After a tumultuous European Union (EU) bailout that lasted several years, Greece has not been making headlines recently. However, although known to be a democracy, press freedom in Greece is under pressure. Matthaios Tsimitakis had this article in Open Democracy. Here is an excerpt:
On Saturday 20 March, Kostas Vaxevanis, publisher of the Athens-based newspaper Documento, tweeted that an arrest warrant had been issued against him. His newspaper had published the full text of a lawsuit lodged against him personally by 22 police officers, with their names on its front page. The policemen were under investigation for the torture of a young activist.
Vaxevanis was not arrested, but the event was an alert to the journalist community of Athens. Documento and Efimerida Syntakton (a cooperatively run newspaper not controlled by the mainstream media conglomerates that are almost unanimously in favour of Greece’s conservative government) have been reporting the stories of victims of police harassment and abuse.
Earlier, on 9 March, clashes had erupted between the police and some of the 5,000 protesters who had gathered in the middle-class Athens suburb of Nea Smyrni to demonstrate against police brutality during the coronavirus quarantine. The protest was prompted by a recent event in the neighbourhood, when a rapid response squad out on COVID-curfew patrol harassed a family and then attacked a young man who stepped in to argue in their defence.
Access the full article through this link.
Greek says
Free press is under assault in Greece … but not by what this article foolishly claims. It’s under assault by extreme leftists, many of the apologists for communism, that slander anyone right of them as “far right” or “fascist”. They resort to embellishment in their crackpot reporting as a method to smear their political opponents. Rather than report news from a politically neutral position, they are like the politburo of the Soviet Union that frame all their reporting from far left perspective.
The mainstream Greek left isn’t like the left in most countries. Although they like to pretend they are liberals to foreigners in practice Greek left parties are filled with far left extremists that think the communists were on the right side of the cold war! Many Greek leftists see communist monsters that committed massive atrocities as their heros. This would include even Alex Tsipiras our former PM whom Greek leftists put into power.Tsipras, literally, bizarrely believes the Fidel Castro, a 50 communist dictator, represents “democracy” and “human rights”.
There are some moderates on the Greek left but the majority these days are extremists that whitewash Marxist crimes in the past and gloss over their leaders are open advocates from Euro-communism. This is akin to someone on the right advocating fascism.. Many the Greek left, including among alleged journalists, have selectively “forgotten” the massive attrocities committed by the far left during the civil war… including by Greek leftists that murdered thousands of Greeks in support of communists like Mao and Stalin during the cold war.
There is a saying if you move too far to the left and right you end up in the same place.
.
Greek says
Oh irony. Alleged “journalism” Matthaios Tsimitakis is a far leftist extremist that has the audacity to leture others on extremism. Case in point.. he was media manager for Alex Tsipras of self-described radical left Syriza…. someone who advocated for Euro-communism Alleged “journalist” Tsimitakis thinks its perfectly fine to support neo-Marxists while pretending to be “moderate” left.
Truman, a classic liberal, formulated the template for fighting communism around the world. Unfortunately post cold wra segments of the mainstream western left now glamorize Marxism (see “journalists” for Jacobin… a Marxist rag that pretends to be a “news’ source) It may be cool to wear t-shirts of communist mass murders like Che Gueverra these days among segments of the left but lets not forget Communists were responsible for nearly 100 million deaths over the course of the cold war OK?. Lets not forget how Marxists oppressed free speech while framing it as “democratic”.
It’s very hard to take this article seriously when it depends on communist apologists for it moral and journalist narratives. A better article would be one on the poor journalistic integrity to be found among many Greek leftist “journalists” who are threatening free speech in Greece once again by muddling their politics as being a synonym for actual journalism.
Adrian Tawfik says
Thank you very much for your comments. I really hear what u saying. Greece seems more complicated to me politically than most places but I am the one that chose this article to post and I appreciate hearing from you to look again. I usually trust some newspapers or organizations to feed me news and sometimes I need to look more into the details than I do. Open Democracy I have used in the past. Im going to leave this post up and our comments, but I will try to be more careful in the future about this issue of researching stories we post more, the need to be careful personally about picking stories on Greek politics, and a few more things. Thanks for writing in. Let me know if you have suggestions for publications/authors related to Greek politics or politics in general. Thanks again