Austerity & Fascism In Greece – The Real 1% Doctrine

[Jan Klimkowski]

He shouldn't be too hard to find. We know where he works and we all saw it on tv. Or on You Tube in our case. Open and shut case for the prosecution.

Apparently not.

This fascist fool is claiming provocation.

Via FuckUBook

Golden Dawn spokesman claims he was provoked before live TV assault

Far-right Greek politician Ilias Kasidiaris, who has been in hiding since slapping female politician on Thursday, says he will sue

Conal Urquhart and agencies

guardian.co.uk, Saturday 9 June 2012 16.25 BST


The far-right Greek politician who slapped a woman and threw water in the face of another on live television has threatened to sue his victims, claiming they provoked his attack.

Ilias Kasidiaris, spokesman for the Golden Dawn party, has been in hiding since Thursday, when he assaulted the two leftwing politicians and stormed off the podium during a television debate.

In a statement posted on Facebook on Saturday, he said he regretted becoming involved in an incident that could damage the party's image ahead of the general election on 17 June, but his adversaries for his actions.

"The events that took place on Thursday morning on 'Antenna TV' were staged with the sole aim of provoking an extreme reaction on my part," he wrote.

"I am sorry that without intending to, I got mixed up in a case that has confused public opinion and was aimed at hitting Golden Dawn. I will go the prosecutor in person to sue those behind the illegal actions that have taken place in the last two days."

He provided no further details and no comment was available from Golden Dawn officials.

The scandal has added a further twist to the election, which could decide whether Greece stays in the euro after five years of deep recession and public anger over painful austerity measures demanded by international lenders.

Golden Dawn, a far-right, anti-immigrant party whose symbol resembles a Nazi swastika, won 7% of the vote in an inconclusive May election and entered parliament for the first time, pledging to stand up for Greeks suffering in the crisis.

The party's image has been severely dented by continuous replays of footage of the 31-year-old Kasidiaris, a former army commando, striking the middle-aged Communist party deputy Liana Kannelli three times.

[Magda Hassan]

Greeks protest against violent neo-Nazi MP on the run

Golden Dawn spokesman who assaulted leftwing politicians evades arrest as protesters denounce fascists.

