Tag: communists

BR#12 – The Fratricides

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

The is something about literature that allows us to understand in a way our eyes cannot always. Perhaps it simply allows us to first see what is possible to understand, doing the hard work for the eyes and mind to follow. When in foreign lands I enjoy reading books by native authors or sometimes those by foreigners set in such places. The foreigners can frustrate as they show they have learnt another version of a place to you but this can be important to realise there are more versions than your own. Natives of the land you are in though will always understand their own people in a way you simply cannot. You only have a formative childhood once, an adult visitor will never be able to truly replicate such a learning experience and understand a people as their own. As I am in Greece then I shall read something Greek. While it is easy to fall for the classics, two thousand years later the Greeks are a very different people and with that comes a necessity to understand now and not then.

Nikos Kazantzakis is probably most famous for Zorba The Greek and The Last Temptation Of Christ, at least with non-Greek readers and likely because films were made of the two in English. The Fratricides deals with the Greek Civil War which took place almost directly after the Second World War between the Communists and the Fascists – the Redhoods and the Blackhoods. It follows the fighting over a small miserable village in the mountains of Epirus and revolves around the local Priest Father Yanaros stuck in the middle. He chooses to be neither red nor black and instead laments the killing of all. In his eyes we are all brothers. It is an indictment of both sides as they destroy Greece in the name of Greece and for Greece, as well as an indictment of the Greek Orthodox Church for the role they played and their heartless corruption.

Nobody is a winner in a war which is being fought for an illusion, fought for someone else’s power. It is ultimately an intense and sad story in which unsurprisingly everyone loses and everyone, including Father Yanaros, is broken and fallible in someway or another. He may be incorruptible but he too makes mistakes. Kazantzakis exposes the grim realities of war and especially civil war, the utterly pointless and divisive nature of such beasts. He deals with the real social and religious problems of the time with a deep understanding of both. Importantly while this may be set seventy years ago, if such issues are resolved through violence and hate, he makes it clear they are never resolved. Something modern generations could learn from and continue not to. It may not be from ancient times but like those it continues in what feels like another chapter in the archetype Greek story, that of the never-ending tragedy of life.

Fucking Fascists

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

I wrote a piece earlier about Greece and the current situation with the refugees crossing from Turkey and attacks on them by the fascists. Fascist is a term thrown around far too easily, I should know I’ve been one of those people calling everyone fascist for years, but in Greece it is genuinely a word you can use to describe people. Greece has actual fascists, everywhere does don’t get me wrong, but in Greece they are numerous, hold varying positions of power and the police are absolutely riddled with them like a disease. The piece I wrote earlier though turned into a rant because these fucking morons are arseholes and they piss my off. I’ve met them, not too often but enough to know how they think. Also Greeks in general can be quite volatile, the possibilities of what could happen in Greece worry me. They’re also just human and I love them for this, they’re genuine in their own way. I am really struggling to stop this turning into a rant again…oh fuck it I’ll just paste the first one below…

