A few days ago I started writing a Commentary for ZNet. Here is the initial part of it:
For months now in slogans and in ordinary discussions the word "helicopters" is bandied all the more often by the Greeks, hence the word "helicopters" in the title. The meaning of the "helicopters" part is rather obvious: the Greeks that think of themselves as the "leaders" of the nation, that is the governing politicians, are bound to leave the country, preferably at night, to escape the wrath of the victimized people.
The meaning of the "Nuremberg" part is a bit more complex. Basically, it tries to convey the idea that the political leaders of a country, who decide the fortunes of millions of humans, should be accountable for their acts and face justice, if those acts are harming these humans.
This past August (of 2011), I was in the city of Nuremberg, in Germany. On August 12, I visited the offices of the "Nuernberger Nachrichten" (News of Nuremberg), the mainstream newspaper of the city. There, I asked to see a member of the staff of the paper to discuss with him an idea (a proposal) of mine. Volkan Altunordu, a young journalist, met me and I started presenting my proposal. Volkan, listened attentively to my proposal and was very polite and friendly.
The proposal:
The United Nations organization, in New York, has proven to be a charade. Almost from the first day of its constitution, this organization has been a tool of the US elites for dominating the world. So, it seems that it is about time that this charade should end. This led to the following two options:
Option A:
– Ameliorate the Charter of the UN, starting from the travesty of the "veto", and so on.
– Move the UN from New York to Nuremberg.
Option B:
– Abolish the UN and build a new organization: The "United Peoples" (UP).
– Write a new Charter, independently of the official leaderships (governments) of the world.
– Locate this new organization of UP in Nuremberg.
The first question by Volkan was: "Why Nuremberg?" I answered that the historical significance of Nueremberg is a good reason. Also, the symbolism is quite obvious and quite important.
Then, I proceeded to expand on Proposal B, which I consider as the right one. My first recommendation, on the map of Nuremberg and environs, was that the city choose a piece of land to build the new headquarters of the UP.
Describing the headquarters of the new organization I proposed that these should conform to three criteria:
1. They should be one-story buildings resembling (in size and shape) the house of ordinary families.
2. They should be separate from each other, on a piece of land for each one.
3. The buildings and the land should be the same for every one of the 190 nations of the world. Adding, that the US and the smallest nation should have the same treatment.
As an engineer, I had prepared a small sketch, on an A4 piece of paper, for a possible plan of the one-story buildings on their separate lots of land for the 190 nations. The shape that I recommended resembled a wheel with 6 spokes to accommodate the 190 lots and the hub of the wheel to be used as the assembly area.
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At that point I stopped writing, intending to finish the commentary at a later date. However, the events in Greece during the last 48 hours demand that I record what is happening in Greece.
On Wednesday, October 19, 2011, there were over 100,000 people demonstrating peacefully, even with their kids, in Syntagma Square, by now the familiar site for demonstrations by the Greeks in Athens. Some estimates raise the number close to 500,000.
At some point, around noon, a group of about 100 black-clad and hooded men attacked the riot police guarding the crowd at its fringes. The riot-police reacted mostly by spraying people with chemicals, in huge amounts. The black-clad men destroyed and vandalized anything in sight. The ordinary people of the demonstration, in the thousands, retreated at a safe distance waiting for the fighting to end. This is a new development of having ordinary people not dispersing and quitting the site of a demonstration, after the riot police attacks. They stayed there and came back demonstrating again for hours after the fighting, even if in lesser numbers.
Next day, Thursday, October 20, 2011, the peaceful crowd was once more at Syntagma square as early as 9 a.m., numbering at about 15,000. This time the people safeguarding the communist bloc in the demonstration, mostly strongly built construction workers carrying clubs resembling baseball bats with a red flag at the top, numbering at about 150 persons, were standing in a row in front of the mass of ordinary demonstrators at the tomb of the unknown soldier, at the foot of the Parliament building. Again, around noon the group of black-clad and hooded people, now numbering more than 200, appeared at Syntagma and attacked the above communist safeguarding-group. This black-clad group was very richly armed with stones, Molotov cocktails (firebombs), chemicals, fire extinguishers, truncheons (identical to those used by the police!), etc.
The Black-clad men attacked the communist guards en masse and very aggressively. Also, they threw fire bombs above the heads of the communist guards straight among the ordinary demonstrators; among them women and children. The communists counterattacked and there was a savage scuffle, mostly in front of the historic "Great Britain Hotel". This lasted for a few hours during which, as usual, the black-clad men vandalized and (in some cases) looted everything in sight.
This is how the "International Herald Tribune" (The Global Edition of the New York Times) of the next day, October 21, describes the scene, in the second paragraph of its main article on the events: "Demonstrations began peacefully outside the Parliament, but soon devolved into violent skirmishes in which, for the first time in recent memory, demonstrators hurled firebombs not at the police but into the crowd".
Notice that the attacking black-clad men are, initially, described as "demonstrators". Further down the article the word "demonstrators" becomes "anarchists". Even further down the expression becomes: "men wearing motorcycle helmets and gas masks". The reader who stopped reading the article after the first few paragraphs remains with the "information" that the skirmish and the throwing of firebombs was between "demonstrators"; between Greek fellow citizens.
At some point, after the police started spraying with chemicals, a 53-year-old communist construction worker in the demonstration died of a heart attack, even though he had not a previous history of heart trouble. The man struggled his entire life to raise his two daughters and help them acquire university degrees and finally had to die probably because of the chemicals of the police; the proxies of the "rulers". All are waiting for the report from the labs doing the autopsy.
