ETHNOHOULIGANISM

"A deposit of free thinking in the country of intellectual unfreedom, of the totalitarian type of imposition of "national" opinions and "vital myths" is something very important and not at all self-evident. A battle for freedom of thought, conscience and expression, which is a universal human right, which unfortunately is never definitively conquered, because the "majorities", the "nationally minded" legions of imaginary "resisters", the most powerful forces of anachronism, they are ready to follow a new 'big' idea, usually an insult to humanity and civilization." The Athens Olympic Games were marred by the doping scandal and ethno-hooliganism. But how can one interpret the extreme ethno-hooligan expressions of our society if one does not first understand the fragile components of the modern Greek ideology? How to interpret ethno-hooliganism without the left-orthodox and Greek-orthodox ideologies of a "Romanism" that blames the world and resists reality, without the bigoted repressed, without international conspiracies, without the caricature of anti-imperialism that consists in the jealousy of the newly freed towards the West, without the doping of the national ideology but also without the patron "God of Greece", whose representative is not only Mr. Christodoulos? Series of texts by the well-known poet Ilias Kanellis, the aim of which is to describe and try to explain certain aspects of the modern national ideology, as expressed during the games. The texts were written to order during the games and published in a provincial daily paper, the "Kyryx" newspaper of Chania. The texts do not deal with champions and performances. They do not comment on the successes of the Greek team or admire the idols of the world sports spectacle. On the contrary, they observe the ways in which Athens (and Greece) received the games, they try to understand the (incomprehensible) attitude of the Greek state to the problems that arose, they are led to conclusions about the character of Greek state sports, they describe the national ideological doping to which the Greek athletes are subjected and, finally, they comment on the Greek-centric behavior of the Greek fans, which combined with the hooligan attitude of many in the games but also in everyday life, fueled the Greek language with a new word: "ethnohooliganism".