An anarchist protest like O Week with tear gas

“Anomia Square,” I told the taxi driver, as I jumped in after the fascist rally.

“What?”

“Anom-”

“Omonoia! Omonoia! It’s Omonoia Square!”

Alright. Clearly a common mistake.

Four hours later, there’s sirens coming from about half a dozen directions tonight, around Omonoia Square tonight, though it’s impossible to know what’s going on. Twelve hours after 50,000 people marched through the centre of Athens, and the whole city closed down, apart from the coffee shops (“are you crazy? Close down? On a strike day?”), and the stalls selling converter plugs and tupperware containers — the anarchists may still be fighting a running battle with the cops.

Or they may all be in Exarcheia, listening to Crass. There is no easy way to follow the Greek anarchists. Committed to actually causing some serious disruption, they do not tweet neither do they blog their explicit intentions. Greece has not slipped, not yet perhaps, into the post-political where communication substitutes for politics.

Though the global mainstream media has made much of a brief barney at the head of today’s rally, the centrepiece of Southern Europe’s latest general strike, there was really very little of it. As the columns of trade unions, workers and parties poured into Syntagma Square, a section of the “Black Bloc“, masked anarchists, all in black, detached and charged the parliament building.

It was never going to be a fair fight, since the thing is on a steepish hill, ringed by stone walls, and they were swept up fairly easily. There were a few rocks. OK, and a Molotov cocktail. Two or three, at most. A bit of tear gas. That was it.

There were two arrests, which was played up as “violence mars march” in the global media, but that played locally as a golden duck in a Sheffield Shield qualifier on a wet Wednesday in Launceston.

The radical left then detached from the main rally and came back up Venizelou Boulevard back to Omonoia. By radical left I don’t mean the Leninist-oriented Communist Party, I mean everyone who thinks they’re moderate sell-outs. The Maoists, the autonomists, the black block, and the Black Bloc veterans brigade, undertaking a program of expropriation and urban remodelling along the way.

Fashion stores mainly, most of them with a ridiculous urban guerrilla chic in the window designs themselves. About a dozen stores got the full treatment, the large rocks scoring huge divots that look like gunshots.

Media reports said that cafes were being raided. I texted someone, a New Zealander fallen among anarchists — her parents believe she’s doing an art conservation course in Florence. “No it was just supermarkets, fascist stores”. It was impossible to know whether she was joking or not.

The group I was trailing behind suddenly made a lunge sideways, up the stairs of the finance ministry, and there was a shower of breaking glass. Half a dozen BBs poured in, and a riot-police detachment was suddenly running up towards the area. Conscious that the “Melbourne-80s-now-fat” outfit,  i.e. black from head to foot, might get me caught in the round-up, I went to slip my press pass into a lanyard, before remembering that the anarchists really, really hate the press.

Across the street, kiosk owners were packing up their stalls in fast motion. There was the feel of a Warner Bros cartoon to the whole thing, an army of Daffy Ducks advancing down the street, Yosemite Sams frantically packing their mules.

The cops let the BBers run out of the building, unlike the British cops they prefer to keep things moving, it would seem, a wise move when your opponents use petrol rather than sarcasm, and we all continued up Venizelou. What was most impressive was the sheer number of them. Let’s face it an Australian Black Bloc is 12 kids who met at the Princes Hill High art therapy co-op, but the Greek equivalent numbered in the hundreds, with an elegantly dressed contingent in their 50s and 60s, faces covered by raffish scarves pulled upwards.

The mainstream of the alt march, the Maoists, various Synaspismos kids protesting on immigration issues, and several immigrants themselves — lean Somalis and Nigerians in threadbare Miller shirts, bearing handmade banners in five languages and three alphabets, demanding to be accorded their full humanity, that march coalesced back into Omonoia/Anomia, and the youthful BBers disappeared down side streets.

I went back to my hotel on the square and couldn’t get in. A place called Fashion House, an art hotel converted from an office bloc, with the long balconies covered in Warholesque prints of paparazzi shots from Who magazine or equivalent, it had a ground-floor restaurant that looked like the interior décor of 2001: a Space Odyssey, and enough exposed glass to keep this aristocracy at play for years to come*.

I waved my key card, but, as one of the half-dozen goons ringing the door said, hell anyone could get a hold of one of those. Since most of the other guests look like Moby, it seems scruffiness alone wasn’t excluding me, but a certain air of … well, of not being a scared vegan, I guess. On the strength of that, someone put a leaflet in my hand “σομετηινγ σομετηινγ βλαη βαλη ΑΝΤΙ-FASCIST ρηθβαρβ ρηθβαρβ amerikis square 6pm.”

This was great. This was like O-week, with tear gas. There was always something next.

“The fascists are rallying at Amerikis if you want to see them,” my contact texted. “I won’t be going near there.”

I watched CNN for half an hour in my room, which is done in an Aubrey Beardsley black and white save for tigers’ head lamps, giving the place an orange glow (no, me neither). There was news that the IMF and European Central Bank wonks had arrived in Athens the day before, and that the Fitch agency had downgraded the four main Greek banks credit rating, which will raise debt costs further, a measure that will make the situation worse applied because, as Fitch says, the situation is likely to get worse. The tigers watched as the wolves circled.

As Synaspismos had noted, the whole “crisis” could have been turned into a process of long-term restructuring if the EU could buy national bonds, thus investing in its own underdeveloped areas, and tying that investment to transparency and governance reform.

Instead, Southern Europe is going to be pushed into a deflation amid a regional and global recession, which will set off untold political consequences, of which the money markets seem blithely unaware.

But anyway the Fashion House’s pillows were so downy and soft that I was late for the fascists rally, and all the good seats were taken, the coffee shops around the square filled with journos nursing a slow cappuccino. The taxi had crawled all the way up 28 October avenue, the bottle-blonde Russian and tweenage African prostitutes of Little — well Little Everywhere, north Omonoia appears to be the crossroads of the world at the moment, yielding to another university district, graffiti running like essays along the stone building, a red banner eight storeys high hanging from a central building. Out the back window of the cab, you could see the Acropolis.

By the time we got there, it was clear that the fascist rally was a fizzer. Organised by a mob called Golden Dawn, who argue that the influx of immigrants is corrupting the purity of Greece (they believe the Ottoman/Albanian/Turkish/Arab/Greek/Roma people currently going under the name Greek are all sons of Aristotle), and they favour blocks of wood as a symbol, redolent of both the fasces and the executioners block.

Apparently, the police had decided that neither the fascist rally nor the anti-fascist takedown of it would take place, and they staked out several blocks of the area to prevent access. The anarchists etc went back to Exarcheia, and to wherever those sirens are coming from now, and the fascists went back to barracks.

Back in Omonoia Square, the last banners had been taken down, and the drug-dealers drifted back in. Three old men in neat suits were playing gypsy music on violins and a wheeled in upright piano. A Georgian woman, about four foot eight, was begging from her wheelchair, her trouser leg pulled up to reveal a calloused and poisoned limb, the flesh pink and bare where the tan skin had come away. Then the sirens began. Omonoia, yes, Omonoia, Omonoia. Not Anomia, not yet.

*After Waugh, the sound of breaking glass is the aristocracy at play. Interestingly the Greek word for “left” is aristeros, which is a definite improvement on the Italian sinistra, which we appear to have got stuck with.

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