Just another Athens Sunday

Shoot-outs in Athens last night.
And all I hear you say is 'what's new then?'

A man and a woman shot at policemen in Metamorphosis, an Athenian suburb. The story goes that they were flagged down for a routine check, they duly stopped and when the policemen got out of their patrol car the pair, on a motorcycle, opened fire before speeding away and disappearing.

The motorcycle was later recovered but, surprise surprise, it had not been properly registered so we don't know who the Metamorphosis Bonnie and Clyde were, why they were armed and why they were so keen to flee.

And as nobody was injured, this is almost a non-story, buried in the back pages of the few newspapers that deigned to report it. And I am only mentioning it here as a backdrop to the main news: the fact that yesterday Nea Dimokratia got a new leader, a man who will spend the next few years trying to persuade us he is better, not only than his predecessor, but also better than the current prime minister at governing the ungovernable jungle that has become Greece. As of today, he wants to make the Metamorphosis shoot-out his problem. He wants to make the ailing economy his problem. He wants to make all our problems, his problem. So here we are. The scene is set and our great protagonist makes his entrance.
Antonis Samaras.
You cannot be bloody serious.

What's so bad, I hear you ask? Wasn't this man once hailed as the greatest hope for Greece's future?
Yes he was. But that was a long time ago. When we were all waiting for Samaras to save the day with bated breath, I was still in high-school and the New Kids on the Block still had a career.
And there has been nothing but water under the bridge since then. Dirty water under a rickety bridge, to be precise.

But let's be fair.
In many ways, Mr Samaras is a definite upgrade from Mr Karamanlis: he has as strong a pedigree being the son and grandson of famous and respected scientist and artists, he has an excellent educational background with degrees from Amherst and Harvard and, quite unlike Mr Kramanlis, he has experience in government. And that, in many ways, is where the problems start...

Mr Samaras served as Finance, Culture and Foreign Affairs minister throughout the 80s and 90s but, if you ask people what they remember him for, no grand policy initiative or genuine substantive change drive springs to mind. People remember him for one of two things:
they may remember his inflammatory and populist 'hard line' approach to the macedonian question that completely failed to take into account geopolitical realities, international treaties already signed or the sheer laws of probability...

Or they may recall the fact that, in 1993, he single-handedly brought down the government he had until the previous year been a minister for by creating his own party and encouraging the defection of an MP that tipped Nea Dimokratia's precarious majority. And all because he had been removed from his post for pursuing a misguided and pointless 'hard line' policy on the Macedonia question.

Mr Samaras' new party, with the comedy name 'Political Spring' and an ideological positioning that largely overlapped with Nea Dimokratia but was decidedly more conservative on a number of issues, was an excellent vehicle for vocal, sweeping opinions and grand dramatic gestures – made safe in the knowledge that the party would never be in government.
And of course it never was. In fact, the party was hardly in parliament as the joke grew tired soon enough. In fact, much sooner than Mr Samaras had anticipated and, after a fairly good run in the 1993 general and 1994 European elections, the party lost support and failed to be reelected. Ever. Then in 2004, mr Samaras rejoined the party he had beached a decade before.

I just want to make clear we all know who we are dealing with here.

And while he's back, with a bang and a vengeance, what I cannot quite decide is whether we – the Greek people, the electorate, the tax payers, the voters – are ridiculously good-hearted and forgiving or just plain dumb, forgetful and criminally indifferent.

And it's not Mr Samaras' victory alone that makes me wonder that. It's the nature of the campaign, the vendetta-style opposition between Samaras and the defeated Dora Bakoyiannis and the populist undertones that drove the voting: rewarding Samaras somehow for his 'stand' against a man that now everyone has learned to hate, the then Premier K. Mitsotakis.

Forgetting how politically irresponsible and devoid of substance Samaras' defection was in 1993, his supporters within the party chose to view it as 'resistance' to the man the entire party now hates, penalising Dora in the process for being mr Mitsotakis' daughter. Despite her solid record in office. And the fact that, regardless of whether you agree with her politics, she was the only contender for the conservative leadership with an agenda, a portfolio of genuine policy initiatives while in office and some political substance. But never mind all that, right? Cos we don't like her daddy. And her last boss. Which brings us back to Mr Samaras whose hands are clean of the failures of the last government. Because he was simply not in it. And why was he not in it? Because he rejoined the party he had brought down a decade previously in 2007 and he never got round to holding serious office, serving as minister of culture for a mere few months following a late-term reshuffle in 2008.
And now here he is, top dog.

Despite accusations of bullying leaked by other candidates. Despite the technical melt-down at the start of the election process that caused ripples among journalists who suspected Florida-style tampering and got momentary illusions of grandeur a la 'first Bush, now us'. And despite a populist campaign of assorted sound-bites, completely devoid of content.

