Meet Greece’s new transport minister

There has been a curious oversight in the mainstream media’s coverage of the European Union’s replacement of the elected Greek government with one allegedly of ‘technocrats’. This effective coup d’état involved the replacement of an elected government of alleged social democrats, which was judged unable to carry out the diktats of the unelected triumvirate of European Commission, European Central Bank (ECB) and International Monetary Fund, with a team headed by  former ECB vice-president Lucas Papademos.
The message was that, regrettable though it may be, the Greek people could not be expected to appreciate the ins and outs of the mess that they had got themselves into, and need a team of experts to get them out of it. What they needed, they were told, was a safe pair of hands.

The reality of what they got turns out not quite to match this image. Papademos himself is more or less what it says on the can, though he is most certainly a conservative politician rather than some neutral expert or technocrat. These species, beloved of the corporate capitalist media, exist only in myth, like the unicorn or the socially responsible capitalist.

Let’s, however, just for a moment, allow the boring banker Papademos his technocrat label. ‘Technocrat’ is the latest political buzzword, and it’s hardly surprising that it’s hard to define, as mainstream political journalism’s task is to obfuscate and obscure the issues. Nevertheless, however you define the word, some of these ‘technocrats’ are quite a long way from anything that may be conjured up by that term.

If I introduce you to a few of them, you may even find yourself greatly preferring the men in grey suits.
Though the end product of their approach may be the same - the destruction of any kind of social state and a huge cut in the living standards of all but the rich - Papademos is rather less crude in his methods than, say, his Minister of Infrastructure, Transport and Networks, Makis Voridis.

In the 1980s Voridis was the leader of a group called the Student Alternative, but its innocent- sounding name was designed to provide a thin cloak for its Nazi politics and violent activities. 
Voridis was thrown out of law school in 1985 and sued by Greece’s equivalent of NUS for taking part in attacks on his fellow law students, during which he often armed himself with the tool from which he takes his nickname, Hammer, though he sometimes preferred a home-made axe.

His party, LAOS, is an amalgam of previously existing far right groups. One of these, the Hellenic Front, formed a common electoral list as recently as 2004 with a party headed by Konstantinos Plevis. Plevis is the author of Jews: the Whole Truth, whose contents include the following pleasantries: “Adolf Hitler: The tragic leader of the German Third Reich is certainly the most impressive leadership figure of the modern age… Human history will blame Adolf Hitler for the following: 1. He could have rid Europe of the Jews, but did not; 2. He did not use the special chemical weapons, which only Germany possessed, to gain a victory... 3.Because of the defeat of Germany then, the White Race and Europe are at risk now.”

Just in case you think this is guilt by association, LAOS itself was founded by Giorgos Karatzeferis, a well-known Holocaust denier who says that Jews have “no legitimacy to speak in Greece” and who has referred to the Holocaust, Auschwitz and Dachau as “myths.”

Ironically, these views were amongst the reasons why Karatzeferis was expelled by the Greek conservative party, New Democracy. This has not stopped New Democracy, along with the formerly social democratic PASOK, from allying with Karatzeferis in the new regime.

Yet the mainstream media internationally have ignored the fact that the far right now has several ministerial positions in the imposed government. Most have simply noted that LAOS supports the austerity package, routinely describing it as ‘populist right’.

This would give the impression that it resembles, for example, Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party in the Netherlands. Anti-immigration and virulently anti-Muslim, Wilders’ party is bad enough, but it has no history of violence and refuses to have anything to do with any group or individual tainted with Nazi or fascist connections. LAOS is much more like the French Front National, a party with a violent history and one which has never truly distanced itself from its Nazi, collaborationist roots.

Like the Front National, Belgium’s Vlaams Belang and the UK’s British National Party and far right Tories, LAOS makes much of its opposition to the European Union. Yet they have been happy to join a government appointed by the European Commission and European Central Bank.

Their real motivation is hatred of working people and fear of the working class.  In Greece, they also do the work of a military which is allowed to continue to spend enormous amounts on armaments sold by French and American companies, despite, or possibly because of the fact that French and German banks are amongst the country’s biggest creditors.

So almost everyone gets what they want.
The EU gets to impose its rule.
The Greek fascists get their blood-stained hands on power.
The Greek military, despite the twin inconveniences of having no enemies and no money, gets to carry on buying lots of deadly, shiny toys.

Only the Greek people, who are told they can no longer afford hospitals, or schools, or pensions, and that they are no longer to be allowed to choose who governs them, lose out.

But don’t think they will be the last.

Steve McGiffen edits Spectrezine.