Greece in chaos: will Syriza’s last desperate gamble pay off? | World news | The Guardian
▻http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/29/greece-chaos-syriza-gamble-banks-closed-referendum
Greece under austerity has become frenetic. Athens right now is slick with perspiration; every public space is charged with hormonal tension and political disagreement – even the bakery where you buy your morning bread. The politics are brutal. Last week, stick-wielding anarchist youths attacked the HQ of the Antarsya – a far-left anti-capitalist party – because the latter had tried to make them pay to go into a music festival when the anarchists thought it should be free.
I’ve seen, in the bohemian Exarchia district, a troupe of black-clad 15-year-olds distrupt a whole street full of similarly bohemian cafe-goers on a Saturday night, using petrol bombs and flaming rubbish bins, simply because “creating mayhem” is their doctrine.
Athens has become, in short, the stage for flamboyant acts of self-dramatisation: sporadic riots, public kissing, street theatre and ill-advised scooter techniques. It is, to use a phrase Huxley once used about Shanghai, “life with the lid off”, and for the same reasons: “so much life, so carefully canalised, so rapidly and strongly flowing”.
Antonis Vradis, a geographer at Durham University who has studied the impact of repeated waves of unrest here since 2008, describes how the youth networks have been preparing for this week’s “rupture” with the ECB: “They are creating structures you can’t default on. Self-organised clinics, the social centres you see all around you. Structures that will help them survive.”