George Kassimeris

Junta by Another Name? The 1974 Metapolitefsi and the Greek Extra-parliamentary Left:

In the years following metapolitefsi (the 1974 transition from dictatorship to multi-party democracy) a plethora of groups from the far left appeared on the Greek post-junta political scene. Obsessed with the dynamics of the Athens Polytechnic revolt of November 1973, these marginal but vocal and persistent groups viewed the process of constitutional change and democratic consolidation with deep scepticism. Many of them did not accept the legitimacy of the transfer of power and used confrontational anti-regime rhetoric and radical forms of action to denounce constitutional structures and attack the regime’s legality, conservative ethos and lack of structured political solutions. The purpose of this article is to describe the emergence and evolution of the major extra-parliamentary groups of the left and to examine their analyses and interpretations of Greek political circumstances in the late 1970s.

The Ideology and Discourse of the English Defence League: ‘Not Racist, Not Violent, Just No Longer Silent’

Research Highlights and Abstract This is the first discursive study of the EDLs publicly available articles and gives an important insight into their ideology. The study problematises the EDLs claim to be an anti-racist human rights organisation and analyses EDL discourse as racial discourse, demonstrating that the apparent gulf between the groups ideological Islamophobia and their violent and intimidating street protests is largely illusory. Understanding Islamophobia as culturally racist and the EDL as a culturally racist organisation is important to deconstructing their claim that Islamophobia is a rational reaction to deviant Muslim presence in the UK. The key contribution is not only a deeper understanding of the group and why they have been so successful in mobilising a section of the public to demonstrate against Islam, but also how this discourse fits in to the larger public debate on Islam and Muslims in the UK. The English Defence League (EDL) emerged in 2009 and quickly became a major ‘anti-Islamist’ street protest movement, able to attract thousands to its national demonstrations. Despite the violence and anti-Muslim rhetoric associated with its protests, the group claims to be an anti-racist human rights organisation dedicated to protecting liberal freedoms. This article employs a critical methodology to address these claims, analysing EDL literature alongside strategies identified as typical of racist discourse construction. The representations, narratives and rhetorical strategies used by the group support the analysis of EDL Islamophobia as a form of cultural racism that constructs opposing ‘British’ and ‘Muslim’ subjects and functions to maintain traditional ethno-cultural dominance of the former over the latter.

Why Greek Terrorists Give Up: Analyzing Individual Exit from the Revolutionary Organization 17 November

This article seeks to analyze the life histories of two former members, Patroklos Tselentis and Sotiris Kondylis, of the defunct terrorist group, the Greek Revolutionary Organization 17 November (1975–2002) in order to look for causes of disengagement, dissociation, and repentance. Analyzing the life histories of Patroklos Tselentis and Sotiris Kondylis offers valuable insights into the development of complex processes of involvement in and disengagement from 17 November terrorism. The detail stemming from their testimonies provides a more complete picture of the groups internal dynamics and challenges a range of simplistic stereotypes, not only about the individuals involved in terrorism but also about the ways in which they make decisions and reflect on their experiences of being part of a terrorist organization.

The West, the rest, and the ‘war on terror’: representation of Muslims in neoconservative media discourse

This paper uses Sayyids concept of Eurocentrism to analyse neoconservative media discourse following the September 11 attacks. Using predicate analysis on articles from The Weekly Standard magazine, this study aims to determine how neoconservative writers created a Muslim subjectivity following the attacks in order to make certain courses of action appear necessary and inevitable. Four subject positions emerged from the analysis: passive Muslims, active Muslims, the passive West, and the active West. By containing and controlling the representation of ‘Islam’ and ‘Muslims’ through these binaries, neoconservatives endeavoured to stabilise the identities of the players in the ‘war on terrorism’, and in doing so, advanced a Eurocentric discourse that attempted to re-centre the West as the vehicle of human progress, with America as its natural leader. This paper concludes that basing the ‘war on terror’ entirely around identities effectively made Eurocentrism (and Islamism) self-reinforcing, as the successful restriction of identities precluded challenges to the neoconservative discourse from any position other than a ‘Muslim’ subjectivity.

Urban Guerrilla or Revolutionary Fantasist? Dimitris Koufodinas and the Revolutionary Organization 17 November

The end of Greeces Revolutionary Organization 17 November (17N) finally came on 5 September 2002 when the groups leader of operations, Dimitris Koufodinas, turned himself to the police. Unlike Alexandros Giotopoulos, the groups chief ideologue who denied any involvement in 17N, Koufodinas took responsibility for the entire 17N experience and sought to defend and justify their violent actions. Drawing on Koufodinass court testimony this article suggests that the world of 17N was a closed, self-referential world where terrorism had become for the members a way of life from which they could not walk away. Defending the groups campaign from beginning to end, Koufodinas contended that 17N was an authentic revolutionary alternative to a barbaric, inhumane and vindictive capitalist order that was running amok. An emblematic personality of 17N terrorism, Dimitris Koufodinas embraced the view that Greeces “self-negating democracy” necessitated exactly the kind of political violence they had undertaken.

