Just two weeks ago there were massed calls from everyone including Phil Goff, the lap-blogs, pretty much everyone in the loony left for John Key to do something, anything, to help the poor stranded passengers in Thailand at risk from the terrible unrest that was happening there. You know where all the bad anti-goverment forces were sitting down in protest and blocking up the place.
Contrast that with Greece where 5 days of rioting and burning and real bodies on the street. Major civil unrest in another popular tourist destination and what have we heard from the chicken littles. Nothing. The newspapers? Nothing. The lap-blogs? Nothing.
So what do we find out from the blogs?
The Greek government, which is conventionally described as “right wing,” I suppose in an effort to signal that the rioting is in some way justified, has responded weakly, arresting the policemen involved in the incident and allowing rioters to devastate Athens and Thessalonika.
As usual these days, it is hard to attribute any clear political ideology to the rioters. They are leftists/socialists/fascists/anarchists/Communists/ignorant louts. Red flags are much in evidence; this one is the flag of the Committee for Workers International:
The perpetrators are generally referred to as “protesters,” rather than what they really are, rioters, i.e., criminals. Sympathy riots have broken out in several other European cities.
I find all of this profoundly depressing. At the Telegraph, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard fashions an elegant argument that ties the rioting to European Union monetary policy, but I don’t buy it. Economic problems are ever-present, the modern version of “the poor you have with you always.” Monetary policy doesn’t explain “youths” with Molotov cocktails and governments too weak to maintain order.
I wonder how many Kiwi’s there are in Greece that are going to need air-lifting out of trouble. Surely the government should be arranging their travel, lordy me they are burning cars there, it is a whole lot worse than a few hundred people sitting down on a runway.
I await the “protestors” breaking out the Che Guevara flags and t-shirts, then we can all breathe a sigh of relief that the “protests” are peaceful.
