Hatewave and its supporters
A specter has been haunting Greece for a month now: that of the «Hatewave festival» organized by Greek far-rightists for some of the Continent’s neo-Nazi groups. Their aim is to honor – in their own curious way, via an offensive disregard of the memory of the millions of dead – the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II. Their blatant and revanchist Nazism, aggressively manifested in their swastika-emblazoned flags, shows that for those people who style themselves after Hitler and Mussolini, «far right» is a politically empty term. As for the home-bred champions of the Third Reich, who honor the «tagmatasfalites» that served in the German security battalions and who curse the relatives of civil war victims, they talk about Plato when, in fact, they are closer to Nero. The rise of Europe’s extreme right is an ugly reality that cannot be reined in with morality talk or prohibitions. Unemployment, economic insecurity and the growing presence of migrants in many Western countries provide fertile ground for right-wing populists who have no trouble accommodating anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist cliches in their speeches. Further to the right of Parliament’s ultra-rightist parties, there are small yet noisy and violent groups who claim the Final Solution was not a crime against humanity but a politically and culturally acceptable and necessary act. If existing social problems and mass apathy allow people to indulge in demagoguery, their plans are also served by their ideas finding a sympathetic ear among official parties. The myth of the «evil Jew» is reproduced, or at least tolerated, by many in Europe. In Greece, the legend about our superior DNA is not exclusive to Chrysi Avgi’s ultra-nationalists. Everyone can fish in these murky waters, including neo-fascists.
