You Can Kill Each Other After I Leave: Refugees, Fascism, and Bloodshed in Greece
Patrick Strickland, Melville House, £25

IN the capitalist world, immigration is an indicator of how capitalism is faring. It seems quite reasonable to write that in 2025 capitalism is not doing very well. In all honesty, this can be said about the last couple of decades. If capitalism isn’t doing well, that means the likelihood of war is increasing, the working class is faltering in terms of income and its ability to pay to live under capitalism, and immigrant workers are for the most part having the worst time of all workers.

Countries like Greece, that have served as entry points for those migrating south to north, are microcosms of this reality. The fact that Greece experienced a genuine fascist threat beginning some 20 years ago is a warning to the rest of us. Indeed, it can easily be argued that the current situation in northern Europe, Britain and the US mimics that recent history of Greece.

Journalist Patrick Strickland tells this story, mostly from the immigrants’ point of view.  This text is also a provocative discussion of the rise and fall of the Greek neo-fascist movement, Golden Dawn. It is a tale of murder, squats, poverty, imperialism, fascism and repression. One reads the tragic stories of human lives lost and human lives saved; of politicians driven by hate and anarchists determined to stand up to them in defence of human rights.

Woven into the stories of immigrants at sea, in camps and squats is an underlying structure of brutality and division driven by economics beyond the everyday human’s control, and manipulated by men and women who profit and thrive from hate and exclusion.

Golden Dawn was founded by Greek politician Nikolaos Michaloliakos in the mid-1980s. It remained a fringe phenomenon in Greek politics up until the early 1990s when it took advantage of a somewhat contrived Greek nationalist anger at the use of the name Macedonia by their neighbour the Republic of Macedonia. Like so many other nationalist campaigns, this campaign was manipulated by the far right into a crusade for a fascist government.

In essence, Golden Dawn hoped to install a regime in Athens that was inspired by the military junta of far-right military officers that ruled Greece from 1967-1973. The party grew rapidly in strength during the Greek financial crisis of 2009, eventually winding up with over 30 seats in parliament.

Despite the party’s legislative presence, Golden Dawn’s rank and file members were more interested in street fighting with anarchists and the left, attacking refugees in their homes and the streets and, ultimately, killing a few of their opponents. After murdering the popular anti-fascist Greek rapper Pavlos Fyssas in 2012, the party came under intense criminal investigation and began to lose some support.

Over 60 of its members were eventually convicted of participating in a criminal organisation along with other charges and the party was eventually banned. In the wake of its demise, new parties have been formed with similar politics, but have not achieved the popularity that Golden Dawn once had.

Strickland weaves the story of Golden Dawn into his narrative; he describes its campaigns and some of its leaders, their support from various wealthy Greeks and everyday citizens. In this telling, he describes the financial stress endured by working class Greeks due to neoliberal capitalism and how so many were convinced that migrants were the cause for their distress. The lives of immigrants — their journeys, the camps and squats and the police harassment — are part of a greater story of failing capitalism, reactionary hatred and liberal weakness in the face of the crisis their economics have created.

Each individual story unveiled by Strickland combines a (perhaps) misplaced hope with an existence in a world that cares less and less about humanity. It’s a tale filled with descriptions of humanity’s best and worst impulses. Heroes abound in the squats peopled by anarchists and others dedicated to fighting fascism and serving humans in flight; their nemesis exists in the fascists led by Golden Dawn and in the social democracy which has forfeited any trust after compromising and then selling out to the neoliberal capitalists determined to destroy the world in their pursuit of profit.

The creeping fascism the world currently faces saw some of its earliest successes in Greece with Golden Dawn. The battle continues to rage there, albeit at a lesser level and without the spectacular headlines it once drew. While this might sound like things are getting better, it is just as likely that people have succumbed, browbeaten by the politicians, beaten by the police and just plain tired of fighting.

Strickland puts it this way in the book’s final paragraphs: “Fascism cannot satiate itself targeting one group. Nationalists will never be satisfied by merely sealing off borders, as if that is even possible. There will always be a new enemy, a new demographic that must be confronted, fought, eliminated. When nationalists, xenophobes, and fascists speak of the harm they intend to inflict on refugees and migrants, they are also warning of their plans for anyone who doesn’t fit into their vision of society.”

One need only look around today to see the truth of these words in the US, in Europe and elsewhere around the world. As the saying goes, praemonitus, praemunitus (forewarned is forearmed).