Despite it all, he's back in black. And despite it all, the top dog promised he'll play nice and will 'wipe off with a sponge' (I am not making this up, check today's Eleftehrotypia for the original quote) all that he heard during the succession race because party unity is now uppermost. Let's all be friends, he says, and together let us 'lead the party in new struggles for the country's progress and young children's right to hope'.
No, it's not a bad translation, it made no sense in Greek either.

So here we are. And I am already dreading the next election. Already. Because it will be just another big pile of 'same old'. In the context of the same old corruption, the same old violence, the same old inefficiency, the same old poverty for the many and same old cushy set-up for the few.
It will be just another Athens Sunday when we go back to the polling booths in four years time and I am getting sick and tired. But at least Olympiakos won both the footie and the basketball yesterday. So thank God for small mercies. Because for once corruption, inefficiency and cushy set-ups gave me something to cheer about and given everything, all you can hope for in Greece is small mercies.

Afghanistan: does defeat go away if you refuse to accept it?

'The key is knowing when to call it a day' said my great uncle.
Although he was talking about drinking and not troop deployment to treacherous war zones, the rule applies. And the rule is this: if you set out to achieve something within a given time frame, and the time frame has elapsed many times over, and what you set out to achieve still eludes you then you have failed and the one thing that is guaranteed to not make the situation any better is a determination to carry on doing what you have been doing because, well, that's the bit that failed.

Modern warfare is nothing like old school sieges. Battering the wall until it cracks worked against medieval citadels but doesn't take you very far as a parable for modern war tactics.

What am I talking about?
I am talking about the front page of yesterday's Times.
I quote: 'President Obama is to ask members of NATO to provide up to 4,000 more troops to help break the deadlock in Afghanistan'. And a good morning to you too.

Although Obama's appeal is expected to go largely unheeded, 35,000 additional US troops are expected to hit Afghanistan before long with supplementary units from Britain and Turkey possibly joining them before long. Possibly.

Talk, of course, is around credibility: the credibility of the alliance if no troops are forthcoming... the credibility of President Obama himself, if his request is ignored... the credibility of the AK party government in Turkey if they send a few hundred more troops... and of course the credibility of our own superhero, Gordon Brown, whose willingness to send more troops is going down with the voters like a proverbial lead balloon. As is his explanation, that he's staying in this war to keep Britain safe.

The war rhetoric has no mileage in it any more.
Democracy for the Afghans peace for the world. Nice idea. Pity about the outcome.

Democratisation sounds good. But after last month's election debacle, I am surprised world leaders still mention democracy and Afghanistan in the same sentence without dying of shame.
'Indelible ink that washed off, voters walking home with whole ballot boxes, election monitors who didn't dare leave their NATO base'. You don't believe me, fish out your back copy of the Guardian (20.10.09) and see for yourself.

Is this our fault? I hear you ask. Hell yes. Have you forgotten the rhetoric? The promises? The democracy banners we waved the world over to justify the invasion and continued presence of allied troops in Afghan provinces up and down the country? Democracy is what we were there to give. Allegedly. Elections were the West's idea and were supposed to take place under our tutelage and protection. Go us. And by this time round the Afghans were supposed to have picked up a few tricks, willing and able disciples of worthy tutors.

As it turned out, the election was not exactly a showcase of democracy in action.

I am not suggesting the allied troops had anything to do with rigging the election. Karzai and his cronies did that all on their own – although their ineptitude even at that suggests they could have used some help, with hindsight. But then again, Karzai could not have had any more help, realistically: from being hand-picked and propped up every step of the way, to being given trust he had not earned as he repeatedly refused there was a fraud problem of any real magnitude on American TV. Not to mention the international community simply not intervening at any point during proceedings, trusting, cowering. Stalling. Failing to pre-empt, failing to prevent, failing to end the abuses.
Failing.
Failing at delivering democracy to the Afghans and peace to the world.

And while the democratisation experiment is clearly not working (yet), more troops are needed in the name of peace, we are told.
Only UK voters are not buying any of this any more.
According to a poll published in yesterday's Independent '4 out of 5 of those questioned do not believe that British involvement in the conflict... is keeping the streets of Britain safe from terrorist attacks'.

So. If by being in Afghanistan we are not helping them and we are not helping ourselves, why exactly are we there still and how will 35,000 additional US soldiers and another 4,000 allied troops help achieve what we are failing at?

Put it this way: How will more troops prevent future killings from corrupt Afghan police officers? I'll tell you how. By taking patrolling away from them and putting it back in the hands of allied troops. By entrenching their presence even further.

But what else can you do? When you have failed but cannot stop doing the same thing... partly because you have no other ideas and partly because you have unleashed forces you cannot control and have managed to leave yourself no way out. What else can you do? Because when you went in, it did not occur to you that an exit strategy may be needed. Because it never occurred to the leadership that it may just be essential to call it a day at some point.

More troops then.
Because we have worked our way clean out of options. More troops.
Because we have ran out of ideas and need to be seen to be doing something.
More troops.
Even though that does not change the fact that refusing to admit defeat doesn't mean you are winning.

