GREECE: Golden Dawn orders blogger locked up for blasphemy

   

Greek right wing nutjobs the Golden Dawn have a way of dealing with people who post amusing blogs. It demands that they are imprisoned for blasphemy.


According to the Greek newspapers, a 27 year old wrote a Facebook page about a respected Orthodox Christian monk Elder Paisios, who lived in Mount Athos.
The page was entitled "Elder Pastitsios the Pastafarian" and mocked the commercialisation of the Pastitsios' legacy.

However, the move has gotten the Golden Dawn's goat. It has submitted an official petition asking the government to take down the page. The charges that the young man faces are "blasphemy" and "disrespect to the religious beliefs of others",
The irony of the move by an anti-Semitic party which wants Muslims kicked out of Greece, and has been dubbed "pagan" by the Greek Orthodox church, seems to have gone unnoticed.

However, somehow the Golden Dawn has managed to get the police to act on its orders and crack down on the unfortunate blogger who was arrested and had his computer taken away.
The charges come from the Computer Crime Unit actually filed medieval style charges of blasphemy. If convicted the poor bloke will probably not be burnt at the stake – after all this is not the 15th century.
Instead, he could be locked up for a year for the crime of taking the Nintendo out of a dead person.

The reason that the Golden Dawn might be rushing to the defence of the long dead Elder Paisios is that it might be planning to use him as a figurehead. During his life, Paisios made a number of controversial political statements and prophecies which your average Golden Dawn nutter would love to fulfil.

These include the prediction that a war with Turkey will lead to a restoration of a Greater Greece that includes Albania, Macedonia, and Istanbul, and the mass conversion of Turks from Islam to Orthodox Christianity.
These are exactly the sort of pretexts that right wing nationalists need to declare war on people.