So why would some say that you asked a hundred people to come?

"Who said it? That’s a lie. That’s a lie."

One strange quirk of the Greek judicial system is that if you are arrested within forty-eight hours of an offense, you are taken straight to court for instant justice. But once that time has elapsed, the case slips into the regular glacially slow process, so it was in Kasidiaris’s interest to avoid the police until the deadline had elapsed. He’s quite open about the fact that he went into hiding. "I used my rights," he says. "They would have put handcuffs on me and represented a wrong image that I didn’t want."

Kasidiaris reappeared to deliver Golden Dawn’s final surreal coup de grâce: He announced that he was suing Dourou and Kanelli for deliberately provoking his actions. Astonishingly, in keeping with the nuanced reactions here to this whole chain of events, not everyone in Greece considered this absurd. It was openly debated in the Greek press whether Kasidiaris had been right or wrong, as though either alternative was quite possible. And online Kasidiaris was widely cheered. Here is a depressingly typical example:

HAHAHAHAHAHA I’ve never felt better to see a man slap a bitch! No one has ever deserved a slap more than that communist bitch cunt in history! I wish he would have knocked her teeth out like she deserved!

Kanelli, the object of the violence, compares these reactions to what happens when mass murderers are incarcerated.

"And then," she says, "the prison is filled with love letters from 15-year-old young girls."

A couple of weeks after I visit the Abuhammids, I hear from them that immigrants in the area have started finding threatening leaflets directed toward them. "We will run after you," the leaflets promise, "if you don’t leave the country...." Around this time, some Pakistani immigrants in the same neighborhood are attacked by a mob of around ten men—some, they claimed, wearing Golden Dawn T-shirts. When the police arrived, after the mob had left, they detained fourteen of the Pakistanis who had gathered, seven of whom were subsequently sentenced for being illegal immigrants.

Golden Dawn later makes news by handing out free food in Syntagma Square, right next to the Greek Parliament, but only to people who have documentation to prove that they are Greek citizens. Meanwhile one of Greece’s best athletes, a triple jumper, is thrown out of the Olympics for racist tweeting, repeating a dumb joke about immigrants and West Nile virus. An examination of her Twitter feed shows that she had previously tweeted to wish Kasidiaris well and had also re-tweeted a recent post of his. In October, I receive an e-mail from Liana Kanelli saying things are getting even worse. She asserts that there has been a horrifying escalation in Golden Dawn’s day-to-day tactics. "And yet," she writes, "they are still in the parliament screaming and shouting like Goebbels’s wolves."

Hope persists that Greece’s grim unraveling can be reversed. For its people’s sake, of course, but maybe also for ours. How sure can we be that there is anything happening today in Greece that could not also, someday not so far into the future, happen here in America? We all live in an era when global finance commonly borrows the language of infectious diseases: When a problem breaks out in one place, the wider concern is often about contagion. In times of progress and enlightenment, the slightly dippy declaration that "we are all one world" suggests some kind of incipient utopian togetherness, but when times turn bad, the same concept—we are all one world—can sound more like a threat.

Shortly before I leave Greece, there is a small story in the newspaper about two men in the north who had been arrested the previous day. They were accused of trying to steal a railway bridge. A local police officer answered my questions about this reluctantly, as though the problem wasn’t a pair of thieves with a crane being caught in the act but people like me kicking up a fuss about a bit of bridge-stealing. "It was a small bridge," he said. "Many people steal metal for the obvious reason of getting money from melting down the metal." His message was that there was nothing worth seeing here; please move on.

"All over Greece," he explained, "there are people doing that."

Chris Heath is a GQ correspondent.