Greece

Thousands Protest Obama Visit

Barack Obama began his valedictory world tour on November 15 with a trip to Greece, a country where working people and the oppressed have long suffered the devastating consequences of the Greek bourgeoisie’s close friendship with the U.S. imperialists. Despite a ban on all public gatherings in the center of Athens, thousands of leftists mobilized in protest on the night of November 15 under slogans such as “Butcher Obama not welcome!” referring to Obama’s war crimes from Iraq to Libya and Syria. The largest demonstration involved trade unionists and others affiliated with the Greek Communist Party (KKE), which demanded closure of U.S. and NATO military bases in Greece with the call: “No land, no water for the murderers of the people!”

The timing of Obama’s visit further provoked the anger of Greek working people because it coincided with the beginning of the annual three-day commemoration of the events of 17 November 1973. On that date, the U.S.-backed Greek military junta sent tanks onto the campus of the Athens Polytechnic university to smash a student occupation called in protest against the right-wing dictatorship. At least 43 people were slaughtered in the assault. Every year on November 17, there is a massive march ending at the U.S. Embassy to honor the junta’s victims and to recall Washington’s role in propping up the bloody military regime of 1967-74. This year, those who tried to march into the center of Athens on November 15 to protest Obama were met with brutal police repression unleashed by the government led by the Syriza party. Thousands of cops attacked the marchers with batons, tear gas and stun grenades and six protesters were arrested. We demand: Drop all charges against the anti-Obama protesters!

Syriza came to power early last year pledging to keep Greece in the imperialist European Union (EU) and eurozone, but at the same time promising to relieve the savage austerity policies imposed since 2010 by the EU, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the bloodsucking banks. While much of the reformist left internationally cheered the bourgeois Syriza, our comrades in the Trotskyist Group of Greece explained before its election that we oppose Syriza “not only because it is committed to keeping Greece in the EU, which is a pledge for more hunger and joblessness, but also because it does not in any way represent the interests of the working class” (“Greece: European Union Austerity Elections,” WV No. 1060, 23 January 2015). The TGG’s position has been thoroughly vindicated by Syriza’s actions in power, grinding down the Greek working people with more and more cruel measures demanded by the imperialists.

Today, Syriza is begging the imperialists and their banks to forgive some of the Greek state’s debt. They hoped that lame duck Obama would make a case for “debt relief” to German chancellor Angela Merkel when he stopped off in Berlin after Athens. While both Obama and the Washington-based IMF are pushing for debt relief (which the EU is refusing to grant), they continue to insist that Greece stick to “reforms” that slash jobs, wages, pensions and social services. These austerity measures have pushed unemployment to over 23 percent; more than 35 percent of Greeks live near the poverty line. After a visit to the Acropolis, Obama made the requisite paeans to ancient Athens as the cradle of democracy. In fact, a more apt reference would be the ancient Athenian practice of atimia, whereby citizens with unpaid debts and their heirs were disenfranchised; women and slaves never had the rights of citizens.

One of the starkest examples of the disenfranchisement of Greek people under EU and U.S. domination was the referendum of 5 July 2015, in which more than 60 percent of Greeks voted against further austerity measures. Yet, at the behest of the imperialists, Syriza forced a new austerity package on the country, claiming that the package was necessary to preserve Greece’s membership in the eurozone and EU. The reformist KKE’s leadership treacherously called for people to cast invalid ballots in the referendum, rather than mobilize its powerful working-class base in struggle against the imperialist EU. WikiLeaks subsequently revealed that Obama’s White House had a hand in pushing Syriza to capitulate to the demands of the EU and IMF. Days after the referendum, former president Bill Clinton was lined up to send a message to Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras with “an underscoring of the importance of staying in Euro for both geopolitical and economic reasons.”

In fact, “geopolitics” has long defined Greece’s subordinate relationship with Washington, especially with the U.S. drive against the Soviet Union following World War II. The workers and peasants of Greece had effectively taken control of the country after the occupying German troops withdrew in late 1944. But the KKE leadership handed power back to the Greek capitalists, who launched a civil war in which some 40,000 Communist supporters were killed with the direct assistance of British, and then U.S., military forces (see “Greece 1940s: A Revolution Betrayed,” Spartacist No. 64, Summer 2014).

Greece became part of the anti-Soviet NATO alliance in the 1950s. The U.S. continued to prop up right-wing forces in Greece during the Cold War, with the CIA bankrolling and engineering the colonels’ 1967 coup. Despite the counterrevolutionary destruction of the bureaucratically deformed Soviet workers state in 1991-92, NATO remains critical for the U.S. imperialists. In recent years, the Obama administration has been menacing Vladimir Putin’s capitalist Russia by strengthening NATO forces in East Europe.

Greece still hosts a NATO air base as well as a U.S. naval base in Souda Bay on the island of Crete, which is strategically located in proximity to the Near East. It is therefore no surprise that, seeking to maintain a stable NATO alliance, the warmonger Obama has pushed hard for Greece to stay in the EU. Our fight for Greece to get out of the EU and euro is an expression of our revolutionary opposition to imperialism. As our Greek comrades wrote in their newspaper The Bolshevik (No. 1, March 2016):

“The catastrophe in Greece is part of a worldwide capitalist crisis, which cannot be resolved within the borders of one country. In order to build a society free of hunger, poverty and oppression, what is needed is a series of socialist revolutions to sweep away the capitalist rulers, including in the imperialist centers like the U.S. and Germany, and establish an internationally planned economy based on workers rule.”