent during the swearwords: the public filled the silences with the original lyrics from the songs.
“In the 90s censorship was directed more towards music, now it is towards movies”, recalls Baroudi. That might be the reason why musicians recently feel safe from Lebanese censorship. In the case of films, the number of bans is on the rise, points out via telephone interview Ayman Mhanna, director of the Samir Kassir Foundation for Freedom of Speech. According to him, in the last year “14 or 15 movies have been censored” Mhanna reminds us that the General Security is advised by a civil committee made up of members of the five ministries in charge of approving the censorship of intellectual creations. “And both of them have less power than political parties or religious groups. When it comes to censorship, all religions agree. Most of the complaints come from religious temples”.

An elder man walks by riot policemen guarding the Interior Ministry in Athens on Wednesday, June 6, 2012. Greece is in a fifth year of recession, with poverty and unemployment rapidly rising amid protracted harsh cutbacks implemented to secure vital international bailout loans. (AP Photo/Kostas Tsironis)

On Sunday, June 17, Antonis Samaras walked into the press centre as the winner of the repeated Greek parliamentary election. It was late at night, and the leader of the conservative New Democracy party was flanked by a gaggle of sweaty and decidedly rotund admirers. To a clued-in observer, the very girth of these men was a signal that the sordid operation jointly engineered by the international financial institutions, Bruxelles, Berlin, the world’s largest banks and the global corporate media was entering its next phase.

The ancient Greek elites that ran the country for the last forty years only to literally bring it to the brink of third-world destitution now finally handed it over to the international financial gamblers. What hurts the most is that almost a half of the Greek electorate decided to vote for them. The mandate the new government thus received is a mandate to implement the full gamut of its ‘modern economy’, a nightmarish vision certain to transcend the region in ever-gruesomer shockwaves.

(AP Photo/Nikolas Giakoumidis)

Clearly collaborating with the international financial institutions, the EU had done all it could to hox the prospects of Syriza, the Greek coalition of radical leftist parties. Led by the charismatic Alexis Tsipras, Syriza is pushing for saying no to the drastic austerity measures. Its agenda is nationalising the banks, fighting to keep a strong public health-care and educational system, and positioning itself as a dam against the mad flood of privatisation threatening everything there is and ever will be.

How did the EU help the predators? One week before Greece’s election, Brussels granted Spain one hundred billion euros of aid – an action many Greek voters interpreted as the promise of a softer-cuts scenario for them as well, if only the conservative block is voted back into power. But this was only a skillful feint. Brussels, Berlin and Washington were simply nervous about Alexis Tsipras, the Syriza leader, possibly having some sort of a back-up plan to follow the country’s pullout from the Eurozone… A back-up plan that would probably be all about forging new alliances with Moscow or Beijing.

Global capitalism fighting for its own survival

»This election was crucial for the survival of global capitalism,« feels Statis Gourgouris, a professor of classic literature at the Columbia university in New York. »The election demonstrated that the majority of the Greek people is refusing to accept the dismantling of its social and economic infrastructure. The people are refusing to condone the flash impoverishment across the broad strata of society, the annihilation of the next generation’s future, and the vilification of an entire way of life. Even more important, Greek society demonstrated it would not accept being used as an experiment in neoliberal economics.«

Professor Gourgouris told me that nothing surprised him any more, least of all the cynicism of both global financial power and the mainstream media in its service. »It is, in many ways, an old story. This is not the first time in history where the fate of whole societies is held in the hands of bankers. But we would do well to remember that when this is pushed to the extreme, societies tend to unravel in extraordinary violence. Given the fact that, as a political ideal, the EU was established to prevent just such an unravelling, it is remarkable to watch its political and economic leadership pursue such a catastrophic course against all prudence and good measure. Greece is a small country. It is also a small economy. This is why it was selected as the laboratory for an experiment in extreme neo-liberalism. But the entire European population now watching needs to realise that Greek resistance to becoming such an experiment has vast consequences since it pertains to the future of all. If Greece goes down and is successfully shackled by the commands of global capital, there will have emerged within the ranks of the European Union a precedent that dismantles the union’s own sovereignty as a political project. However it happens, be it by total capitulation or by expulsion, well – for the EU, killing Greece is like commiting suicide.«

