Greece
The BBC’s Malcolm Brabant has a nice background piece on the rioting: Rebellion deeply embedded in Greece. The end of the piece is a pretty good summary by a Greek:
One of the wisest observations has come from Nikos Konstandaras, the managing editor of Kathimerini, one of Greece’s more sober and respected newspapers.
In an editorial entitled “Anger’s teen martyr”, Mr Konstandaras wrote that Mr Grioropoulos’ blood would be “used to bind together every disparate protest and complaint into a platform of righteous rage against all the ills of our society.
“It will quickly become a flag of convenience for anyone who has a grudge against the state, the government, the economic system, foreign powers, capitalism and so on.”
“If Greece had already appeared difficult to govern, it will now be out of control.”
If someone is getting ready to throw a Molotov cocktail [petrol bomb] that is very definitely a “shoot”. If you had ever seen what a bottle of gasoline with a wick can do you would understand why.
When I spent a lot of time in Europe in the late 60s and early 70s Spain and Greece were under very repressive governments, but that is no longer the case, and hasn’t been for decades.
5 comments
Allegations that Alexandros Grigoropoulos, age 15, possessed a Molotov cocktail when he was shot and killed don’t appear very credible. For one thing, witnesses are pretty much unanimous that while empty bottles were flying, none of them were Molotov cocktails, they’d apparently been standing around drinking when the cops came by to harass them for underage public drinking. Then there is the question of where a 15 year old would get a bottle full of gasoline and the wick to put into it while standing in the middle of a street with his chums harrassing the cops for hassling them. Finally, while the cell phone video of the incident posted on the Internet is very blurry, as you’d expect of a cell phone video taken at night, it shows no flare of brightness that might be a Molotov cocktail.
I doubt we’ll ever know what exactly happened that night. I doubt the cops pulled out their weapons and started firing just for the fun of it, something made them feel threatened, maybe they even thought someone was about to throw a Molotov cocktail at them when they fired. But it doesn’t seem likely that there really was a Molotov cocktail on the scene, given the video that’s been posted showing no flames as you’d see if the cops shot someone who had a Molotov cocktail.
BTW, this shows a major difference between Greeks and Americans. Greeks have balls. Americans… meh. Not so much. They’d just shrug at a 15 year old kid being shot dead and say “he probably had it coming” and go back to watching their favorite television show…
The petrol bomb was part of the police report. Anyone you has every seen an instant replay knows that camera angle makes all the difference in what was seen. Anyone who has ever interviewed witnesses at a crime scene knows that every witness saw something slightly different. This is why there are trials.
Enforcing the law isn’t “hassling people”, it is what the police are paid to do. If you don’t like the law, change it. People complain about groups of people on the street, drinking and the police are sent to do something about it.
It takes no courage to be part of mob, and the rioting has destroyed the property of a lot of people who had absolutely nothing to do with the incident. They do it because they know they can take sanctuary in universities and the police can’t touch them because of the Greek constitution. That indicates that they don’t think the police are lawless, or they wouldn’t feel safe.
If the students would really like to be “brave”, they might consider voting in elections and putting people in office that they agree with. If they do that, however, they won’t be able to take part in these all too frequent bursts of destruction and looting.
As the editor says, the death of this boy isn’t the reason, it is the excuse. The reason is that the economy is in the toilet in Greece, like the rest of the world, and life isn’t easy.
I wasn’t there, so I don’t know what happened. If I spoke fluent Greek and had an opportunity to question the people who were there, I could tell you what happened because I’m that competent an interrogator. As it stands, it is highly unlikely that anyone will ever know what really happened.
Oh. the flaring of the wick – that doesn’t always happen. Sometimes the wicks burn with a very pale blue flame, rather than the bright yellow flame. It may have to do with the fuel in the bottle and the fabric in the wick.
When the glass bottle of a Molotov cocktail falls out of the hands of someone holding it, someone who just got shot, it’ll usually break and spill out its contents. WHOOMP! Not much to be said about camera angle in that situation, either you get a lot of flames as the gasoline spills across the street or you don’t. And yeah, I know about what happens when you drop a Molotov first-hand. (The statute of limitations is long over on that one, though, heh! Amazing how dumb I was thirty years ago…).
The cell phone video is from overhead, from behind and to the side of the cop car, the side that the kids were on, apparently taken by someone who was standing on a nearby balcony. There is a blur of motion, looks like the kids are in front of the cop car and on the driver’s side of the cop car approaching the car to rock the cop car or maybe smash in its windows with rocks or something, then “pop pop pop pop!” and the kids running (except for the one who is dead of course). Then the cop car sits there until other emergency vehicles arrive. So clearly a threatening situation for the cops at the time they opened fire, but no Molotov cocktail in sight.
