Fascism grows

In an empty belly. Keep an eye on Greece, because this is some scary shit:

The Golden Dawn office in downtown Athens is open three evenings a week. Most of the visitors are middle-aged women with dull eyes and sunken cheeks, faces too old for their bodies, hardened, tired expressions. More than 50 come in an hour. Quietly, they ask the bouncers, “Are they giving out food inside?” “Third floor,” the bouncers say; but most of the women come out empty-handed save for a mauve piece of paper with the Golden Dawn logo on it. There’s only enough today for voters from this ward; they’ll announce the next distribution on a poster, in the papers, if you phone.


Away from the door, Maria Kirimi tells me she’s been locked out of her flat with all her things inside since 29 July; the family are crowded at her mother’s now, seven people surviving on €400 a month. “We’re the living dead,” she says. Isn’t she troubled by Golden Dawn’s violence? “The boys in the black shirts are the only ones I’m not scared of. I feel they’ll protect me.” I ask her mother, old enough to remember the junta, what she thinks of their far-right views. “I heard Michaloliakos say on TV that their sign isn’t Hitler’s sign but a patriotic one,” she says, and then looks down at her feet. “It does upset me a bit. But I haven’t heard of anyone else giving out food.”