On Greece’s democracy and freedom, drug users and elections
Plans to let drug users inject under supervision
That the drug users will go to a specified place to inject drugs under supervision is as insane as believing that any of them will cross the city to shoot drugs when one is ready for his «fix.”
When are we going to start punishing those who break the law rather than accommodating them?
The fabric of our society is getting more and more tattered every day and we seem to be unable to take the measures needed to establish law and order.
Aren’t we suggesting with a wink that it is alright to use illegal substances as long as one does these activities in a specified place?
More and more of our youth will be sucked into this vaccuum and the cost will be great to all of us. There is something called prevention, policing the borders, arresting the dealers.
By the way there are posters in this paper who live in Zurich. They may be able to explain why these programs do not work. If in an organised society like the Swiss one cannot have success with the Zurich park for drug addicts, I do not believe we will have success with one by (out of all places) Larissis square that has been descending into chaos for years now.
Monica Lane
Florida US
What fun, elections again
The biggest con of the 20th century has been that where you have elections you have democracy.
Greece needs another set of elections like it needs another ten-year rule by the same fools who have been in Parliament the last twenty years strongly supported by a Greek population who were too lazy to think about what is happening around them.
We have shown ourselves to be the useless people of Europe as described by Pericles:
“We alone regard a man who takes no interest in public affairs, not as a harmless, but as a useless character».
The endless demonstrations and demands for a better life by Greeks of today do not match their interest of the near past in the Greek economy. I cannot understand why Greeks think that other people outside Greece are obligated to provide them with an income and a lifestyle they have become accustomed to.
When the majority of the world has an income of $300 per annum, Greeks are doing very well.
Many Greeks who are still alive today lived in houses without water, electricity and a sewerage system. The outskirts of Thessaloniki and Athens only got water, electricity and sewerage systems in the last forty years. They may need to live without services until they can afford them again. The majority of the world does not have basic services.
Welcome to the «stone age».
Greeks may need to revert to a diet of what most of my friends and I depended on most of the year.
Breakfast: wild herb tea, wholemeal bread and jam
Lunch: wholemeal bread with olive oil and rock salt
Dinner: dried beans and salted cabbage
All the milk, cheese and meat imported from Britain and the Netherlands should stop at once, except for tourists, for Greece to pay the debt by this generation and not pass it on to future generations.
No Greek should be allowed to migrate until he has paid his portion of the debt.
It may get through to a few people after they have to shovel their own s**t and do without imported food that they have to take an interest in the rule of the country, and realise when they steal from the country they steal from their children and their neighbours.
Going to elections without rewriting the Greek Constitution, appointing new judges to the Greek courts from other countries, appointing new heads of departments from other countries and teaching every Greek what the Constitution is all about, is going back to the same disaster.
The only answer to the Greek problem is for Greeks to accept and defend democratic rule and the rule of law. We cannot go on playing the «village idiot» of Europe, and wait for others to throw us a mouldy crust.
If any Greek thinks that the refugees in Athens streets have a bad lifestyle, it will be worse for Greek refugees in the frozen streets of Northern Europe or the heat of North Africa.
If any Greek parent cannot be bothered to think about politics, just think about the East European parents who had to send their teenage daughters to work in the brothels of the Middle East because thinking was too was too much like hard work.
The very existence of Greece as a country is in this generation?s hands, dare to think, dare to escape the disaster.
Charilaos Lithoxopoulos
Does all stupidity flow out of the Greek Parliament?
How did a country that is supposed to be democratic have restrictions on who can brew beer or who can botttle water?
What else are we going hear?
Is there a restriction on who can grow red tomatoes?
Is there a restriction who can wear green shirts and yellow shoes?
Is there a restriction who can bake bread and who can bake cakes?
Did those Stalinist Greeks from Russia contaminate Greece or is it a local problem?
Please burn the Stalinist constitution and laws and liberate Greece from stupidity.
Charilaos Lithoxopoulos
May 6 elections — a repeat of 67?
Well, it seems we are approaching a moment in time and history strangely reminiscent of another moment in time and history…
Will the May 6 elections be pre-empted by or result in a repetition of 21 April 1967?
To most Greeks of an EU frame of mind, this seems as taboo a subject as the ‘H’ is in Germany.
Yet apparently a journalist called Dominique Doms claims he was at a meeting where Papoulias and Greek generals planned/discussed intervention if the coming elections failed to produce a stable government (or any government at all for that matter…).
The report in question is: ‘Greek military ready to intervene and take over Greek Parliament’.
Given that the Greek military is presently conspicuous for the health of its finances and resourcing relative to the rest of the Greek state, and that it was visited by a NATO general not so long ago, there is at least a certain plausibility to the notion that Germany wants Greece to leave the EU in a ‘stable’ if not necessarily democratic fashion.
I’m sorry if this notion hurts liberal and pro-EU sensibilities, but I think we are fast getting past the point where such considerations are necessarily valid or realistic. After these elections Greece will need stabilty of a determined sort to go wherever she will go next. If the military alone can provide that then so be it. We are living in very historically challenging and unique times and some solutions may be lesser evils than other solutions.
Philip Andrews
Freedom or death
I read the article «Freedom or death» attentively but I was not moved at all because it contains many imaginary areas that never and will never exist in Greece. Greece’s democracy and freedom has invariably been shy of perfection, let alone stationed in the middle of perfection.
Greece has always been discriminative amongst its own people. No Greek had been able to gain employment without knowing someone from the political parties. Add to this insult the injury of paying this politician to gain employment. Greece had a junta not long ago where no one was able to express his/her opinion plainly and freely. Up to this day, Greece is full of areas where freedom is hijacked by acts of corruption, populism and indifference. As I see it, Greece is a somewhat free country ranked ahead of the Middle Eastern and African countries where freedom is in short supply; but when comparing it to Western Europe, Greece has failed big time in terms of freedom and democracy. I believe that Greece could have been a cradle of democracy and a shining rod in the world if our politicians had not trashed and tarnished its history with their demeaning attitudes. Take for example Tsochatzopoulos, who took million of bribes and acquired more than 15 properites of high value and is still walking freely amongst us. Not only this, but also raping our thinking by claiming he’s innocent. Had he been in Western Europe, he would have been jailed for life. If this is not an example of how trashy our freedom and democracy is, what is?
John Elkass