When 'every little' doesn't help

'May you live in interesting times'.
That, says my beloved Terry Pratchett, is not a blessing. Rather it's a bit of a curse, if you think about it. And there is no denying that we are now living in interesting times. And there is no denying that's not all that great. But that's no excuse for totally losing all sense of perspective.

We are scared.
Of terrorism. Of pedophiles. Of swine flu. Of the E coli 0157:H7 virus and other pathogens carried in poorly packaged or poorly cooked meat. Of Nick Griffin and hate preachers. Of racists. Of Islamic fundamentalists. Of sounding racist. Of our own shadows.

We are scared at the citizen level and we are scared at the government level. And what do we do about it? If you look through the papers of a day, you may well come to the same conclusion as me: what we do about it is kick frantically to all directions, keeping clear of the heart of each issue but making enough noise to look like we are doing something. When all we are doing is making noise. And noise is rarely a good thing.

Now as you know, I live in Britain so my examples are local yet I fear that, no matter where you are, similar things are happening every day: a sense of impeding hysteria, an overwhelming sensation that we really do not know what to do to prevent bad things from happening so we'll just try to allow few things to happen full stop and thus play the numbers game.

We all laugh when we see airport security staff putting children's plastic sandals through the scanner. Laugh but don't stop them because you never know and better to be safe and late than sorry and dead.
But what is the outer limit of caution?

Britain's tabloids have gone wild this week as parents in Watford are no longer allowed to supervise their children in playgrounds unless they have undergone criminal records checks. Vetted 'play rangers' are to supervise children instead of mums and dads.

Why? Because the case of Vanessa George has sent shock-waves through the nation. She is a paedophile. She is a woman. She is a mum. That means the demographic of potential dangers to children just widened to include absolutely everyone, so absolutely everyone is banned from playgrounds and here's to hoping that whatever tests play rangers are subjected to are the right kind and perverts don't creep through. I would still personally prefer to know that each kid was looked after by his or her parent. And that parents are keeping an eye on each other. What the hell. I would like to know that when I have kids I will be allowed to keep an eye on them myself.

But with a recent case of suspected rape of an eight-year old girl by two ten-year-old boys, stunning us all into silence, the only truth is that we really don't know how to keep our kids safe and putting them in a glass jar may well be the only way forward. Because if our children are not even safe from other children, then what is safe?
A glass jar. Safety through separation.

Now, I don't have kids. But I'm guessing, in light of recent events, if I had kids and was not allowed to keep an eye on them in the playgrounds, I'd just keep them away from the playgrounds and be done with it. Was that what the council was going for? I'm guessing not. But that's what they'll get. Because a blanket policy of considering everyone guilty until proven innocent is never going to bring about good things. Still how can we expect Watford council to maintain a sense of perspective when everyone else has lost it?

A woman in labour asked for 'ethnic minority' staff to leave her bedside, at a hospital in Milton Keynes earlier this week. It is not clear what particular minority she objected to (although according to reports, it was one group in particular she objects to) and it is not clear why she objected to them being present. What is clear is that the hospital refused to accommodate her. So the hospital acted as they should. Her request was racist, unreasonable and by the sounds of it unreasoned. The hospital overruled her and she went home a while later with a healthy child.

Now she could be facing action in a county court on grounds of discrimination. And although I object to her racism and find her ability to demand racial segregation between contractions faintly amusing, I can't help but think that the thought police are on the prowl. I disagree with what she stands for. But she didn't act on it because the hospital did not let her. So what would the trial be about? And why is there a threat from the Equality and Human Rights Commission that the hospital may be under suspicion as well, when no discriminatory act was perpetrated by hospital staff?

I fear the answer is simpler than we are comfortable with: this is the sort of problem we can deal with, be outraged by, 'handle', judge and close. Only it doesn't solve a thing. If anything, it exacerbates the situation. The likes of Nick Griffin can spin the whole 'no place for Britons in Britain' tale and the bottom line remains that we have lost perspective because the big issues are just too big for us to deal with so we contend ourselves with the contained little issues thinking it's better than nothing. Only it isn't. It's actually worse than throwing hands up in the air and going 'this is too big and I can't fix it the way I've been fixing things hitherto. I need to think, I need to change'.

If you are not sold yet, here is another example:
An elderly lady in Norfolk wrote to her council to complain about a gay pride march in her vicinity. I personally enjoy Pride and everything it stands for and tend to join when I can although I am not, myself, gay. Nobody cares. Pride, as I know it, is inclusive and open and most participants would welcome elderly ladies from Norfolk if they wanted to join in the festivities. But they would equally accept her right to refrain, even to disapprove of them. Each to their own and all that.

