Greece's Migrant Community Besieged

Xenophobia, racial discrimination, unnatural hatreds manufactured or ramped up in the pursuit of political ends - this is one of the more despicable tools used by capitalism's puppet masters. In another time or another place, another situation, this could be me or you or our children or parents. Divide and conquer, divide and rule. Why? Aren't we all just human beings?

JS

Many years before the first clouds of the crisis would hover over the greek skies, amidst greek society’s most glorious of moments and its most mundane of days, the lives and labour of migrants would be faced with their meticulous devaluation.

For them, the crisis has by now come of age. Yet despite and against shallow journalistic interpretations, there is nothing humanitarian about it. This is because for them, the crisis was from the upstart orchestrated politically, socially and militarily. In this way, the discourse about racism in crisis-ridden Greece merely obfuscates and comes in handy, for it obscures exactly how structural this devaluation had been for the development of the Greek state in itself, as well as for the self-perception of Greek society.

Yet the crisis knows how to twist meanings too. Today, migrants are accused of the very decline of the Greek edifice. And within this twisted world, their devaluation takes on a more offensive and, at the same time, a more legitimate form. Impossible Biographies, as part of the research project The City at a Time of Crisis, bears witness to this offensive. Today, just like yesterday, the devalued lives of migrants shall remind us how it is to live and die within an enforced anonymity and invisibility. How it is to live a life whose biography is impossible.

(The latest short documentary by the ‘City at a Time of Crisis’ research project portrays the harrowing plight of Greece’s besieged migrant community.

Produced by Ross Domoney and Christos Filippidis)

vimeo here
info from here