This leaflet was published by anarchists frequenting the Chrysallida social space, in August 1985.¹⁾

The Hooligans, the Stingies, the Starved People and the Bad Asses

The football league is over; the mass rallies of July have also passed. The Cuéllar initiative froze, as usual, and everything indicated that Cypriot society would remain for about a month without mass spectacles to organize its boredom.

And suddenly “chaos” erupts in Germasogeia. A new “fruit” for the “Cypriot reality”; and the hysteria of the occasion is analogous. The newspapers are shouting about hooligans, they are searching for the “brains” (in this place it seems that spontaneity has been abolished), leftists and rightists demand increased policing, they worry about OUR state, for the room bookings of OUR hotels, for OUR post-war economic “miracle” (pay attention to that OUR). Let us not talk of the political parties and their supporters. They live –to the extent that they can live- in their own world.

Within this entire phantasmagoric spectacle constructed by reporters, the State and the gossiping in the coffee shops, the attitude supporting an attack against a section of the youth started to be visible and materialize in practice. And this is not a random event. It has been under preparation for a long time, through all those bla bla bla about the youth that has “turned bad” and “gone astray”. That is, having escaped, in some way, from their direct control, re-locating its pursuits away from Greco-Christian potatoes and struggling cucumbers. How much pursuit there can be in Michael Jackson and catcalling is another story. Recently, the lords of Ayia Napa gathered to suggest an import ban on the motorcycles used by the “kamikaze” (Quite the imagination at the Ayia Napa municipal council – and we thought that fascism had its limits). With the last incidences in Germasogeia everyone broke out against the hooligans, the kamikaze, the anarchists (look at our note) – the “pests”, the “cancers”, the so-called “anti-social elements”.

So what happened in Germasogeia then? A mass outburst or racist hysteria? Probably both. However, these phenomena are neither foreign-imported nor as surprising as the newspapers present them. It was the explosion of contradictions produced by our bloated society. On the one hand, a youth full of anger, drifting through boredom, monotony, the fascism of the army, and the authoritarianism of the Cypriot family. On the other hand, the same youth forced to choose between puritanism and canned ideologies and ideals, between remaining a passive spectator of life and surrendering to the extreme isolation of party or other forms of herd mentality, between marginalization and sexual misery in front of a Europeanized display of luxury.

That is why what has happened, happened in Germasogeia. There, where the spectacle pushes the contradiction of a miserable, backward society and its European façade to the extremes. Within these frameworks, youth have every right to be angry and to rebel in order to claim their autonomy and their right to self-determine their lives. However, in Germasogeia there was no social uprising—or even a conflict that sought the overthrow of the old in order to replace it with the new. On the contrary, ideologically it was the expression of hysterical racism and a ridiculous attempt to wash away the shame of the ‘male honour’ of our equally ridiculous society (Oh, of course!!! Are we supposed to let the Arabs fuck us?).

The tragicomic aspect of the whole story was that the outburst of the youth came as the realization of the hidden desires of the average Cypriot. Because the racism and the degraded masculinity that gave both the trigger and the ideological direction to the outburst are born and bred within our very society. They are the sick attitudes that emerge from everyday life and its traditional logic-irrationality. It is the mindset of the proper gentleman that sells his house to the Arabs and then turns and swears at them.

It is at the same time the mentality of ‘male honour’, of the macho man, who considers his phallus the centre of the universe. And this is not accidental. It stems directly from the patriarchal structure of society, which supports the dowry, virginity, sexual repression, the oppression of women, the oppression of youth, etc.

On Saturday, the youth became an instrument for the materialization of the fantasies of the social whole (and of course the Arabs were the easy target). Fake toughness, thuggery, and racism. The following day, a lot of proper ladies and gentlemen, rightists and leftists, bourgeois and proletariat, young and old, said: “what they did to them was fitting”. On Monday, power gritted its teeth – journalists rushed in, along with the State and political parties, and issued the line of ‘condemnation of the incidents’. It is from this point that everyone began the search for scapegoats – and of course the easy target was the youth.

Road blocks were raised; investigations and arrests began, as well as the policing of the youth (and not only). In Larnaca, on Monday, 45 youths were arrested in such anti-pest operations. No one is protesting. All those who kept on going on for democracies and liberties have shut up. They don’t even keep up the pretences anymore.

And what are you youngsters doing? It is easy to beat up defenseless people in the street. Now that they are swearing at you from all angles, that investigate your every step, that arrest you, where is your protest? Don’t talk to us of disgraced threats that the same things will repeat themselves because even stupidity has its limits.

Our depravity is both the cause and the result of our social order. After all, it is the MMAD [anti-riot police] that beats and arrests people, it is the newspapers and the café gossip that fuel the ideology of racist outbursts, and it is the State itself that organizes and directs the terror against the youth.

THE LADS NO LONGER EXIST

THEY’VE BEEN RAN OVER BY THE TRAIN

• the events in Germasogeia were nothing but a false expression of our misery.
• They are perhaps the beginning of the end of the “miracle” of the post-war period.
• It would be the end of the end if this youth realizes what exactly is being done to it.

A N A R C H I S T S

NOTE TOWARDS REPORTERS AND OTHER CLUELESS: Racism has no relation to anarchy and anarchism; and the anarchists are not some idiots to become the instruments of your fantasies.