And a letter to the council is a rather innocuous – if pointless – form of protest that will not have any real effect on Pride. On this occasion, however, it may have a real effect on the person complaining as the council wrote back to the homophobic old lady warning her that she may be guilty of a hate crime. The matter was passed on to the police and I expect it to be dropped but the point remains: with real hate crimes committed every day, why is a narrow-minded pensioner exercising a democratic right to free speech targeted? It could be because a council employee was not thinking or was misguidedly over-zealous. It could also be that she is simply an easier target than say the thugs who still engage in gay bashing in the centres of our towns. The same way that a bigoted mother in labour is an easier target than the police officers whose routine racism victimises young, black males as a matter of course as the Guardian recently revealed.
And I use 'revealed' very loosely here.
Because we all know.
We know racism is a violent reality for many people in our communities. Homophobia is spectre in many lives. Real, physical dangers to people's bodily integrity and sense of safety.
And yes we do know that child abusers of all genders and all ages are also abroad.
We know all that.

The question is what do we do about it?
And all I'm saying by pooling together three largely unrelated examples is that we are currently doing NOTHING. Because bashing soft targets and imposing blanket bans is not making our society more tolerant or safer, it is just making it more hypocritical, harder to live in and less likely to resolve the real issues underlying the violence and sense of threat that seems to hide in every dark corner.
Making every person a suspected paedophile does not make children safer.
Punishing unsavoury opinions does not make hate crimes less likely. Making opinion - however unpalatable - a crime makes us the bad guys. It makes our democracy shambolic while race and homophobic crimes - actual acts, the stuff the law should target - carry on occurring because they are not properly prevented or followed up.

And creating a society of division, mistrust and fear will not make anyone safer.
So no, ladies and gents, every little does not always help. Particularly when we are trying to navigate through 'interesting times' without throwing everything we have achieved through decades of social struggle, democratisation and liberalisation overboard.

What fearing Nick Griffin tells us about ourselves

Why is everyone so scared of letting the leader of the British National Party speak during tonight's Question Time show? Why is everyone so worried about what it will signify, to take a seat on a panel next to him, in obvious opposition to him?
Don't give me that crap about legitimising him. What additional legitimacy does a democratically elected representative of the people need?

Tell me what's really on your mind people.

Are you afraid that cool, articulate, unflustered, racist Nick Griffin will get his despicable point across better than the representatives of the political mainstream?
Because that is what I am afraid of.
I am afraid he will be calmer than the other guys.
Less arrogant in the eyes of the average viewer.
I am afraid he will be more articulate and more convincing, keeping things real and relevant, never using abstractions and generalisations. I am afraid he will manage to reduce big issues to small, personal fears in a way that is non-patronising and almost self-evident.
I am afraid he will do all that without insulting any of his fellow panelists while they will be struggling to hold back cries of 'begone you disgusting racist slug'.
And I am afraid that the other side, the non-racist side, our side damn it, will be left speaking in generalities, attacking his racism but offering no coherent answer to counter his concerns and offering absolutely no counter-solution to his own objectionable measures.

So the problem is not him. It's us, folks.

Let's call a spade a spade.
Immigration is not a subject most parties are comfortable with. Invariably, even parties on the left are in favour of controlling the borders and not throwing the gates open to all and sundry. Increasingly centre and left-of-centre parties grudgingly accept that freedom of speech will not deal with radical Islamist preachers in our midst 'organically' and a bold fresh look is needed asking where their liberty infringes on someone else's – not on a community basis but on an individual basis, you know, the way we used to apply the law all these years before this became such a 'hot potato' issue. And then there is the issue of building community, and living together in all our multi-colour, multi-faith, multilingual splendour.
And many left or centre-left politicians are not comfortable with immigration debates because they rightly consider these three issues distinct and separate and find that more and more people don't and in fudging the debate these people confuse the matter, create panics and allow concerns over hate preachers to poison community relations.
Nick Griffin is one of those people.

He is not afraid to talk about immigration. For him the distinctions are distracting and the problem boils down to what moves and scares the individual citizen. And his solutions are stark, simple, bold. And racist.
But what is the other side counter-suggesting?
A convoluted narrative of freedom, multi-culturalism and necessary border controls, constant reminders that the problem is multi-faceted and many-tiered and above all not simple. All solutions offered are halting, nuanced, complicated, careful – because one should not confuse the issues. And rightly so. Still, I fear that Nick Griffin has this one wrapped up if 'straight talking' is what the audience are after.

Holding a contradiction in his mind is not a challenge for Mr Griffin who is both articulate and clever. He understand the contradictions and in them he sees the weakness his opponents most suffer from. This contradiction, in his hands, stops being innate in the subject and becomes a weakness in his opponents' political will and solutions' agenda.

What do we have to counter that? I am using 'we' in the loosest possible sense here, siding with the people who disagree with Nick Griffin even if that is the only thing we agree on.

What have we got?
Don't forget Jack Straw is sitting on our side.
Griffin is articulate, confident and confidence-inspiring. He sounds like he commands the issues and can effortlessly pare them down to their essence. Even though that essence is tainted, one-sided and heavily nuanced, he appears to be offering common sense summaries and bold solutions. Jack Straw is not and does not.

