There is a saying: I don’t like what you’re saying but I will die for your right to say it!
I don’t like what Golden Dawn, the ultra right wing racist party of Greece has to say and I understand that they are arrested in connection with the murder of an anti Golden Dawn rapper but if the Greek people allow the leaders of this party to be arrested and kept in prison to rot because the Troika doesn’t want to allow political dissent they are as good as dead in the water.
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In what may be a highly destabilizing step, both political and socially, Greece announced this morning that in a shocking political crackdown, the biggest since the fall of the military junta in 1974, the Police had arrested the leader and more than a dozen senior members of the far-right Golden Dawn party after the killing of an anti-fascist rapper by a party supporter triggered outrage and protests across the country. Reuters reports that the party’s leader Nikolaos Mihaloliakos, spokesman Ilias Kassidiaris, two other lawmakers and 10 members were arrested on charges of founding a criminal organisation. They are due to appear in court this weekend to be charged formally. Police confiscated two guns and a hunting rifle from the home of Mihaloliakos, saying he did not have a license for them. As has been reported previously, Golden Dawn, is under investigation for the murder of Pavlos Fissas, who bled to death after being stabbed twice by a party sympathiser.
The crackdown, however, is a major problem in a country in which the neo-nazi Golden Dawn party is widely seen as the third most popular party, and this step, which will be largely seen as a politically-motivated ideological retaliation by the party’s supporters, will almost certainly unleash even more social unrest and instability.
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