Greece’s Golden Dawn leaders sentenced to 13 years in jail

Financial Times, 14 Oct

Neo-Nazi party heads ran criminal organisation responsible for murder and attacks on migrants on trade unionists.

The leaders of Greece’s neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn received 13-year jail sentences on Wednesday for running a criminal organisation responsible for the stabbing to death of a Greek rap artist and violent attacks against migrant workers and leftwing trade unionists.

       
        Nikos Michaloliakos

A special appeals court on Wednesday sentenced Nikos Michaloliakos, the party’s founder, and six other ex-lawmakers who formed its core leadership following a five-and-a half year trial. None of the seven was present in court as all had boycotted the proceeding in protest except when they were called to testify. 

Giorgos Roupakias, a Golden Dawn supporter found guilty of stabbing Pavlos Fyssas, a popular leftwing rapper, in a street brawl in 2013 in a low-income Athens suburb, received a life sentence for murder.

Ioannis Lagos, a member of the core group who was elected to the European parliament last year after founding his own political party, dismissed his conviction in a series of tweets, saying he intended to “continue on the same [political] path”.

The group’s requests for leniency on grounds that none had a previous criminal record were rejected by the three judges who presided over the marathon criminal trial which included the examination of some 250 witnesses and frequent delays caused by procedural objections from the defendants’ lawyers. 

“This was a political trial . . . the leadership of Golden Dawn received heavy sentences while not being accused of specific crimes. The party is not a criminal organisation, it is a one of national resistance,” Mr Michaloliakos said after the sentences were handed down.

Another 49 Golden Dawn members and supporters were sentenced to between five and 10 years for belonging to a criminal organisation. It was not immediately clear how many of those sentenced would remain free pending appeal.

“Golden Dawn is finished but what they represented continues, whenever attacks occur against refugees or there is discrimination or bullying in neighbourhoods and schools,” said former prime minister Alexis Tsipras, leader of the leftwing party Syriza. 

Mr Michaloliakos started his political career as the leader of a pro-junta youth group during Greece’s military dictatorship in the 1970s. After years on the fringes of Greek politics he led Golden Dawn into parliament at the height of the country’s economic crisis in 2012, winning almost 7 per cent of the vote in two successive elections that year.

He rapidly became the country’s most controversial politician because of Golden Dawn’s extremist rhetoric, fascist-style rallies and tolerance of violence by its members.

Yet the governing right-of-centre New Democracy party considered co-operation with Golden Dawn as it struggled to counter a surge in support for Syriza.

The New Democracy government arrested Golden Dawn’s leaders and party bosses in Athens immediately after Mr Fyssas was killed. Mr Michaloliakos spent 18 months in pre-trial detention before being allowed to resume his role in parliament — until the party lost all its seats at a general election last year.

Despite its neo-Nazi ideology, Golden Dawn has not been banned. An opinion poll published after the convictions were announced last week showed that 20 per cent of respondents believed there was a place in Greek politics for a “sober and serious” far-right party.

Nationalism: Understanding Our Struggle by Keith Woods

Kemi Badenoch, a Nigerian immigrant and Tory post girl for diversity, now serving as Equalities Minister in Boris Johnson’s government, has been in the news for her response in the Commons two days ago to a demand from Dawn Butler, Labour MP and the daughter of Jamaican immigrants, for the decolonisation of the school history curriculum.  Here is the guts of her reply:

Of course, the media are very excited about a black woman minister tearing into BLM; and it is good to see.  But the interesting thing is this passage at the end of the recording:

“Any school which teaches these elements of critical race theory as fact, or which promotes partisan political views such as defunding the police without offering a balanced treatment of opposing views, is breaking the law.

No doubt she is referring to one of the Education Acts.  But from a nationalist perspective it is simple racism to speak of, in Ms Badenoch’s words, “whiteness as oppression”.  Any generalised, race-based accusation directed at our ethnic kind is simple racism.  The practise of anti-racism itself is racism.

There is a primary and universal principle at issue here, which is that all peoples grouped by kinship naturally self-identify, and naturally express self-interest and self-concern.  In fact, British law does not disqualify any ethnic or racial group from so doing.  It is silent on the matter, seeking only to defend all groups defined by their “protected characteristics”, one of which, importantly, is national origin.