So why are we so scared of letting him speak tonight?
Not because we disagree profoundly with what he has to say – that, if anything, is reason to take him on, thrash it out, expose him to the public, ensure the other side is heard.
Not because we fear what his effect might be on the polity – because he is already in the polity so it is too late, plus we already know that enforced isolation and silence creates heroes and not villains.

It is because we are afraid we can't match him, blow for blow, for the hearts and minds of the viewers. And that is terrifying.
It's because we know Nick Griffin is as popular as his opinions are objectionable. And we know we have all the good arguments. But we don't have a Nick Griffin on our side to deliver those arguments in level, even-toned, convincing, populist nuggets.

So we are scared.
Of course we are scared.
I, for one, am terrified.

And I don't know about you. But I will be glued to Question Time tonight. Munching pop-corn, mumbling to myself and hoping against hope that Griffin will have a bad day, that he will lose his cool, that he will sound to all tonight as offensive as he sounds to me all the time. And that Baroness Warsi, Chris Huhne or Bonnie Greer will pull an ace out of their sleeves explaining why a world where Nick Griffin's opinions are not put into practice is a better world for all. And that Jack Straw stays silent. Wishful thinking but what the hell, while I'm at it I might as well.

I just hope that the arguments for our side go further than 'Nick Griffin, you are a racist' because he will slam them down and go for a home run before anything else has been stated. Not because he is not racist. But because pointing out the obvious in a petulant way is not good debating.
Telling him his policies are wrong because he is a bad person is a non-sequitur that makes us look like fools with nothing else to say and gives him the moral high-ground.
And that's the last place you want to concede to your neighborhood racist. He is already self-appointed defender of home and hearth, hand him the moral high ground on a platter and what have you got? A populist, playing on everyone's most closely guarded fears, articulating their concerns about safety on their streets, jobs for their children, a culture they call their own, who is victimised by the very same people who don't address the people's worries, the very same people who have no counter-argument to throw his way than an insult.
Attack him on who he is rather than what he says and you've driven people into his arms in droves.

You do see where I'm going with this right?
The urge to slap Nick Griffin lurks in us all. But that is not what is called for today.
We need to take him on the issues or go home. Blow by blow, line by line. Address the same questions, counter his conclusions, offer alternative solutions.
Speak to the same people he is speaking to on the same issues.
He claims he is of the people, for the people. Do we all realise what that means?
If he is addressing a struggling, white manual labourer in Bradford, we cannot be addressing a professor of ethics at Edinburgh. If he speaks about protection against radical Islam, we cannot be addressing comparative theology scholars who understand that the Islamic Umma is a community of peace ergo Griffin is wrong.
Take him on, damn it. Being more highbrow than him is how we lose this battle not how we win it.
Surely, career politicians can do this, right?

So what are we afraid of?
Are we afraid of 'the people'? Their inability to see through him and know better? Then we should all go home because no democrat is afraid of the people. You either trust in the people or join the populists a la Nick Griffin.

So if not that then what?
Could it be that although we disagree with Griffin we have absolutely no ideas on the matter he is about to challenge us on that we are comfortable with? I sincerely hope not. But I can see no other explanation that makes sense. We are afraid of Nick Griffin because he's calling our bluff and, other than grand ideas, the political mainstream have nothing to suggest that makes sense to their voters.
In which case we should be afraid of Nick Griffin. Very afraid.

Forget Wonderland. Through the Looking Glass, lies Turkey

If asked to take a guess, would you suppose that:
A western-oriented, secularist, aggressively modernising party would be in favour or its country joining the EU?
An army would be traditionally conservative and sympathetic to religion and tradition?
A populist government would always make sure they carry the people with them?

Yeah, you would, wouldn't you?
Only if you were talking about Turkey you'd be wrong.

In Turkey, the populist Islamist government currently in power is in favour of EU accession and the secularist, traditionally westernising opposition (the CHP, Atatürk's own party) are vocally against all reform efforts and, although theoretically in favour of accession, effectively blocking the path to EU by demanding that the EU 'respects' Turkey in ways that make no sense to the EU whatsoever. Not that the Euros mind. All delays to Turkey's accession are well and good by Brussels, but that's another story altogether.

Meanwhile the AKP is locked in a battle to the death with the country's high-profile, aggressively secularist military who, quite frankly, loathe the AKP and everything it stands for and are – possibly, maybe – trying to undermine the government quite actively. A series of leaks (more on this in a minute) have caused the army's otherwise impeccable reputation to suffer and for the first time in the Republic's eight decades, the people are losing faith in the military and are beginning to see the value in purging politics from military influence and putting the soldiers back in their box.