A Roma trader sells live chickens for one euro each to immigrants in central Athens on Friday, May 25, 2012. Greece is in a fifth year of recession, with poverty and unemployment rapidly rising amid protracted harsh cutbacks implemented to secure vital international bailout loans. But political uncertainty ahead of new elections next month has intensified fears that the country could be forced to abandon the euro and revert to a devalued version of its old drachma currency. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis)

The rape of dignity

Greece is being transformed into a classical third-world country. In March, youth unemployment reached fifty percent. The welfare state is vanishing at a flabbergasting pace. In the last few months, the European monetary institutions made the Greek politicians cut pensions by an average of 200 euros. The minimum monthly wage fell from 800 to 568 euros. This year alone, some 15 000 public-sector employees are bound to lose their jobs. The state is being shrunk on every possible level, and health and education are the ones taking the most savage beating.

A few days ago, the managing director of a mental institution located on the Leros island sent a letter to his ministry of health. In it, he summed up what had been going on in countless other hospitals all over Greece. »We are notifying you we are no longer able to feed our patients,« the director, Yannis Antartis, wrote in his letter: »Many now have to go hungry. We no longer get any food deliveries, for we are unable to pay for them, being heavily in debt.«

Costas Lapavitsas, the economics professor from the London School fro African and Oriental studies (SOAS), feels the original sin of the Greek crisis was the country joining the Eurozone in 2001. Instead of pity, he urges, his country now needs concrete assistance. The Greek crisis is in fact the crisis of the entire Europe, and as such it demands a pan-European solution. Success is possible only if that solution is forged in order to help the people, not the fatcats. Lapavitsas is the first to agree far too many people in Greece hadn’t been paying their taxes. But these were mostly the same people who’s recklessly usurped the important state offices to push the land over the brink of third-world serfdom. »There is no doubt that Greece needs root-and-branch change,« Lapavitsas points out: »But the necessary reform is unlikely to be delivered by the dominant social layers. Again: these are precisely the people who do not pay taxes, preside over extensive networks of patronage and are therefore desperate to remain in the monetary union. Genuine reform in Greece must be led by the working people, most of whom are paying their taxes meticulously.«

According to Lapavitsas and countless other critics, austerity has led to lower public expenditure and higher taxes, thus reducing demand. »This opened our bussinesses up to a great deal of additional grief, particularly as banks have also reduced the supply of credit. The results are now clear: rising unemployment, plummeting consumption, very little investment. Unemployment at 22% and loss of output around 20%? These are the figures you’d expect from a country devastated by war! Since incomes across the board have shrunk, it has become more difficult to deal with both our public and private debt. Not to mention collecting taxes.«

The eminent greek economist believes we are not far from the Eurozone’s dissolution. He adds that Greece’s bankrupcy was a certainty from the crisis’ inception, thought the country would have been much better equipped to deal with it two years ago. »The Greek politicians need to formulate plan B. With preparatory measures and popular mobilisation, the shock of default and exit could be lessened. There would have to be major public intervention at all levels, including nationalisation of banks, capital controls, administrative measures to secure supplies of oil, medicine and food, and protection for small and medium businesses. Greece can draw on the accumulated knowledge from similar extraordinary situations, not least in Argentina after 2001.«

Lapavitsas, one of the architects of Syriza’s economic programme, believes the true victor of the Greek election is the coalition of radical leftist parties. »Not so long ago, Syriza had 5 percent of the vote, maybe not even that. Now it has almost 27 percent, and it is the official opposition. I would call that a major achievement. Syriza has come to represent all those who’ve suffered enormously from the bailout policies. There’s no doubt at all about it. However, in the last couple of weeks, there were expectations and even anticipation that Syriza might win. And because it didn’t, there is an element of disappointment among some people, even within Syriza itself. I think that’s completely unfounded. I think the outcome is basically a triumph for Syriza, which is now set to become the organized voice of Greek wage labor and Greek low- and middle

(AP Photo)

On Wednesday, April 4, nine in the morning saw a 77-year-old man yelling in the middle of the teeming Syntagma square – the emotional centre of the Greek protests against the dictat(orship) imposed by the international monetary institutions. The old man was screaming at the hated parliament building, and his cries amounted to a seething denunciation of the fact that his debt will have to be repaid by his children and his grandchildren. After he’d said his peace he leaned against a tree, pulled a pistol out of his pocket and shot himself in the head.

