End the dictatorship of fear! Support the Greek people on Bloomsday
“God, Kinch, if you and I could only work together we might do something for the island. Hellenise it”
This Saturday, Bloomsday, we will take to the streets of Dublin to show solidarity with the Greek people in their brave struggle against the destruction of their society by the Troika.
Our demonstration will take place on the eve of elections in which the Greek people can break the circuit of fear imposed on the peoples of Europe. This fear is imposed by political and economic elites whose intent is to do away with democracy altogether.
Without Greece, Bloomsday would have been simply unthinkable. James Joyce was deeply influenced by Greece –its philosophy, its literature, its language, its mythology.
Ulysses, the book celebrated by Bloomsday, ‘the revelation of all life in a single day’, as one writer put it, is based on Homer’s Odyssey. Joyce wanted the cover of Ulysses to show the colours of the Greek flag. Joyce would have been horrified at the destruction visited on present day Greek society.
If Leopold Bloom, Joyce’s modern Odysseus, were wandering the streets of Dublin this Saturday, he would make his way to the Spire.
Bloom, the central figure of Ulysses, is an internationalist. He longs for universality and democratic equality: the very things that the regimes imposed by the Troika place under attack.
In the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund, Leopold Bloom would have seen his visions of ‘manufactured monsters for mutual murder’ made reality.
Universality and democratic equality: the Greek people can stand up for these values with their vote on Sunday.
On Bloomsday, that is what we will be standing up for too. We will not stand by and allow dreams of a democratic Europe to be destroyed by fear, or, as Leopold Bloom put it, by the ‘hideous hobgoblins produced by a horde of capitalistic lusts'.
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Assemble the Spire, O’Connell Street, 1pm, Saturday 16 June.