Philippe Legrain, “Eurozone voters have been blackmailed and betrayed. No wonder they’re angry,” The Guardian, May 15, 2014
“The European Union was often unpopular even before the financial crisis. But the long slump and eurozone policymakers’ blunders have created a political firestorm. Support for the EU has plunged to all-time lows. Most Europeans now associate it with austerity, recession and German domination, with constraints on what they can do, rather than on how we can achieve more together. Anti-EU parties, often xenophobic and comprising reactionary extremists, are set to do well in next week’s European elections. … The crisis has shredded trust in mainstream politicians’ competence and motives. They failed to prevent the crisis and have proved incapable of resolving it. They bailed out banks and their creditors while slashing spending on poor schoolchildren. They inflict suffering on others, while remaining largely unscathed themselves. No wonder voters are angry.”
“Timothy Geithner reveals Schauble’s plan to kick Greece out of the euro and ‘terrify’ the rest of Europe,” The Press Project, May 14, 2014 →.
Richard Falk, Predatory Globalization: A Critique(Cambridge: Polity, 1999).
Robert Cooper, The Breaking of Nations: Order and Chaos in the Twenty-first Century (New York: Grove Press, 2004).
Roman Herzog, “Man muss die AfD ernst nehmen,”Handelsblatt, Nov. 21, 2013.
Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government, trans. Lorenzo Chiesa and Matteo Mandarini (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011).
Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, trans. Zakir Paul (London: Verso, 2013), 42.
Jeremy Rifkin, The European Dream: How Europe’s Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream (London: Polity Press, 2004).
Cornelius Castoriadis, “Imaginary and Imagination at the Crossroads,” in Figures of the Thinkable, trans. Helen Arnold (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 146.
Kostis Stafylakis, “Rethinking ‘overidentification’: activist practices in the context of the Greek Crisis,” in MediaImpact: International Festival of Activist Art, ed. Tatiana Volkova, exhibition catalogue, (2011), 48. As Spencer Sunshine puts it, “The danger National-Anarchists represent is not in their marginal political strength, but in their potential to show an innovative way that fascist groups can rebrand themselves and reset their project on a new footing … Like the European New Right, the National-Anarchists adapt a sophisticated left-wing critique of problems with contemporary society, and draw their symbols and cultural orientation from the Left; then they offer racial separatism as the answer to these problems.” Spencer Sunshine, “Rebranding Fascism: National-Anarchists” The Public Eye vol. 23, no. 4 (Winter 2008) →.
Golden Dawn took part in national elections in 1996, receiving 0.1 percent of the total vote. But in the 2009 elections, it received 6.97 percent of the total vote. Despite the fact that the majority of the party’s MPs are under investigation for allegedly forming a criminal organization, the party’s candidate in the 2014 Athens municipal elections received 16.12 percent of the vote. As journalist Kostis Papaioanou, author of the investigative book The “Clean Hands” of the Golden Dawn: Applications of Nazi Purity(2013) and member of the Racist Violence Recording Network (RVRN), maintains, “In our country [Greece] there is an extreme-right tradition that goes back several decades, to the civil war, collaborationism, and the dictatorship. This world and its political offspring have been scattered among larger electoral organizations during other periods; they were adrift and didn’t have a prominent presence” (translated from the Greek by the author). See Kostis Papaioannou, “We are still at the beginning of the Golden Dawn story,” Propaganda.gr, May 19, 2014 →.
Stafylakis, “Rethinking ‘overidentification,’” 48.
Colin Crouch, Post-Democracy (London: Polity Press, 2004).
Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1991).
Slavoj Žižek: “You formulate your identity on the fantasy that the Other is the one who automatically wants to steal from you. These are the two basic fantasies: one is that the Other wants to steal from us our precious enjoyment, usually the fantasy behind the racist idea of David Duke—blacks, others, they want to ruin the American way of life. The other idea, like with the Jew, is that the Other possesses some kind of excessive and strange enjoyment, which is in itself a threat to us.” Josefina Ayerza, interview with Slavoj Žižek, “It Doesn’t Have to Be a Jew,” Lacan.com, 1994 →.
To my mind, the Black Circle project conceived by Kavecsprojects represents an efficacious effort of this kind. For information on the project, see →.