Липовый прыжок ныряльщика (декабрьское восстание в Греции, 11 месяцев спустя)

The fake jump of the diver (December’s revolt in Greece, eleven months on)

How fast does time run? A bit of a silly question, one might think. Surely time always runs at a steady pace – the ticking of a wall clock testifies to this, at every single second. The passage of days, weeks and months; pages flying one after the other off a wall-calendar… The pace of time for ever remains the same. But bring to your mind the following image for a moment: think not of one, but of many wall clocks in the same room. Each of these clocks’ fingers moves either in their usual or the opposite direction, yet they are all moving in an accelerating, frantic speed. None of them abides to what was the previously normal time – something has happened in that room, a spark, that has made the clocks go crazy. The assassination of 16-year old Alexis Grigoropoulos in Athens last December was a spark like this. How much time has elapsed since his assassination? If we were to trust our calendars it has been just over ten months. If we were to look at the changes in the country though – and these are happening in all sorts of directions – it has definitely been much, much longer.

Since Alexis’ assassination and already from the night of December 6th Greece has been seeing an outstanding political polarization – the unabridged gap between the two traditionally opposed political poles (probably conservative/radical would describe it better than left/right) must now be at its widest since the Civil War of the 1940s. Those standing between now have to make a choice – and certainly it is not a surprise that most of the mild centre-politics scene of jokers, such as the social-democrats of PASOK that have found themselves in government since October 4th, jumped right into the security of the conservative pole.

The radical political pole in the country came out stronger than even before, already from the very first nights of December. This not simply in terms of its street-fighting power on the barricades set around the capital and other cities across the country but mostly, in political terms after the revolt. Eleven months on, there are obvious signs all around the country: an enormous growth of grassroots neighbourhood-based popular assemblies; guerrilla gardening reclaiming the grey Greek urban spaces; squatting of new buildings in central Athens and beyond, and a broader popular solidarity to all these activities. During the summer, the last prisoner of December’s revolt went on hunger strike and won his release, at least temporarily. Moreover, on a separate front, Greece saw existing urban guerrilla groups intensifying their activity and new ones springing up.