You Can Kill Each Other After I Leave: Refugees, Fascism, and Bloodshed in Greece

by Patrick Strickland

Overview

In the vein of George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia and Martha Gellhorn's The View from the Ground, a remarkable work of reportage based on hundreds of hours of on-the-ground reporting, that tells how Greece's violent far right is trying to destroy the birthplace of democracy . . .

In 2012, Greece’s far-right political party the Golden Dawn were building a significant street presence in Greece. Over the previous decade they had grown from a tiny group of neofascist brawlers to a formidable vigilante force responsible for multiple murders, street fights and shootings.

On the eve of the 2012 election one of their candidates said that the “knives will come out after the elections.” And the knives did come out. Golden Dawn became a significant parliamentary presence and used it as a platform to escalate their terror campaigns against migrants and leftists across the country. They also became an inspiration for far-right groups across Europe and the Americas.

Journalist Patrick Strickland first arrived in Greece in 2015 to cover the European refugee crisis, just as Golden Dawn were ramping up their campaign of terror. With an eye for journalistic detail that recalls Orwell’s reportage in Spain, Strickland traces the antecedents of Golden Dawn to the dark years of Nazi occupation and subsequent military dictatorship, and looks at the post 2008 economic crisis that emboldened the far right.

He also introduces us to the resistance forces standing up to the right, taking us to the Greek islands where people rallied together to support the hundreds of thousands of refugees traveling across the Aegean Sea. Strickland also takes us to the anarchist squats in Athens where activists took over abandoned buildings and opened them up to the refugees, a tactic they viewed as an anti-fascist alternative to dooming migrants to life in the squalid refugee camps.

You Can Kill Each Other After I Leave is an exemplary work of narrative nonfiction and compelling journalism that provides an intimate portrait of the stories of migrants and activists resisting the growth of the far-right, as well as a vivid and shrewd analysis of the evolving political landscape in Greece and Europe.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781685890667
Publisher:	Melville House Publishing
Publication date:	04/15/2025
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.75(w) x 8.52(h) x 1.07(d)

About the Author

Patrick Strickland is a journalist and author from Texas who has reported from some fifteen countries across Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, covering immigration, the rise of the far right, humanitarian catastrophes, armed conflict and more. His reportage has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Nation, The New Republic, Politico, The Guardian, Vice, In These Times, and elsewhere. He is the managing editor of Inkstick Media, based in Athens, Greece. His previous books are Alerta! Alerta! Snapshots of Europe's Anti-Fascist Struggle and The Marauders: Standing Up to Vigilantes in the American Borderlands.

Read an Excerpt

May 23, 2017, marked the 156th day of the trial of Golden Dawn, the Greek neo-Nazi party that had, just five years earlier, made history when it entered the Hellenic Parliament for the first time. Even before its political successes, the party had shocked much of Greek society by terrorizing refugees and migrants and carrying out wanton violence against political opponents, most often leftists. Entering parliament with 7 percent of the vote had not tampered the neo-Nazi party’s tendency toward bloodshed. Threats compounded. The pogroms continued. Murders followed, brutal knifings in which victims were left to bleed out in the streets. Now, sixty-nine Golden Dawn members were on trial. After a Golden Dawn supporter stabbed and killed the Greek anti-fascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas in September 2013, the state accused the defendants of operating a criminal organization.

That day, United Kingdom–based filmmaker Konstantinos Georgousis, who had followed Golden Dawn members for his documentary The Cleaners, arrived at Korydallos Prison near the capital, where the trial was taking place. Georgousis took the stand and spoke about what he had seen while documenting the party’s campaigning some five years earlier.

During the lead-up to the parliamentary elections in May 2012, Georgousis had tailed party candidate Alekos Plomaritis as he campaigned in Athens. Golden Dawn surged in those elections and a subsequent vote later in the year. When the young documentary filmmaker took the stand, none of the defendants were present, an absence that would come to define much of the five-year trial. Plomaritis made several horrifying statements to Georgousis throughout the filming. At one point during the filming, Georgousis followed Plomaritis and others as they harassed non-Greek vendors in an open-air market. “Get out of here,” he barked. “You’re not Greek.”