The AKP, of course, agrees and has been trying to do just that for the best part of a decade now. But do they manage to carry the people with them?
No sir.
They manage, magically, to make the people feel excluded from proceedings and by-passed as the government is acting on what everyone in principle agrees upon but without any public debate or evident deliberation. And although agreement over the bottom line is there, these are vital questions affecting the nature and future of the Turkish polity and reform without deliberation is unacceptable in principle, agreement notwithstanding.
You'd think that for sheer ease the government would have capitalised on the popularity of the idea, being populist and all. But paternalistic habits die hard and even populists take a leaf out of the book on old school Turkish politics traditions.

Under normal circumstances you would expect the opposition to make the most of the government's failures roundabout now. But don't hold your breath.
The opposition is even more paternalistic than the AKP who have nothing to worry about because the CHP seems hell-bent on working itself into extinction one statement at a time.

First of all, the CHP are perceived (and dismissed) as a mouthpiece for the increasingly discredited military. This, at least, gives them something relevant to say as, when not saying what the generals want them to say, the CHP have little to say that is of any interest to the people. Out of touch? And then some as the CHP have been outside power for the best part of two decades and once, after the 1999 elections, also outside Parliament. Popularity is evidently not the word here but has the CHP leader Deniz Baykal resigned to let a more credible (not to mention likeable) candidate to take the reigns? Like hell he has.

Now being perceived as the mouthpiece of the military wouldn't have been all that bad had it not been for a series of recent leaks and almost-scandals that show the military getting really jittery, planning coups, plotting against the government and against powerful religious brotherhoods, particularly against the Gülenists. Obviously, none of these plots have come off – or I would have been blogging about that instead – and most of them have been stopped by the military leadership themselves but the fact remains that people believe the military is taking things too far. All cries that the memos are fabricated or that the army purges itself fail to drown out the feeling that the time is right for change.

The people want it.
The Gülenists want it.
The AKP want it.

So why is it not happening?

Well. Bits of it are happening. Change is afoot and has been non-stop since 2001. To a Turkey buff like me the changes that have come to pass in the past 8 years are immense, mind-boggling, 'I never thought I'd see this' type changes. But to the naked eye, things are not as great. To the close-up look of a Turkish citizen or the bird's eye view of an external observer, change is slow, sluggish, halting, half-hearted and above all: a bit of a sand-castle on the surf. Because you can reform all you want, unless you tackle the constitutional foundations of the state, it's like selecting toppings before you make sure you have enough flour to make a pizza.

And what I mean by that is this: for all the bravado and all the radical mini reforms, the AKP's policy has been a balancing act so far. Pushing change as far as it can go before things snap, break, shatter and come back to bite you in the proverbial rear. The AKP's genius – if you will permit me the term – is that they have managed to play on all their opponents' weaknesses while using their opponents' ideas to further their own cause. And it has worked. It has worked well enough to keep the AKP in power, to keep the EU happy and the accession process ticking over. It has also helped accomplish important and much needed reforms and keep the people on side. Most of the time.

But a balancing act rarely bodes well as a sign of decisive political will, which is what fundamental constitutional reform would entail.
In short.
Turkey's constitution was written by the army in the 80s. It reflects their ideas, it promotes their priorities and it upholds their role as guardian of the Republic.
Amen.
This constitution has been massively amended. It is now a patchwork of ideas and a lot of the 'in your face' militaristic provisions have been removed. So what? The heart of it remains and it will always do until someone has the political balls to say 'enough of this, let's make a new constitution that tells the soldiers what to do rather than the other way round'.

But who is going to be that guy?
And assuming we get 'that guy', where on earth will he start?
Where do you start in a political system where nothing is what you expect, allegiances are very idiosyncratic and nobody ever says exactly what they mean because there are laws against that.
And even when things seem aligned, groups seem to agree, consensus seems almost inevitable nothing ever happens like you'd think it would. Because you are through the looking glass and nothing is as it seems.

And as with the fairytale, so with Turkey, while the white rabbit, the mad hatter and the queen of hearts indulge in their games, express their quirks and pursue whatever takes their fancy, it is the common folk that have to dodge the Cheshire cat, ensure they hold onto their heads and try to build for themselves a semblance of normality despite it all.
And you can't help but think that, given the circumstances, 'that guy', 'those guys' the people who can visualize and implement real change are exactly the people who are trying to get past the cat and the deranged queen of hearts. The people who could change it all are exactly the people who are too busy trying to build a life, despite it all.

Cry, the beloved country

I did not vote yesterday.
I live in London, innit?

Plus the election results seemed almost predestined.
Plus, I cannot legitimately bring myself to choose between the choices available and as casting a blank 'protest' ballot would simply boost the top party along its way in this curious twist of proportional representation whereby blank and spoiled ballots are added to the votes knowingly cast for the winner, I didn't vote.

