A story that gripped Greek media and social networks this week was the solving of a murder: a 75-year-old woman killed in her home on the island of Salamina on 31 October.
After police investigations, the victim’s daughter-in-law was arrested and confessed to the crime. She’d broken into her mother-in-law’s house to steal money, then murdered her when she feared she’d been recognised.
Before the case was cracked, suspicion naturally fell on some foreigner or other. A Greek couldn’t possibly do such a thing—kill a helpless woman who’d done nothing wrong.
“Sadly,” the son wrote on Facebook, “they’ve built a Greece that devours its own children—a Greece where Greeks are murdered inside their own homes. The truth must finally be heard! The situation in our homeland has spiralled out of control. We must all remain constantly vigilant and united… Only a few good people are left, sadly, in this godforsaken country—in the Police, the Army, the Security Forces, the private sector—fighting against this beast, this monster, trying to keep it standing… Look after your loved ones. Look after your children. And all of us must become human again, proper Greeks, because we’ve gone badly off the rails, every last one of us”.
At the same time, he promised his mother—a woman who’d raised her children “the Greek way, with values, with our Christ and our Homeland”—that “we’ll find the killers, and we’ll carry on with Honour and Faith, as you taught us”.
And find them they did. It was the woman beside him, the one he’d sung hymns about. His strength, as he put it, the force of his life, with whom he shared the same ideals and who helped him become a better person.
Those ideals, as she expressed them in her own posts, celebrated racial purity: “The Greeks are a special race, and women would do well—because Greek women have gone bad—they’d do well not to imitate the models they see in magazines or wherever. Each should be her own personality, what she is, the Greek woman. You should know we are neither Europeans nor Balkanites nor English nor Americans. We are Greeks! A special race in a special place”.
She herself was a member of Golden Dawn and had stood as a candidate in municipal and parliamentary elections.
People like this manage to sow hatred in the name of Greek values, preaching that “every non-Greek is a barbarian”—when the real barbarians are them.