The suicide of this desperate Greek pensioner carries a heavy symbollic significance. It evokes the spirit of the Czech patriot Jan Pallach, 21, who – protesting the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia – set himself on fire on January 16, 1969. It is also strongly evocative of the self-immolation of Mouhammed al Bouazizi, the Tunisian grocer who triggered off the Arab spring.

»We are the first victim of the financial world war. He have been occupied by the European markets and international financial institutions who are out to dismantle what is left of the welfare state and turn us all into slaves. What you can see today is only the beginning of a major upheaval. They are not only taking away our way of life, they are robbing us of our dignity. The only question is who’s next.« I was told this by a 60-year-old businessman named Yannis Michalopoulos. I was speaking to him inside his furniture shop beneath the Acropolis, one hour after the tragic suicide in the Syntagma square.

(AP)

Mr. Michalopoulos followed the quote with a lengthy monologue on the demise of civilisation, the utter lack of hope for the younger generations, the suffering of both legal and illegal immigrants, and the obviousness of the fact that all of this had been carefully planned. The crisis, he opined, has gone on for far too long to still be called a crisis. Big business was consistently and very succesfully enacting the shock doctrine, only it no longer needed to confine itself to exporting it to places like Iraq, Afghanistan or Chile.

Welcome to the Third World

Indeed, Greece is being transformed into a classical third-world country. In March, the unemployment among the young reached fifty percent. The welfare state is vanishing at a shocking pace. In the last few months, the European monetary institutions made the Greek politicians cut pensions by 200 euros on average. The minimum monthly wage fell from 800 to 568 euros. Some 15 000 public-sector employees are bound to lose their jobs this year alone. The state is being shrunk on every possible level, and health and education are the ones taking the most savage beating.

But then the private sector is even worse off. No one is even paying attention to the dutiful bleatings of the once-powerful unions anymore. The owners and the managers have embraced the crisis as a tailor-made alibi to cut all sorts of costs. The streets of Athens are filled with beggars and the newly homeless. A year ago, many of these have been living in suburban comfort. Now, literally overnight, they have been stripped of everything. Greece is turning into a German protectorate and a guinea pig for the ‘modern economy’, a nightmarish doctrine stiched from the worst parts of American neoliberalism and Chinese capitalo-communism.

A third of the unemployed among the young have a university degree. In Greece, only those with health insurance can get the social help – and since most of the young have only held temp jobs without benefits, the welfare checks are but a lavish dream. No wonder the especially gifted are leaving the country in droves – much like under the military dictatorship in the sixties and the seventies. You hardly need to be a genius to figure out what the future holds in store for the cradle of democracy: 85 percent of the young studying abroad have no plans to return to their homeland. In Greece, brain drain is a daily fact, and it is only going to get worse.

Even the unemployment offices are being shut down one by one. This is not so much because, like the governmental institutions, they’ve run out of money. It is because they simply have nothing to offer to job-seekers, not even good advice.

The same goes for the humanitarian organisations. George Protopapas, the head of the NGO called SOS Children’s Villages with the aim of helping abandoned children, claims that the humanitarian organisations are now providing as much as a half of the social services that should be provided by the state. Yet even most of the humanitarians are about to shut down. They, too, are all facing bankruptcy. At the moment, the same also goes for roughly a half of all Greek privately-owned companies, so it is little wonder that tax revenues are dropping dramatically and countless workers are being fired. All of the above makes for one hell of a social bomb, and sooner or later it is bound to go off. On the othe hand Greece is still one of the biggest European importer of the weapons. According to the International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) from Stockholm, Greece has been the EU’s number one importer of weapons between 2007 and 2011. It has also – quite a coincidence! – been the German military industry’s best customer.

Last year, in spite of the crisis, the Greek government bought 13 percent of Germany’s and 10 percent of France’s entire weapon exports in 2011.

Understandably, the streets of Athens are seeing the intensification of police violence. The ones who are getting it the worst are the refugees and immigrants.

In the increasingly xenophobic Greece, they are demonstrably worse off than their peers anywhere else in the European Union. In Greece, most of them are actually worse off than back home, where they at least hadn’t been targeted by organised extremist gangs. Most of these are operating within the framework of the Golden Dawn movement, which will surely gained entry to the parliament during the general election.

