to read the continuation. Pleasure reading you. I don't remember if I've commented on this before, but I really adore your writing, Barbara!

I can resist anything but temptation.- Oscar Wilde

P.S. I'm sure you're enjoying extensive contribution from Miguel these days, as he's unrestrained in his ET usage.  If you see him online past 4:00 A.M. GMT, please do me a favour and tell him to go to bed. Thanks.

"If you cannot say what you have to say in twenty minutes, you should go away and write a book about it." Lord Brabazon

ROTFLMAO!  They can't organize a freaking conference and they want to centrally plan an economy!

Oh well.

Thank you for these reports, Barbara.

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

Maybe I just need time. Listen more, see more, talk to people. Be selective. Sure not everyone is a die-hard communist here. I heard a good talk on global warming, and another one on social housing programes. I'm taking notes and will write down the most interesting stuff.

I bet the panelists and speakers will be quite good, while the "bazaar" part of the event is taken over by prozelytizing trotskyists. The feeling you describe is the same bad vibe one gets when attending an anti-war march in the US (only ANSWER, the proselytising trotskyists, seem to be able to organize a demonstration) or when I attended a gathering in solidarity with De Menezes on Parliament Square here in London last summer, which was full of people leafletting for assorted lonny-left groups, or when I went to hear Tariq Ali (and George Galloway, among others) speak against racism and war also last summer, or when I went to the anti-war demonstration in Central London last autumn and got to see Tony Benn speak while dodging leafletters. It's always the same. There are reasons to attend left political events, and good people to see and hear speak, and recruiters to ignore.  

A society committed to the notion that government is always bad will have bad government. And it doesn't have to be that way. — Paul Krugman

Having experienced the Soviet system before it broke apart (several trips to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe between 1987 and 1991, when I was fairly young, as well as after, I will never lose that core of visceral anti-communism, or anyway anti-whatever-what-you-want-to-call-what-they-had-over-there-back-then, and that acute awareness that arbitrariness was not a vain concept then. Having experienced that arbitrariness personally, my criticism of what we have in the West will always be tempered by that experience - and vice-versa.

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

Thank you Barbara for your very interesting and pitoresc description. I am looking forward to the sequel.

Sometimes it feels like the only difference between paricipants of such conventions from the right and the left is the color of the t-shirts and the flags. Its powergames and the wellbeing of the people is forgotten. If we only had more Gandhi's who could put their personal gains aside and work for the wellbeing of all.

Happy to hear from you and to enjoy your fine writing. Plus I have noted that the scope of subjects addressed over here on ET is constantly broadening, and your are among those who make this happen, so thank you and please carry on.

When through hell, just keep going. W. Churchill

Barbara: I'm quite sure that there are quite a few Stalinists attending. However it's worth mentioning that the "orthodox" Communist party, KKE (formerly pro-Soviet until there was no Soviet Union to be for), is not participating in the Forum (these are "reformists" according to them). Both the Greek Unions and the Synaspismos party who are the biggest partners are not Stalinist in any way (OK the Unions have a large and vocal Stalinist component which they have to accommodate).

The organizational problems seem to be endemic in the country. Add to that the fact that the Forum was set up on a shoestring budget by people who had no experience at all in organizing anything at this scale, and you might be willing to give them a C for effort.

As for the Sickle and Hammer, I would argue that the significance of that in Greece (if the banners you are referring to are from Greek organizations) is quite different from that in the USSR and Eastern Europe. Not only are the ones carrying these banners Trotskyites (talking about the parties that are officially participating in the Forum) - and thus politically descended from victims of Stalinism, but the fact of the matter is that the Sickle and Hammer over here has a history not of persecuting but of being persecuted. In fact I could argue that as far as political persecution and ideological preaching is concerned, Greece 1944-1974 was competing with the worst of the Eastern European countries (including re-education camps and our own island gulags). The communists here were considered even by their enemies, as principled ideologues who stood up to intimidation, imprisonment, exile, torture and execution. On top of that I can personally attest that the only demonstration against Jaruzelski's coup and for the striking workers in Poland in 1980-81, in Greece was organized by the (euro)communist youth, under sickle and hammer banners, with slogans ranging from "Communists are not Militarists" to No democracy-no socialism (or something like that, it has been some time). So (at least among the Greek participants) I'm not sure you'll find many in Agios Kosmas eager to support the "red life" you describe. An interesting note is that quite a large part of the "reformed" anti-soviet communists that split from the Greek Communist party n 1968 (as a result of the Soveit invasion of Czechoslovakia) were political refugees living in Eastern Europe and (especially) the USSR, who became completely disenchanted with the Soviet model, that they lived under.

As for the forum: us working folks could not possibly attend yesterday, and if I'm not too exhausted I'll try for this evening. Certailnly the weekend, including the anti-war demonstration down-town on Saturday.

Today the first significant political action took place, over at a notorious police station, implicated in Abu-Ghraib level atrocities against immigrants last year (what I wrote about it, and the local anarchists reaction then). Apparently, from what I have heard one Italian member (and one Greek possibly) of the Europarliament were arrested and later released, along with a number of human rights lawyers and activists and Coalition of the Left party MPs... There was a lot of tension over there, with the riot police "intervening" unprovoked in their usual friendly way...

Just an explanatory note for some of the local context of all of this... Do keep up these diaries, I'll see if I have something to report from the demo tommorrow.

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom - William Blake

Great diary, Barbara...funny how stuff from our past pops up and stares us in the face at the strangest of times...

"Once in awhile we get shown the light, in the strangest of places, if we look at it right" - Hunter/Garcia

I'm only left with supplementing Migeru's and talos's points.

On one hand, that you see idiots with Stalin photos [can you tell which country they came from, BTW?] at the ESF, or Trot proselytizers at London peace marches, or guys in dreadlocks singing and chanting at environmental events, and the ANSWER crowd at US events, is something that IMO looks bad on the majority of the rest of us [evidently not you]: it's mostly all these loons who actually bother to take action on any issue, while most of the rest rather goes shopping or stays at home frowning at the strange bedfellows (rather than get out and out-number them).

You weren't yet in London so I'm not sure you know, but the 1.5-million 15 February 2003 anti-war march there wouldn't have happened had the handful activists of the British Trotskites of the Socialist Workers' Party not organised it (and had they not showed enough big-tent sense to form the Stop The War Coalition umbrella that was wide enough to include Labour-Left, Liberals, British Muslims and even anti-war tories). If these people were born into say the Czech Republic 60 years ago, they would have been the enthusiastic fools who let themselves be shot at at the radio headquarters in 1968.

I've got not much to add to talos's story on the separate long domestic history of Greek far-leftism, except to note that Italy was another country with a, to us survivors of the Shortage Economy and serial swoons at compulsory November 7 'celebrations' and an industry covering forests in grey and no-photography signs at bases of 'firendly' Soviet tanks both strange and largely unknown, long domestic history of popular homegrown 'Eurocommunism' (indeed its heirs form dominant parties of the recently victorious coalition behind Prodi). And also that the Greek years of retribution were really bad, there was an entire village for refugees in Hungary (who in no small part were simple rural people, not would-be Greek Husák's; they even had a priest).

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}