Greece appears to be fucked at the moment. Fucked doesn’t appear to be a strong enough word but I’ll use it anyway. Turkey has opened the gates to Europe using people for political gain and power, while Greece is attempting to shut them also for political gain and power. The Turks are exaggerating the numbers they’ve let through and the Greeks deny they’ve let through many at all. There have been videos online of all sorts of actions against refugees this last week. The Greek coastguard firing live rounds into the water near a boat they had previously tried to sink with a stick and turn over by ramming. When you have about seventy people on a boat designed for fifteen and only just above the waterline it is remarkable that didn’t happen. It is a shocking video and had it not been for political point scoring by the Turkish coastguard who are guilty of the same and worse, it would never have been shown. These things have been going on for the last few years in that narrow strip of water between Greece and Turkey but just away from the cameras. You then have refugees, NGOs and foreign volunteers being attacked on the beaches by roving bands of fascists, as the police look on doing nothing. The police themselves in Greece have an horrendous reputation for being indiscriminate racist morons who will only make the situation worse. New Democracy, the right-wing government in power since last summer doing all they can to attack left-wing squats, attack refugees and turn the islands into prison camps. Greece has a rich history of right-wing military dictatorships in the last hundred years and one thing they loved doing was throwing communists on prison islands to die, history repeats itself yet again. Moria camp on Lesvos has a capacity of three thousand but contains something like twelve thousand at present. I don’t blame the locals on the island for being pissed off at the national government for wanting to build more and larger (prison) camps on Lesvos, Chios, Samos and Kos but as per usual they’re going after the wrong people. The reality in Greece is that the fascists are real and they’re very much at the front of an angry populace. It is not hyperbole. Once there was Golden Dawn the far-right party but to win power New Democracy just appealed to the lighter elements of their message and then gave them free reign once they came to power. I remember when I was living there it was pretty clear that it wouldn’t take much for Greece to descend into another bloody civil war and with the right-wing violence of this last week just feels like another step in that direction. An incredibly polarised country in which they hate each other. Tourists always say about how nice and welcoming the Greeks are and it’s true, they are great at looking after guests, as well as their own families but outside of this they can be total arseholes to each other. Give them a divisive issue when they’re already struggling with no work or money and a country that is falling apart and doesn’t give a shit about them and the violence is inevitable. Who gets hurts, the innocent people once again. As the EU commends Greece for shutting the gates to Europe it ignores the abuse of innocents, of children being tear gassed, women being clubbed and boats being rammed. The Greek government has said they will stop taking asylum requests, I may be corrected here but surely there must be some kind of international law they’re breaking with that. But commend them our governments will. Commend the fascist thugs terrorising with impunity they will. Commend the brutalising of an already beaten populace they will. This has been a little bit of a unthought rant and I’m wary of doing so. But I also know people who have been threatened and attacked. This is a rant because it’s an emotive issue and it scares me and I worry about people I know in Greece. As I said a few days ago about the fascists in Spain, in Greece they have been and continue to be just as real. The Nazis were never short of collaborators, neither were the British and Americans backing the right wing in the civil war of the late forties. So nothing has changed in seventy years, it’s the same old bullshit as our governments feed the monster before distancing themselves once the job is done and letting everyone else pick up the pieces. Fuck them, that makes the Brits collaborators, the EU, everyones a collaborator. We’re all collaborating with right wing extremism because they’re doing in our name. How much do we love the EU now? Perhaps they’re not that perfect after all. Blood on everyones hands.

Good Versus Evil

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

Yesterdays piece is apparently the one hundredth on this blog which understandably I’m reasonable pleased with. There’s a good chance you’ll struggle to find many things I’ve stuck to for three months, especially as, or maybe it’s because, it has been a daily exercise. It seems only fitting then to go with the suggestion I made yesterday and discuss the concept of good and bad with this being piece 101, fitting indeed if you ask Winston in 1984. I’ll not be discussing rats in cages fixed to your face but more so the fact that although I clearly described something as good and bad yesterday I am generally loathed to do so.

It is an easy thing to do to describe something as either good or bad. It immediately gives the recipient of this information a general understanding of what we mean. If you call someone a bad man it is pretty clear that you are suggesting in someway they are responsible for something or have a character that could be described as negative. We have been conditioned by society through our education, our parents, movies, television, religion to have a general understanding of this notion. Typically in all these examples, in particular movies, although arguable they’re just the outcome of centuries of religious influence, we see the battle of good versus evil, with good usually overcoming some odds stacked against them to be victorious. In films it can be portrayed as the action hero overcoming a larger force of bad guys, usually represented by whoever is the political enemy of the time, think communists to Islamists to probably Chinese very soon. I haven’t read the Bible but have been brought up in a Christian country and therefore am aware of the general attempt to portray this good versus evil battle throughout the whole text. The absolutist necessity to portray Jesus as a righteous saviour over all the evil in the world, but he can only save you if you join him. It all comes back to power and contemporary politics too is riddled with this. Join us, we are the good guys who are fighting those other guys. They’re bad, it’s okay to kill them…and so on.

