That’s right! After the collapse of a decade-long economic boom in most corners of the globe, youth everywhere are feeling a great pinch and they perceive this to be a very long-term pinch.
The first riots in Greece on December 6 had been sparked when police shot to death an unarmed 16 year-old boy named Alexandros Grigoropoulos.
These riots had appeared to die down at the end of last week, but rioting took off again on Saturday after the “one-week anniversary” of the shooting took place and Greek anarchists along with others attacked the very police station where the culprits who had shot young Grigoropoulos were stationed.
Actually, to be fair to a large number of Greek youth, December 13th’s one-week vigil of the Grigoropoulos shooting had started peaceably with a candle light vigil being the main focus.
However, as has occurred often in the past week, more violent groups joined and usurped the more peaceful protests.
What is most surprising and notable is that most of the earliest protests in Greece were carried out by school-aged teenagers (mostly between the ages of 13 and 16).
The overall disillusionment of Greek youth reminded me of the “No Future” movements in the 1970s and 1980s in NATO European lands, whereby alienated youth were tuning out all over the continent. This was especially true in the mid-1980s as the political hope of the 1960s had died out and a new Cold War rhetoric had re-enveloped the continent, especially after the year when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and the sudden increased spending on armaments across Europe dovetailed with the bad economic effects resulting from the higher fuel prices and high rates of unemployment in Western Europe in those same years.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/7781516.stm
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