• Helena Smith in Athens
  
• guardian.co.uk, Friday 8 June 2012 19.14 BST
  

Video here
Thousands took to the street to demand that Golden Dawn is expelled from Greek parliament. Link to this videoProtesters across Greece poured on to the streets of cities Friday night, denouncing the "dark force" of fascism as the spokesman of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party continued to elude arrest more than 24 hours after his extraordinary on-screen assault of two female leftwing politicians.
Nine days before fresh general elections, the fault lines in Greek society are deepening.
And late on Friday, as a police manhunt for Ilias Kasidiaris showed little sign of yielding a positive result, the divisions were on full display.
While anti-fascist demonstrators descended on public squares, supporters of Golden Dawn crammed into a hotel in Athens to hear the party's leader, Nikos Michaloliakos, rail against immigrant "scum" and the corrupt and crooked system that had brought the crisis-hit country to such a "dark place".
"There is growing polarisation. People are becoming increasingly radicalised thanks to all the rhetoric in the EU and here against the anti-austerity leftist majority and that is opening the door for Golden Dawn," said veteran activist Petros Constantinou. "We are demonstrating not only against the rise of the far right but against those who have enabled fascism to take root."
Constantinou, a tall, thin man who has spent years running an organisation that protects migrants, is, like a growing number of Greeks, convinced that it is the police who have facilitated Golden Dawn. "Without police cover and protection Golden Dawn would not have survived," he said. "And the proof of that is the failure to capture Kasidiaris.
"How is it possible that a man can do what he did in a television studio and yet manage to get away and stay on the run after a state prosecutor has ordered his arrest? The police clearly don't want to arrest him."
Dimitris Trimis, the head of the Greek journalists' association, ESEA, agreed. In a nation where physical violence is rare and public displays of violence against women even rarer Kasidiaris's assault on Liana Kanelli and Rena Dourou, during a live TV debate of politicians representing the seven parties that won seats in the country's inconclusive 6 May election, had clearly shocked Greeks.
All day Friday, TV channels had replayed footage showing Kasidiaris, a former commando in the Greek army, lashing out at Dourou first, hurling a glass of water in her face before turning his fists on Kanelli, the KKE communist party's spokeswoman, a former news anchor.
But his ability to evade arrest was entirely plausible, said Trimis.
"Suspicions of the collaboration between the police and Golden Dawn were confirmed at the ballot box in May," he said.
"As much as 50% of the police force voted for the party. There might be all the political will to arrest Kasidiarias. But there is a certain level of unwillingness among the police force that will stop that happening."
For years, he said, rightwing extremists had done the police force's "dirty work", mopping up migrants from the ghettoes of inner Athens in exchange for protection.
The spokesman of the Hellenic police force, Thanassis Kokkalakis, denied the accusations and said special units all over Greece were looking for Kasidiaris.
"Our belief is that he is hiding in the knowledge that the arrest warrant runs out at one minute past midnight. He doesn't want the media all over him, showing him in handcuffs ahead of the election."
Golden Dawn is widely regarded as Europe's most fanatical neo-Nazi party, going so far as to ensure that its emblem bears an uncanny resemblance to the swastika.
By playing on deep disgruntlement over the punishing income cuts and tax increases demanded by creditors in return for rescue loans, it won 7% of the vote last month ushering the hard right's entry into parliament for the first time since the collapse of military rule in 1974. Although polls have shown its popularity dropping to as low as 3.6% as Greeks gear up for a second election, it would be enough to allow the party representation in Athens' 300-seat house.
Emboldened by the growing divisions between left and right, rich and poor, Golden Dawn has resolutely refused to condemn or even reprimand Kasidiaris for his behaviour. A party statement said the spokesman had instead been provoked by the female politicians.
"Ms Kanelli got up first ... hitting him unprovoked in the face with a sheaf of documents," it said.
The denial fits in with the neo-Nazi party's history of terrorising women, including female journalists whose photographs and passport numbers have been published in the party's weekly newspaper.
With Thursday's assault quickly followed by Golden Dawn attacks on socialist MPs campaigning in northern Greece and leftwing students at Athens' Panteion University, there are mounting concerns that the darkening mood could be a precursor of worse to come even if Kasidiaris's explosive temper has shone a spotlight on the party as never before.
On television and radio chatshows commentators voiced fears that in a country where memories of the brutal 1946-49 civil war are still vivid, Greece could be hurtling towards a full-scale social breakdown sparked initially by its worst economic crisis in modern times and now exacerbated by the political uncertainty engulfing the nation.
"After months of extreme hate speech, violence has climaxed," wrote the analyst Vivian Ethymiopoulou in the mass-selling Ta Nea newspaper.
"From verbal run-ins and yoghurt throwing we have officially passed to acts of personal revenge and daggers being drawn."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jun...olden-dawn

[Peter Lemkin]

Far-right Greek politician Ilias Kasidiaris, who has been in hiding since slapping female politician on Thursday, says he will sue

This reminds me of the Woody Allen line that goes something like: "Next, I hit them in the fist with my nose..":kraka: A fascist and a liar.....the all too usual combination.

[Magda Hassan]

A google translation from French

Greece: the specter of famine

Thursday, July 5, 2012 at 05:00 | Read 8075 times I 13 comment (s)

GREEK CRISIS - BLOGGER ASSOCIATED

Historian and anthropologist, former correspondent in France for Greek magazine Nemecis, Panagiotis ... Learn more about this author

While the Troika is back in Athens this week, poverty is growing in Greece. Our partner blogger Panagioris Grigoriou explains how to organize what is now called the "survival" daily. A situation not without political consequences.

(Meals provided by the churches of Athens, late 2011 - PETER NICHOLLS / THE TIMES / SIPA)

Our world becomes more refined and precise in all its expressions as possible and practicable policy. Or rather acquires sclerosis crudest of the crisis, by normalizing.And indeed, this policy can be reduced by increasing the gains the most basic and essential, namely survival. Facing the fear of starvation, deprivation, and that of otherness, regarded as more threatening every day and frankly, to be felled. What remains: few social rights as a meager relics museum, in a world that no longer quite the social body. Still, left it welcomes the decision of a Chamber of Justice Athenian unconstitutional and forced unilateral cuts in wages and bonuses in the public, in violation of the European Convention on Human Rights and the Conventions of the International Labour Office. This is certainly a significant step, and the radical left Daily Avghi , dated Tuesday (03/07), does not hesitate to "salute the crack construction salairophage" . But for effectiveness in practice? Mystery still.

