New right-wing Greek government attacks students

This 2014 video is called Learn Greek Holidays – [1973] Athens Polytechnic Uprising – Επέτειος του Πολυτεχνείου.

So, the new right-wing Greek government not only attacks refugees …

By George Gallanis:

Greece’s New Democracy party seeks to overturn law protecting students from police repression

30 July 2019

The proposal by Greece’s new Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, a member of the right-wing New Democracy (ND), to end the country’s Academic Asylum law must be taken as a serious warning by the Greek working class. The Greek ruling class is preparing the grounds for a dictatorial state reminiscent of Greece’s 1967-1974 junta, from whose bloody legacy the law was born.

The law, put in place in 1982, bars police from entering university campuses. Police can only enter campus grounds if given permission by university administrators. The law guarantees students protection from arrest or state brutality. Such a law exists nowhere else in Europe.

The law was put in place in response to the brutal murder by the US-backed military junta of at least 23 students and pedestrians, including a five-year-old boy, during the uprising at the Polytechnic University in Athens, now called the National Technical University of Athens, on November 17, 1973. On that day, the third day of protests, students launched a strike under the slogan of “bread, education, freedom”. Students were calling for the downfall of the Greek military junta, led by CIA-connected George Papadopoulos, which had taken power in 1967. That day, tanks and soldiers would come crashing through the university’s gates and carry out the slaughter.

November 17 is marked annually by demonstrations of youth and workers throughout Greece in remembrance of the victims of the Greek military dictatorship.

In 2011 the law was scrapped under the [‘center-left’] PASOK government, and for the first time since the collapse of the junta in 1974, Greek police entered university campuses on November 17 of the same year, a day marked by Greece’s largest protests in years. That evening, police entered the campus of Aristotle University after chasing a group of youth into the grounds.

The Syriza government, led by former Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, reinstated the asylum law in 2017. …

New Greek Prime Minister Mitsotakis (ND) promised to increase state violence and repression. He said, “We will strengthen the police, which has to do its job well. We have to protect policemen, while there has to be more police activity in the centre of Athens. For the next government security is a political priority … Police commanders of precincts that go into hostile areas will be rewarded.”

Mitsotakis is putting forth the lie that the Asylum law has allowed university campuses to become festering centers of violence and drug use. He said, “We want universities where students and teachers aren’t afraid; universities that we are not ashamed of … I pledge that no space will be occupied in our public universities. The gangs that today exist there will be eradicated.”

In reality, Mitsotakis, representing the aims of the Greek ruling class, wants to strip away protections from the working class and students that would prohibit the ND government from violently repressing, or as Mitsotakis bluntly put it, “eradicating” demonstrations and strikes by students and workers. This aim is also bound up with the fact that campuses have also been used by refugees as shelters from the Greek police.

In every country the ruling class is responding to the growing revolutionary challenge from below with a sharp shift to the right and toward dictatorial measures. The threat to scrap the Academic Asylum law comes at a time of growing class tensions that have seen a wave of explosive protests and strikes.