Greece's Golden Dawn leader Nikolaos Mihaloliakos held

[JackRiddler]

36. Let's be clear, it's not policy, it's a criminal case.

And a long overdue one. Of course it is also policy in the sense that the N.D. government is playing it as a shift to grab the center while reabsorbing the G.D. vote.

You are consistently missing what happened, however, when you write: "The government moved on them after the murder because it was politically convenient, not because they give a damn." I don't agree at all. I refuse to downplay the role of the people. The government was forced by the popular response and the revelations to act. The latter provided the evidence of a criminal organization engaged in multiple assaults and killings.

That is what made it "politically convenient." It could have brought them down, in combination with the rest of the Greek situation. This government has been unstable during its entire tenure, just like the last two Greek governments. (They lost one junior partner in June and barely have a majority, with PASOK possibly in its final death throes.)

Of course the government doesn't give a damn! This is a victory of the people. Forced to act, the government is now claiming full ownership of it as policy, acting with vigor and playing the game to their advantage without scruples. This is to be expected from a fairly canny and authoritarian government that was already playing political "shock and awe" in their other policies (immigrant concentration camps, ERT shutdown, forced-work orders on strikers, arrests of journalists demanding their sources, etc.).

My "approval of the arrests" does not rest on the idea that justice will be done. It may not be, unfortunately. The arrests were something that should have started happening several murders ago. These are not just scumbags with an ugly line, they were planning and executing murders on the street.