Man Commits Suicide In Broad Daylight On Athens' Syntagma Square To Protest "Occupation Government"

The Arabian Spring started after the self-immolation of a 26 year old fruit vendor in Tunisia to protest a life he could no longer live. Will the European Summer set off with a suicide as well? News are crossing that a few hours ago, a 77 year old Greek has killed himself in broad daylight on Athens' symbolic and inappropriately named Syntagma square to protest the "occupier government" and not wanting to be a burden to his child. As Kathimerini reports, "an elderly man committed suicide on Friday morning in Syntagma Square in Athens, in front of Parliament. Some reports said witnesses claimed the man shouted «I don't want to leave debts to my children,» before he shot himself in the head. According to Skai TV, witnesses said the man did not say anything. The incident occurred shortly before 9 a.m. when the square was full of people and commuters using Syntagma metro station. The man had positioned himself next to a big tree and was not in view of most people in the square. Two people who were sitting on a bench some 10 meters away have been questioned by the police." Will this latest tragedy provoke a groundswell popular response? We doubt it - alas the status quo appears set to continue chugging along as per usual, taking advantage of appathetic and welfare addicted societies around the world.

Keep Talking Greece has more on the tragedy:

It was short before 9 o’ clock in the morning when stunned passers-by heard a gunshot and saw a man falling dead. Right there, next to a flowerbed, behind the biggest tree of the park, at the entrance of the Metro at Syntagma Square, near the stairs leading to  the Greek parliament, in the heart of Athens. The elderly man, estimated around his 60?s, put the gun on his head and pulled the trigger. A single bullet to give an end to a life of despair.

The sound of the gunshot froze the people walking at the square, during the morning rush hour.

Police and ambulance rushed to the spot, his corpse has been taken to the morgue.

Up to this hour there is no police statement about the identity of the man.

Some Greek media quoted an eye-witness claiming the man shouted “I don’t want to leave debts to my children.” Other eye-witnesses claimed, the man said nothing before pulling the trigger.

Latest information has it that  the man was 77 years old, according to his Identity Card.

A tragedy with unknown motives, a shocking act to end the day at its start…

Suicides saw a dramatic increase during the last three years of deep economic crisis. According to Greek Ministry of Citizen Protection, the suicides and attempted suicides saw a sharp rise of 22.5% since 2009. A total of 1,727 recorded suicide death and attempted suicide incidents have occurred nationwide since the Greek recession began in 2009.

The number of suicides and attempted suicides  jumped from 507 in 2009 to 622 in 2010, marking a 22.5 percent increase, and to 598 in the last year up to until December 10, 2011.

And courtesy of George Mitakides, this is what the suicide note said:

h/t Nikolaos

Comments

[alonedriver]

I am a Greek "loser" my friends...

I am writing these lines from athens, greece.

Greek people has been mind abutated by the system...

The SYSTEM are:

1. Big multination corporations that corrupt

a. politicians.

b. media.

c. local bankers.

These all together debt our beautiful and peacefull country so much, and now we cannot repay our debt...

THE MAIN DIFFERENCE between Greece and Iceland is TURKEY...

Not officially but surely unofficially (the politicians) tell us that if we go against the EUROPEAN BANK CARTEL, turkey will attack our islands and occupy our country while we haven't any money to refill our planes to defence our country...

So before blaim GREEK people, think please that our country stands helpless near the most offensive nation of Mediterranean sea...

It is good to speak inside the safety net of USA...

That's why European Union DO NOT GUARRANTEE our borders, so any military action against Greece to become a military action against Germany, France etc...

We need YOUR HELP...

We ask JUST FOR THAT... Border protection... and we can rebuild our economy... we can throw out our politicians and re-BIRTH of REAL DEMOCRACY...

[prole]

Dude, grab an AK, but please don't look for any "help" from Uncle Allah (US/HATO) unless you are as suicidal as the Greek Grandfather.

If "we" (puke) got involved militarily between you and the Turks, it would be to exterminate you and cleanse your people from their own lands for the expansion of Islam. Remember Kosovo? Now it is the Albanian Islamic Republic of Kosova, and Uncle Allah is TODAY working to cleanse the last few remaining Christians from the Caliphate.

Americans united until the last Christian is killed

[q99x2]

God bless the little one's soul.

[connda]

I'm sure the one tenth of one percenters (0.1%) are just thinking, "Ah...useless eaters are self-destructing." 

They probably wouldn't be against gun control if we can convince them that we'll use our guns to blow our own brains out in desperation and despair.

[Calmyourself]

Tyler, whats the problem ?  You racist against Italians or something? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-17556273

"Italians have been left shocked by two cases of men setting themselves on fire in the past two days in protest at their financial hardship."

Seriously, the West will not mobilize over these or any other protests for the majority bread and circuses continue, only hunger massive widespread hunger creates the conditions for change.  The ME still operates under a tribal ethos which translates to violent protests much more quickly than we wil lever gather. 

Once again the farmers are key, follow closely food prices and distribution issues, vis a vis fuel prices..  It is all that really matters in terms of real change prior to some imagined uprising in the West.

[smiler03]

Take note Tyler.

You must report every suicide in the world in the name of balanced and fair journalism.