"THE HAND THAT FEEDS"

The dark side of force, the Golden Dawn wants to broaden his political base by holding the bowl of the citizen. According to the report dated July 2 at the site of La Repubblica - "In Athens, a market at low prices for those who have Greek blood" - taken over by the Greek daily Protothema , the far-right party is currently establish grocery stores in neighborhoods with citizens suffering of western Athens, like those already operational, created at the initiative of associations, the church and some municipalities. Moreover, meals distributed every day, nothing in Athens, will not count thousands. The peculiarity of this citizens' initiative of the label extreme right is explicit yet: "free offer, or sell at very low prices, food and food only to Greek citizens who can prove their membership in the nation by ties of blood " . It's not very original indeed, except that the political significance of this ethnicization of humanitarianism is immediately provided. Just yesterday, Ilias Kasidiaris, inaugurating a new local branch of his movement in the northern suburbs of Athens, has managed to gather a thousand enthusiastic people. Contradicting, Alexis Tsipras has already stressed the need for a contingency plan " in self-help and citizen solidarity and left. " The humanitarian crisis is at hand. Leftmost among paléocommunistes KKE, yet it remains doubtful: " I would rather die than accept food aid, there is the fight that counts " , summed up a militant encountered during pre-election rally party in Athens two weeks ago. In any case, no doubt that politics is done and will now also on the plate of the poor. Here lie all the historical force of this "policy can be reduced to acquire the most basic" . And thinking citizen will be reduced in turn - who can doubt it - the only remaining politically correct contemplation, suggests that now the"visible hand nourishing" . And it's not without reason that some columnists left recall that time the National Liberation Front (EAM) of the 1940s, a key priority of the political partisan army was fighting against starvation, while in Meanwhile, the occupying German authorities and the right-wing organizations of the time, did not neglect the political bias of emergency assistance. We're not in the famine years of 1941-1943 course. But the chorus of that old time gathered all the misery is increasingly heard ...

"SINCE JUNE 17, WE DIED"

On a different apparently related, Stelios Vaskos, native son, went to Munich from Trikala, bicycle, and the last I heard he would be on the way back, while the local Red Cross organizes a violin concerto. For a poster pasted on the walls of the Prefecture, the Society of Animal Welfare in the next town, Karditsa, sending out an SOS: "After the theft of food for our animals, mud and snow from last winter almost gave the coup de grace to our kennel, so many years of effort ... " . Some televisions national audience, reports showed on the hard life of animals in the memorandum: abandonment, killing, violence. It is probably for this reason that Monday night, July 2, Antonis Samaras and other heads policies of the coalition came together to finally find a parade in front of the Troika, expected within a week in Greece. In reality they have no room for negotiation and everyone understands it: "They apply the Memorandum, the Memorandum alone, we know. Samaras is a draw, also at the Brussels summit, there has not been a single word for Greece. It turns out that since June 17, we are dead " , heard to say in the cafe of the fortress city of Trikala. But the discussion did not go further. Because in some cases at all, probably because of the vote in favor of tripartism"Troika from within" , wanting to make the argument becomes more tricky. In such circumstances it is better to be silent. It is preferred to change the topic of conversation and discuss "the history of our glorious infallible people" , and other stereotypes such as a salve, recyclable desire in all coffee trade respectable. It regrets, however, the flight of young people, their new emergency emigration, and to close the discussion, some even reminisce about their old memories of the time "RFA positive" of Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt: "I was at my worker-bodybuilder debut in Karlsruhe, then I became a restaurateur, and after fifteen years, I returned to Greece with 800,000 DM to finally realize my dream: build a restaurant in the country and leave Germany. I'm about to go bankrupt now, there is more than a dream, but in less than a year I will retire " .

ALREADY PROVISIONS FOR THE WINTER

The fight grocer has already begun and will certainly be good times ahead in this country. Meanwhile, thieves who had robbed the churches of Milos just been arrested by police in the Cyclades, while at the same time in Athens, small posters addressing our friends germanophones, extolling the virtues of rooms for rent in Sikinos (a beautiful island, it's true). Aris my neighbor in the village will not go anyway, he spent all his money to buy nine tons of wood for next winter. It also increased its production of greenhouse tomato and waiting for better days. Getting ready already in effect for the winter. Each according to his ability, each according to need. Thus two popes in the neighboring department of Karditsa defrauded the Treasury, by falsifying forms for use in payment of pensions by the State of the prelates. Result (Divine): 700,000 euro between January and June 2012. Both men were indicted. And in terms of the clergy, according to some here in Trikala, political commissars of the local church would have suggested an informal online political unequivocal: "Let us vote and do vote Golden Dawn, this is our only way to be saved " . Other residents refute these remarks: "This is probably isolated cases. Because everyone here knows, the Church and the monasteries were in favor of a New Democracy MP and not whatever it is the former Prefect (elected). How many roads or other development of the sacred territory under control of the monks, were incurred during its passage through the prefectural? " During his time in a symposium organized by The Economist , July 2, Alexis Tsipras yet once said that the idea of growth was possible only after "abandonment of the memorandum, introduction of a Tobin tax, issue of eurobonds, and implementation of legislation regulating the banking and neutralizing tax havens " . This is perhaps a new form of struggle grocer to another level ... In the meantime, we leave the grocery world. Carrefour, for example, who sold his share to his partner Marinopoulos native. Credit Agricole also, which is selling its Greek subsidiary Emporiki Bank. French capitalism is about to leave us, because this would be rather Barony German, more it seems, from June 17 New Deal, or simply sharing the new Levant, who knows ...According to local press, expected in a few days the visit likelihood of the aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, who should meet shortly in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Charles de Gaulle ... Historically, the East is a mirage of the West ...
http://www.marianne2.fr/Grece-le-spectre...20398.html

