of communication among them? Where does ultra-right ideology seem to be most deeply rooted? To what degree did the “dejuntaization” ater 1974 afect the structures of the parastate? Did it succeed in dissolving or silencing these? What was the efect of the accession of the socialist/centre-let party PASOK to power in 1981? What were the crucial moments that changed the scenery during the 1990s? How does the surrounding political culture relect itself in the luctuations of ultra-right extremism within the State? Can we document through political research that the rise in racism and xenophobia against immigrants in Greece served to legitimate or remobilize ultra-right extremism within the State? Are we dealing with the familiar ofspring of post-civil war Greece, or with something altogether new? At some point, a discussion started about the “deep state” in Greece. What exactly is this? Again, is it something new and discrete, or a variation on something old? Ultra-right ideology is deeply rooted in Greek political history. A major part of Greek political culture is based on a compact and continuous background of totalitarianism and authoritarianism. Let us not forget that in the last century Greece has seen more constitutional aberrations than any other supposedly comparable European country. This is a country where the appeal to “danger” has always functioned as a pretext for the abrogation of constitutions and guarantees on liberties, with Greek security forces and the military in the vanguard of such abolitions. Forty years have passed since the transition of 1974, and yet these are not enough to forget the parastate of a “sickly” republic, according to an apt characterization of the Greek Republic.2 Constituted power in Greece has developed vigorous romances with the ultra-right, which though intermittent seem to endure, as the following pages will show. The military, the church, the judiciary and the police have been the “great nodes of anti-communism”,3 eminent branches of a “national and ideological” State such as the Greek one was for the major part of its trajectory in the 20th century. In our harsh times, certain pockets within these State apparatuses wish to reconstitute the old romance. The impunity granted to Nazi violence, whether as a product of tolerance due to ailiation or of distance due to fear, is truly without precedent in the European context and enables the recent revival fuelled by the despair and anger of the Greek people. Let us not forget that the lagrantly bigoted speech of State oicials, which would promptly activate the penal code in other European countries, and the total lack of accountability for this, have also fed Nazism. What is there to say, when in the spring of 2013 a government led by New Democracy passed an “anti-racist” bill that explicitly excluded all State oicials from criminal responsibility for hate speech? As long as Greece continues as a stigmatized country along a socially painful path of neoliberal restructuring, the threat of fascistization cannot be considered to have been repulsed just because of the current efort to dismantle Golden Dawn. The Greek Republic degenerates along with the dismantlement of orga- 2. 3. 10 | Nikolakopoulos 2001. Bournazos 2009: 23. ROSA LUXEMBURG STIFTUNG