Evangelos Venizelos and Greece’s Jewish and gay problem
IT always comes back to the Jews. Evangelos Venizelos, leader of Greece’s socialist Pasok party and former Greek finance minister, reportedly, says the names on the Lagarde list are “Jewish”.
The Lagarde list is what the Greek press have dubbed a list containing 1,991 names of wealthy, Swiss-bank-account-possessing Greeks. It’s named after French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde, head of the International Monetary Fund. Evangelos Venizelos says he was given the list.
Venizelos got the “unpleasant impression that three of the names were of Greek Jewish origin”.
He spots only the Jews?
What is happening in Greece?
Laurie Penny writes of a battle outside the Chytirio theatre, where Terrence McNally’s play Corpus Christi is on show:
This is the opening night of Corpus Christi, Terrence McNally’s iconoclastic 1998 play which casts Jesus and his disciples as gay men in rural Texas. It wasn’t supposed to be the first performance – last night’s opening was violently shut down by a gang of thugs from the fascist Golden Dawn party, who warned that that “in any case where the religious sentiment of Greeks is insulted, the Golden Dawn will react “dynamically”.
“Dynamically” meant, in practice, that audience members and journalists were beaten, threatened and called “faggots” and “ass-munchers”, and the police – 50 percent of whom, according to some polls, are Golden Dawn supporters – allowed it to happen. Eventually the fascists managed to lock the actors inside the theatre and opening night was postponed. Postponed, but not cancelled – it seems that it will take more than the threat of getting their brains beaten out on the pavement while the police stand by and do nothing to stop this cast from putting on the play they came to perform.
Manolis V, a blogger for Lifo magazine, wrote:
“I told them that I write for Lifo, thinking that that would protect me. Instead they started yelling, ‘This fag works for Lifo, come and see this faggot.’ They ganged up on me, started swearing at me and pulling my beard, and one of the Golden Dawn MPs spat in my face. They were all around me.”
Corpus Christi director, Laertis Vasiliou adds:
“Then last night outside the theatre, it was like Kristallnacht, you know, during the Third Reich in Germany…The people who came to see the performance, they had tickets in their hands and they were beaten. They were beaten! They were beaten by these extremist thugs and they were thrown out. We couldn’t open the gates of the theatre. We did a rehearsal instead. We are hoping that the performance will go ahead tonight…
“You know, it is hard for a person to hear people calling his name and saying, ‘Come out you fucking Albanian, we’re going to put a stick through your asshole and shove it up through your mouth and mount you outside the theatre for the world to see.’
“I feel threatened. Wouldn’t you feel threatened?”
The show goes on…
http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/greeks-fascist-homophobes-have-gay-jesus-on-their-side
Posted: 15th, October 2012 | In: Reviews Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
