Anarchy at Home Blows Up Tsipras' U.S. Tour

That noise you heard when a bomb exploded at the Athens Mall was any chance that Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA) leader Alexis Tsipras ever had of becoming Greece’s leader, not that he had one anyway.
With his party fomenting political violence, it also blew up in his face in Washington, D.C., where he limped through a feeble performance at the Brookings Institution, a think tank he wouldn’t be able to get into if he weren’t a politician.
While his Leftist cohorts in Athens were calling on Greeks to consider picking up a gun to combat austerity measures, instead of electing people who would know how to bring growth and reform to a country that needs it, Tspiras – in a reference to fears he would take Greece out of the Eurozone  – was telling his American audience, “I hope to convince you that I’m not as dangerous as some are trying to say.”
He’s not, but his bomb-tossing anarchist followers are, and you only have to go back to May, 2010 and the cowardly Molotov Cocktail firebombing of a Marfin Bank branch in downtown Athens where three people – including a pregnant woman – were killed. Police said it was – no surprise – anarchists who hide behind their hoods while pretending to support workers instead of killing them.
Tsipras didn’t even try to distance himself from the people who were rioting and tossing bombs and, by his implicit support, encouraged them to keep doing so, an indelible stain that will stick to him like the blood of innocent people killed because of the radical ideas he espouses. He can hardly contain his glee every time there’s another incident of violence, hoping it will bring down a government that needs to be replaced, but not by the likes of him and his motley band of Trotskyites, Maoists, Communists and anarchists.
The bombing spree in Athens – four outside the homes of journalists and another at the home of the brother of the government spokesman – had all the signatures of anarchists who brew deadly cocktails in the dark where they hide. While Tsipras was talking to U.S. officials about his economic plans (he has none) he didn’t condemn the growing political violence in Greece because he supports it.
Two new anarchist groups who have apparently merged, Wild Freedom and Instigators of Social Explosions, claimed responsibility for the mall blast, which came after the building had been evacuated on a Sunday, upsetting the plans of innocent people who were sitting in cafes, and children hoping to see a matinee. The bomb placers were Tsipras’ kind of people, showing you can learn about someone by the company they keep.
Some like to portray him as a charming young idealist, although putting the word charm next to Tsipras is an oxymoron even more poignant than Compassionate Conservative. He’s so dull that you could sandpaper the rust off your car with him, and his next original idea will be his first because he takes his from the How To Kill 40 Million People Stalin Playbook, and there’s no silver linings in his.
The eight-day strike by Metro workers who want to be exempted from pay cuts, the same deal Prime Minister Antonis Samaras gave Parliament workers, undermined Tsipras’ false words to his American audience that he would be a stable leader because his party defended the strikers shutting down the city so they wouldn’t have their 2,500 euros per month salaries – twice what teachers earn – cut. He may have been far away when riot police broke the strike but he was picking up the cudgel for an indefensible cause.
LEFT TURNS ONLY
The anarchists said they targeted the Athens Mall, the country’s largest shopping center, a sterile collection of cookie-cutter franchise stores and plastic food center, because it’s a symbol of vapid Capitalism. It is, of course, and it has as much charm as Tsipras, but that’s no reason to blow it up.
The anarchists said: “For us, the mall and every mall is a cemetery for people and real values. That’s why we hit it. Those murdered by capitalism are buried in the foundations of malls.” Yes, and those murdered by anarchists are left to die choking in the fire and smoke of the bank where they tried to eke out a living to support their families.
There’s another cuckoo anarchist group running around, the Lovers of Lawlessness, undoubtedly made up of rich young people who like to blow up all the banks except where their daddies keep their money so they can have enough to buy hoods and barrel staves and pass out free copies of The Anarchists Cookbook.
Many people know who tossed the bombs into the Marfin – the first one to make a point and a second to make sure as few people as possible would escape – but they haven’t come forward because, like Tsipras, they are too cowardly to confront society’s problems with anything other than an incendiary advice. From now on, the gasoline-filled bottles tossed around in Athens like confetti will be called Tsipras Cocktails. A man with a bomb in his hand is one with nothing in his head.
The New Anarchists say they were protesting the removal of squatters from abandoned buildings in Athens that had been used to house conferences and concerts, but also – according to the police and not denied by anyone – store weapons. Unless the riot sticks were being given out as souvenirs at concerts bleating about injustice, you can bet they were going to be used to crack the skull of someone who doesn’t know who Che Guevara was.
HEY KIDS! WHAT TIME IS IT?
Aeschylus had it right. “Neither a life of anarchy nor one beneath a despot should you praise.” Terrorism has a long history in Greece and the new bombings remind of the long run of November 17 before it was finally taken apart, and let’s not forget these fighters of injustice planted a bomb in a subway car last year, a form of transportation no politician or the rich know even exists.
The damage being done in Greece was felt in America, where Tsipras’ Bogus Traveling Salvation Show, including a stop at Columbia University in New York, will do nothing to enhance his image because he doesn’t have one, just as he doesn’t have a clue how to run a country.
His plan? Stop taking money from international lenders, don’t fire any of the million or so people who allegedly work for the government, restore all the pay cuts, roll back all the tax hikes and, apparently, close his eyes and say, “I think I can! I think I can!” because there’s no money to do what he wants. The answer is to make cuts, but also to bring growth, and stop punishing workers, pensioners and the poor, too many of whom look to Tsipras for answers when he doesn’t have any beyond pie-in-the-sky promises.
The thieves of the alternating administrations of the New Democracy Capitalists and PASOK Anti-Socialists created this phenomenon by plundering the treasury for more than four decades, during which they packed public payrolls with hundreds of thousands of needless workers in return for votes. You can get better service from zombies than most Greek civil servants, and the deadbeat lifers expecting retirement have tarnished the good work of many public workers who are decent and diligent and hardworking.
Politics abhors a vacuum though, so this big Black Hole in Greece is being filled by bomb-tossing Leftist Anarchists and the bullies of the immigrant-beating neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party that prefers odds of 30-1 in its favor before picking a fight.
So maybe that’s the answer. Let the Anarchists and Golden Dawn slug it out while a new movement arises in Greece, one that sheds the greed of New Democracy, the hypocrisy and unfettered corruption of PASOK, the vacillation of the Democratic Left,  the anachronism of the Communists and the irrelevance of other fringe groups who are of no use in public life.
Tsipras told the Americans he blames the Germans and, apparently, mysterious outside forces for Greece’s problems but he’s little more than Howdy Doody, and about as wooden as that American puppet that was the darling of children from 1947-60. While the ramparts were being set up in Athens for the coming revolution, Tsipras was in the U.S. pretending to be a statesman when he’s really little more than a front for recklessness and violence. “
He may have fooled his audiences in the U.S. that he’s no threat to Greece but his words didn’t. “We are prepared for a battle,” Tsipras said. “In politics there is no such thing as tea and crumpets. There are interests that conflict.” Ta-ra-ra boom-de-yay. Or is that bomb?