Geography Archives: Greece

I defied my advanced age to board a special train, with a thousand mostly young people, and join in the big “Blockupy” demonstration in Frankfurt am Main, Germany’s big banking city.  The trip, though not the usual four and a half but seven hours, retained till well into the night a spirit of happy anticipation. […]

  . . . So, our party [Communist Party of Greece, KKE] was very clear — for many years now — that the European Union is a union of capital and an anti-people hornet’s nest.  The parties of the plutocracy in Greece as well as other countries lied to the peoples, fostered illusions that they […]

  The renaming of Troika to Institutions, Memorandum to Agreement, and Lenders to Partners, the way fish is baptized “meat,” does not change the previous situation. Neither does it change, of course, the vote of the Greek people in the 25 January 2015 elections. The people voted for what SYRIZA promised: We will overthrow the […]

No matter what you call it, the government’s agreement is in form and substance a clear extension of the memorandum, with strict supervision, with evaluation by the institutions (troika), and especially with the continuation of the anti-people reforms.  Any revision of the program, e.g. lower primary surpluses, will be done not to actually relieve the […]

Tsipras-Schleuder #Rosenmontag #Helau #Düsseldorf #Merkel pic.twitter.com/EiRvyRvf7k — Christoph Ullrich (@ullrich001) February 16, 2015 Every year the Rhine region and southern Germany go crazy.  Carnival or Fasching, a cousin of Mardi Gras, officially beginning at 11:11 AM on 11/11 and ending with the Lent period, has been celebrated in Catholic areas since the 1820s — with […]

If you have ever read Edgar Allen Poe‘s gruesome stories you may recall feelings of horror like those which made me, still a youngster, cringe and shudder.  I have similar feelings when I hear of bloodthirsty, barely-hidden “concerts” by German Neo-Nazis, which too often lead to violence against subjects of their hatred: hippy-type leftist youngsters […]

“Has there ever been a demonstration where people chanted the name of a finance minister? This must be a world first!” says the ironic Xenia, a 53-year-old woman who has been shouting for several minutes, with thousands of demonstrators, the now omnipresent name in Athens: “Yanis Varoufakis, Yanis Varoufakis, Yanis Varoufakis!”

The European Central Bank’s political decision to blackmail Athens is arrogant and dumb.  An institution buying vast quantities of toxic assets from banks ought to be also providing the Greek government with the necessary breathing space now, so that a solution to the European debt crisis can be negotiated. The practice of officials who have […]

  Bandera de la república popular de España en Atenas, entre las canciones Bella Ciao y Bandiera Rossa. #Syriza pic.twitter.com/HuVaAfO3Dg — ALFON (@TxabierAlonso) January 25, 2015 As a communist, if I were Greek I would certainly be active in the KKE (Communist Party of Greece) and this Sunday the party would have had my vote.  […]

SYRIZA’s electoral victory is a historic opportunity for the whole of Europe.  The Greek voters voted for an end to the catastrophic policy of cuts dictated to Greece by the Troika composed of the EU Commission, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the European Central Bank (ECB).  This election is therefore also a defeat for […]

Greek Communist Party (KKE) MEP Kostas Papadakis firmly says: “SYRIZA has made very clear that it is not going to defy the EU or NATO.  We say: What kind of left is this?” “The EU has no fear of SYRIZA.  SYRIZA is not the oligarchy’s first choice, but it is the new face of social […]

Recent events here in Germany remind me of a playground seesaw, with constant ups and downs of one side and the other. All autumn we watched the upward swing of PEGIDA, “Patriotic Europeans Against Islamization of the West,” most rapidly but not only in Saxony’s capital Dresden.  Its main features were a fast-talking, shady leader […]

Government austerity for the masses (raising taxes and cutting public services) is becoming the issue shaping politics in western Europe, north America, and Japan.  In the US, austerity turned millions away from the polls where before they supported an Obama who promised changes from such policies.  So Republicans will control Congress and conflicts over austerity […]

A long, warm, coatless autumn made some wonder whether climate change might cancel winter this year in a reverse of the canceled summer two centuries ago in a year called “Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death.”  But no, I now read that the weather will change after all.  Northern blasts may soon be here. Perhaps […]

​Global capitalism has huge problems coping with the second worst collapse in its history. Its extreme and deepening inequalities have provoked millions to question and challenge capitalism. Yet socialists of all sorts now find it more difficult than ever to make effective criticisms and offer alternatives that inspire. Part of the problem lies with classic […]

Two famous heads got lost in Berlin.  Neither loss, I hasten to add, was connected with brutality.  From the past or near future, they caused melancholy or rejoicing, depending on your viewpoint. One loss really occurred twenty-two years ago, when the 62-foot red granite statue of Lenin on East Berlin’s Lenin Square and Lenin Allee […]

During my month in my home country, the USA, things kept moving along on this eastern side of the Atlantic.  I must try to catch up! In early June Europe had to digest results of the European Parliament elections — and choke down some pretty revolting clumps.  Far-right groups took alarming leads in France and […]

Running up a down escalator is itself mighty difficult.  Trying to keep your footing both on an up and a down escalator at the same time is simply hard to imagine.  Yet it gives an idea of Germany’s present Ukrainian policy. Soon after Soviet soldiers left East Germany between 1989 and 1994, the newly-unified country […]

The progressivist view of history often goes hand in hand with the faith that a new class — sometimes the proletariat, at other times “the people” — has a privileged perspective or consciousness.  If scientific (as opposed to vulgar) Marxism debunks this idea on a theoretical level — showing how commodity and money fetishism’s inversions […]

  In the lead-up to the international day of action against fascism on 22 March, Thanasis Kampagiannis, writing in the latest issue of Σοσιαλισμός από Κάτω (Socialism From Below), the theoretical journal of the Greek Socialist Workers Party (SEK), looks at the danger of a major far Right breakthrough in May’s European Parliament elections and […]