on the other hand, a recent history of sustained police brutality can get people a bit miffed. i would hope that were there such a climate of indiscriminate police brutality in the states that people would react, and strongly if need be.
but post wroldwar 2 greece was born of incredible violence that issued into a civil war, and has been plagued with the direct and indirect consequences of that history of massacre since. a string of heavy-handed governments. routine police brutality. you cannot do this sort of thing with impunity if you're a cop. sooner or later, there'll be hell to pay.
this is the same kind of scenario that triggered the riots in the parisian suburbs a few years ago--the paramilitary style police is trained to see the people as a Problem and do "deal with" problems with "maximum efficiency"---which can result in things like kids being thrown out windows while handcuffed (st denis) or asthmatic kids not being given their inhalers while in holding cells so they suffocate. this is particularly an issue in cities like paris and athens, which are also national capitals--so that local violence, from either the streets of the cops, becomes political, and nationally political, very quickly. whence the rationale for fine groups of folk like the crs.
it also appears that the press in both greece and france is in a sense more free than the american in that they do not simply capitulate before police attempts to commit violence off-camera.
o btw i dont know if you read french, but this is pretty remarkable:
http://www.lemonde.fr/europe/article...1993_3214.html
the gist of this article is that for a few minutes during a speech by the greek prime minister, a group of students turned up on camera.
they were able to do it because they temporarily took over a major television station and broadcast the action, during which they held up a sign (in the photo) part of which says: STOP WATCHING. GO OUT ONTO THE STREETS. they also demanded that everyone who had been arrested be released.
the prime minister later said that this was "beyond all limits"---that's right: in contemporary capitalism, anything that disrupts the top=down character of the media relay apparatus does surpass limits--but it's interesting to think about what those limits are.