[Magda Hassan]

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[Magda Hassan]

Laurie Penny: It's not rhetoric to draw parallels with Nazism

Actual fascists in actual black shirts are waving swastikas and murdering ethnic minorities in Athens

LAURIE PENNY


THURSDAY 30 AUGUST 2012

"After the immigrants, you're next." That's what was written on flyers that appeared this week in the gay clubbing district of Athens. As violence against immigrants and ethnic minorities escalates across Greece, supporters of the ultra-right Golden Dawn party have also begun to promote hate attacks on homosexuals and people with disabilities. These fascists march with black shirts and flares through Athens, terrorising ethnic and sexual minorities, waving an insignia which looks like nothing but an unravelled swastika, and declaring disdain for the political process. And yet, across Europe, they continue to be treated as a mere symptom of Greece's economic crisis.





Once, right-wing thugs only came out to attack immigrants at night. Now they do so in daylight, unafraid of the consequences because there rarely are any. In recent weeks, the number and severity of the attacks have increased on 12 August, a 19-year-old Iraqi asylum seeker was fatally stabbed by a gang on motorcycles just streets away from the Greek parliament and if migrants report attacks to police, they risk being arrested.
Not only are crimes against immigrants in Greece considered low priority, much of Golden Dawn's support base comes from police ranks. Exit polls in the May 2012 elections suggested that in some urban districts up to 50 per cent of Greek police voted for the racist group, which now holds 7 per cent of the seats in parliament.
The stabbings, beatings and motorbike attacks have become so routine that in many parts of the capital, immigrants are afraid to go out alone. While Greece has long had a large migrant population 80 per cent of refugees to the European Union arrive in Greek ports families who came to the country seeking safety are now afraid for their children. A recent Human Rights Watch report, Hate on the Streets, found that "national authorities as well as the EU and the international community at large have largely turned a blind eye" to xenophobic violence in Greece.
Turning a blind eye would be bad enough. But now the Minister for Public Order, Nikos Dendias, has pledged to crack down on immigration, which he described as an "invasion" and "a bomb at the foundations of society". Tellingly, Dendias also described the presence of foreigners in Greece as a more significant threat than the economic crisis a message he would no doubt plaster across the walls of Athens if he could.
Whipping up racism has become a strategy for diverting an embittered nation's attention away from the government and public spending crisis. Like many flagging centre-right administrations, the New Democracy coalition is mimicking the language of far-right extremists, pandering to rather than pacifying public xenophobia. With Dendias's support, the police are rounding up immigrants, arresting and deporting thousands in raids across Athens and nearby cities a programme named, with no apparent irony, after Zeus Xenios, the Greek God of hospitality.
Golden Dawn's surge in popularity and confidence did not come from nowhere. The party has been active for decades, but four years ago, before the first wave of austerity cuts in Greece, it was regarded as something of a joke. This summer, with its party at the table in parliament, members of Golden Dawn are setting up "Greeks only" supermarkets and distributing food parcels to the unemployed in Syntagma Square but only for "real Greeks".
The left does not need to point to the historic correlation between imposed economic austerity and the rise of fascism: Golden Dawn is making that link explicit, celebrating it. But simple willingness to capitalise on public anger will never, in any nation, make racist thugs the voice of the people.
As with many fascist groups, Golden Dawn claims to represent the marginalised working class. Like far-right groups across Europe including the English Defence League and the new British Freedom Party Golden Dawn declares itself the enemy of a bankrupt democratic system, exploiting for its own ends popular anger against neoliberal economic mismanagement. However, although it professes to stand against austerity, it has no economic project: its tactics are simply violent, divisive and nauseatingly racist. And the governments of Greece and Europe seem willing to tolerate this as the social cost of an ongoing austerity consensus.
The European Union was established after the Second World War to ensure socio-economic unity on a continent ripped apart by fascism. In the Greece of today, Golden Dawn is being treated as a serious political party, despite its members' eschewal of democratic process and tendency to assault rival politicians on television.
Long after the Nazi party took power in Germany in 1933, after the Reichstag had been burned and anti-semitic violence became official state policy, European governments remained more worried about the possibility of a socialist Germany than a fascist one. Almost until the Second World War, it remained more important to many world leaders that Germany pay down its debts. Drawing historical parallels with Nazism is a weary rhetorical technique that commentators on left and right have cheapened by tossing the simile into discussions of food labelling and over-enthusiastic traffic control. In this case, however, it's not rhetoric.
Actual fascists in actual black shirts are actually marching around Athens waving swastikas and burning torches, and maiming and murdering ethnic minorities, and world governments appear frighteningly relaxed about it as long as the Greek people continue to pay off the debts of the European elite. When the lessons of history are taught by rote, they can be easy to miss when most needed. This time, Europe must remember that the price of fostering fascism is crueller and costlier by far than any national debt.
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/com...92591.html

