Exchanging Fake Greek Columns for Real Ones

President Obama visits Greece in three days, and is walking into hazardous territory, at least for the photo ops he was planning in the birthplace of democracy. In Greece, there is none of the cognitive dissonance about President Obama that one sees in the U.S.: although an overwhelming majority of Americans believe the country is going in the wrong direction, Obama remains personally quite popular. It's as if we can't look beyond Obama's winning, grinning persona and cannot see that Obama is the one responsible for the country's wrong direction.

In Greece, unfortunately, there has been a strong anti-American view of the U.S. ever since Andreas Papandreou demagogued the American bases out of Greece during the 1980s. The mainland bases were duly shut down, Souda Bay on the island of Crete was the only one that remained open. To say that Orthodox Christian Greeks did not take kindly to Bill Clinton's bombing of Orthodox Christian Serbs in the spring of 1999 would be a pretty considerable understatement, so when Clinton visited the city of Athens that autumn the walls of its buildings were suddenly plastered with posters of Clinton as Hitler. There were a lot of demonstrations and property damage leading up to, and carried on during, Clinton's visit. Then George W. Bush invaded Iraq just a few years later. Greeks were apoplectic, and not just because they opposed the invasion. Having lived through the Nazi occupation of WWII, and a subsequent civil war between communists and republicans (Greece was the only nation contested and saved from communist rule in the aftermath of WWII), Greeks were afraid the war would spread (it didn't) and concerned that a refugee crisis would result (it did). Anarchists and far leftists are pretty common in Greece. The mysterious November 17th terrorist group, which for decades seemed to be committing mayhem on a regular basis with no consequences, was finally unmasked in 2002 by a Chinese clock which malfunctioned, detonating a bomb being carried by one of its members, who was injured, but not severely enough to prevent him from dropping the dime on his fellows. November 17th took its name from the student uprising in 1974 at the Athens Polytechnic College which protested the ongoing rule of an American-backed military junta that had seized power and imposed virtual martial law on the country in 1967. While the CIA's involvement, exposed as a result of FOI requests, was not our finest hour, geopolitical considerations (i.e., the Cold War and Greece's proximity to the USSR) led then-president Johnson to approve of the overthrow. The protests at the Polytechnic College and the subsequent restoration of democracy to the people who actually invented democracy was not a bad thing. What was a bad thing, however, is that, having seen a successful attempt to take over an institution of higher learning, anarchists have since used the same tactic to really tear things up from time to time. The chief reason they use this tactic of co-opting universities and using them as a base for their nefarious work is that after the '74 Polytechnic uprising, Greece passed a law declaring all of its universities and colleges places of asylum: the police and military are not allowed onto their grounds. So when they want to wreak a little havoc, whether it be against the IMF, the EU, the G8, or the U.S., the anarchists simply camp out on university property, manufacture Molotov cocktails on their premises, load them into shopping carts swiped from local supermarkets, and push them out into the streets where the cocktails get ignited and thrown at buildings, businesses, and law enforcement personnel. Traditionally, Greek police adopt a policy of containment and pretty much let the anarchists have their way as long as they stay within predetermined boundaries. Now here's the problem with Obama's visit: it falls on November 15-16, exactly at the time when anarchists get revved up to celebrate the November 17 uprising. My Greek wife is incredulous. "Did not the Americans know about November 17th?" she asked me. "Doesn't their ambassador know anything about Greece?" Obama had planned on a magnificent speech lauding the Greek democratic tradition on Pnyx Hill, just to the west of the Acropolis. This is the place the Athens ekklesia, or assembly, met during classical times to hash out and vote on policies for their city-state. Mr. Obama was to stand there, demonstrating his considerable oratorical skills like a latter-day Demosthenes, with the real columns of the Parthenon in the background, instead of those Styrofoam things he had placed behind him in Denver's Mile High Stadium in 2008 when he accepted the Democrat nomination for president. Buildings' walls all around Athens are once again festooned posters denigrating the American president: they show Obama with the "prohibited slash across his face like an "insufficient funds" stamp on a bounced check. The text of these posters is as follows: Obama: Unwanted! To the Streets of November! Anti-imperialistic Uprising Against: NATO, American Bases, Imperialistic Wars and Fascism, The Division of Cyprus, (and) The Social Barbarism of the European Union and the IMF! The AP reports that the "Conspiracy Cells of Fire," a member in good standing of the Anti-imperialistic Consortium of Leftists, is "urging anarchists to 'spoil the party... and sabotage'" Obama's visit. The group's website encourages anarchists to "return a little of the violence that we receive daily" to the organizers of Obama's visit (What "violence" they are referring to is anyone's guess.). A march to the U.S. embassy is planned. A similar march protesting Clinton's visit in '99 resulted in violent clashes and extensive property damage. So we have some fireworks to look forward to in Greece during the next few days. By the way, in 2007 a rocket was fired at the embassy from a construction site across the street by yet another anarchist group, the Revolutionary Struggle. On the route to the embassy, in the median of Vasillisas Olgas Avenue, stands a life-sized bronze statue of Harry Truman. Truman is striking a dynamic pose, one foot forward, his coattail flowing backwards in a breeze, left hand down near his pants pocket and balled into a fist, his right tightly holding a rolled up copy of the Marshall Plan. The statue was erected during a happier time for Greek-U.S. relations, after Harry had fed thousands of starving Greeks with American food products in the aftermath of WWII, during which the Nazis had shipped all of Greece's agricultural output to Germany. Poor Harry. He gets torn down every time the anarchists act out, and he'll probably get pulled off his pedestal during the November 15th demonstration as well. And poor Barack. He kind of got torn down from his pedestal, too, on November 8th. Now the dramatic venue for his speech has been cancelled. Due to security concerns, instead of the Pnyx, he'll speak at an indoor auditorium in downtown Athens. Here's hoping he has a safe trip, and I mean that sincerely.