The Golden Dawn nightmare: The Orthodox Church and Greece's war against neo-Nazism – Opinion – ABC Religion & Ethics (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

"Around 2006, Golden Dawn used to attract something like 0.2% of the vote in the national elections. The emergence of Neo-Nazism in "the country that gave birth to democracy" seemed to most of us as a logical impossibility. Surely there was no cause for worry.

But a few years later, the nightmare came true. In the latest national elections in June 2012, Golden Dawn took 6.9% of the vote and saw 18 MPs elected to the Greek Parliament of 300 seats. Worse was yet to come. The polls kept showing that support for Golden Dawn was steadily rising. Until a few weeks ago, it was estimated that, if national elections were held, Golden Dawn would come third and could take between 15% and 20% of the vote, when the first party was expected to get less than 30%. As we began to realize what this might mean, many of us held our breath in horror: Neo-Nazi admirers of Hitler might run the Greek State. What happened in Germany back in the 1930s could happen again in Greece!"

Demetrios Bathrellos describes his personal experience of what is going in people he knows, from a bright fellow student who became second in command until imprisoned for the attempted murder of an anti-fascist student, to an Orthodox bishop who described Golden Dawn as Greece's "sweet hope" - but also the humanity and Christian goodness of by far most Orthodox people, clergy and bishops. In 2012 Professor Gerasimos Macris gave a lecture at Heythrop examining the Orthodox Church in Greece and identified a growing problem for both Church and Society in that there is a fundamental failure of the Christian tradition to engage with modernity - either through a retreat into antiquity for the dominant Orthodox Church community as it clarifies and expresses its identity in challenging and changing world, or by the wider society through the turning with an element of despair at the supposed weakness of the received Faith, the received democratic conventions and the received economic systems,  to discredited and elsewhere discarded fantasy politics and ideology, such as socialism, communism, fascism and nationalism, specifically nazism. Read Demetrios Bathrellos' full article here:

The Golden Dawn nightmare: The Orthodox Church and Greece's war against neo-Nazism – Opinion – ABC Religion & Ethics (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)