The arrest last week of four suspected young hoodlums, who, police say, have been making and exploding bombs, after forming the Conspiracy of Fire Nuclei terror cell, could be the beginning of shedding some real light into one of the darkest alleys of post-junta Greek history, that of domestic terrorism.

image Our cops were never too eager or too effective in pursuing bombers and killers, who mushroomed into “revolutionary” organizations after 1974, at a time when the rest of Europe was leaving behind the bloody disasters of the 1970s along with that criminally haphazard battalion of bloody “anti-capitalist freedom fighters” and tin-horned “militants,” like the Baader-Meinhoff gang, Carlos the Jackal, and Action Directe. Here in Greece, we suffered a delayed terrorist reaction that, unfortunately, continues to this day.

The four now in jail facing multiple felony counts did not emerge from the fringes of society. On the contrary, press reports say, they are offspring of comfortably placed families with a record of “model citizenship”. These latter-day “urban guerrillas” came from Athens neighborhoods like Paleo Phsyhiko, where buying a doormat will cost you $10,000 and the house another $3 million. The girl of the group labored, the poor thing, in London, trying to get a very expensive university education, apparently so that she could join the international libertarian communist movement in earnest as a front-line reincarnation of Pasionaria (police, the press says, traced the posting of the Conspiracy’s latest manifesto on the Internet to an IP address located in London).

Even more ominously, cops believe one of the Gang of Four supplied the rocket that hit the US Embassy in Athens in January 2007 to the Revolutionary Struggle terror gang that has claimed the honor of the attack. This is very serious business and poses some vexing questions that originate in the very heart of Greece’s thickening social and political troubles.

Where did this 20 or 21-year old found suppliers of such deadly toys? What type of “friendships” did he develop on the side of his studies to allow him to become involved in such killing play? What motivation did he have to get tangled with the Revolutionary Struggle gang, who have not hidden their intention to cause great harm, including mass casualties, upon Greek society? How did he go about his business unmolested for over two years in a country that is a mere handful and where “common” criminals, even today, have significant difficulties hiding away? The same questions should be asked about the rest of his comrades.

Police, press reports said, did have intelligence indicating that the arrested floated inside the nebulous of young anarchists, street thugs, petty criminals, illegal immigrants, and other such “disgruntled” who played protagonist in the devastation of the December 2008 riots. And to add to the atmosphere of the surreal surrounding this mess, six others, who are wanted by the police in relation to the Conspiracy’s terror activities, could have found sanctuary inside the Athens university campus, where police cannot enter because of the “asylum law” prohibiting the authorities to pursue criminals inside university walls.

Greece, after thirty five years of “robust” democracy, dominated by leftwing obsessions and practices that have unraveled the security services and cultivated a generalized sub-culture of aimless rebellion and tolerance of violence as a “legitimate” form of protest, is now faced with the inevitable results: gangs of 20-year olds that threaten the country with terrorist incidents which can have international repercussions, not to mention contributing to mass insurrection like the one we experienced in December 2008.

Greek politicians are not alone in their fatal responsibility for what we’re facing now. Equal shares go to ourimage “intellectuals,” who have parroted “progressive” trash forever in their effort not to miss the bandwagon; to our school teachers and university faculties, equally divided between a leftist agitating class and those fearing for their lives in the presence of political party thugs everywhere; to our artists, media people, and “opinion makers,” who have, directly or indirectly, supported and promoted anarchy and revolt as if these monsters are children’s toys easily controlled by the inept, the opportunist, and those seeking cheap political points; to our economic “elites,” who have robbed the country blind and built corruption into the defining condition of the Greek state; and, last but not least, to the fathers and mothers (always inside quotation marks) of the younger generation, the functional social illiterates and useless “upper comers,” who have left their offspring light and loose, with no sense of right and wrong, with no respect for themselves and others, without even a shred of personal consciousness acting as the last safety valve in a personal existence dominated by apathy, callousness, addiction to self-gratification, and modern semi-barbarity happily laced with drugs and any other form of deviance now termed an “alternative lifestyle” (clue: those who have a life don’t need ‘lifestyles’).

The four now in jail didn’t suffer in the hands of aristocratic masters or class overlords. They weren’t whipped with a bushwhacker’s snake whip or put in shackles. They apparently never woke up in the morning with the burning insecurities of those who cannot put bread on the table or a decent roof over their heads. They are foreign to the debilitating wear and tear dominating the lives of millions who toil for a pittance. In short, their “protest” — and their killing games — seem to have no relation to the dominant historical origins of violent opposition to authority. Theirs is an empty, gray, cold world of numbing intellectual and social retardation that seeks to vent through acts of violence perceived in obvious disassociation from harsh realities making up the real world.

This is the generation of personal computer game terrorists.

This is the generation of virtual reality where death, mayhem, and destruction are all aseptically distant and eerily ethereal behind a glowing screen.

We have no repair theory for treating the roots of this kind of violence and the psychotic underpinnings of it all…. although promoting some old fashioned values, so detested by our unbridled “democrats,” wouldn’t hurt and, in fact, perhaps could help in erecting a first rampart against the killing onslaught of this “angry youth” without a cause.