From the Financial Times:
Greece’s neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party has penetrated the country’s police force, set up caches of heavy weapons in remote locations and trained its recruits to carry out brutal attacks against immigrants and political opponents, according to the country’s top security official.
Nikos Dendias, minister of public order and civil protection, said in an interview with the Financial Times that Golden Dawn’s cult of extreme violence was “unique” among European far-right groups.
The Ancient Greek leaders stressed things like prudent philosophy, intellectual inquiry, and the importance of reason. Modern Greeks – along with the governments of most European nations – spend money they don’t have on things they don’t need at rates they can’t maintain. The party is over for big-government socialism, but the economic (and political) nightmare of recession, depression and an increasingly unruly citizenry has just begun.
And what type of clientele comprise the membership of a group like the Golden Dawn? What do many of those who join share in common?
Analysts say Golden Dawn’s voter base is mainly among people hit hard by the country’s economic crisis, both young Greeks trying to join the labour market and the over-40s, who feel angry and frustrated at losing their jobs.
A refrain regularly repeated by proponents of big government and wealth re-distribution is that “poverty causes violence.” To some extent, I agree with this sentiment. Many of the world’s poorest regions give rise to some of the most dangerous killers. It takes little more than common sense to see that when you leave people – especially young men – with nothing to do and rampant poverty all around them, they will turn to whatever means necessary in order to survive. Radical groups easily prey upon this, giving people – again, especially young men – something to live and fight for.
But then there is the example of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 who overwhelmingly did not come from abject poverty. Many of them were educated in the West. Many of them were able to afford a standard of living well above that of most folks from their home countries. Their radicalism seems to have sprung forth more from a religious ideology than a socio-economic one.
However, the excesses and ineffectiveness of big government and massive wealth re-distribution can be found as primary contributors to the resulting problems in both cases. Socialism does not work. It cannot work. It’s a secular myth that presupposes a Judeo-Christian work ethic and birthrate. Claiming the mantle of rationality and science, it utterly ignores economic realities like scarcity, supply-and-demand, and the importance of risk-and-reward. In practice, it eventually undermines belief in God all while hoping that men will behave as angels simply because they won’t have to work more than 35 hours per week (at a job they don’t really want and won’t eventually have when inflationary crap hits the fiscal fan).
In the case of the unemployed radicals in Greece, progressive policies allowed the current generation’s parents and grandparents to spend their progeny’s inheritance (all while addicting the populous to untenable entitlements). The result? Economic catastrophe, wide-spread unemployment and disgruntled voters.
In the case of the 9/11 hijackers (and radical Muslims all across Great Britain and Europe), their terrorist activities were funded by big government policies that pay out money those same big governments don’t actually have to anyone (including illegal immigrants sounding the cry for violent jihad) with a pulse.
And yet we hear nothing from Western media outlets about the clear and present failures of big government socialism. With such glaring examples of what happens when you hand your economy, health care, government and law over to the same brood of bureaucratic vipers, one would think that there would be plenty for American intellectuals and politicians to learn. But instead we get mountains of new regulations, out-of-context Bible verses about “being my brother’s keeper” and promises that our dear leaders will somehow be able to add tens of millions of people to the health care system while making it cheaper and of a higher quality.
A large part of the problem is that we’ve detached Christian virtues from one another and tried to cleave the popular ones to secular ideologies – ones founded by men who rejected God and sought to establish their own “heaven on earth.” What starts off being all about “the worker” or “the little guy” ends up being a nightmare for everyone because the system put into place, at root, denies the inherent worth (and personal responsibility) of the individual. You’re now just a cog in a machine that was enthusiastically built with good intentions and faulty parts.
The violence we see in the crumbling nation-state of Greece is inexcusable, but it is not indiscernible to see why it was accelerated (and how some of it might have been avoided).
“The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered…it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.”
–G.K. Chesterton
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