[Jan Klimkowski]

the Minister for Public Order, Nikos Dendias, has pledged to crack down on immigration, which he described as an "invasion" and "a bomb at the foundations of society". Tellingly, Dendias also described the presence of foreigners in Greece as a more significant threat than the economic crisis a message he would no doubt plaster across the walls of Athens if he could.

Spot the Facilitator.

The Beast is stalking Europe once more.

Sponsored by the Usual Suspects.

[Magda Hassan]

The malignancy spreads. And is allowed to spread. Google translation from a Spanish media.

The leader of the Nazi party Golden Dawn will found a subsidiary in Spain in November

By Javier FonsecaMore articles by this author





The Nazi party leader Greek Golden Dawn, sometimes also translated as Golden Dawn, Nikolaos Michaloliakos visit Spain in late November to inaugurate a Spanish branch of his party. The place in which to perform the launch of his party is the city of Malaga.

Javier Fonseca. 07.09.12. The emergence of Nazi Golden Dawn Greek party on the political scene in Spain Tenda his clone. To do their leader Nikolaos Michaloliakos Malaga will attend the November 18 and present to inaugurate his party's subsidiary in Spain. Journal has been told thorn in exclusive representative in Spain of the new party will have the same ideology and principles that its promoter is Miguel Angel Fontan, a notorious neo-Nazi living in Malaga and Valencia earlier groups linked to the same ideology as Hammerskin Patriot Movement and the Socialist.
Golden Dawn, succeeded against all odds 18 seats in the national parliament Greek and 6.9% of the vote in elections in June this year, and that kept the result of 21 deputies and 7% of the vote, and no hides his National Socialist ideology is absolutely. Nikolaos Michaloliakos Their leader is a former military paratrooper arrested numerous times for his activism ultranationalist and racist and fascist ideas follower of Ioannis Metaxas.

The participation of members of the Golden Dawn in beating of violence against immigrants and foreigners living in Greece, with the complicity of the Greek police, and proposals as to undermine the borders to prevent the entry of immigrants has made them jump to the front page of every newspaper world. A phenomenon that pretend to implement now in Spain.

http://www.diarioelaguijon.com/noticia/4...embre.html

[Jan Klimkowski]

This is a very important thread.

MSM is concentrating on the "imperative" for Greece to accept massive cuts in state expenditure and allow the dismantling of employment protection, pension rights and living wages. Simultaneously, MSM is ignoring the fascist beast stalking the streets of Greece.

In reality, Shock Therapy creates the conditions in which fascism thrives.

Those who conjured Hitler know the playbook well.

[Jan Klimkowski]

The Fascist Beast is prowling Greek streets, seeking its prey.

For those who know their occult history, Golden Dawn is a resonant name for a neo-fascist movement.

Greek police send crime victims to neo-Nazi 'protectors'

Far-right Golden Dawn party filling vacuum for those neglected by state after MPs elected to fight 'immigrant scum'

Helena Smith in Athens

The Guardian, Friday 28 September 2012 19.32 BST



Greece's far-right Golden Dawn party is increasingly assuming the role of law enforcement officers on the streets of the bankrupt country, with mounting evidence that Athenians are being openly directed by police to seek help from the neo-Nazi group, analysts, activists and lawyers say.