Regarding cops hassling people standing on the street, maybe I’m biased by what’s happening here in San Jose right now. California state law requires no test of any sort in order to arrest and convict someone for public drunkenness, just the statement of the arresting officer that the person was drunk. We have now found out that the San Jose police have been making sweeps of various downtown blocks immediately after bar closing time and arresting any brown-skinned person they see for “public drunkenness”, including at least one person who hadn’t had a drink at all and was in fact the designated driver for his group. In areas of town where clubs are concentrated the cops are out there all the time hassling people for no good reason other than that the Mayor is a prude who hates the clubs and wants to put them all out of business. So when I see reports of cops in another club-oriented area hassling people who are standing around outside the clubs, I immediately assumed the local situation. Maybe that’s a wrong assumption. But what little I get from the eyewitnesses who’ve talked about what happened doesn’t contradict it.
Finally, regarding relative balls of average Greeks vs. average Americans, compare the situation with drug gangs in northern Mexico right now with the situation with drug gangs in inner-city Los Angeles or Houston right now. Mexican cops are getting capped left and right and won’t go on patrol without having an Army patrol right next to them. Basically policing has totally collapsed along the U.S.-Mexican border on the Mexican side of the border, the judges are in hiding or dead, the cops are turning in their badges and going home, or worse yet going into the pay of the gangsters, because the gangs are going to kill them otherwise. The gangs have even taken out entire Mexican Army patrols from time to time. Meanwhile, in Los Angeles the LAPD patrols everywhere and their SWAT teams have no problem swooping in to arrest major gang figures, while in northern Mexico those SWAT teams would be dog meat by now. I’m sorry, but when even our most hardened and vicious criminals here in the United States have all the balls of a castrati when it comes to taking on The Man (thankfully), you aren’t going to convince me that America’s students would ever rise up en masse to take on “the man” even if they *did* have safe refuge on their campuses…
– Badtux the Cynical Penguin
That’s right Badtux, Kent State, and Jackson State, and Columbia, and Berkeley, etc. never happened, it was all a myth perpetrated so the Baby Boomers could oppress you.
I wasn’t there, and I’m not going to make judgments based on supposed evidence in a digital format without some proof that the evidence is real and was taken when and where it is claimed to have been taken and wasn’t edited. But then I believe in the rule of law, not the rule of the mob.
I lived in Greece under the colonels, and it is sad to see what these “students” have done to the memory of the students who did risk life and limb to protest a repressive government.
The deal with rule of law is that you have to be careful to keep it, else you end up with rule of mob — except the mob that’s ruling has badges.
We’ve moved far too much towards paramilitary policing in this country where so-called “law officers” behave in ways which are completely incompatible with rule of law and completely compatible with rule of mob with badges. Unfortunately maintaining rule of law requires a general public that wants rule of law. Which we do not have in the United States. The governmental institutions necessary for rule of law — a working adversary prosecutor-defense system, working courts that provide trials that have at least some inkling of fairness (you can’t say that any system that requires you to fork over $100K up front to have any chance at all of staying out of prison if you’re prosecuted in federal court has anything akin to “fairness” in it), and, most importantly, law officers who themselves respect and obey the law — are of supreme disinterest to the average American, who simply want cops to go out there and be judge, jury, and executioner rather than have to bother their minds with issues of law and justice. So we’re getting what we want, good and hard, in far too many places.
You brought up some riots from the 1960’s, and police misconduct there. So yeah, it’s not a new syndrome. Mayor Daley’s thugs didn’t give a flip that network television cameras were rolling when they went out there to “beat up some long-haired hippy’s asses”, and the majority of Americans had no problem with that then either. Jackson State, yeah, another example. Nobody gave a sh*t about ni**ers in Mississippi gettin’ all uppity and getting shot up. Nowdays it just goes drip, drip, drip. A baby shot here. A grannie shot there. A mentally retarded man shot in the back there. A paranoid man shot in the back here. Drip, drip, drip. They deserved it, must have, or else the cops wouldn’t have shot them, right? So if I sound a bit cynical about “rule of law” right now, it’s because I read too damned much news from unofficial sources as vs. Officially Approved Sources, and what I’m reading sounds like what we got right now is rule of law in much the same way that Velveeta is cheese. Yeah, it sorta looks and tastes like it. But it ain’t. It’s a “processed cheese product”, a term for a something that contains less than 51% cheese. Yeppers, Velveeta is to cheese what the U.S. justice system is to justice. But hey, it’s what Americans want…
– Badtux the Cynical Penguin