Greece: the persistence of political terrorism

Greece has one of the most sustained problems of political terrorism anywhere in the world. From the mid-1970s to the present, the countrys political and socioeconomic institutions have been confronted by systematic terrorist violence mainly at the hands of revolutionary guerrilla groups. The long story of Greek terrorism was thought to have ended in the summer of 2002 with the collapse of the countrys premier terrorist group and one of Europes longest-running gangs, the notorious Revolutionary Organization 17 November (17N). 17Ns dismantling and imprisonment, rather than demoralizing and emasculating the countrys armed struggle movement, led instead to the emergence of new urban guerrilla groups and an increase and intensification of revolutionary violence. In consequence, the article places Greek extremist violence in a broader political and cultural perspective and explains why it has become a permanent fixture of national public life. Language: en

British Muslims and the discourses of dysfunction: community cohesion and counterterrorism in the West Midlands

This article analyses how British discursive representations of Muslims during the last decade were utilised in a local context during the planning stages of a proposed mosque in the West Midlands town of Dudley. Locating the central narratives in dominant national discourses of community cohesion and counterterrorism, this article analyses how correspondents to a local newspaper re-articulated national representations of Muslims as culturally dysfunctional in a local context and used these representations to argue against construction. By critically analysing the local expression of dominant national discourses of threat and blame, in terms of both inherent contradictions and ideological effects, this article highlights the ways in which these discourses worked to exclude Muslims while simultaneously reprimanding them for failing to integrate into a national and local culture that regarded them as inherently ‘other’.

Last Act in a Violent Drama? The Trial of Greece's Revolutionary Organization 17 November

ABSTRACT By strange coincidence, Greeces Revolutionary Organization 17 November (17 N) met its end almost exactly a year after Osama bin Ladens Al Qaeda terrorists felled New Yorks twin towers, when the groups leader of operations, Dimitris Koufodinas, turned himself in to the police after months on the run, on September 5, 2002. The capture of Koufodinas and his group marked the demise of the last and most stubborn of a generation of ideological terrorists whose campaigns caused serious political and security problems in Western Europe for more than a quarter of a century. Drawing on the judicial investigation findings and the courtroom testimonies of the terrorists, this article attempts to tell the stories of the four most senior group members in order to understand what led them to act in the way they did and, more crucially, what kept them inside a terrorist organization with no prospects and community support for so long.

Negotiating race and religion in the West Midlands: narratives of inclusion and exclusion during the 1967–69 Wolverhampton bus workers’ turban dispute

Abstract This article considers the 1967–1969 Wolverhampton Transport turban dispute in the context of increased anxiety over immigration to the area and Wolverhampton South West MP Enoch Powell’s April 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. We trace the narratives of the dispute through letters to the Editor in local newspaper The Express & Star, and argue that the letters column was a site of community construction for writers and readers, which elevated the issue from a trivial industrial dispute to a symbol around which the deep anxieties of race and nation coalesced.

The 2004 Greek Election: PASOK's Monopoly Ends

In Greece, the election of a New Democracy (ND) government had long seemed inevitable and duly came about on 7 March 2004. The final crisis of the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) government – confirmed by the decision of its leader Costas Simitis to step down and make way for his foreign minister, George Papandreou – and the loss of its parliamentary majority had been long anticipated, although the exact sequence and timing of events still came as a surprise to many. Widespread dissatisfaction at spiralling prices, persistent unemployment and perceived corruption within the governing party, which had been in power for 19 of the past 22 years, led to a significantly better result for ND and its leader Costas Karamanlis than even some of its most dedicated supporters had hoped for. Karamanlis, the nephew of the founder of the party, Konstantinos Karamanlis, was expected to win this electoral contest, but in a close race. When the last opinion polls were published a fortnight before the election, PASOK was trailing 2 to 3 points behind ND. The final results, however, gave New Democracy 45.4 per cent of the vote to 40.5 cent for PASOK, a wider margin than most pollsters and analysts had predicted. In the 300-seat Greek parliament, the conservatives now have 165 seats compared to 117 for the socialists, with the remaining seats going to two small left-wing parties, the Communist Party of Greece, KKE (5.9 per cent and 12 seats) and the Synaspismos Left Coalition (3.3 per cent and 6 seats).