No Art!!

          In Greece it is now illegal apparently, to be standing still while socially distancing in a public square. Art students decided to act as a display of various paintings and artworks, standing in Syntagma Square hoping to interact with passers by, however their only contact was with riot police shields.

 

      See about: Police violence again in silent protest of artists in the Constitution [Video] Attack on artists in Syntagma: What really happened and Chrysochoidis' cameras did not show

        

March 24, 2021, Athens, Syntagma Square.

        While "the new National Gallery is brilliantly performed", students of the drama schools of Athens gathered at Syntagma and built our own National Gallery of the Square. Disguised as well-known paintings and sculptures, we asked the Ministry of Education and Science "If the theater could fit in the gallery, would you give it more importance?"
        By creating a living gallery, we exposed ourselves to passers-by trying to communicate what we have been experiencing absurdly for almost 5 months. Eventually, for its part, the state only sent the police to "contact" us, resulting in our violent repulsion with their shields and tear gas, as the Deputy Minister of Culture, Mr. Giatromanolakis, was busy with the inauguration.
      We answered, we answer and we will answer with Art, with our Art. If we want Greece to be more than a theme park of past cultures and greatness, if we want it to be a fertile ground that creates and continues to produce culture, the State owes the practical and direct support of the artistic community. We demand the state care that is owed to us. We demand immediate and clear answers to the questions we have repeatedly asked the leadership of the Ministry.
         Culture is not inherited, culture is conquered by each generation again. The students of Drama Schools ”

From: alerta.gr **********

Poor translation from the Greek, but the best I could get. 

Original Greek text HERE:

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UTOPIA ON THE HORIZON.

     People change, circumstances change people, our circumstances are changing dramatically, how will we change? We will change, how rapidly will we change, what direction will we look? Will we seek that Utopia? If not, why not?

Again, from The Greek Streets:

     ROARMAG.org presents: ‘Utopia on the Horizon’, a documentary for those who chose to struggle.
     In May 2011, hundreds of thousands of Greeks swarmed into Syntagma Square in Athens to protest against the firesale of their country, their labor rights and their livelihoods to corrupt domestic elites and foreign financial interests.
       In a matter of days, a protest camp was set up — organized on the principles of direct democracy, leaderless self-management and mutual aid — providing a glimpse of utopia in the midst of a devastating financial, political and social crisis. On June 28-29, during a Parliamentary vote on further austerity measures, the state finally responded with brutal force, eventually evicting the protesters from the square and crushing the radical potential of their social experiment.

     A year later, Leonidas Oikonomakis and Jérôme Roos — PhD researchers at the European University Institute and co-authors of the activist blog ROARMAG.org — returned to Athens to speak to activists involved in the movement and the occupation of Syntagma Square, as well as WWII resistance hero Manolis Glezos. What follows is this dramatic portrait of a country veering on the brink of collapse; and the people who chose to struggle in order to build a new world on the ruins of the old.

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GREECE BURNS AS THE BANKERS DEMAND THEIR POUND OF FLESH.

           Today in Greece tens of thousands, possible hundreds of thousands of its people have taken to the streets, In Athens it is estimated that more than 50,000 people crowded the streets around Syntagma Square where running battles with the police continued well after dark. Several buildings were on fire as darkness engulfed the city. At the time of writing tear gas and Molotov cocktails are criss-crossing the streets. The Euro-Bank and the first floor of the State's Accounts Office are ablaze. What I find more significant about this demonstration is that as there have been demonstrations across the country and the islands, there has also been many occupations by demonstrators the list of building is quite impressive;

          Protesters and strikers have occupied the following buildings and have transformed them into headquarters for the evening rally:

Athens Law School

Ministry of Health in Athens

Cinema-Theatre Olympion in Thessaloniki

Building of the Regional government of Western Greece in Patras

Building of the Regional Government of Ionian islands in Corfu

Building of the Regional Government of Crete in Rethymnon

Building of the Regional Government of Thessaly in Larisa

Rethymno City Hall

Holargos City Hall

Regional Union of Imathia in Veroia.