While all that seems pretty obvious it is still remarkable how successful it can be at manipulating people. We are so triggered by this concept of good versus evil that we fall for it in such an easy way. It is why despite the fact I dislike it I still used it in yesterdays piece as it was an easy way to get my point across. The issue though lies more with what is good and what is evil. People will always use the concept to manipulate people but we seem oblivious in these moments to step back and actually question what is bad and why that is a bad thing. Not only that but clearly one person’s good can be different to another’s, who are we really to say what is right and wrong about someone when it is clearly such a subjective thing. I am aware it would be better to discuss this after spending a few hours reading some essays on morality and ethics but like each piece I just start writing, wing it and see what happens. There may be a lack of depth to my point but ultimately with the knowledge that one thing can be credibly both good and bad to different people, as well as everything in between, how can we legitimately label something so without giving it real thought. It is such a simplified take on the world and that makes it easy to manipulate of course, but for this reason we must be so careful about throwing these two words around. Really who am I to say somethings bad; I’m no god, I barely even understand ethics and like everyone am prone to bouts of hypocrisy. To know ones fallible yet proceed with authority anyway, oh to be human, oh to misunderstand balance.

A Manipulated Mass

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

It is very hard in this day and age to know what is true and what isn’t. The internet is arguably the fount of all knowledge, and when we’re not looking at pictures of cats and stalking ex-partners we are quite simply blessed with the opportunity to discover – or to google which is a disturbing example of the evolution of language – the answer to any question we may want to ask. The problem here is that it seems very easy to get a variety of answers to one question. On the one hand that is great, difference of opinion will further debate and understanding within and of society. On the other though you have powerful financial interests manipulating which arguments are most easily accessible, the only inevitability is that debate becomes inaccurate and corrupted. There are few long term positives of such things unless you are the one doing the corrupting.

While this is all seemingly quite obvious, what appears to be the outcome are articles using public opinion to validate the argument, angle or narrative they are attempting to push. For example if you want to push a news story about public perception of an issue, it is very simple to go on the idiots validator – Twitter – select a few tweets – cringe – and post them within your article as proof of your argument. While it may seem obvious that people will dismiss the arguments of morons or people who are clearly not experts in the field – a corruptible concept too – people for one psychological reason or another seem unconsciously more likely to agree with the article if they believe it to be the majority opinion.

I saw an article recently describing how the left have disowned George Orwell because it had come out that he gave the names of suspected communists to the British government in 1949. The article was backed up by a few angry tweets criticising and disavowing him from people who clearly missed the point and didn’t understand the background to why he may have done that. This was in The Independent too which is a left wing British newspaper but it was total bullshit being validated by total bullshit.

The same could be done on the news. When a segment presents interviews with three people in the street for example, we often see two or three with one opinion that supports the overall message and one who doesn’t, how do we know that they only ever interviewed them and not ten others. The point is the media is as corrupt and untrustworthy as the politicians have always been yet we take what they say at face value. With eighty-three percent of mainstream media in the UK owned by three corporations, they can pretty much convince anybody of anything with enough coverage. They can be corrupt and it doesn’t matter. We have vaults of information online but who really looks beyond supposedly trustworthy news sources such as the BBC, or their equivalent in other countries and cultures.

Ultimately we’re as much a pack animal as dogs and if we believe the majority think something we’re more likely to go with it to remain part of the group. If you have such an array of opinions all appearing to validate something it has never been so easy to convince people even when it is in your interests and actively against theirs. The internet is arguable the greatest invention since the printing press, and with such knowledge comes the opportunity for rebellion and sedition live never before. Unfortunately it also seems to bring rise to the polarising and manipulating of peoples the world over. It is though early days, the internet is but a baby in the long history of information. There is still time yet.