Admittedly this is anecdotal, and admittedly I’m talking about 25 years ago, but I spent “longer than the summer” in Greece, and went everywhere from Patras in the east to Klimaki in the west and tossed around the southern half of the Peloponnese, along with periodic visits to the toilet that is / was Athens, also did the island chain down to Milos / Antimilos, Kapsali and all the Saronics in Athens bay area.
I wasn’t a “tourist” I was there mainly working and drinking and partying, I wasn’t there on holiday, though I did do a brief stint of work for a company that was in the tourism business.
Getting around Athens was mainly done on the buses and urban trains (they were busy digging up everything for the new metro extensions) and to and from the islands on the russian made hydrofoils.
Here’s the thing.. nobody (local) paid, only the tourists paid, if a conductor / ticket sales driod approached you, the standard response was “gamisou” (sod off) and turn away and ignore them.
Same with the toll roads, only an idiot or a tourist paid, if you could go around the barrier or force it up or anything else, you did.
Nobody paid any kind of taxes either, nor did they pay any heed to things like planning permission and so on, and of course if you were Greek and had kids, you were untouchable unless you did something seriously wrong like kill someone.
If you had a boat why pay harbour dues, when all you had to do was have the odd drink at the harbour bar where the fishermen and harbour master drank, and make a point of buying the odd round and smiling and being friendly.
The point I’m trying to get across here is there was an entire culture of “free shit” and the only saving grace as a people was you could eat and drink and then pretend you did not understand what they said when you asked how much, and hold your hands out with surplus money in them, so they have to steal from you to overcharge you tourist rates, and back then at least, they never would… show your appreciation by staying for another beer.
I drank Amstel beer and smoked Sante Skiato fags like the old boys did, none of your trendy modern imported shit, I pretty much didn’t drink any liquid but beer the whole time I was there.
It came as no surprise to me at all that 2 decades later the free shit train came off the tracks and the people got up in arms, it was a bit like my years in Spain which were not long after the fall of Franco, the Greek military coup ended around the same time, and in Spain I got in at the height of the post dictatorship laissez faire, and in Greece a bit past that, still laissez faire, but the lite calmed down version.
Don’t assume from this that I am saying that the Spanish peoples and the Greek peoples are pretty much the same, all northern Med types, because they aren’t, they have more to set them apart than they have in common.
Read about ancient history and you’ll think these places are amazing and magical, fucking GO there, preferably on your own 2 wheeled transport, and you’ll find ancient capital cities of world spanning empires that would fit in a Wal-mart car park, I’m pretty much speaking literally here.
I’m going to digress for a moment and go further back in time to my own younger years as a pubescent school boy in a catholic school system, one of the things that used to delight me was the fact that the bible mentioned so very many different things and events in all its various sections and stories, but nobody could ever explain to me how there was no mention at all of the pyramids, which Herodotus knew about and wrote about 400 years BC, so we know the Greeks and Romans knew all about them, but the bible which was (largely) set twice as near to the pyramids and 400 years later… crickets.
I went off piste there because it makes a lovely example, we don’t know *why* the bible doesn’t mention the pyramids, we just know it doesn’t.
Riding around what used to be ancient Greece and visiting these sites (it’s probably a lot like yanks coming to England and visiting Stonehenge… is that fucking it??) gives you a visceral understanding that world populations were unimaginably lower back then, and so by modern standards an incredibly modest and small structure would assume world fame status, and back in those days the Centurion in charge of 100 men at arms was pretty fucking awesome indeed, probably the nuclear bomber of the day, even though today it’s just a small Company with a Craptain in charge, anyone capable of fielding a regiment or a brigade, well, pretty much science fiction or a hollywood rewriting of history, true legendary stuff like Thermopylae pitted 7,000 Greeks holding a narrow path against maybe as many as 100,000 Persians, 14 to 1 odds, but doable given the tactical advantage of the region until Ephialtes sold out his countrymen and showed the Persians a way around, and then 1,500 greeks (including the 300 spartans of hollywood fame) went on a suicide mission to delay them while the rest of the Greek army pulled back and regrouped.
Little is made nowadays of the forces of population pressure, the Persians had to either go on a conquering war or Xerxes of Persia faced internal revolt and the end of his own power trip.