/s [for the dummies]

[Shylockracy]

The suicide note and the stupid PS by Mitakide encapsulates the Greek incapacity to face their own failings.

A 77 year old blames his current problems and perhaps his misspent life on the 3 years of war he experienced as 7 year old boy. With that attitude and sense of entitlement, Germany would still be the smoldering pile of rubble they were in 1945, and not Greece's biggest creditor and political benefactor in the EU that they are today.

Mitakides cheap shot at Merkel is the resentment of those long accustumed to living on the kindness of strangers without standing up to the fact.

Mitakides and Angela deserve each other in this cloaca maxima that is the EUSSR.

[JOYFUL]

Your link to the story about Mohammed Bouazizi leading this post is from the mouthpiece sionist organ haaretz????

Hmmm,

that's weird, cause I always considered his to be the one authentic act in the farce of orchestrated al-CIADA [counter]revolutions that took place in ominous sequence a year ago...a personal protest against the endless depredations of an outta control bureaucratic State...

but then I remember the Guardian article from the time,

"Visiting the dusty town of Sidi Bouzid it seems there are two Mohammed Bouazizis. There is the simple young man of 26 who worked so hard to send his sisters to school and university, selling fruit on the roadside to earn $5 a day. A young man who was often required to pay bribes worth more than he could earn in a day to the local authorities to set up his stall because they would not give him a permit. Who on other days – like the day he set himself on fire – had his business shut down on a whim.

...

Then there is the Mohammed Bouazizi who has already been elevated to the status of a myth, transformed into an Arab Jan Palach, invested with a meaning more national, social and political than personal. A Czech student, Palach killed himself in the same way in Czechoslovakia in 1968. But where his act was overtly political, Bouazizi's death was an expression of a frustration that could not be articulated."  [http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/20/tunisian-fruit-seller-mohamm...] ...

and become even more cynical than usual...perhaps there really is no act left for any of us that can remain free of the contagion of spin and desecration by the  jackals of the ZOGBIE media  ...not even in death is one left the freedom to make a statement of protest against it's overweening efforts to dampen all dissent and turn it against it's very purpose. As happens daily now in the former bastion of freedom which once posed as defender of Europe against the Red Menace and other threats to personal liberty.

Prague Spring...I remember xactly where I was August 68 when the news hit  bout the tanks rolling in to end Dubcek’s "experiment" ... I remember Costa-Gravas' Z, about the military coup in Greece, Tianamen Square, September 11 in the Palace with Allende, all the myths of a BABY BOOM generation only now exposed to it's terminal naivete as dupes who bought into a trotskyite managed "new left" neo con optical illusion of 'hope n change' that is almost ready to spring into it's final form as a variant of fascism more fully evil that anything we have even imagined. 

There are no more revolutions anymore, only stage managed productions that are designed to enhance the terminal confusion of reality with it's antithesis...the Obamination zone...where even constitutionally protected protest becomes an act of 'domestic terrorism.

but then my native optimism springs back, as always...

and I hope that when I remember the day that tanks roll into D.C.  driven by soldiers loyal to the Constitution of the USA, commanded by officers directing them to remove the usurpers from power, that this period of insane totalitarian doublespeak and duplicity will be but a distant memory, a troubled time our children  study as history, rather than the nightmarish miasma of a nations, nay, a culture's, suicide, as it seems to be at the moment.

When "the people" have become mind-controlled puppets of the ZOG imperium, then maybe it's time to free one's mind to look towards the least likely hope for liberation... rebellion in the ranks of those we were taught to regard as enforcers of the "occupier government"...

http://vidrebel.wordpress.com/2012/04/04/an-american-mutiny-in-the-persi... ....this is not your father's military coup!

[Loukanika the r...]

We're fooked!! This poor guy has obviously seen the writing on the wall. The Finance Ministry here (Greece) announced plans on Tuesday to raise the tax on heating fuel, mostly in an attempt to combat fuel doctoring and tax evasion. However, the move will raise heating fuel prices substantially as the ministry aims to tax diesel and heating oil equally. Currently the going rate for heating oil averages at 1.046 euros per liter, according to the Development Ministry’s price observatory, while the equivalent rate for diesel stands at 1.591 euros/l. Last October a liter of heating oil cost 90 cents, while a year ago it was around 65 cents. Meanwhile Back in Athens the outstanding debt that the state has to third parties (suppliers, construction companies etc) climbed to 6.3 billion euros at the end of February, from 5.7 billion at end-December, the Finance Ministry announced on Tuesday.

[nah]

whats next

.

mass suicide

[Sweet Chicken]

I'm saddened. MY thoughts are with this man's family this morning.

[kanenas]

Here is a translation of the note:

“The occupation government of Tsolakoglou* literally annihilated any possibility for my survival that was depended on a decent pension which only I personally paid for 35 years (without any state support).

Because my age does not give me the possibility for a dynamic reaction (without meaning that if a Greek would grab the kalashnikov, I wouldn’t be the second one [to grab one], I see no other solution than the decent end before I start searching in the garbage for food.

I believe that one day the youth without future will take the arms and hang upside down at Syntagma Square the national traitors as the Italians did with Mussolini  in 1945 Piazza Poreto in Milan)”

REF: http://www.keeptalkinggreece.com/2012/04/04/athens-suicide-man-leaves-be...