Cyprus: The Republic of Authoritarian Stupidity

You've got to love the bubbles.

Many readers of ours may have formed the view that because this half of Boaty & D is of Greek extraction, he must therefore be biased to all things Greek. Au Contraire. As with anything in life, I believe in consistency and weighing up all the facts before making an informed decision. This means that nationalism or patriotism or whatever you want to call it mean precisely zero to me. I do not see the point of it.

There are over 60 million people in Britain. Most of them are British. Similarly, there are around three quarters of a million people living in Cyprus; a majority of whom (in the Republic) are ethnically Greek Cypriot. And guess what?

In each instance, I've met well under 0.0000001% of them. And of those I have met, a reasonably large proportion haven't been overwhelmingly nice to me.

So why should I be biased towards any group of people, based on flag and nationhood? It is a bollocks concept, and I ask all who read my articles to consider the logic in supporting a country's politics, people or culture out of tribal loyalty.

Yet, as ever, I digress. What I rail against today is one of my usual targets: authoritarianism. Except this time I am not talking about authoritarianism and its pernicious effects on the individual in Britain. You may read this and feel a modicum of relief, if you are one of our UK readers, because I sincerely believe things have not plumbed quite such ridiculous depths over here...for now at least.

I seek to draw your attention to some goings on in a land of my ancestral heritage and a land where I spent a few years living and working as an ex pat earlier this decade.

Today I read a staggering story in the Cyprus Mail (a correspondence piece may also be found in the Daily *gulp* Mail) about a bunch of very old women who were arrested and charged for playing gin rummy.

The women, from Limassol, Cyprus, were charged on Sunday.

According to the Cyprus Mail piece:

"Officers found the 42 women at the club run by two women aged 79 and 70. The oldest person arrested was a 95-year-old. The raid took place around 6pm on Sunday after a series of complaints by neighbours about noise in the evenings when the women were coming and going from the house. Officers found that one of the rooms in the house had been set up with several tables covered in green felt. The 42 women were caught seated around the tables playing poker and gin rummy for cash in a similar fashion to a gambling club.

Playing cards for money is illegal in Cyprus and police regularly carry out raids around the island at betting shops, clubs and associations particularly coming up to Christmas, and through New Year, when more people go out to play cards and socialise over the holiday period."

Lovely stuff, eh? Some old women get together on a winter's evening, because they unlike everyone else don't want to spend their remaining years in front of a TV and would rather do something different with their private lives, and they are arrested. For hurting precisely...no-one.

As the Mail correctly reports:

"Many Greek Cypriots, including mainly middle-class women, are passionate card players. But it is a criminal offence to play for money, even in the privacy of one’s home."

As the articles on both publications spells out quite clearly, not only is this a law in Cyprus, but it's a law that the police are more than happy to enforce in the most heavy handed manner. To the extent that they don't care about nicking and banging up ancient grannies who like to diddle about with a few Euros once every now and then.

"I've got a Full House, dear! No, not my hand, I mean there's a SWAT team in my lounge..."

This reminds me of a trip I took to Cyprus back in '02, where I stayed at a hotel in Larnaca with my parents and decided to get the cards out in the hotel bar and play brag with my mum for matchsticks. The barman came over and bumptiously told me to stop playing and put the cards away. I was bewildered at the demand, and my attempts to explain that we were not gambling came to nought.

Plainly this is because he feared his joint getting busted up by the filth, because the sight of two consenting adults playing a game of cards provides reasonable suspicion of a twisted felony in action over there. The fucking tools.

My position is this: if a law exists that stops people engaging in voluntary activities, as free individual agents, where those activities are of no consequence or hindrance to the liberties of third party agents then that fucking law should not exist in the first fucking place.

It's that fucking simple.

There is another howling example of this sort of mindless, disgusting authoritarianism in Cyprus: the laws that forbid teachers from teaching. Yes, you read that correctly. Only state employed teachers, and teachers who are documented as working for (and within the physical confines of) private schools are allowed to teach pupils of any age. Child or adult.

I read several stories in the press of young people in their thirties being arrested by the filth and charged, because they were caught...giving private tuition at home to students studying for their exams.

Want another example? In Cyprus, you're not allowed to let your property to tenants without getting permission and a license from the Cypriot government. There is much hoo-ha out there because of the numbers of Brits who live in Paphos and let out their first and second homes to foreigners for periods of the year - there are spies in Cyprus who keep an eye on websites to track down people who try and advertise their property.

"You is arrested, you slaggos, do you 'ave anything to say in your defence, innit?"


"How many times do I have to tell the little fucker, you never end a sentence with a fucking preposition!"

Their fucking property. An individual has no right out there to do with his or her property, what he or she wishes, and the state gets to muscle in to try and wangle a piece of the pie for their greedy little coffers.

However, in areas you would not expect, libertarianism as a concept is taken, injected with a crack-adrenaline-diesel fuel cocktail, bottle fed to a rabid Alsatian, and unleashed upon the kindergarten pen of unsuspecting toddlers.

For example, they don't bother with drink drivers in Cyprus. My experience of the Cyprus police is that they are hideously lazy and corrupt. They bum about the station eating and smoking fags, and when they're not doing that, they are cruising up and down the sea front checking out girls and stopping off at tavernas for free beer and chips.

I had a mate out there who told me of a friend who was at a party out near the mountains where two guests were police officers. They were steaming drunk, and when asked if they thought it was a good idea to drive home, they scoffed and said 'yeah sure, why not, we do it all the time!'

Boy racers and football hooliganism are a serious issue out there now. Larger numbers of young lads think nothing of spending all their time and money on ridiculously fast, turbo injected Japanese motors and racing them at weekends and evenings in residential areas at in excess of 80-90 miles per hour. The rate of accidents because of stupid pricks like this is rampant.

Then there's the Russian Mafia and the 'Cabarets' (sex clubs staffed by forced Eastern European labour, often consisting of very young and scared girls deprived of their passports and any sense of dignity).

The cabarets operate openly. Their clubs are easily identified by their neon lit signs and they are ubiquitous in the extreme. The Russians, who run these clubs and other illicit enterprises) settle disputes with grenades and guns. They tend not to get arrested or hassled, because they bribe and back hand government officials and the police.

The Greek Orthodox church gets to see about 1% of the fall out of the horrific human rights abuses meted out to sex slaves through the charity and refuge work they do, by taking in scared and abused Russian and Eastern European girls who have escaped captivity or who attempted suicide and wound up in hospital where outsiders could reach them.

What sort of fucking joke is it, that normal, innocent, peaceful and harmless people are pursued relentlessly by the state and turned into outcasts and criminals, while the real pricks and villains are allowed to go about their mayhem without fear or obstacle?

This is just the sort of madness that I fear will envelope Britain, though for very different reasons.

EDIT TO ADD:

I almost forgot to mention. The filth confiscated a combined pot of 90 Euros at the iniquitous gambling den of Granny gin rummy evil. Apparently, 45 old biddies were in attendance, including the 95 year old. That means each granny went along to this gambling fest armed with 2 Euros each.

2 Euros doesn't even buy you half a fucking pint of Keo out there. What a bunch of fucking cunts. Tosser police bastards.