The members of the movement greet each other with the Nazi salute, and the swastika is an easily discernible part of its emblem. Recently, the Greek authorities (under direct orders from Brussels and with European money) initiated the construction of thirty new so called detention centres, actually prisons. Their purpose is to house and as soon as possible ship back all the illegal imigrants, most of whom are currently jobless and prospectless and living on the increasingly dangerous streets of major cities.

The speed of the country’s decline is at its most visible in the centre of the Greek capital. Every day, Athens is more redolent of the crumbling Cairo or the apocalyptic vision of Paul Auster’s In the Country of Last Things.

Hell(as)

The Omonia square, for example, which lies a mere kilometer away from some key tourist attractions, turns at night into a savage theatre of survival Some of what you can see is truly gruesome. The narrow streets are filled with junkies in their final stages – half-naked walking corpses shooting their doses into their necks or thighs. Stray dogs and prostitutes are strolling among them, some of the latter clearly being underage. Homeless beggars are sleeping in front of the 50 cent shops peddling the tawdriest imaginable merchandise. Police patrols are chasing immigrants, who have long become the majority in this forsaken part of the town. Shrieks of terror are now a workaday soundtrack here. As many as twenty-five immigrants are being crowded in a single ancient and decrepit apartment. Many dwellings have been up for sale for the past two years, but no one is buying. The walls are covered with posters declaring the supremacy of the white race and exhorting the Greek population to reclaim their land. Next to them, you can find the propaganda of the Greek comminust party (KKE), which never really distanced itself from the Soviet school of socialism and whose younger members can often be seen wearing Stalin T-shirts.
It is impossible to shake the impression that what you can see in Greece is the shape of things to come. A dire and savage future is hurtling at so many of us, the soft and privileged Europeans – it is coming at us as inexorably as that blue planet in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia.

»What we got here is a furious fight for survival. The police is chasing immigrants. The neo-nazis are keen to beat them up. The people who have come here hoping for a better life have arrived straight to hell. Most of the immigrants have got it worse here than they did at home. I can say that with confidence, since I’ve worked in several warzones. And the situation here in Greece will only deteriorate. We are living in ideal conditions for the flourishing of extremist movements. The neo-nazis are growing stronger every day. The financial crisis is the best possible nourishment for all kinds of fascism. The immigrants are the Jews of our time. They are guilty for everything. They look different, so they can be easily spotted and accused of anything. And then their job is to prove their innocence. They have no rights at all. Here in Athens I’m now seeing images that I only got to see in those warzones I mentioned earlier. No, there is no real hope that things will settle down. The authorities are building so-called detention centres. That reminds me of a whole different age,« said dr. Nikitas Kanakis, the head of the Greek branch of the Doctors of the World. Dr. Kanakis was stationed in Rwanda, Afghanistan and Iraq – so he is clearly a man who knows what he’s talking about.

The Protests That Change Nothing

The peaceful and dignified protest commemorating the 77-year-old man who shot himself in the head started in near perfect silence, but it quickly deteriorated into what is now a typical scene from the Greek streets.

The members of special police units, who taunted the protesters with insolence and impunity, got hit by a barrage of stones and a few Molotov cocktails. The wind brought over a cloud of tear-gas that had been fired by the policemen before the demonstrations in front of the Greek parliament had even begun. People of all ages and social standings were crying, sneezing and cursing like there was no tomorrow – which, for many of them, there wasn’t. While their lives are rapidly and irreversibly changing for the worse, they are taking part in endless debates with the aim of finding the magic formula of viable resistence. The demonstrations in front of the parliament have – with various stops and pauses – gone on for three years and a half, but they changed nothing. Less and less people are turning up for the protests. Hundreds of thousands of them are forced to devote the sum of their energies to the most basic survival.

»I’ve had it up to here. It’s getting worse every day. They’re slowly wearing us down – they’re always pushing us to determine our limits. But we have no other option than to stay on the streets and keep fighting for our rights. At this stage, we really don’t have that much to lose. We’ve become a German colony and a prisoner of the international monetary institutions. We’re losing our very independence. Our country is being run by foreign banks. Even our prime minister is a banker,« said Bill Papadoupoluos, whom I met during a strike of medical staff employed in the private sector.