Napflion back in the day probably had a population of 1000 or so, estimates reckon Athens had a TOTAL population of around 125,000 (of whom only 35,000 would be local adult male citizens) back in 400 BC, so it blew away London 1,500 years later in 1066 AD with only 10,000 people, so it’s important the realise that for the times, these places (Rome, Athens, etc) were insanely big, and I do not mean like today where the residents of London or DC act like they are the whole country, back in those days these places pretty much were the whole country, which is why historically people talked about Rome and Athens, not about the country they sat in and controlled.
And the historical record shows us that that shit worked, when a million people was an entire massive nation, particularly so when 3 out of every 4 people in a city were either slaves or wimminz and not citizens, Athens could pick 1 in 250 of its population and have an army of 500 men at arms, and that’s basically big enough to just steamroller over everything in its path, short of another nation / city / capital, or a foreign nation as an invasion force.
Athens in 1995 with a population of around 3 million was basically ungovernable, because they were all citizens and none of them were slaves or property, you can’t touch any of them without pissing them all off, so in 8 months of riding trains and buses and hydrofoils for free, never paying a toll, never paying a tax, I never saw or heard of anyone who got into any shit for it… and I was a fucking foreigner, if anyone would have been nabbed it would have been me.
Effectively the only thing you have left is a very few rules that get enacted against a very few people who kill or murder, because the rest of the population goes along with that, and that is pretty much your entire toolkit.
Effectively the individual has to self select themselves to stand apart from society and kill some sucker to even appear on the radar, until that point, there is nothing in the toolkit that can be brought to bear on them.
So now Athens has an estimated population of around 4 million, and as opposed to back in 400 BC when 1 in 4 was a “citizen” and the rest were property, now 1 in 4 is basically a foreigner, with all the rights of a citizen, and suddenly that toolkit just got a lot weaker, because 1 in 4 of the population are going to start screaming about auslander-o-phobia or some such shit, and it is even more ungovernable than it was back in the mid nineties when you had fuck all chance of making anyone pay their share of anything, but everyone still has their hands out for their share of the free shit.
You basically *cannot* even address, much less solve, *any* of these issues, until you make additions to your toolkit, and you can’t make *any* additions to your toolkit until and unless you start separating the population into different groups or classes of people.
So the mayor of Albstadt in southern Germany says yes, we have a population of 45,000 and a budget that allows us to have 5,000 school places, so they first go to people whose parents and grandparents were born here and paid taxes here, then if there are any left to those whose parents were born here, then if there are any left to those who were born here, then if there are any left to those whose parents and grandparents were born in Germany, then if there are any left to those whose parents were born in Germany, then if there are any left to those who were born in Germany, then if there are any left to those who are white European christians, then if there are any left to white European pagan and atheists, then if there are any left to Australians and so on…..
… and also we have a law, if your children are not attending school, both you and they are deported to any country of their choice, or imprisoned, Spiekroog will make a nice internment camp, and we won’t be shipping any supplies or shelter or anything else, you’ll have to live off the land, such as it is…
Or, we can not do these things, and stoke the fires up.
When the freeloaders and invaders have destroyed the rest of the infrastructure so that for example fires once set in Athens will just burn out of control until there is nothing left, then maybe again Athens will support a population of as many as 125,000 people, 1 in 4 of whom will be citizens, 3 in 4 of whom will be property.
Of urban areas, there will be nothing, because all urban areas are all basically parasitic “cities lite” or rural, and the only way you’ll find niggers and ragheads working the fields is if they have chains on their ankles.
The population pressures that drove Xerxes of Persia to invade Greece are still here today, but the invaders are not people who will fight to have some farm land of their own to till, or seas of their own to fish, or forests to husband and harvest.
And just like 480 BC, it’s fucking cunts on our own side doing the same as Ephialtes selling us out, so it isn’t going to be a war fought at the borders, it’s going to be fought on every street.
ISIS *wants* shit like yesterdays news that a white guy took a leaf out of their book and ram raided some muzzies outside Finsbury mosque, they think it will provoke more radical ragheads… beware the fucking white man when he is riled up good and proper, he’ll show you true barbarism and atrocity.