“The knife will go in at the ear and move down right through.

Shocking statements voiced by some of Golden Dawn’s parliamentary candidates and other party cadres on camera for K. Georgoussis’s documentary film: “We’ll hack to pieces all the fuckers who ruled Greece.” “There’ll be a civil war, you mark my words!” “Just the sound of ‘Golden Dawn’ will have them running scared.”

By ‘Ios’ [journalist group]

Following [hip-hop artist and antifascist] Pavlos Fyssas’s murder that left public opinion reeling with shock, Golden Dawn members started to speak out. The Nazi gang’s activities have started to unravel before the eyes of all the media, even those that had up until now merely provided a platform for marketing its senior members as lifestyle icons. However, most reporting to date has been based on information provided by anonymous sources.

Today we reveal activities that Golden Dawn members themselves bragged about openly – in fact on camera. What they state confirms the criminal nature of their organisation and truly sends shivers down the spine.

This is from the material filmed by Konstantinos Georgoussis for his film ‘The Cleaners’ (2012). The director followed the activities of a Golden Dawn cell around [Athens inner city area] Agios Panteleimonas for a month, and filmed what its candidates said on camera in the run up to the [back-to-back] 2012 general elections. Filming followed the fly-on-the-wall tradition and has already been screened at Amsterdam’s International Documentary Film Festival (IDFA), whilst also winning a special award at the 19^th International Film Festival of Sarajevo. Its Athens premiere is due next week.

UK TV station Channel 4 broadcast a few minutes from the film last March, causing an international outcry due to the openly Nazi threats made by the Golden Dawn members.  During the lengthy period of filming a lot of material was captured on film. Here follows a small sample.

The ‘supervisor’

One of the film’s central characters is Giorgos Vathis, the ‘supervisor’ of the Agios Panteleimonas square. He is the organisation’s eyes in the area. In fact we watched him appear as an ‘enraged’ local resident on Greek public television’s news just before it was shut down [by the Government in June 2013]:

“Are you recording this? Make sure you record this” he says at some point, which proves he was fully aware he was speaking to the camera. “When we Golden Dawn get elected,  all these guys, all these fuckers who ruled Greece and took away the Greek people’s money, we will hack them to bits, all of them. The knife will go in at the ear and move down right through till it pops out between the third and fourth ribs. You got that? We’ll rip them up, all of them. All the old-timers in the Parliament will go. They’ve all been at it, they’ve gorged themselves [on public money]. We’ll rip their assholes apart, forget about shitting, they won’t even be able to spit properly. ‘Cause we’ll stick some cock down their throats as well. You make sure you got this.”

Is all this just talk? The answer to this can be found in the revelations made by local Golden Dawn politico Alexandros Plomaritis, who was a party candidate at local elections in 2010 and general elections in 2012:

“Giorgos [Vathis] has already whacked two [people]. If he whacks one more, that’ll be a bonus from the state; he won’t have to pay. He’s done two and got 21 years inside. If he does one more, he’ll only get six months. That’s because he’s got to the limit of three. So he doesn’t get punished any more. Fact. That’s the law, my boy.”

At another point Vathis says: “We respect all illegal immigrants.” His fellow Golden Dawners get upset: “What are you talking about? How come we respect them?” So, the ‘supervisor’ makes them feel at ease: “We don’t chop off their hands or their heads. Merely from their ankles downwards. Just their ankle tendons really.”

As for the organisation’s strategy, that’s clear too in the minds of this group: “We won’t leave Greece. You mark these words. There’ll be a civil war down here. You listen to me, mate. There will be a civil war.”

The ‘politician’

Plomaritis is asked how Golden Dawn will deal with immigrants once in power:

“Nothing. Soap! Soap, but not for human consumption, because these guys are toxic and we might get a rash or something. We’ll use this soap for cars, soap for sidewalks, maybe make a lamp shade out of their skin, Giorgos here will get their hair and sell it in [bric-a-brac sellers neighbourhood] Monastiraki, to make worry beads for foreigners. What else are you gonna take, Giorgo?”