Bill is working as a nurse at a privately-owned clinic, but he hadn’t been paid for the last five months. Many of his colleagues are doing even worse. Some of them hadn’t received their salaries for up to thirteen months.

»This strike has been organised to force our employers into renewing the contract with our union,« he said: »Most of the employers have made a cartel pact under the full blessing of the EU to turn us all into wage-slaves. They took away our traveling expenses and lunch recompensation. They no longer even pay our social benefits. On paper, they cut all the salaries – regardless of the worker’s output or his education – to the minimum wage… But that doesn’t really matter, you see, since they long stopped paying us! Most of our savings are gone. Only our parents are there to help us. We cannot hold out for much longer,« explained this brave free-thinking nurse.

At the same time as the medical staff, archeologists went on strike as well. Greece has almost completely stopped its excavations and thus symbollically cut its ties to its glorious past. In front of the Greek national bank one could see a protesting crowd of exhausted and financially wrung-out pensioners. All of them were repeating the tale of how a fellow pensioner had commited suicide in their name, but many were growling it had really been murder – murder jointly commited by the politicians and various monetary predators. That was also the gist of one of the messages left by the mourners on the now ominous tree in the middle of the Syntagma square: »This wasn’t suicide. This was murder!«

Un hombre se prende fuego frente al banco de Piraeus, Thessalonik (AP)

Occupation 2.0

»In the space of two years,« was the estimation of Alexis Cipra: »after a painful cycle of failure of the stabilization programs, we have been led to the point where our country is so looted that it is facing complete bankruptcy. In practice, this means lost lives, lost dignity and lost future.«

Cipra, 38, is the president of the SYRZIA party – a sort of coalition of left-leaning political movements. A young politican is convinced that on the pretext of the debt crisis, a brutal experiment is being conducted. In his opinion, ‘big capital’ and the key EU institutions are testing a society’s capacity to function without salaries, without social justice, without public wealth. »If this experiment is successful, they will try to force this project onto the whole of Europe. But they can already see the Greek people are not going to keep their cool for much longer. The parties that consented to this project are sinking. The society is in turmoil. Even more now, as the crisis has been transmitted to the rest of the European south, threatening Europe as a whole. The plan is definitely to strip Greece of all its productive resources and public wealth. The plan is for the ‘indigenous’ people to start working for miserable wages and without any laws to protect them,« explained Cipra.

He had no doubts about the crisis’ origins: »It is definitely a plan cooked up by the international capital, but it has been wholeheartedly embraced by our national capitalists as well. Luckily, it looks like they failed. The crisis of a country which is responsible for 2% of the Eurozone’s GDP is now threatening to topple the entire European edifice. Big bussiness’ greed has exceeded all limits and has actually taken on auto-destructive dimensions.  The people realized this very fast, but it seems that the capitalists will be the last to get it. The only hope is the resistance that comes from society. It will be either the markets or the people who will prevail.«

The youngish leader of the Greek leftists claims that jumping out of the eurozone is not the solution. First of all, that would only benefit those who have already accumulated wealth. Also: by doing this, the Greek people would puss away and transform themselves into enemies of people who are today their allies. »What we really need to do is to overturn the balance of power, to put an end to the neoliberal dogma and open a new road for a democratic and welfare-minded Europe!«

Hunger

Athens (AP)

From the early hours of the morning, a long line of tired and humiliated people is winding toward the Sappfho street, where the Doctors of the World organisation is handing out parcels of food and medicine. Both the Greeks – who are in the majority – and the immigrants are patiently waiting for their meals, while policemen in bulletproof vests are pacing up and down the street.

There is something profoundly wrong with this picture.

Greece is fast changing into a crisis spot. A couple of weeks ago, the German philosopher Hans Magnus Enzensberger said that in Europe, only the anorexic girls are going hungry. This was arrogance beyond anything that could still be deemed excusable. Enzensberger not only forgot about hundreds of thousands of immigrants; he also forgot about the sort of lines that can be witnessed at Sappfho street. In the Greek capital, there are at least a dozen such public kitchens. One out of eleven residents of this once-proud city now goes to them. As recently as a year ago, most of those standing in such lines were immigrants. Today the data provided by the Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) shows that at least seventy percent of those queueing are the Greeks. No wonder that a wall near the city center bears the slogan: »Do not underestimate hunger!«

The public kitchens are ill-equipped to keep up with the ever growing needs of the people who had been tossed across the poverty threshold like a bag of trash. The same goes for the so-called ‘solidarity clinics’, where kind-hearted doctors are offering free services and care for the poor without insurance. At the moment, a staggering third of the Greek population is living under the official poverty threshold. According to countless predictions, one out of every two Greek families will be poor in about a year.

