Tomás Ó Flatharta

A shameful story from Athens – source : https://freedomnews.org.uk/2023/03/10/russian-and-ukrainian-activists-silenced-at-mera25-event/ also : https://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article65987; also

Russian activist Artem Temirov writes on what he sees as a concerning trend within the Hellenic left to fall into a knee-jerk “anti-imperialism” that is in fact anything but.

Author’s note: A significant part of the Greek Left for a very long time has been plagued by narrow anti-Americanism that has replaced genuine anti-imperialism. As a result of that even supposedly more moderate voices on the Left often fell in the trap of siding, even if in a subtle way, with regimes that supposedly oppose the West, regardless of how authoritarian and oppressive they might be. This has created an increasingly widening gap between this Greek Left current and leftist dissidents that come from countries whose governments are perceived by the former as “anti-imperialist”. It seems that the former are disinterested in listening to those who have come to seek refuge and avoid arrest and torture. There have even been recorded cases of representatives of the more hard-line pro-Putinist Left in Greece physically attacked an Iranian refugee at a public event, because the latter protested the pro-Putinist, pro-Mullah propaganda he was hearing. The case presented below, if much milder in regards the confrontation, represents continuation in this worrying trend of Greek leftists refusing to listen to the voices of those who have lived under the boot of supposed “anti-imperialist” regimes. This comes to indicate an ideological dogmatism, as well as a loss in trust in the abilities of common people to self-organize and initiate from below revolutionary change. In the imaginary of such leftists greater hope for social change is placed not on the potentials of popular self-determination and self-emancipation, but on foreign geopolitical powers. This must be perceived as drastic counter-revolutionary regression towards Stalinist type of thinking that can only nurture authoritarian logics.

Last year, my wife and I arrived in Greece. While I am a Russian citizen, my wife is a citizen of Ukraine. She left Kyiv a week after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and I left Russia a few days later because it became dangerous to stay there with an anti-war position, with both us always holding left-wing and antifascist positions. In Greece, we are living under a temporary protection program for Ukrainian families.