Addressing the camera, Plomaritis said of migrants: “These parasites drink our water, eat our food, and breathe our Greek air. And they kill us.” He continued, “We are ready to open the ovens. We would turn them into soap, but we may get a rash. So, we’ll only use it to wash cars and pavements.” Of the statements that most haunted Georgousis, he later told the courtroom, was a threat that proved with time to be true: “The knives will come out after the elections.”

Golden Dawn had already accumulated a terrifying track record of violence, which included highly organized pogroms carried out by well-trained attackers reminiscent of Nazi Germany’s assault squads, but there was no doubt that the bloodshed reached a crescendo after the party entered the parliament. And while it was true that Golden Dawn had never had a monopoly on far-right violence or anti-migrant pogroms in Greece, there was no denying the party’s concerted effort to till the soil for militant racists and neo-fascists who sought to “cleanse” Greece of groups whom Golden Dawn had always identified as enemies: refugees, migrants, minorities, members of the LGBTQ community, leftists, anarchists, and anti-fascists of all stripes.

Although Golden Dawn is an outlier in many respects, the neo-Nazi organization’s catastrophic rise in Greece marked a worrisome development on a global scale. Throughout the party’s existence, Golden Dawn imported white nationalist texts from abroad and often modeled its strategic operations off neo-Nazi groups outside of Greece. The success Golden Dawn enjoyed in a pair of 2012 legislative elections in Greece, however, changed everything. Around Europe, far-right groups had been growing for decades, but they eschewed the sort of unabashed Nazism that Golden Dawn celebrated. Landing in the Greek parliament while also commanding a terrifying presence in the streets represented something entirely new, and neo-Nazis and white nationalists the globe over took notice. The Greek party offered a blueprint for others that hoped to straddle parliamentary politics and street- level violence.

***

Throughout much of the time while I was writing and reporting this book, Golden Dawn’s trial was ongoing—and it groaned along at a funeral pace. There were thousands of documents to trudge through, and a series of strikes by public sector workers and lawyers didn’t help speed up the process. With proceedings repeatedly delayed, a verdict seemed distant, and clarity about the exact extent of the party’s role in the wave of destruction and bloodshed that had gripped Greece for so long remained unclear. And the violence, though occasionally decreasing, had never been eradicated. Between 2012 and 2018, the Athens-based Racist Violence Recording Network documented 988 incidents of bigoted violence, more than half of them targeting refugees and migrants.

Editorial Reviews

"Dives deep into into the world of Greece's far right movement and monitors the country's political struggle over the treatment of refugees" — The New York Times

"You Can Kill Each Other After I Leave tells the story of the global rise of the far right by centering the reader in the Greek experience. The book weaves together a story that rests both on the heartbreaking reality of racism's violent rise across Europe, and the inspiring commitment of the communities who have fought back. Strickland prose is incisive and poetic, lending incredible warmth to the struggle against the politics of fear and division. This is one of the best books written about our current political crisis, and it never loses sight of the real struggle for justice happening on the border and in the streets." —Shane Burley, author of Safety through Solidarity

"Veteran journalist Patrick Strickland provides a rigorous, thrillingly written look at how Greece became Europe's ground zero for resurgent fascism—and at the activists fighting back." —Molly Crabapple, author of Drawing Blood

"The number of forcibly displaced people globally is currently at record highs and yet we too rarely hear their stories and challenges. This startling book could not be timelier as the far right surges in popularity from Austria to Germany and Sweden to Greece. Star investigative journalist and chronicler Patrick Strickland goes deep into today's Greece and finds an ugly core, an emboldened fascism that provides inspiration to Europe's anti-refugee alliances. This book is a warning that we'd be foolish to ignore." — Antony Loewenstein, investigative journalist and author of The Palestine Laboratory

"You Can Kill Each Other After I Leave offers a disturbing exploration of the trajectory of the anti-immigrant movement in Greece and beyond. An authoritative book on the dark events that led to the present political calamities across the West." — Creede Newton, Senior Investigative Reporter, Southern Poverty Law Center

From the Publisher