Does your country even have a fighting chance, I asked the author and poet Anastassis Vistonisitis, one of Greece’s most reputable writers. »Well,« he replied: »We used to have humongous growth and countless foreign investors. We were the stars, the centre of the world. Money used to be so very cheap. We bought cars and apartments, we launched new companies. No one saved their money. It was such great fun. Happy days, right? We got the Euro, the Olympic games – we grew so fast. And then the hammer fell down. Overnight. At first, we couldn’t believe it. Then we gradually began to sober up. The first wave of cuts was put in effect, then the second and the third. The international financial institutions backed us into a corner. When the first representatives of the International Monetary Fund arrived to Athens, I knew we were in deep shit. Wherever those guys came, they brought only penury and destruction. But we, the Greeks, are a proud people. We will not be humiliated. We shall get back on our feet. We always have. Our history is a succesion of ups and downs. That’s what makes me optimistic.«

I first met Vistonitis in June 2004, two months before the beginning of the Olympic games. He had been the head of the task force charged with drafting the proposal for the Greek candidacy. Eight years ago, I remember him as a fellow of exceptionally good cheer. Those were modern Greece’s most heady days. I remember the Spanish architect Santiago Caltrava grinning with glee while overseeing the finishing touches on the new futuristic olympic stadium. The Greek economy was growing by six to seven percent per year. Unemployment was at a record low, commerce was booming. On top of all that, the Greek football squad won the European Championship. The whole Athens was a starburst of joy. The Greeks were living out their ancient myths.

Organic Rot

Eight years later, Greece is rotting while technically still alive. Those Olympic memories now seem as distant as the time of The Iliad. »We are not the only ones to blame for the situation we are now facing. Almost the entire world is in debt. We are far from being the worst case, so I find it a great injustice that we are the only ones paying the price. Oh well, a number of other European countries are sure to follow. Ireland, Portugal, Spain, even France. When those major players start taking hits as well, the Entire Europe will be shaken to its foundations. We have all been screwed by those loans. It wasn’t relief, it was pure extortion. Our politicians – they’re the ones to blame for the debt, not the people! The politicians have been blindly following the dictates of Brussels and Berlin. Europe should be grateful to us for accepting its rules, which are good for their financial elites and nobody else. Anyway, they should be grateful to us, instead of humiliating and insulting us! At any moment, we could have called China for help, but we didn’t! You know that the Chinese wouldn’t hesitate for a minute! They cannot wait to get their hands on some key European ports. In a very short time, this would enable them do dominate European trade. Just imagine what that would mean for the European economy, and for the United States as well! Forging an alliance with China is our great strategic weapon that we can use at any time,« explained Vistonitis, who feels that the entire Western world is in crisis. We have all made a mess of things and squandered our future, he feels.

»It simply can’t go on this way. We’ll all be forced to make some sacrifices, and that is how it should be, but the European elites want to turn us into slaves working for two hundred Euros. They want to turn us into Bulgaria or Romania. And we won’t allow that. We are much too proud and much too well aware of how much we’ve got. We are a Mediterranean country which has always been fairly self-sufficient. We’ll take our future into our own hands. We have plenty of food, water and sea. Now, through our Cyprus connection, we have plenty of natural gas as well. We refuse to be enslaved by the monetary institutions. We will survive!« So spoke the writer in the Monastiraki square at the heart of Athens. His country, he said, was being demolished, and its people were highly strung-out. »Enough is enough! If they keep pushing us toward poverty and despair, then we’ll take the matter into our own hands. That moment is approaching fast. Does that mean getting out of the European Union and the eurozone? We’ll see. But I get the strong feeling that the people will no longer stand for being extorted in this manner. If the Europe decides we are to perish, it is sure to perish along with us.«