Golden Dawn finally getting theirs.

Things are bad in Europe. Like, really really bad. The richer nations of northern Europe are doing all right, but the poorer ones of southern Europe are facing Great Depression-like economic indicators. Half of the youth are unemployed, GDP constantly falls, etc. And, like what happened in a different European country during the actual Great Depression, a far-right fringe party is starting to grow in power in one of the worst-hit countries, Greece.

Chrysi Avgi (Golden Dawn) is not just another rightist anti-immigrant European party. They deny the Holocaust, blame the crash on "Jewish bankers," terrorize and murder foreigners in Greece, and maintain their social standing by organizing food giveaways to "ethnic Greeks only" and by keeping close ties to the cops. The Greek cops are so hand-in-hand with these bastards that in many cases, they refer people with criminal complaints to Golden Dawn, who then end up having to pay donations to the party for their continued protection.

So Greece is seriously on the cusp of fascism because of the crisis, and finally has seemed to realize it. They arrested the parliamentary leader of Golden Dawn after the party was implicated in the murder of a leftist Greek rapper. (Apparently killing non-Greeks isn't a serious enough crime to get the authorities over yonder interested in justice.) And the predictable clucking of tongues from moralizers has begun.

You want to worry about democracy, about what happens when a country has to arrest some of its lawmakers? Look to the source of the extremism. It's not the immigrants, or even Chrysi Avgi. It's Angela fuckin' Merkel, the chancellor of Germany, who's forced austerity down the throats of southern Europe. She's the arch-Republican of Europe, believing in the magical wonders of lower government spending when all empirical evidence says otherwise.

Southern Europe can't cut their way out of the crisis. Hell, they can't even balance their books by cutting government spending - the cuts just cause the economies to contract quicker than the cuts. But they do it anyway, because they're afraid to default and leave the euro, and because Merkel's Germany is the biggest "rich" nation that can afford to bail them out. They create a Great Depression for their people, they create hopelessness for their people to appease the Germans, and their people consequently have no hope. No small wonder that their people then, at least in part, turn to crazies that'll at least protect them, give them food, and look out for their basic interests when Europe ordered them to starve.

Chrysi Avgi are murderous monsters and their very existence as a viable electoral party is far more of a threat to Greek democracy than arresting them will ever be. But instead of chiding them for breaking democratic norms, Europe and the IMF should chide themselves for creating the conditions that let it happen.