Our defining characteristic is not solely that we possess the physical trait of white skin by way of our northern European descent.  Our identity as the native ethny of the land which bears our name is also our defining characteristic of origin.  It is a proving point of difference to every other group in our home, white and non-white, for it automatically orients our self-interest and self-concern as qualities of a people equipped by Nature with the right, unique to us here, of defence of life and land.  It cannot be otherwise.  British law, in protecting our national origin, cannot but protect that orientation or it is to void it of meaning.  Nowhere does British law void our native status of meaning.  The principle of non-discrimination itself cannot void the native status of its meaning, for that would be discriminatory and therefore fall foul of itself.

British law does not void our native ethnic self-interest and self-concern of its meaning.  Therefore, attacks on our nationalism as the expression of that meaning (ie, as defence of our people against non-national groups colonising our home) cannot be lawfully made or communicated.

Discrimination against our native status is possible only because of a quite unexamined and one-eyed presumption that our act of self-defence is illegitimate merely because it expresses in opposition to the other groups who have come into our home over the past seven decades.  Those groups, by their acts of colonisation, initiate the oppositional relationship.  No native people, ensconced in its own home, can be held uniquely responsibly for the oppositional character of the relationship between coloniser and colonised.  It is the party which is offended against.

The moment is nearing when we must establish if the existing protections under law, ie, those parts of legislation dating from the 2010 Equalities Act back to the 1986 Public Order Act which are relevant and have force, apply equally to all.  If so, we must recover our right to speak and act in our own group interest, free of untrue and hateful accusations, like any other group.  The fact that, as the natives here, our people’s ethnic interests run contrary to the interests of non-native groups and to government policy on race, immigration and population is completely immaterial, and cannot constitute a lawful basis for discrimination against advocacy of our ethnic interests.

If action is taken one day and succeeds, the results will be felt across the polity, turning the tables completely on anti-racists, breaking their one weapon into small pieces, making us respectable at a stroke, and leaving them to stew in their own inexpressible hatreds.  The press will also be unable to mechanically employ the use of the same hateful and untrue terms, and could additionally be in breach of libel law if it does so.

I understand that the following is reported by the DT, raising the question as to whether the Met is rowing back on its persecution of David Starkey and Darren Grimes:

Police set to review investigation into Darren Grimes and David Starkey over YouTube comments
Scotland Yard has said a senior officer would be looking at the investigation to see if it was “proportionate”

The Metropolitan Police is reviewing its investigation into Darren Grimes and Dr David Starkey in connection with allegations of stirring up racial hatred, it can be revealed.

Scotland Yard has contacted both the conservative commentator and the historian to inform them a senior officer would be looking at the investigation to see if it was “proportionate” and that they are not required to attend a police station at this time.

The decision to investigate Mr Grimes for broadcasting an interview with Dr Starkey has led to widespread condemnation since it was revealed by the Daily Telegraph last week.

In the interview published on Mr Grime’s Reasoned UK YouTube channel on June 30 the historian said: “Slavery was not genocide, otherwise there wouldn’t be so many damn blacks in Africa or in Britain would there?”

... Mr Grimes told the Telegraph: “This vexatious claim against me should never have been investigated. At a time when many have been propelled into misery, it is a gross abuse of taxpayer cash and police time.

“I will be requesting a copy of the CPS advice that led to the intervention irrespective of whether they proceed or not, the dangerous precedent of broadcasters and journalists facing arrest and up to seven years imprisonment for ‘stirring up’ racial hatred as a consequence of what a guest said during an interview must not stand.

“We need an urgent review of the unprecedented use of this legislation to attack press freedom.”

A source close to Dr Starkey said “David’s supporters are delighted that common sense has at least temporarily prevailed”

One suspects that conservatives, along with reactionary historians, will sleep safer in the knowledge that the Metropolitan Police will probably not come knocking on their door because some slimy little pencil-neck in a Liverpool bedsit has exercise his citizen’s right to complain about “racism”.  Nationalists, however ...

The DT reports on an ONS survey into the reducing pay-gap between “white” people and “BAME ethnic minorities” (they are not ethnic minorities, of course, because they are foreign colonisers; and we are not merely white, we are the native British).

