CHAPTER 4 The Military Dimosthenis Papadatos 1/ THE MILITARY, THE ULTRA-RIGHT AND A “STATE IN WAR”: TENTATIVE CHALLENGES OF A DOUBLE BOUNDARY “Some isolated incidents that have been publicly disclosed at various times cannot change the fact that four decades ater the collapse of the dictatorship the military has been better immunized against ultra-right intrusion than any other security force.” This summarizes the common position of all those who participated in our survey on the military and who, for obvious reasons, prefer to remain anonymous. However, two transformative events dramatically cast doubt on the validity of such judgments: In the atermath of the assassination of the 34-year-old anti-fascist musician Pavlos Fyssas by the neo-Nazis of Golden Dawn, it was revealed, among other things, that members of this organization had received unoicial training from military oicers. Just one week later, a group called the Special Forces Reserve Oicers Community (SFROC) announced online its intent to stage a coup d’etat within the week. This was seen as a factor of further destabilization, and mobilized the judiciary. On 28 September 2013, the announced day of the coup, there was of course no “establishment of a national emergency government under the President of the Supreme Court and guaranteed by the Armed Forces”, as the SFROC had demanded. What happened instead on that day was something unprecedented in Greek history in the period since the 1974 transition (the period of the “Changeover”). Security forces carried out the arrest of Nikos Michaloliakos, a member of parliament and the leader of Golden Dawn, as well as four other Golden Dawn MPs (out of a total of eighteen in parliament), and thirteen other leading members of the neo-Nazi party. The members of SFROC have oicially denied any relationship with Golden Dawn. Their activities were investigated by Supreme Court Prosecutor Eterpi Koutzamani, who ordered a preliminary examination. The minister of national defence, Dimitris Avramopoulos, also reacted immediately, ordering the irst deputy chief of the Hellenic Armed Forces General Staf to start an investigation of the abandoned military camps in Mandra and Attica, and of old ammunition depots in Malakasa, Attiki – places that were identiied by members of Golden Dawn as their training sites. The subject of this chapter is the political-organizational and ideological role of the Greek military as a mechanism of State repression in recent years – which have 64 | ROSA LUXEMBURG STIFTUNG