You Can Kill Each Other After I Leave: Refugees, Fascism, and Bloodshed in Greece

In the vein of George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia and Martha Gellhorn’s The View from the Ground, a remarkable work of reportage based on hundreds of hours on-the-ground reporting, that tells how the Greece’s far right is trying to destroy the birthplace of democracy

In 2012, the far right Golden Dawn were building a significant street presence in Greece. Over the previous decade they had grown from a tiny group of neofascist brawlers to a formidable vigilante force responsible for multiples murders, street fights and shootings.

On the eve of the 2012 election one of their candidates said that the ＂knives will come out after the elections.＂ And the knives did come out. Golden Dawn became a significant parliamentary presence and used it as a platform to escalate their terror campaigns against migrants and leftist across the country. They also became an inspiration for far right groups across Europe and the Americas.

Strickland first arrived in Greece in 2015 to cover the European refugee crisis, eventually moving there in 2017, just as Golden Dawn were ramping up their campaign of terror. With an eye for journalistic detail that recalls Orwell’s reportage in Spain, Strickland traces the antecedents of Golden Dawn to the dark years of Nazi occupation and subsequent military dictatorship and looks at the post 2008 economic crisis that emboldened the far right.

It also introduces us to the resistance forces to the far right, taking us to the Greek islands where people rallied together to support the hundreds of thousands of refugees traveling across the Aegean Sea to the anarchist squats in Athens where activists took over abandoned buildings and opened them up to the refugees, a tactic they viewed as an anti-fascist alternative to dooming migrants to life in the squalid refugee camps.

You Can Kill Each Other After I Leave is an exemplary work of narrative nonfiction and journalism that provides an intimate portrait of the stories of migrants and activists resisting the growth of the far-right, as well as a vivid and shrewd analysis of the evolving political landscape in Greece and Europe.

Patrick Strickland is a journalist and author from Texas who has reported from some fifteen countries across Europe, the Middle East, and North America. His reportage has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Nation, The New Republic, Politico, The Guardian, Vice, In These Times, and elsewhere. He is the author of Alerta! Alerta! and The Marauders.