Athens: Suicide Man Leaves Behind Shocking Note

In a sharp political  -and for some even “shocking” -  tone the man who committed suicidejust a couple of meters away from the Greek Parliament in the heart of Athens on Wednesday morning explained the motives for his desperate act. In a hand-written note, retired pharmacist D.X., 77, spoke of loss of dignity due to harsh austerity and wished that some day the youth of the country would take the arms and hang those politicians who brought the country and its people to this stage.  He had left a similar not to his daughter.

“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)”

D.X. was married and had a daughter. He was a member of the Greek Pharmacists’ Association. He had sold his pharmacy in 1994 and had gone into retirement.

It looks as if the several pension cuts of the last two years had  created such conditions that the man could not bear.

Meanwhile, dozens of Athenians flocked to the spot where D.X. committed suicide, less than two hundred meters away from the Greek Parliament, and started to leave flowers, candles and notes full of anger and indignation against the social injustice of the austerity measures.

When the paramedics removed his corpse in the morning, the stunned passengers had applaud.

D.X. killed himself on Wednesday morning under a park tree with a single bullet on his head.

Greek politicians expressed their shock and shed the usual crocodile tears.

*Georgios Tsolakoglou was a Greek military officer who became the first Prime Minister of the Greek collaborationist government during the Axis Occupation forces of Germany and Italy  in 1941-1942, during the WWII. In modern Greece “Tsolakoglou” has the negative connotation meaning a traitor. In times of loan agreemends and Memorandums of Understanding, “Tsolakoglou” refers to those Greek politicians “collaborating” with the country’s lenders, the Troika of IMF, EU and ECB.