Italy is gripped by crisis and unemployment and with democracy in danger, but is not the only nation in Western Europe in these conditions. Greece experience a similar situation in many respects. Even though recently there the Socialist Party won the election, still isn't ended the social unrest that followed the death of a 15 years old student, killed by police on 6 December 2008. New clashes between students and the Greek police took place on November 17.
On the same day in which demonstrated the Italian students too, young Greek commemorated the Athens Polytechnic uprising in 1973, during the dictatorship of the colonels, when the military killed 24 protesting people. This time there were about 300 arrests, many more than the 2 students arrested in Italy, in Milan. But Greece and Italy are very similar in social and political terms.
Occupied for centuries by foreign powers, they have achieved independence during the 1800 with popular movements that have captured the attention of the whole Europe, but the ideal momentum of that time could not change the basic structure of society, which remained reactionary and feudal. The political and economic corruption and the widespread use of the unfair recommendations keep alive a system that humiliates and frustrates innovation and creativity and form an old, conservative, immobile society with perennial unemployment, precarious jobs, widespread exploitation of young people. These are elements common to both nations that provoke protests in both, simply because a large part of the Greeks, like many Italians, cannot stand anymore to live in the Middle Ages.
The Greek political scene, such as the Italian, is always dominated by the same people, and Greece has not even had a period of struggle against corruption as Clean Hands in Italy, even if in our country that time hasn't succeed in producing real changes. Greece from 1967 to 1974 also remained under the yoke of a bloody military dictatorship, a danger grazed also in Italy in those years. Today Greece has been hit hard by the crisis because, like Italy, has a vibrant and flexible economy.
As happens too often in Italy, also in Greece, there are always incidents of neo-Nazi violence, homophobic and racist. As in Italy, the punitive and racist attitude of the government and police toward immigrants has occurred in constant violations of human rights, beatings, murders, and the well-founded concerns of humanitarian organizations. Often displaced Afghans or Kurds seeking to arrive in Italy through Greece are rejected by Italian authorities, in violation of all possible international laws. Survivors of war and persecution in their country of origin, they face a long journey to find the death in Italy or in Greece.
Of course, Greece has just elected a new government and the hope is that it can heal the social tensions, that it will usher in a more humanitarian attitude towards immigration and that it wants to do something concrete to democratize the police and to overcome the economic crisis with serious reforms to fight the structural backwardness of the country. The same expectations cultivated by many Italians in 1996 and 2006, only that didn't went so well for us.
The two nations of the western Mediterranean that were the cradles of civilization in the ancient world and avant-garde of European freedom in the nineteenth century, now seem too often two nations without hope and without real democracy.
Francesco Defferrari
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