Let me say right off the bat, it's a great place for a quiet week of relaxation, with great food and drink, and just about everyone wants your time there to be pleasant. Yes, they want you to return and visit again.
If the sun, food and wine does't convince you....maybe the hospitality will work in the end.
One day, walking around the center of town, I came to this poster....which is the announcement of a local 'stop fascism' meeting. It's a local political group who wants people charged up to prevent Nazis, fascism, or such from taking root in Greece.
For the record, Greeks spend a significant amount of time talking about things. I am reminded of a piece I read on Socrates once....who was a Greek.....with folks trying to find out his original 'position' in life. They believe that he was a blacksmith starting out in life, and simply got real talkative with folks stopping by. Eventually, visitors came to want his two-cents on things, and he apparently took up the philosopher work. Maybe this Greek-chat thing is what drives the whole society, even today.
So back to 'stop fascism'.
For years, I've had this interest in the fascism angle, how people buy into the trend, and the counter-fascism angle.
Most experts (usually professors saying this), will point at the five obvious things about hyped-up fascism: (1) Corruption is always part of the way forward, (2) there's always crime that needs fixing, with more laws, and more prison for 'bad-boys', (3) they hate intellectuals (mostly for being thinking they are smarter than fascists), (4) industry and business owners are incompetent (if they are making money and hiring more people), and (5) the news media needs good censorship to prevent them from lying to the public.
I should emphasize....that a good fascist operation will always have some type of blame-game going on, and it's awful hard in a great economic period to generate blame.
So for the folks in Corfu, it's ripe for fascism to occur (unemployment is way up, commerce is utterly dependent upon tourism, and the economy has never really resolved itself since 2008/2009).
The problem is, and it's obvious....the anti-fascist folks are often a mirror image of the pro-fascist folks. They want you to listen into the conversation....get hyped-up and to take bold stands.
But added to it, they'd like to suggest: (1) some form of cronyism where you take up association with like-minded groups who you really don't know much about or agree with totally, (2) believe labor is always under threat (even if you had a 5-percent unemployment rate), (3) talk you into wanting extra laws given to the police and judges, which hint of hatred but aren't that clear or obvious, (4) that the news media is just as important to manipulate or use as the fascist's cause, and (5) anti-nationalism is driven to the degree of the fascist push for pro-nationalism.
In the end, you have a society often on the edge of their seats....in turmoil....attending meetings and getting politically thrilled about saving-the-world or saving-your-city.
Most Greeks thrilled by the two groups? No. That's the amusing thing about the whole trend. Over two-thousand years, it's just been a lot of talk, without much real accomplishment. Occasionally a regular war or a civil war will occur, to re-balance things, but generally.....it's what you could do at your local or neighborhood level that matters. With talk often being kinda 'cheap'.
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