This translation was created for the purposes of archiving and does not originate from the original creators of the text.
This leaflet was published by anarchists frequenting the Chrysallida social space, in 1985.
The Hooligans, the Stingies, the Starved People and the Bad Asses
The football league is over; the mass rallies of July have also passed. The Cuéllar initiative froze, as usual, and everything indicated that Cypriot society would remain for about a month without mass spectacles to organize its boredom.
And suddenly “chaos” erupts in Germasogeia. A new “fruit” for the “Cypriot reality”; and the hysteria of the occasion is analogous. The newspapers are shouting about hooligans, they are searching for the “brains” (in this place it seems that spontaneity has been abolished), leftists and rightists demand increased policing, they worry about OUR state, for the room bookings of OUR hotels, for OUR post-war economic “miracle” (pay attention to that OUR). Let us not talk of the political parties and their supporters. They live –to the extent that they can live- in their own world.
Within this entire phantasmagoric spectacle constructed by reporters, the State and the gossiping in the coffee shops, the attitude supporting an attack against a section of the youth started to be visible and materialize in practice. And this is not a random event. It has been under preparation for a long time, through all those bla bla bla about the youth that has “turned bad” and “gone astray”. That is, having escaped, in some way, from their direct control, re-locating its pursuits away from Greco-Christian potatoes and struggling cucumbers. How much pursuit there can be in Michael Jackson and catcalling is another story. Recently, the lords of Ayia Napa gathered to suggest an import ban on the motorcycles used by the “kamikaze” (Quite the imagination at the Ayia Napa municipal council – and we thought that fascism had its limits). With the last incidences in Germasogeia everyone broke out against the hooligans, the kamikaze, the anarchists (look at our note) – the “pests”, the “cancers”, the so-called “anti-social elements”.
What then happened at Germasogeia? Mass release or racist hysteria? Probably both. However, these phenomena are neither foreign, nor that astonishing, regardless of how newspapers are presenting them. They were the explosion of the contradictions born by our hydrocephalus society. On the one side, a youth fed up, drifting in boredom, monotony, the fascism of the army and the authoritarianism of the Cypriot family. On the other side, the same youth that has to choose between puritanism and canned ideologies and ideals, between staying as a spectator of life and surrendering to the ultimate isolation of being a political party; or some other form of sheep, between marginalization and the sexual misery in front of a Europeanized luxurious display window.
That is why what has occurred, occurred in Germasogeia. It is where the spectacle pushes the contradiction between a miserable, backward society and its European display, to the extreme. Within this context, the youth have every right to be fed up and revolt to claim its autonomy and its right to determine its own life. However, there was no social insurrection in Germasogeia – or even some conflict that demanded the overthrow of the old, to replace it with the new. In contrast, ideologically it was the expression of a hysterical racism and of a ridiculous attempt to rinse the shame of “male honor” of our equally ridiculous society (Of course!!! How can it be acceptable for the Arabs to fuck us?).
The comedic-tragic element of this whole story was that the outburst of the youth emerged as the materialization of the hidden desires of the average Cypriot. Because the racism and disgraced machismo that provided the excuse and ideological direction of the outburst, has been born and nourished by our own society. They are the sick mindsets that emerge from everyday life and its traditional logic-irrationality. It is the mindset of the proper gentleman that sells his house to the Arabs and then turns and swears at them. It is at the same time the mindset of “male honor” of the macho man, who considers the penis the center of the universe. And this is not accidental. It originates directly from the patriarchal structure of a society that supports dowry, virginity, sexual repression, the oppression of women, of the youth etc.
On Saturday, the youth became an instrument for the materialization of the fantasies of the social whole (And of course the Arabs were the easy target). Bravado, machismo and racism. The following day, a lot of proper ladies and gentlemen, rightists and leftists, bourgeoisie and proletariats, young and old, said: “what they did to them was fitting”. On Monday, power gritted its teeth – reporters, the State, the political parties ran to provide the line of the “condemnation of deviancy”. It is from this point that everyone began the search for scapegoats – and of course the easy target was the youth.
Road blocks were raised; investigations and arrests began, as well as the policing of the youth (and not only). In Larnaca, on Monday, 45 youths were arrested in such anti-pest operations. No one is protesting. All those who kept on going on for democracies and liberties have shut up. They don’t even keep up the pretenses anymore.
And what are you youngsters doing? It is easy to beat up defenseless people in the street. Now that they are swearing at you from all angles, that investigate your every step, that arrest you, where is your protest? Don’t talk to us of disgraced threats that the same things will repeat themselves because even stupidity has its limits.
Our wretchedness is the cause and the result of our social establishment. After all, it is the riot police [ΜΜΑΔ] that beats up and arrests, it is the newspapers and the coffee shop gossiping that feed the ideology of the racist outburst, and it is the State itself that organizes and directs the terrorization of the youth.
THE LADS NO LONGER EXIST
THEY’VE BEEN RAN OVER BY THE TRAIN
A N A R C H I S T S
NOTE TOWARDS REPORTERS AND OTHER CLUELESS: Racism has no relation to anarchy and anarchism; and the anarchists are not some idiots to become the instruments of your fantasies.