“In order to save the banks from bankruptcy, they’ve thrown us into poverty and unemployment. They sold off our country and all that belongs to us. Switch off your TV, take to the streets, for victory!”

          So while the expensive suits, without consulting the people, sit in the parliament building trying to do a deal with the devil, heaping more misery on the heads of the Greek people, the people have been on the streets telling them that deal or no deal they will not accept any more deprivation to protect the wealth of the bankers.

           We should all be out demonstrating in solidarity with the Greek people, what is happening to them is no less than the sacrifice of a people on the alter of bankers greed. Greece is being turned into a third world country and there is no guarantee that it will not come over here. Portugal, Spain, Italy, Ireland, Romania, and Hungary are all teetering on the brink, and when the chips are down the bankers will have no qualms about doing to the rest of Europe, what they are now doing to Greece.

           It was also interesting watching the BBC six o'clock news, and thinking of a previous post, true to form, the main item and the longest spot went to the death of an American singer Whitney Houston, with Greece and what is happening there a very brief second spot.

          Since writing this I have learnt that there are several banks on fire across Athens. How far will the bankers push the rest of the people in Europe??

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DEMOCRACY vs MYTHOLOGY:

THE BATTLE IN SYNTAGMA SQUARE.

        I have continually spouted that the deficit reduction has nothing to do with deficit reduction. It is all to do with saving the banks and the bond markets from losing any of their illgotten assets and rescue them from their gambling excesses. The billionaire playboys gambled massively and lost, so now they want the ordinary people of the world to pay for their greed. Living standards will be slashed, social services will be decimated, unemployment will rise, pensions will be plundered and all public assets will be sold off at bargain prices to those very billionaire gamblers.

      All this is happening not because your government wants to destroy the social fabric of the nation, but because they are being dictated to by foreign billionaires and as they are in the pay of those billionaires they obey for fear of losing their own wealth, power and privileges. It is an army of occupation taking over all the decision making in their target countries.

      It is explained excellently in the following extract from STURDYBLOG. Please take the time to read the article in full and spread the details as widely as possible. This is your battle, it is not just something that is happening over there in some foreign land. It is here, it is our struggle, it is your and your kids future.

     "I have never been more desperate to explain and more hopeful for your understanding of any single fact than this: The protests in Greece concern all of you directly.

        What is going on in Athens at the moment is resistance against an invasion; an invasion as brutal as that against Poland in 1939. The invading army wears suits instead of uniforms and holds laptops instead of guns, but make no mistake – the attack on our sovereignty is as violent and thorough. Private wealth interests are dictating policy to a sovereign nation, which is expressly and directly against its national interest. Ignore it at your peril. Say to yourselves, if you wish, that perhaps it will stop there. That perhaps the bailiffs will not go after the Portugal and Ireland next. And then Spain and the UK. But it is already beginning to happen. This is why you cannot afford to ignore these events.

      The powers that be have suggested that there is plenty to sell. Josef Schlarmann, a senior member of Angela Merkel’s party, recently made the helpful suggestion that we should sell some of our islands to private buyers in order to pay the interest on these loans, which have been forced on us to stabilise financial institutions and a failed currency experiment. (Of course, it is not a coincidence that recent studies have shown immense reserves of natural gas under the Aegean sea).

       China has waded in, because it holds vast currency reserves and more than a third are in Euros. Sites of historical interest like the Acropolis could be made private. If we do not do as we are told, the explicit threat is that foreign and more responsible politicians will do it by force. Let’s make the Parthenon and the ancient Agora a Disney park, where badly paid locals dress like Plato or Socrates and play out the fantasies of the rich.---"

 

       We have to admit that the world at this moment in time is owned by gambling billionaires, they buy governments and plunder the planet. We can continue in this fashion and leave a future of deprivation and corporate fascism to our grandchildren, or we can orgainse in solidarity with all the ordinary people of the world and change the way our world is run. We can create a world based on needs, mutual aid and sustainability, we have the resources, we have the ability, all we are lacking is the will to start that change.

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