Dec 08
12

Greek Rioters

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I’ve been following the coverage on the situation in Greece since a 15 year old boy was killed by an officer last Saturday. Reports indicate that two police officers were confronted by a group of youths that started to throw things at the officers. Things get a bit hazy from here, as the lawyer for the officer said that he fired a warning shot in the air and the bullet ricocheted and hit the teen. While that is a little hard to believe, that’s really not the subject of this article and I have to give him the benefit of a doubt. The two officers have since been arrested and are awaiting trial, with the 2nd officer being charged as an accomplice. These boys should have never confronted these officers and thrown stuff at them in the first place though. They put themselves into a confrontation with two officers that were outnumbered and had only their weapons to defend themselves with.

Soon after the incident, self described youth anarchists began rioting in various parts of Greece and have been rioting ever since, causing massive damage to stores and other buildings. They have been throwing firebombs at stores and police and erecting burning barricades in the streets. Complete lawlessness has overtaken parts of Greece by what appears to be the youth socialist movement. For those that don’t understand Greek society, it is mostly comprised of a younger generation of socialists and an older generation of capitalists, with the current government being pro-capitalist.

Overall, this appears to be an incident that these people have taken advantage of to justify taking to the streets and destroying anything they can, all the while calling for the Prime Minister to resign over the matter as well, supported by socialist party politicians. These people that have caused all of this destruction should be detained, charged, fined, and should have to serve jail time for acting like lawless savages. They should also have to personally apologize to the owners of the stores that they have destroyed.

If these people don’t like the current direction of the government, they should organize peacefully and vote the current politicians out of office that they don’t agree with. While fully accomplishing what I’m sure are their real goals of removing all elements of the government that aren’t in line with their socialist views won’t happen, they need to realize that they aren’t living in a country where everyone agrees on the same ideas and must accept that they have to live peacefully beside people who may not agree with their views, and that includes living with a majority elected government.

The only time I would give consent to physically overthrow a government, is if the government has acted in a way to severely infringe upon the rights of the citizen, which hasn’t happened here. We live in a modern world full of civil societies, I expect people to act in a civil manner.

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This entry was posted on December 12, 2008 at 3:41 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Posted in The News by Stephen 2 Comments

2 Responses to "Greek Rioters"

  • Jordan Amdahl says:
    December 14, 2008 at 3:54 pm

    I’m curious as to what the underlying cause of the unrest is, beyond simple differences in ideology. I know essentially nothing about Greece, but in some western European countries, the unrest of the youth population can be partially attributed to government policies which make firings difficult. This in turn, leads businesses to hire fewer workers, and in particular, fewer teens. Teens are unreliable, so any laws that force employers to make long term commitments with their employees makes teens much more risky to employ.

    However, Greece isn’t western Europe and, as you said, the current Greek government is largely pro-capitalist. If this is a different phenomenon than what is happening in countries like France, are there any structural features of the Greek economy or society that explain it?

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  • Stephen says:
    December 15, 2008 at 2:10 pm

    From what I can tell, the youths, who mostly attend college, feel that with a capitalist government, all of their safety nets are gone and feel that their degrees will be heavily devalued. This younger generation of people are heavily into socialism and seem to completely be against most capitalism. The underlying cause is basically differences in ideology and because the capitalists are in power right now. They are using chaos to try and unseat an official government. At some point the Greek government will have to crackdown on these violent protesters by getting more aggressive and arresting these people to hold them accountable for what they have done.

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