In return, a growing number of Greek crime victims have come to see the party, whose symbol bears an uncanny resemblance to the swastika, as a "protector".

One victim of crime, an eloquent US-trained civil servant, told the Guardian of her family's shock at being referred to the party when her mother recently called the police following an incident involving Albanian immigrants in their downtown apartment block.

"They immediately said if it's an issue with immigrants go to Golden Dawn," said the 38-year-old, who fearing for her job and safety, spoke only on condition of anonymity. "We don't condone Golden Dawn but there is an acute social problem that has come with the breakdown of feeling of security among lower and middle class people in the urban centre," she told the Guardian. "If the police and official mechanism can't deliver and there is no recourse to justice, then you have to turn to other maverick solutions."

Other Greeks with similar experiences said the far-rightists, catapulted into parliament on a ticket of tackling "immigrant scum" were simply doing the job of a defunct state that had left a growing number feeling overwhelmed by a "sense of powerlessness". "Nature hates vacuums and Golden Dawn is just filling a vacuum that no other party is addressing," one woman lamented. "It gives 'little people' a sense that they can survive, that they are safe in their own homes."

Far from being tamed, parliamentary legitimacy appears only to have emboldened the extremists. In recent weeks racially-motivated attacks have proliferated. Immigrants have spoken of their fear of roaming the streets at night following a spate of attacks by black-clad men on motorbikes. Street vendors from Africa and Asia have also been targeted.

"For a lot of people in poorer neighbourhoods we are liberators," crowed Yiannis Lagos, one of 18 MPs from the stridently patriot "popular nationalist movement" to enter the 300-seat house in June. "The state does nothing," he told a TV chat show, adding that Golden Dawn was the only party that was helping Greeks, hit by record levels of poverty and unemployment, on the ground. Through an expansive social outreach programme, which also includes providing services to the elderly in crime-ridden areas, the group regularly distributes food and clothes parcels to the needy.

But the hand-outs come at a price: allegiance to Golden Dawn. "A friend who was being seriously harassed by her husband and was referred to the party by the police very soon found herself giving it clothes and food in return," said a Greek teacher, who, citing the worsening environment enveloping the country, again spoke only on condition of anonymity. "She's a liberal and certainly no racist and is disgusted by what she has had to do."

The strategy, however, appears to be paying off. On the back of widespread anger over biting austerity measures that have also hit the poorest hardest, the popularity of the far-rightists has grown dramatically with polls indicating a surge in support for the party.

One survey last week showed a near doubling in the number of people voicing "positive opinions" about Golden Dawn, up from 12% in May to 22%. The popularity of Nikos Michaloliakos, the party's rabble-rousing leader had shot up by 8 points, much more than any other party leader.

Paschos Mandravelis, a prominent political analyst, attributed the rise in part to the symbiotic relationship between the police and Golden Dawn. "Greeks haven't turned extremist overnight. A lot of the party's backing comes from the police, young recruits who are a-political and know nothing about the Nazis or Hitler," he said. "For them, Golden Dawn supporters are their only allies on the frontline when there are clashes between riot police and leftists."

Riding the wave, the party has taken steps to set up branches among diaspora Greek communities abroad, opening an office in New York last week. Others are expected to open in Australia and Canada. Cadres say they are seeing particular momentum in support from women.

With Greeks becoming ever more radicalised, the conservative-led government has also clamped down on illegal immigration, detaining thousands in camps and increasing patrols along the country's land and sea frontier with Turkey.

But in an environment of ever increasing hate speech and mounting tensions, the party's heavy-handedness is also causing divisions. A threat by Golden Dawn to conduct raids against vendors attending an annual fair in the town of Arta this weekend has caused uproar.

"They say they have received complaints about immigrant vendors from shop owners here but that is simply untrue," said socialist mayor Yiannis Papalexis. "Extra police have been sent down from Athens and if they come they will be met by leftists who have said they will beat them up with clubs. I worry for the stability of my country."

Seated in her office beneath the Acropolis, Anna Diamantopoulou, a former EU commissioner, shakes her head in disbelief. Despair, she says, has brought Greece to a dangerous place.

"I never imagined that something like Golden Dawn would happen here, that Greeks could vote for such people," she sighed. "This policy they have of giving food only to the Greeks and blood only to the Greeks. The whole package is terrifying. This is a party based on hate of 'the other'. Now 'the other' is immigrants, but who will 'the other' be tomorrow?"