Ideally, we would like to send all of our readers seasonal greetings.
Instead, we would like to direct you to two web pages.
The first is the image that we would most like to share with you in these days of mirth and merriment - it is of the giant christmas tree aflame in front of the parliament building in Athens (see: http://www.daylife.com/photo/04m1b5A4rV4ik).
The second is a collection of images from the Boston Globe showing the uprising (see: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/12/2008_greek_riots.html).
And while all Englishmen, women and their dogs have fretted over the winner of some hyperreal extravaganza of dismal dancing, Greeks have had a proper message to give to free market capitalism, the machinations of the deep state and the utter lack of meritocracy in their nepotistic society.
When the students occupied the national tv station, this is the statement that they put out:
"Our action is the result of an accumulated pressure which is robbing us of our lives, and not only an emotional explosion based on the murder of Alexis Grigoropulos by the police. We are one more collective, a piece of the revolt which is taking place.
Against pacification by the mass media, we are carrying out an intervention-interjection in the flow of the program of ERT [state television]. It's our view that the mass media systematically cultivates fear. Rather than informing, they misinform. They are presenting a multifaceted revolt as a blind release.
They are explaining the social explosion in penal rather than political terms. They are selectively concealing the actual facts. They are representing a revolt as another spectacle which we should simply follow until the next soap opera begins. The mass media is daily turned into a means of suppressing free and public thought.
Let's organize ourselves. No authority can offer solutions to our problems. We need to meet with other human beings. To turn our public places, the streets, the squares, the parks, the schools, into places of unmediated expression. To find ourselves face to face so that we can transform together our thought and actions.
Let's not be afraid. Let's turn off our televisions, go out of our houses, continue to lay claim to our life, to take it into our hands.
We condemn the police violence, immediate release of the arrested demonstrators. For human emancipation and freedom."
Oh my gosh, I miss living in Kerkyra...
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
