YOUTH PROTEST AND ANARCHISM—ARE THE GREEK YOUTH RIGHTS A HARBINGER OF YOUTH UNREST TO COME WORLD WIDE?
As many followers of European news note: This weekend in Athens there was further rioting and anarchistic activism.
According to the KUWAIT TIMES, “The ferocity of rioting by frustrated young Greeks shocked many across Europe but provides a warning to the continent's leaders as they discuss ways to confront the global economic crisis. Seven days of protests, which caused hundreds of millions of euros of damage across 10 Greek cities, were triggered by the police shooting of a teenager on Dec 6, but fed on resentment at high youth unemployment, low salaries and inadequate welfare.”
Some of these European-wide protests were “organized over the Internet or by SMS message, as many young people feel leaders are ignoring their frustrations.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7782039.stm
Do the events in Greece pose a harbinger of dissatisfied masses of youth worldwide over the next decade as more and more young people feel permanently caught in an economic traffic jam as the same old-powerful economic and political leaders maintain the status quo—even in time of recession and depression?
STORY FROM AN ACTIVIST’S POINT OF VIEW
Nikos Lountos, a student activist and Greek Socialist worker party member, both warns and explains the reasons behind the protests and violence, “I think it’s a mixture of things. We [in Greece] have a government that’s—a government of the ruling party called New Democracy, a very right-wing government. It has tried to make many attacks on working people and students, especially students. The students were some form of guinea pigs for the government. When it was elected after 2004, they tried—the government tried to privatize universities, which are public in Greece, and put more obstacles for school students to get into university.”
Lountos, who was interviewed last week on DEMOCRACY NOW, explained to American listeners, “The financial burden on the poor families if they want their children to be educated is really big in Greece. And the worst is that even if you have a university degree, even if you are a doctor or lawyer, in most cases, young people get a salary below the level of poverty in Greece. So the majority of young people in Greece stay with their families ’til their late twenties, many ’til their thirties, in order to cope with this uncertainty. And so, this mixture, along with the economic crisis and their unstable, weak government, was what was behind all this explosion.”
The same situation certainly exists in the U.S.A. in this decade. Could a major youth revolt be in the offing in the U.S. and other lands more permanently in 2009, 2010 and onwards?
That’s right! After the collapse of a decade-long economic boom in most corners of the globe, youth everywhere are feeling a great pinch and they perceive this to be a very long-term pinch.
The first riots in Greece on December 6 had been sparked when police shot to death an unarmed 16 year-old boy named Alexandros Grigoropoulos.
These riots had appeared to die down at the end of last week, but rioting took off again on Saturday after the “one-week anniversary” of the shooting took place and Greek anarchists along with others attacked the very police station where the culprits who had shot young Grigoropoulos were stationed.
Actually, to be fair to a large number of Greek youth, December 13th’s one-week vigil of the Grigoropoulos shooting had started peaceably with a candle light vigil being the main focus.
However, as has occurred often in the past week, more violent groups joined and usurped the more peaceful protests.
What is most surprising and notable is that most of the earliest protests in Greece were carried out by school-aged teenagers (mostly between the ages of 13 and 16).
