Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Syntagma, Athens, June 15th 2011. How to put to words what we lived in this square, over the course of a single day?
A society in some spectacular turmoil; the most unusual of suspects have now taken to the streets. Syntagma was meant to be the epicentre of today’s attempt to block off Parliament as called by the square’s popular assembly. It was also the main focus point of the General Strike. At times, it felt like worlds in collusion: the naivety of pacificism, the fetischisation of anti-police violence. And around this collusion, a myriad others… In Syntagma today we fought off the Neo-nazis of the Golden Dawn, who had the nerve to show up at a General Strike. We saw the demonstrators’ clashing with police in the square’s South-eastern corner (for an unjustifiably long time) being followed by an astonishing, but only momentary, sweeping clean of the thousands on its square. People were trampled over tents, gassed like ants, fainting all over. By the time that the Delta motorcycle police tried to come into play, people had learnt the rules of the game — and they pushed them off. Twelve hours of nearly uninterrupted beating, tear-gassing, running, fighting. For these twelve hours, Syntagma compressed and showed naked the haphazard patterns into which people’s actions are cornered by this social order. A social order that is crumbling, an authority at loss, unable to manage its populace any longer. A regime that has fallen a while ago, only resting on the fallacy of some imagined national unity to try engineer change, to lengthen its days.
How can we possibly buy this? The hundreds of thousands who were out in Athens today already know: Syntagma was a storm; we are just waiting for the thunder.
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