But this is not a critique of Greece's electoral system.
It's not a critique of Greece's political system.
It's just a realisation, that crept up on me slowly last night as I was watching the results come in over the internet and talked on the phone with family and friends out in Greece. And the realisation is this: we, the Greek public, are like one of those girls, neglected, abused and unloved by their boyfriends but so convinced we can do no better, that we have learned to draw pleasure from the days when he isn't so bad and we are simply over the moon on the days he can muster some basic decency. And so deep is this conviction that we can do no better that, when we finally leave the brute, we end up in the arms of someone just like him because 'that's what men are like'.

How many times on the run-up to this election did you say: 'well, at least the new one cannot possibly be as bad as the last one, he may try but it is impossible to be just as bad'?
How many times did you hear: 'well now the only way is up, surely we have hit rock bottom'?
How many times did the voting public vocally and actively affirm that they considered the choices presented to them inadequate and the act of voting a mechanical discharge in the hope that further evil would be averted by removing from power the guy who so clearly failed to resolve all the pressing problems that presented themselves on his watch?

And replace him with what?
A guy the voting public had pointedly rejected twice before.
A guy who did not have the decency to resign when he should have because he knew that if he stuck around it was a matter of time before we needed somewhere to run, away from the neglect and abuse of our Nea Dimokratia boyfriend. And despite our previous rejections, when things got depserate and we had nowhere else to run, we did run straight into the arms of suitor number 2, George Papandreou: twice rejected but never actually gotten rid of.
He stuck around shamelessly and here he is now, in power.

So don't talk to me about George Papandreou's 'triumph'. Mr Karamanlis simply lost the election. He lost it with a bang, he lost it by a mile but he lost it by himself. Mr Papandreou didn't need to actively win it. He just needed to wait for power to land on his lap. As it did.

Semantics, I hear you say?
Hardly.
Negative voting of the 'I really don't want this guy, I'll vote for the other one' variety makes the lives of politicians really really easy. They do not need to campaign on the issues, they do not need to stick to the issues, they hardly need to do anything about the issues once they are in power. All they need to do is be perceived as a better choice than the other guy. So on this occasion Karamanlis had sunk so low in people's estimations that Papandreou could have turned up on the day without campaigning and he still would have won by a landslide.

'Ultimate personal vindication' for Papandreou, says the front page of Eleftherotypia today.
Give me a break.
They feed us this crap and we sit here and take it. As if the election results prove that Papandreou was right not to resign after his last defeat – and the one before – as if this proves we were always coming back to him. As if the poor choice and the chronic damage it is doing both to our political culture and to the country as such is not even worth mentioning. Because when it comes to prime ministers and boyfriends, they are all much of a muchness and prince charming has been dead for decades.

At least Karamanlis resigned, so that is that there and on we go with a new face and old ideas when the time for their leadership election comes. Even more mediocre suitors to choose from. But maybe the baseline will be higher. Maybe Nea Demokratia's next leader will realise that if you have been in power two years, during which all you have achieved is beaching the economy and watching idly on while riots raged throughout your country, well if those conditions are met then you don't call an election unless losing it is what you are after.
And maybe that is what you were after, Mr Karamanlis, you were tired after all and the glamour wore off pretty soon this second time round, didn't it?

So what have we got?
A populace that is dispirited, tired and completely disillusioned. A populace that puts up with the neglectful, abusive boyfriends because it is convinced that mediocrity is 'as good as it gets' and the goal is to swap one inadequate man with another to avoid the worst of it and keep afloat.

This makes the job of running for elections that bit easier. The less your voters care, the less you have to do to convince them. The less your girlfriend expects, the more you get away with.

Meanwhile, the parties of the left are losing support – not fast, but noticeably – and LAOS, the racist, ultira-nationalistic, uber-rightist party that seemed like a bad joke when it first hit our TV screens is gathering votes – fast and noticeably.

Does that matter?
Damn right it does.
Because some people vote for mr Karatzaferis despite his politics, for his affability – and that is simultaneously stupid and irresponsible. But many are voting for him for his politics and his affability: at least he cares, they say, and maybe he could have handled the riots better (as the extreme right are want to do) and maybe he would have handled the economic crisis better, by clamping down on the illegal immigrants because, didn't you know, they brought down the international banking system and are to blame for Greece's ailing economy.

So maiden Greece assessed her available suitors and, convinced she can do no better, is salvaging what she can. Taking the power mantle away from the guy who failed her most recently and giving it to the guy whom she has repeatedly rejected but who won't take the hint because he knows, he just knows her expectations are low and if he waits long enough, if he just waits long enough.

And he did. Wait long enough. And here we are in his arms. In fact, so eager were we to get rid of Karamanlis, that we rushed to the polls and gave the new guy a majority that means he doesn't need to consult with anyone, within or outside parliament, setting him up to be our new abusive and neglectful boyfriend, convinced that we can do no better.

Blogging for democracy

World rejoice. I am back.
I've been offline for a whole month and, although I am sure you missed me and, I assure you, I missed you back, I must report that it is possible to live away from a computer. For a few weeks, I caught a glimpse of a parallel universe in which my friends were not scattered the world over, my job did not rely on shared documents and email and day-to-day activities did not depend so totally on the internet.
You guessed it. I was on holiday.

