Hopefully in the very near future i'll have time to write a longer piece about the Indignados resistance camp in Thessaloniki - for now, i'm doing as promised and publishing English and Spanish versions of their most recent declaration. The activists have a website of their own which is mostly in Greek, but you can find some English, Spanish and German translations there as well.
Words cannot properly convey the level outrage i've encountered about the level of police violence in Athens. i'm waiting to receive some video links to post here - most of the street media is being done by Greeks, in Greek, so while there's a ton of it on youtube, it's also hard to navigate if one doesn't speak the language and is short on time. The worst and most shocking stories have been about the repeated gasing of people inside the metro stations, evidently with expired gas canisters, so who knows what chemicals the good citizens of Athens have been exposed to? Teargas cocktails are definitely not for the meek or asthmatic! Horrific, truly. i've not seen any of the Terminator films, but everyone seems to think in order to fully appreciate what's going on here now, it would be a good idea if i did.
i've also been told that MPs are being stalked, hounded and pelted with the odd tomato , egg, etc. wherever they go: from the time they step out of their door to the point where they're able to escape public access to their persons. People are cynical to the extreme at this point and Greece is definitely going to see a huge brain drain in the coming months because professionals and recent university graduates see no future for themselves in this country, at least in the short- and medium-term. i spoke with one young woman who has one more year of university left and she's committed to staying here to resist the government and its repressive measures, but without a large collective pooling of resources, it's hard to say how long encampments and organizers are going to survive the economics of full-time resistance... more thoughts on this point at a later date.
Anyway, that's a little insight into the situation as seen from the White Tower (Lefkos Pyrgos) of Thessaloniki. Here's the declaration; if it's too difficult to read in blogspot size, try clicking on it to get a large image. And if you're reading this in Thessaloniki or any other town in Greece, please stop going to Starbucks for your afternoon frappes. This company is exemplary of the larger economic theft in the country and you would do much better supporting you local kafe owner whose business has nothing to do with maximizing stockholder returns. If the argument is that they alone offer fair trade coffee, then it's time to change that situation and i'm betting that given the current anti-corporate sentiment throughout Greece, this wouldn't be an impossible thing to accomplish.
Words cannot properly convey the level outrage i've encountered about the level of police violence in Athens. i'm waiting to receive some video links to post here - most of the street media is being done by Greeks, in Greek, so while there's a ton of it on youtube, it's also hard to navigate if one doesn't speak the language and is short on time. The worst and most shocking stories have been about the repeated gasing of people inside the metro stations, evidently with expired gas canisters, so who knows what chemicals the good citizens of Athens have been exposed to? Teargas cocktails are definitely not for the meek or asthmatic! Horrific, truly. i've not seen any of the Terminator films, but everyone seems to think in order to fully appreciate what's going on here now, it would be a good idea if i did.
i've also been told that MPs are being stalked, hounded and pelted with the odd tomato , egg, etc. wherever they go: from the time they step out of their door to the point where they're able to escape public access to their persons. People are cynical to the extreme at this point and Greece is definitely going to see a huge brain drain in the coming months because professionals and recent university graduates see no future for themselves in this country, at least in the short- and medium-term. i spoke with one young woman who has one more year of university left and she's committed to staying here to resist the government and its repressive measures, but without a large collective pooling of resources, it's hard to say how long encampments and organizers are going to survive the economics of full-time resistance... more thoughts on this point at a later date.
Anyway, that's a little insight into the situation as seen from the White Tower (Lefkos Pyrgos) of Thessaloniki. Here's the declaration; if it's too difficult to read in blogspot size, try clicking on it to get a large image. And if you're reading this in Thessaloniki or any other town in Greece, please stop going to Starbucks for your afternoon frappes. This company is exemplary of the larger economic theft in the country and you would do much better supporting you local kafe owner whose business has nothing to do with maximizing stockholder returns. If the argument is that they alone offer fair trade coffee, then it's time to change that situation and i'm betting that given the current anti-corporate sentiment throughout Greece, this wouldn't be an impossible thing to accomplish.
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