Why the Rise of Greece's Golden Dawn Party Is Bad for Europe

Myrto Papadopoulos

"Blood! Honor! Golden Dawn!" Hundreds of the "new Spartans" rally around a statue of Leonidas, hero of the Battle of Thermopylae.

In Thermopylae, in the year 480 B.C., King Leonidas of Sparta and hundreds of Greek warriors made history by battling 300,000 invaders who made up the army of Xerxes, the Persian King of Kings. A bronze statue of Leonidas towers there now, and on a late August day in the year 2012, about 800 people crowded around it. Many were unsmiling men in army fatigues and black T-shirts printed with a meandros, an ancient Greek symbol that happens to resemble a swastika. Some had shaved heads and pork-chop sideburns. "Greece belongs to the Greeks!" the men in black chanted as they...

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