In real life of course staying away from the computer is not an option. Work. Checking cinema listings. Submitting my tax return. Downloading the latest TED talk. Reading the papers. Chatting to friends. Grocery shopping. Job applications. Travel bookings and theatre reservations.
What did we ever do before the internet? But really, what are we really doing with the internet?

Bear with me.
I was walking through Athens a few weeks ago till a gaggle of teenage tourists caught my eye.
'The Pnyx. Where the hell is the Pnyx. I don't see anything' said one.
Behind you, you moron, thought I.
But I didn't say it. Because really, the Pnyx is not much to look at. Places where real business takes place rarely are. The Pnyx, or what is left of it, is easy to just walk past and, in the dark, it looks less like a world heritage site and more like an empty lot. Which, nowadays, it is in more ways than one.
So the tourists walked on, having decided that their guide book was rubbish and it was time for a drink and I was left thinking that they are not alone in having totally missed the Pnyx.

Athenian democracy was flawed, we all know that. But the one thing that was right about it was the Pnyx and everything that transpired there as this was where the citizens, free and equal, got to speak, openly and on any subject they wished to speak on.
Dull? I bet it was.
Every Tom, Dick and Harry having a constitutional right to go on and on and on (and on) about their pet peeve, their favourite gripe. Painful. But vital. For democracy. For community. For fairness. In the Pnyx no politician could ever claim to be 'the voice of the people'. The people would speak for themselves and tell him where to get off. The people can of course be wrong – they did, after all, kill Socrates and exile Aristeidis – but that's an occupational hazard if you are a democrat. At least back then the people had a chance to get it wrong themselves, rather than by proxy.

Democracy is not meant to be the system of good outcomes. Democracy takes care of the many. If the many are wrong, so is their polity. If the many are brutal so is their state. If the many are inspired, so is their society.
Democracy has nothing to do with the what and everything to do with the how.

For the ancients, getting that right involved leaving women and slaves out of it because they had no cognitive abilities. Do I disagree with it? Of course I disagree with it. But I don't disagree with the premise, even though it would leave me out in the cold without a vote.
Deciding who your citizens are is hard and every benchmark is arbitrary – gender, age, money, nationality, religion, race: what criteria define 'the people'?
Lines need to be drawn and it is not always obvious where you should draw them. Women today have universal suffrage while monarchs, refugees, migrants, lunatics, children and criminals don't get the vote.
Defining 'the people' is neither easy nor straightforward.
In Athens that group was narrow and closed. But at least it was equal and free. Which is more than we can say about the citizen body of any modern democracy.

In Athens only free-born, Athenian-born males of some property were part of the 'people'. The group was small. Still it had wild variations within. But once you were in you were in and you got to benefit from a system that was there to serve you. Now there's a thought.
Inequalities of wealth and status among citizens did not matter in the exercise of civic duty and the enjoyment of civic rights. Politics was the great leveller. The exact opposite of today's democracy where status, money, skin colour and connections determine power, access, influence and civic security.

Democracy in its purest form rested on three simple principles: isonomia, isopoliteia, isigoria.
All citizens are equal under the law.
All citizens have equal voting rights.
All citizens have an equal right to debate policy.

The Pnyx is the spatial substantiation of the principle of isigoria, the forgotten heart of democracy, the right and opportunity to speak on an equal footing in matters of state.

Of course, the three principles of Athenian democracy are mentioned in every self-proclaimed democratic constitution in Europe, America and, I am sure, in a few even less probable locations. We pay lipservice to isigoria: everyone is allowed to speak. Everyone is allowed to stand for election. Everyone is allowed to speak to their MP. In the UK you are even allowed to stand on a soap box and speak to the pigeons of Hyde Park Corner.
So bloody what?
It ain't the Pnyx is it? It ain't the Pnyx if nobody is listening.

Isigoria means you have a right to be listened to. Not just a right to babble.
Isigoria means you have guaranteed access to media that will allow your opinions to be heard and considered. In ancient Athens that medium was a rock near the Acropolis. Central. Good acoustics. It worked.
Today it would be an online citizen forum, a people's assembly, a rally.
Today it could be a million and one things – we have, after all, the internet.
We have it, but what do we do with it?

A lot. Actually.
Our governments may not be helping here. They don't protect our access. They don't encourage our participation. But now, for the first time ever, we don't need them to. We have the internet.
The internet is for porn and facebook.
The internet is for speed dating and spam email.
The internet is full of fascinating blogs, community portals, grassroot mobilisation sites, civil society organisations and communal action outlets.
The internet is our Pnyx.

So blog away my friends and let's get back what is rightfully ours.

And next time someone asks where the Pnyx is within earshot, I'll give them the only possible answer: it's wherever you make it happen.