But who really are these black-clad men and which is the aim of their acts?
Almost every Greek accepts as an answer that these black-clad thugs are subhumans used by the state to achieve the aims of the state. In this case: to scare the ordinary Greeks out of Syntagma Square and put an end to the demonstrations.
The members of these "elite commandos" of the Greek governing elites are:
– Policemen in active duty.
– Thugs in the employ of the Greek Central Information Service (a branch of the CIA of the US).
– Independent Neo-Nazis
– Neo-Nazis, controlled by the Neo-Nazi parties in the Greek Parliament.
– "Pure" sadists, as described by the creator of the Gestapo.
– Self-styled "anarchists" that are not anarchists.
– A group, ignored or unknown to all, but their controllers.
The last group in the list are criminals who have served their penalty in prison and have become collaborators of the police. Probably they constitute the most important group. Also, this explains the excessive savagery and the looting.
For the last two nights after the Friday demonstration, some "brave" men burned some offices of the Communist Party.
So, what is the situation in Greece now?
The members of Parliament cannot walk in the Greek streets. They are not going to be physically attacked, but they are going to be insulted by having mostly yogurt thrown on them and verbally reviled.
It is not an exaggeration to say that some of the top members of the "socialist" government might use helicopters to leave the country.
But, what is going to happen after that?
There are going to be elections. The governing "socialists" are by now almost extinct. The rightists have the usual power, based on the significant percentage of assholes constituting any given society. The Neo-Nazis, who have strived to be respectable, by adopting a vulgar populism supporting the Greek… proletariat as if they were communists, will probably manage to enter in the Parliament.
So, what is left is the Left. About 65 % of the Greeks are so angry that if there was a credible Left alternative they would have voted for it.
The Left is mainly constituted of the (Stalinist) Greek Communist Party (KKE), the Left Coalition (Syriza), and the Greens. The KKE and Syriza, with roots in the original communist party of the 1930s, are "mortal" enemies probably based in personal enmities created in communist families during the stay of older members of the families as refugees in the Soviet Union from 1949 to the late 1970s, after their defeat during what is called the Greek "civil war".
The Greens are rather weak in Greece, a problem that should not have existed in Greece as the "leading" persons in the movement had and still have the best background in their political thinking. They have been adherents of the thoughts of Murray Bookchin, Noam Chomsky, and now of Mike Albert. However, as usually happens, they are cut off from people with similar backgrounds and let their personal differences, even enmities, intervene in their social struggle. The sad human tendency that has harmed so deeply the world Left. About two decades ago I had met a couple of them, after the publication of a book of mine on transportation and earthquakes, and I hoped that the Greens should gain the part in Greek society that they deserve. If they read this, let it be a friendly exhortation to them that they insist more on the "direct democracy" factor of their movement, based on Bookchin, Chomsky, Albert, and Takis Fotopoulos (of "Inclusive Democracy"). Also, they should understand that close cooperation with the rest of the Left, today is a "must".
My estimate is that things in Greece have reached a point that the ordinary people will "force" the Left (KKE, Syriza, and the Greens) to understand that they have a moral duty to not let this opportunity to be lost. Also, they should understand that Greece is part of the "Arab Spring", the Spanish, the Italian, the US, and the Irish "squares", and that they have a chance to base their acts on this international solidarity.
In addition, there are a couple of recent social developments in Greece that are very hopeful:
– Young Greeks return to the fields and the farms of their parents in their home villages, a significant part of them with university degrees and fluent in two or three languages. (Something that Merkel, Rumsfeld's protegee, cannot boast for the disciplined and hard working German youth.)
– The Tahrir-Syntagma Square "revolution" has brought in the light members of the Greek society that are extremely valuable in the struggle for a better life. For example, Prof. Yanis Varoufakis and Dimitris Kazakis, two economists, whose integrity, honesty and rationality have captivated a significant part of ordinary Greeks.
Concluding: It seems that, finally, the elites not only in Greece but worldwide (read: elites of the US) are in trouble!
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Back to Nuremberg and the rest of the original article:
The diameter of the quasi-wheel could be around 350 meters (1,150 feet) and will cover about 0,12 square kilometers (about 30 acres).
Volkan referring to the number of 190 nations correctly observed that if the term "peoples" is adopted then there may be more than 190 peoples in the world. I admitted that he was right and I pointed that there is enough space in the plan to accommodate all the peoples.
I added, verbally, a few technical details about the new UP headquarters in Nuremberg, Volkan Xeroxed the few sketches and the handwritten information of the proposal, and I bade goodbye to Volkan.
Back in Greece, on August 18, 2011, I sent an email to Volkan asking if there was any development in the paper about the proposal. I also, added a copy of my latest ZNet Commentary, "Nazis in Norway and Beyond", in which I had proposed that Nuremberg should "be the first of a long…series of forums" for the punishment of criminals like Breivik, the Norwegian who massacred the youths in Norway. I got no answer.
Then, on August 26 I sent one more email asking about the proposal, adding that he "should not hesitate to relay to me any negative reaction". Again, no answer.
Is the proposal "utopian"?
"Occupy Wall Street" (OWS) was (very) utopian, a few weeks ago.
Is OWS important? It is more than important.
Could a new "United Peoples" organization be equally important?
If it is, let this article be an invitation, to the ZNeters and to anyone that reads this, to express their ideas for ending the UN charade in New York.
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