“We’ll need their teeth for worry beads”, comes Vathis’s reply.

At some point Plomaritis calls on the rest of the group: “Take your machete and let’s go take out the illegal immigrants.” He speaks to the camera explaining: “These guys are all Kasa-Vubu [racist slur like nigger or kaffir]. What we need to do with them is put them on a ship with a hole in its hull. Take’em out in the Aegean with gale-force winds and make sure none comes back. Let them go belly up! We don’t care, because we’re ready to get the furnaces going.”

He shows off with his big black dog he calls Sissie. He tries to get her to attack: “That’s how we get them. It’s the dogs that do the chewing, not our fault.”

An immigrant happens to be passing by, pushing a cart loaded with scrap metal: “Fucking hell, you get my pistol, I wanna shoot him. Giorgo, go give him a kick. Get a plank and go for his head.”

Plomaritis proposes the same treatment for the Greek Left: “As for leftists, we’ll send them all to some shitty little island and they’ll snuff it once the food runs out. Be finished with this, get rid of them. Now we’ll talk about SYRIZA [major left-wing party that has since become the largest opposition force in the Parliament].  We’re getting the gallows ready, it’s so many of them, and I’ll have them laid out here on Pipinou street and shout ‘Burn the red dogs.’ And they’ll be wriggling as they hang.”

The ‘theoretician’

The organisation’s Agios Panteleimonas cell is jointly led by Ilias Kasidiaris and Ilias Panagiotaros [both currently under investigation for various allegations]. Plomaritis and Ioannis Batsis – a party candidate in [North-west region Epirus town] Arta and a member of the Agios Panteleimonas group – both appear next to Kasidiaris as the latter exits the courts following his acquittal on 7 March 2013 [for an earlier criminal trial]. Another man is Ioannis Lyris, who is the organisation’s ‘theoretician’ and a candidate in the Athens Second Electoral Region. He is with a Golden Dawn committee that visits the Municipality of Athens’s vehicle depot at Iera Odos avenue, aiming to let employees in on the secrets of Nazism:

“I’ll be frank. The nationalist movements during the mid-war period, the Thirties, regarding social policy and benefits, we have a study on this. Not [just] in Germany; in every nationalist movement. If you go back, [you’ll find out that] the eight-hour working day was set up by [Greek fascist dictator between 1936-1940] Metaxas, Sunday as a day off was set up by Metaxas, the Social Security Institution (IKA) was set up by Metaxas. Everything that happened during that time, we are studying it for society. And because you said something about Hitler, did you know that in 1937 the British blocked German ocean liners from docking in Britain? You know why? So that British workers would not be able to see how [well] German employees were doing. So, we’re societalists [koinonistes in Greek] and nationalists.

As for the salutes, this salute is of ancient Greek, in fact Doric origin. Golden Dawn has no official salute. This is how the [ancient Greek ethnic group] Dorians and the Romans saluted each other, and now the Hizbollah. Hitler did not salute like this. They are wrong. In the Doric salute the hand is outstretched and raised at eye level. The [Nazi] Germans saluted at an angle of ninety degrees. Similarly, the meander that is our symbol is not the swastika. Although, it should be noted that the swastika is of Greek origin. Hitler was an admirer of Greece.”

The ‘diver’

Georgios Smirniotis, a.k.a. ‘the diver’, is less of an intellectual but certainly a lot clearer:

“What I wanna say is that I want to make sure they get a taste of the damage they’ve done to us and the damage they’ve done to my country. Feel the fear. Because if there is fear, there will also be respect for you and for me and for everyone. Because all they care for is their own interest, nothing else. I want revenge. I want revenge for what they’ve done to my country and all the Greeks. And I mean what I say. Just the sound of ‘Golden Dawn’ will have them running scared.”

The few scenes of the film shown on Channel 4 prompted an investigation by the public prosecutor’s office in March. An investigation whose fate is so far unknown.

Translated from Efimerida ton Syntakton newspaper, 23/09/2013