(Text: AthensLiveGr, 14/2/2017)
The release of a video of a neo-Nazi rock concert in 2005 attended by the leadership of Golden Dawn in Greece has grabbed headlines and is proving a major blow to the fascist party, which is on trial for constituting a criminal organisation.
The video came on the day of a second Golden Dawn related trial, of the mayor of the city of Patras, Costas Peletidis.
The Communist Party mayor of the western Greek city is being prosecuted for refusing to grant municipal facilities to Golden Dawn during elections in 2015.
The content of the video provides strong grounds for his defense. Golden Dawn is attempting in that case and in efforts to rehabilitate itself in Greek public life to claim that its members are nothing more than Greek nationalists.
But as the “Editors Daily” which broke the story this morning says on its front page: “The true homeland of Golden Dawn is Nazi Germany.”
The video shows Golden Dawn leader Nikos Michaloliakos along with leading cadres Ilias Kasidiaris, Ilias Panagiotaros, Giorgos Germenis, Artemis Matthaiopoulos, Giorgos Misiakas and others.
Attendees to the Nazi fest are shown giving the Nazi salute while singing the Greek national anthem.
The bands are from the neo-Nazi and White Power scene. They include Nazi activists under investigation by the German security services.
The slogans chanted from the crowd are the classic hate cries of the Hitler movement and are shouted in German: “Sieg Heil!” and “Juden raus!” (Jews out).
They are raised in honour of two German Nazi performers Michael and Annette. As the crowd shouts “Juden raus” he interrupts them to say, in English: “Not only out. But exterminated.”
The regalia and flags are of the SS and the battle colours of the Nazi Wehrmacht, along with swastikas.
Golden Dawn leaders were not only in attendance but the organisation promoted the event in its magazine, Counterstrike, and reported on it afterwards.
The surfacing of this video is a huge embarrassment to Golden Dawn. It will be added to the large bundle of prosecuting evidence in the ongoing trial of the fascist party. Its leaders and core members (69 in all) are being prosecuted for a number of specific crimes, including the murder in September 2013 of rap singer Pavlos Fyssas.
Those are part of an overall case that Golden Dawn constitutes a criminal organisation. The prosecution is not of its ideas, but of its criminal acts and of the criminal nature of the organisation commissioning and directing those acts.
The trial resumes today with continuing testimony about the attack by a Golden Dawn battalion squad on a radical social centre. The court has already heard copious evidence of the National-Socialist, i.e. Nazi, character of the organisation, which is the motivation and organising ideology of the criminal actions it has pursued over decades.
Later this year, the court will assess directly this video along with large amounts of other documentary, video, photographic and witness evidence about the true character of Golden Dawn in what is the biggest trial of fascist criminality in Europe since the Nuremberg process at the end of the Second World War.