A prostitute in Athens

The gift of the Greek authorities on the worker’s May Day holiday was to publicize the photographs of 11 HIV-positive female prostitutes. These women had sex with their customers, without using condoms, thus putting lives in danger –lives of honorable families and family men who had the misfortune of having sex without a condom with these particular women.  As soon as the photographs became public, they began to circulate – at first mostly in secret – from one family to the next.

Dynamic women began to cross-examine their husbands. Waving handfuls of published photographs in front of their husband’s surprised eyes they asked “hey, do you know any of these women?”  The wives’ reactions were determined by the answers of their husbands. Wives who wouldn’t dare to interrogate their husbands, wander around the brothel district disguised as beggars, holding a photo of their husband and covertly asking passers-by “have you seen this man around this neighborhood?” 

Other wives wrote letters directly to Mr. Loverdos (Health Minister) and Mr. Chrisohoidis (Citizens’ Protection Minister), promising their vote to whichever of the two can offer the required information first, not only regarding their husbands’ behavior but their husbands’ perceptions in regards to their relationship with the brothels.  This explains the behind-the-scenes conflict which has broken out between the two former ‘princes’ of PASOK, Mr. Chrisohoidis and Mr. Loverdos – the former of the two having the comparative advantage in the matter because of his access to EYP (National Intelligence Service) files.

Nevertheless, the polls show that the recent developments have caused a deep upheaval in the very heart of the Greek nuclear family, as well as the extended family – wherever the family structure has kept its traditional form.  As a consequence, they continue – something like this can influence the electoral behavior of the voters. In other words, the last undecided voters are leaning towards the parties which not only promise the public chastisement and imprisonment of the HIV-positive women, but their public burning as well (in the case that they are foreigners).

In order to avoid a disagreeable result at the ballot box, which would endanger the pro-European course of the country, the two political parties in power promise that if their clients vote for them again, they will establish the “Office of Family Support” which will deal with the interrogation of the prostitutes until they reveal the names of their customers. If the customer happens to be a foreigner, he will be deported. If he happens to be a foreigner who has Greek citizenship, he will be stripped of his citizenship and be deported. If the customer is a Greek man, he will be treated with complete discretion and be called to take an AIDS test.

  

The issue is that the European Troika, in regards to the new memorandum, has not approved the establishment of such an Office nor has it foreseen the necessary funds for the establishment of such an Office – a point which the parties of the extreme left  and right use as an additional argument to convince voters that the country is indeed “under German occupation”.

Finally, there are circumstances when the only thing left to do is use black humor to comment on a dark reality – an ever-increasing fascist reality.

PS. The text was written two days before the general elections in Greece. Last Sunday 440.894 Greek voters voted for the nazi Party “Gold Dawn”, that is 7% of the votes. It is the first time, after World War II, that a pure nazi Party enters the Parliament of a country of European Union. I guess that those voting for the Nazis still hope to find a job in the public sector: in the forthcoming Concentration Camps…