The pay gap between white and ethnic minority employees continues to fall and has reached its smallest level for seven years, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has found. Researchers found there was a 2.3 per cent gap in earnings between white and ethnic minority employees in England and Wales in 2019.

White employees earned on average £12.40 per hour, compared with £12.11 for those in 17 ethnic minority groups on average.

... Ethnic minority employees aged 30 and over tend to earn less than their white counterparts, while those aged 16-29 tend to earn more, the ONS research showed.

This year, the ONS found that Chinese, white Irish, white and Asian and Indian ethnicities earned more on average than white British employees between 2012 and 2019. However, most ethnic groups, including Bangladeshi, Pakistani and Arab, consistently earned less than white British employees over the same period.

The biggest gaps were between Pakistani workers (£10.55 per hour) and white British (£12.49 per hour), while white Irish workers earned £17.55 per hour on average.

Taking into account factors such as age, sex, marital status, children, qualifications, country of birth and location of employees narrows the gap for many ethnic groups, the ONS found.

... It found the gap is larger for men than women, although men earn more than women across most ethnic groups. In 2019, ethnic minority men earned 6.1 per cent less than white men, while the hourly pay of ethnic minority women was 2.1% more than white women.

That difference was most pronounced in London, at 23.8 per cent, and smallest in Wales, at 1.4 per cent, the ONS, which analysed data on earnings from the Annual Population Survey, said.

“It almost passes belief that at this moment 20 or 30 additional immigrant children are arriving from overseas in Wolverhampton alone every week - and that means 15 or 20 additional families a decade or two hence. Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre. So insane are we that we actually permit unmarried persons to immigrate for the purpose of founding a family with spouses and fiancés whom they have never seen.”
- Enoch Powell, from his famous speech to a Conservative Association meeting in Birmingham on April 20 1968.

“Must be seen to be doing something” ... the permanent response to crisis of an uncaring overclass worried, primarily, for its own appearance of competence.  And why not?  What other justification but good appearances ... the respectability of incumbency ... does it have to exist?

NHS Test and Trace has been recording the locations at which infected people met close contacts who were later found to have the virus. Overwhelmingly, that was in the home.

Figures released last Friday in the weekly Public Health England (PHE) surveillance report show that more than three-quarters of people – 75.3 per cent – contacted by tracers came into contact with an infected person either in their own home or someone else’s.

In the report, PHE even accepts that “this is the potential exposure setting”.

Only around five per cent reported close contact in a “leisure or community” setting – and that category bundled together pubs, restaurants, places of worship, celebrations, entertainment, organised trips and community activities.

... What seems to be happening is that the Government does not want to shut schools, universities and workplaces and cannot do anything about household transmissions, even though these are by far the biggest drivers of disease.

DT article by Science Editor Sarah Napton

Big Tech and Color Revolutions with Allum Bokhari and Darren Beattie

Note, in their discussion of the color revolutions theory, they are emphatic to stress their belief that the “left / right ” divide is obsolete, but they are failing to recognize that the Marxist, international, anti-national left merges with right wing elitism and liberalism license as pitted against the unionization of ethnonationalism.

Furthermore, as neo-liberal sources (a step in the process toward the Marxist international, as far as those types see it) are behind the color revolutions, it is problematic indeed, as a Russian puppet dictatorship such as Lukashenko’s should be replaced, not with neo-liberalism, but with a Belarusian, ethnonational leadership.

Same issue in this next discussion - Michael Anton | The BLM Movement and Civil Rights | Constitution Day Panel - an otherwise brilliant analysis, but hopefully people will begin to see, along with me, that if the Powers That Be can’t get you to argue against their marketed characterology of the Left (in order to distract you from the fact that you should be adopting a left ethonationalist concept) then they will try to put across the notion that the “left / right ” distinction is an obsolete concept (in order to distract you from the fact that you should be adopting a left ethonationalist concept):

Michael Anton | The BLM Movement and Civil Rights | Constitution Day Panel

Lots of talk of “the left” - by which, as we know, if we are to be generous to them, they mean the internationalist, anti-White Left - which they explain has a heck of a shake-down racket going on, with the BLM the shock troops on the ground, invoking massive funding from the corporations…