Sound and fury signifying nothing
Jun. 29th, 2011 12:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bktheirregularNever a good thing when the city you're living in makes the international news.
For perspective: whatever was on the TV, things were nowhere near as bad as the May 2010 riots or the December 2008 riots. (The latter did lots of property damage in the wake of the shooting of a kid in the anarchist zone; the former was when a bank got burned out two blocks from me and three people died.)
Today, the protests seem more wide-ranging; there are marchers outside the office window, chanting things that seem to boil down to decrying capitalism in general. This makes me suspect that it's the Communist-associated labor union group (red scare and McCarthyism aside, the Greek Communist Party has been operating openly ever since the end of the colonels' junta in 1973, and one of the umbrella organizations openly associates itself with the Communists).
For a lot of the marchers, the rhetoric seems to boil down to "us vs. them", which may sound great in theory until you realize that the lines separating "us" from "them" get kinda fuzzy, and the price for being on the "them" side of the line has been kind of extreme in the past.
For "extreme", read "eyes being gouged out to make an example". That last bit comes from my aunt, correcting me when I'd guessed that they'd made examples by cutting throats.
My aunt lived through the civil war, you see, and the Communists had a tendency to do that.
In any case, down on street level, it's screaming rhetoric through megaphones, whipping up the crowds. Which means it's only a matter of time before frenzied marchers decide to get rowdy, and the hooligans decide the time is right to start throwing shattered marble at the cops, and the cops respond with flashbangs and tear gas, and the hooligans decide that means it's OK to start firebombing.
It felt like rain in the forecast today. I'm hoping for an epic downpour.
For perspective: whatever was on the TV, things were nowhere near as bad as the May 2010 riots or the December 2008 riots. (The latter did lots of property damage in the wake of the shooting of a kid in the anarchist zone; the former was when a bank got burned out two blocks from me and three people died.)
Today, the protests seem more wide-ranging; there are marchers outside the office window, chanting things that seem to boil down to decrying capitalism in general. This makes me suspect that it's the Communist-associated labor union group (red scare and McCarthyism aside, the Greek Communist Party has been operating openly ever since the end of the colonels' junta in 1973, and one of the umbrella organizations openly associates itself with the Communists).
For a lot of the marchers, the rhetoric seems to boil down to "us vs. them", which may sound great in theory until you realize that the lines separating "us" from "them" get kinda fuzzy, and the price for being on the "them" side of the line has been kind of extreme in the past.
For "extreme", read "eyes being gouged out to make an example". That last bit comes from my aunt, correcting me when I'd guessed that they'd made examples by cutting throats.
My aunt lived through the civil war, you see, and the Communists had a tendency to do that.
In any case, down on street level, it's screaming rhetoric through megaphones, whipping up the crowds. Which means it's only a matter of time before frenzied marchers decide to get rowdy, and the hooligans decide the time is right to start throwing shattered marble at the cops, and the cops respond with flashbangs and tear gas, and the hooligans decide that means it's OK to start firebombing.
It felt like rain in the forecast today. I'm hoping for an epic downpour.
