It was the 5th of September 1997 when the President of the International Olympic Committee Juan Antonio Samaranch proclaimed Athens as the city that would organize the 2004 Olympics. The Olympic Games would return to the country in which they had been born. And if in 776 BC they were performed in honor of the god Zeus, in 2004 they would be performed in honor of the god Money. And together with it, for an entirely profitable parade of doped-up machines, for enormous profits for all the bosses and the multinationals and simultaneously with an enormous economic, social and ecological cost for the society.
Since that moment, the statists would enter a contest in order to, on the one hand, ensure the timely building of the necessary infrastructure for the organization of the Olympic games and, on the other, to convince the people to accept any sacrifice the Olympic ideal required. The first sacrifice, during the feverish works for the beautification of Athens, was the violation of elementary safety and sanitation regulations in the working areas the supervisors established, the intensification of operations that, coupled with the lack of measures of personal protection, led to an increase of “accidents” (over 600 deaths and thousands of injured, during the period of the works). With the pretext of the “safety” of the games, the intensification of repressive measures and the obedience of people to the propaganda of the mass media, the establishment of the notorious “Terror-Act”, in line with the (anti)terrorist crusade the Overlords have declared since September 11th, the cameras spying on citizens in public places or during demonstrations, the special courts, the policemen walking the neighborhoods, the “red zones” in entire regions, the local and foreign Secret Services. The destruction, privatization and turning of land into real estates – like the 1,240 acres on the side of Parnitha mountain for the building of the Olympic Village, which would collapse after the Olympics ended because of an administrative, organizational and financial impasse, the 450 acres of the important wildlife wetlands of Attica in the Marathonas area for the building of Olympic Rowing Ground, which would too become an area of abandonment and waste disposal, the 120 acres of green meadows sacrificed for the road around Ymittos, etc.
There is no doubt therefore that the totality of the authoritative approaches to this endeavor was unable to hide the fraudulence of this international spectacle, the infinitesimal profit and the impossible-to-meet cost that its organization would entail. Neither did it hide its intentions for the application of the arsenal of repressive measures after the end of the games, nor that modernization, in effect, means common steps, co-ordination of actions of domination in governmental, continental and intercontinental level.
However, the state did not manage to create the image it wanted. The intense terrorizing atmosphere, the threats intending to prohibit rallies, the prosecutions and arrests of comrades remained a moot point. Rallies took place (just like the one against the American minister Colin Powell), and direct actions against the Olympic Games took place in Athens and other cities of Greece. Actions that confirmed once more that in a world of Bosses, there exist no Olympic Games, but only social and class struggles.