Greek Conspiracy Theories

It was definitely the Romans, imperialism never dies.

Don't forget the immigrants!

I'd promote Island. They have less than 100 anti riot cops, they don't have a single water canon or armoured vehicle, they people are awfully angry anywhere, they are on a strategic position right between Europe and the Americas and the best thing about it is, that after a nice riots day you can plop into hot thermal water, drink a bear and barter your poorest horses with your friends while your a sitting in the soup. I guess 1.000 greek kids could do the job within two days, I they threaten to use Hákarl instead of molotov cocktails. Island is ripe for revolution and most people there are underhand anarchists anyway.

As long as you arent't a vegetarian or vegan, yes. They got lots of sheep, nice little horses with six-fold overdrive transaxle and big muscles, ugly colorful birds called "lundi" and really fat segulls. Hence, enough proteins for carnivors. But things are improving even for the "V"-faction: Since there are incredible amounts of cheap geothermal energy, people began to grow tomatos and other stuff in greenhouses. In Selfoss you sometimes feel like you were in the Netherlands. And Island will be one of the winners of global warming, at least as long as the gulf stream will not collapse as a result of the glacier smelter in Greenland (would be another nice place, less than 20 riot cops but hardly any hot water).

With Iceland there are only a small couple of caveats:

First the language - if you ever wanted to know, why the Europeans really were terrified by the Viking mass tourism 1000 years ago, you should try to listen to an Icelander. It is even worse than English even though there is a lot of Icelandic in the English language (And English mass tourism sometimes very much reminds me of a nice little Viking – drinking, looting and other things that aren't in fact politically correct).

Second the alcohol: If you ever thought Dutch beer is horrible, you should try to get an icelandic one. Same goes with the Brennivin, the hard stuff for hard winters. They call it the "svarti dauði" –the "black death"– and this is what it is. Even hard-core Russian or Polish vodka addictives would not touch it whilst they are not on a cold turkey. Icelanders need it so they can stand that the smell of that Hakarl I talked about earlier. Their strategy with it is to die of alcoholic cirrhosis before they die of all the acetone in that fermented rotten shark. Often they are really successful with it.

Third: The elves and the trolls: If you –like any other brave materialist– thought, that there are no elves and trolls, forget about it. Or at least do not let the Icelander know. Most of them confess they have seen elves and trolls at least one time in their live. I don't know whether this is related to the "svarti dauði", but a good portion of the them even claims to have had sex with one of them. Ok, to be honest, this goes more for the elves than for the trolls.

But apart from this small defects, Island is a really nice place to be. Well, at least during the northern summer. But this is no problem at all. We could move our anarchist community with a fleet of black and red Zeppelins to –let's say– Patagonia during the northern winter. Would be a good opportunity for a stopover at the Azores islands which are another nice place. Some more cops, amounts of hot water, more beef to eat than horses and lots of vegetables for the "V" faction.

I am not sure whether this is a troll or a baby photo of Red Zora. Normally trolls are at least three meters high and of bad humour. Remember that Moria cave troll in "Lord of the rings"? In Germany is it a running gag that once you see an ugly riot cop everybody shouts "Hey look, they've got a cave troll!".

I think we need to take this a bit more seriously. There has already been a preparation for comparing al-qaeda with the Bolsheviks in some commentary on the subject. I think it's Jason Burke who suggests that al-qaeda interpret "muslim consciousness" in a similar way to the Bolsheviks' interpretation of class consciousness - i.e. a massive, spectacular events (Russian Revolution for the Bolsheviks, acts of terror for al-qaeda) to push the masses into rising up.

The whole "propaganda by the deed", which was basically terrorism, is even more associated with anarchism and can provide some fertile ground for basically tarring the whole movement as "terrorist".

I haven't been able to keep up with the Greek thing so I have no position on it, but I think this kind of bourgeois propaganda is going to be common fare in the future.

immigrants do eat swans, I've seen it happen, but so do royals, so its all good.

To answer your question more seriously Laure, no there hasn't been anything vaguely like that in the British press.

Did you translate that article yourself? I might put it up in the library as part of the Greece unrest archive.

In the German media there is nothing comparable to that conspiracy stuff from Poland, it is just to blatant nonsense. The mainstream discourse is different yet mostly defaming as well. It follows an intelectual tradition that is specific for German media when they are reporting about social uprising. The analyzed very quickly, that the unrest in Greece is much more than just a protest against a police murder. They got the point and wrote about a "lost generation", the corruption of the Karamanlis and Papandreo family system etc.

Then they started dividing into the legitimate, though somewhat rude youth and –what they call– the "professional rioters". The latter they identified as "autonomous", yet there aren't any autonomous groups in Greece, except for a handful of comrades in their fifties that try to keep the "Autonomia Operaia" ideas. But "Autonome" is what the German media know and fight in their own country, so they use the label instead of "anarchists". They do not like to mention anarchists in Germany now. They really had problems when "Anarchists against the wall" was rewarded a mayor German human rights award a few days ago. No mainstream media dared to present them as an "anarchist group", all of them made a "group" out of them

After having sorted out who was the bad and who was the good in the Greek uprising, they started to write about "the international of brick throwsers", when solidarity demonstrations ended in clashes. Some of them prepared a nice soup with ingredients from Greece, the Heiligendamm G8 protests in 2008, Genua 2001 etc. They qualify the "Autonome" as Hooligans which love the riot but have no political ideas.

I guess this "divide-et-impera" strategy is not an accident. The media know, that what happens in Greece could well be the prequel of even the beginning of a type of revolt that could emerge in other countries of the European Union as well. On the edge of the worst economic crises for more than 50 years, with an estimated 3% to 4% shrinking of the German economy in 2009, the media are really in fear of a social uprising to come. Therefor they bash the Greek "Autonome" but what they really aim for is the situation in their own country.