Just got my official letter telling me I can vote in the European parliamentary election. I’m considering voting for DiEM25, I mean I’m a Basic Leftist who normally votes Linkspartei all day every day and I’m not that impressed with their “Let’s save capitalism FOR GREAT MARXIST JUSTICE” idea, but voting for Yanis Varoufakis once in my life has been on my sampo list since 2015 and now is my chance which I never thought I would have!
Voting for a party because of an individual candidate is for suckers, I know. But he was ready, willing and able to outwit the EU establishment with his secret plan, and I will never forget it – nor the cowardice of others that stopped the plan from being implemented.
There is a recurring bill I pay in Italy, in person, with a credit card. When I finish the transaction, the secretary makes a handwritten note in a small book. She makes the same note on a card-sized piece of notebook paper which I carry. One time, I forgot to bring the card-sized piece of paper. The secretary urgently retrieved an identical card and wrote down the entire history of our financial transactions, so that if she ever tried to cheat me, I could say, no, look here, in your handwriting it says I paid, because this ballpoint numeral is more meaningful than a credit card statement.
Read more about how Italy does money, and what austerity feels like in the world’s eighth-largest economy: “Social Trust in a Cash Economy,” at The Billfold.
Short as this piece is, it took nearly two years to write; I had a notebook and then a word doc where I collected vignettes and interactions around money that were in some way unexpected or culturally unfamiliar. As I got further into it, it occurred to me that I couldn’t tell how much of what I was seeing was Italian tradition, some of it medieval, and how much was a reaction to the economic crisis (was resistance; was resilience; was capitulation).
[photo by Ciro Faienza of a DiEM25 march in Rome, marzo 2017]
Greece’s opposition parties condemned Russia’s military operation in Ukraine on Thursday morning.
Main opposition left-wing party SYRIZA said in a statement:
“SYRIZA-Progressive Alliance unequivocally condemns Russia’s military operations in Ukraine since early Thursday, which violate the territorial integrity and sovereignty of the country.
The EU must use all diplomatic means to ensure peace and a return to the negotiating table..
Meanwhile, measures must be taken to support the Greek community and the Greek citizens in Ukraine.”
Communist party KKE:
“30 years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the overthrow of socialism, which many celebrated because it was supposed to make the world more “peaceful” and “safer”, another imperialist war broke out on European soil, after the war in Yugoslavia and elsewhere.
The typical start of the war is the unacceptable military intervention and invasion of Russia to Ukraine, however, the flammable material has been gradually accumulating in the region for years.
Regardless of the pretexts used by both sides, the war in Ukraine is the result of intensifying rivalries between the two warring factions, focusing first and foremost on spheres of influence, market shares, raw materials, energy plans and transport routes, competitions that can no longer be resolved through diplomatic-political means and fragile compromises.
On the one hand are the US, NATO, the EU, which support the reactionary government of Kiev, the paramilitary mechanisms and the fascist groups of Ukraine and which for years have been promoting their positions (NATO enlargement with Eastern European countries, missile defense shield, etc.), aimed at the economic, political and military siege of Russia.
On the other hand is capitalist Russia, which is promoting its own plans for the capitalist unification of the countries of the former USSR and which in recent years has proceeded to the annexation of Crimea to the Russian Federation and the recent recognition of the “independence” of the so-called “People’s Republics” of Donetsk. of Lugansk.” (full statement in Greek here.).
Yanis Varoufakis, the former finance minister of Greece, accused Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg of stealing the word “Meta” from a left-wing think-tank.
Posting on Twitter Varoufakis said: “Hands off our mέta, our Centre for Postcapitalist Civilisation, Mr Zuckerberg. You, and your minions wouldn’t recognise civilisation even if it hit you with a bargepole.”
Varoufakis on advisory board of Meta
The Greek politician, a central figure during the debt crisis of 2015, said that Meta is the acronym for the Centre for Postcapitalist Civilisation, a left wing think-tank whose advisory board includes prominent philosophers, economists, film-makers, artists and activists such as Noam Chomsky, Srećko Horvat Brian Eno, Ken Loach and James K. Galbraith.
Especially today, words of farewell are not easy to write. People like Mikis Theodorakis are not born nor do they die every day.
A composer, an anti-fascist, a Zorba, a peace fighter, a Greek, a communist — the world owes him a lot. We Greeks owe him a lot. And everyone knows why. Because everyone has danced to his music or sung his songs. Thanks to him, the Greeks learned of their great poets, through his songs with lyrics by Yiannis Ritsos (Lenin Peace Prize 1976), Giorgos Seferis (Nobel Prize in Literature 1963), Odysseus Elytis (Nobel Prize in Literature 1979) and even Pablo Neruda (Nobel Prize in Literature 1971). In 2000, he himself was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Mikis not only defined an era, he came out of this era itself. As a young man, he did not live in times of democracy. He lived as an outlaw and member of the resistance against the German occupiers. Counting backwards before the restoration of the republic, he lived under dictatorship, post-civil war Greece, exile, civil war and Nazi occupation. He suffered exile, prison, censorship, torture and humiliation, hunger and loss.
The political history of Greece itself is embodied in his face. His concert at the fall of the junta of the colonels. His music for the film “Z” by Costa-Gavras, the symphonic work he composed while in exile on Makronisos and the national anthem of Palestine under Yasser Arafat. The song “We are two, we are three,” which he sang with rapture along with the people at his concerts.
His music has been a companion in my life since the first time I remember hearing his songs, when I was 6 or 7 years old. Under the junta, we whispered his lyrics in secret. That’s because Mikis’s songs were banned in 1967. Not just certain songs, but all of them. You were not allowed to sing any of these songs, not even those that had no political content.
Some were love lyrics by the greatest Greek poets, others were simply lyrical; all of them were wonderful in the “Greekness” they exuded and the sense of freedom that resonated in them. If you were heard singing even one of their verses in public, it was enough for you to be arrested and taken to the police.
But we, young schoolchildren and then students, sang them secretly in our gatherings and for our first loves. During the anti-dictatorship uprising at the Athens Polytechnic in November 1973, Mikis’s songs became for us an act of resistance. We were now singing them openly in the street, and they could be heard loudly over the speakers. With them, we young people urged the people to revolt for the fall of the junta.
After that fall finally came, I met Mikis for the first time and shook his hand at a meeting of the United Left in 1974, when he was elected as a deputy from the working-class neighborhoods of Piraeus. I still remember his magnetic personality and the humility he exuded.
This week’s newsletter from AthensLive is out:
* The police kill an unarmed 18-year old.
* The aftermath - And one MP with a black eye.
* Piraeus Port: The most crucial strike you will read nothing of.
- are the main headlines to be found inside this highly informative weekly must-read from and about Greece.
An 18-year old Roma man, co-driver in a stolen car, and two juveniles are dead from police fire. Serious questions arise about whether the use of lethal force was legitimate.
Riot police cracked down on demonstrators. They beat an MP. One smashed a shop window as if he was some hooligan.
Container handling workers on the Port of Piraeus have risen up against their COSCO employers as one of their colleagues lost his life at work.
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