_
♪
Hi, I'm Shane Smith. This is Ryan Duffy.
We're here in Athens, Greece, in the middle of a protest.
This week we're gonna be looking at the rise of the ultra-right...
[Crowd shouting]
and radical left in Europe...
and the unexpected result of China's one-child policy.
_
Do you have a daughter? Do you have a daughter?
Like I have visible stink lines or something.
[Shouts] Whoa. It's OK.
SHANE: The world is changing.
Now, no one knows where it's going.
But we'll be there, uncovering the news... This is World War III.
culture, and politics
that expose the absurdity of the modern condition.
RYAN: That little child has a huge gun.
This scene isn't really kosher by American standards.
I was interviewing suicide bombers, and they were kids.
SHANE: This is the world through our eyes.
MAN: We win or we die!
This is the world of "Vice."
Sync & corrections by honeybunny www.addic7ed.com
Hi, I'm Shane Smith, and we're here
in the Vice offices in Brooklyn, New York.
For our first story tonight, we go to China.
China famously adopted
a one-child policy in the late 1970s.
Now, this controversial bit of social engineering
has led to a lot of complex ramifications.
For example, there are now around 50 million--
that's five zero million-- more men than there are women,
which means a lot of Chinese men are very, very frustrated.
So we sent Thomas Morton to China to see
just how hard it is to get a girlfriend.
_
THOMAS: This is Jingshan Park, in the middle of Beijing,
and this is where all the parents come to basically barter off their children.
The way they do it is they make these little signs for them that--their vital stats:
their birthday, what year of the Zodiac they're born, and what jobs they got.
All these people are parents trying to marry off their sons
and daughters and, uh, I'm trying to...
hook up with this woman's daughter.
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THOMAS: Pretty good, right?
_
This is a little manic.
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This of any interest?
No? Oh, OK.
_
Oh. Xie xie.
A lot of people are kind of running off from me like, I'm, you know--
like I got visible stink lines or something.
THOMAS: When Mao died, the Communist government decided to give capitalism a go.
As they bulked up their economy, they also attempted to slim down
their runaway population growth by means of the one-child policy,
a massive social engineering project
that's completely deranged the dating landscape
and proven that when you screw with the natural order of things,
nature will find a way to screw you right back.
Freaked out and honestly bewildered by the parents in the park,
I hired a professional matchmaker to help me navigate the maelstrom
that is dating in post-one-child china.
Her name is Kitty.
So, Kitty, how long have you been a matchmaker?
_
In Beijing? Or all of China?
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THOMAS: Kitty's first suggestion was to go to a dating event in Xiamen.
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Sixty-eight?
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I don't even think I know what the criterion is. I'm flying blind.
_
Um, maybe in China.
No.
[Both laugh]
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Oh, they're-- my dad's an engineer.
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- Is it? Cool. I'll tell him that. - Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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Yes.
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Really? OK. Yeah!
Why is that? Why? Why do they--
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Sync & corrections by honeybunny www.addic7ed.com
OK, yeah. I have a sister. Does that matter?
No, girls don't count?
Yeah. OK.
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It seems like a lot of this boils down to money.
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THOMAS: With my point rating and American persona both firmly in place,
I can finally hit the event and do some dating.
_
OK, yeah.
I'm a fucking cowboy. Ha ha ha!
THOMAS: What I assumed would be a giant singles mixer,
or Chinese speed-dating,
turned out to be some sort of Karaoke dance-off,
pitting the town's bachelors in direct competition against each other
for the town's available females on stage.
_
[Laughter]
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[Singing off-key in Chinese]
[Clears throat]
[Laughter]
THOMAS: Painful though this may have been, I really
couldn't have picked a better act to follow.
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[Singing off-key]
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Thank you. Xie xie.
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THOMAS, VOICE-OVER: I have no idea how any of this is supposed to work,
or help me get laid.
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THOMAS, VOICE-OVER: In the end, I was paired up with a short, sort of Olive Oyl-looking girl
who I guess likes Glenn Campbell.
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THOMAS, VOICE-OVER: The event organizers then escorted us
to the matchmaking office for a supervised pre-date
in one of their designated dating rooms.
THOMAS: This looks like an interrogation room. What happens in here?
Um...
Is--is this normal?
Do you do this a lot? Like, this seems very odd to me.
What, um...
What do you look for in, um,
in a guy? Like, are there traits?
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THOMAS: Since my pre-date bombed,
I went to meet up with the other competitors and commiserate over some beers.
♪
So tell me about what happened today. How did the dating event go?
_
Are you guys nervous about getting older?
Like, do you think you've got a good chance now,
or do you have less of a chance than when you were younger?
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THOMAS, VOICE-OVER: If everybody seems a little hung up on money,
it's because they are, and with good cause.
Outside of dwindling state support, Chinese kids are
traditionally supposed to take care of their parents when they get old.
Before the eighties, this burden could be split among 4 or 5 sons,
but since One Child, that one child is wholly responsible
for not only his folks' welfare, but his wife's folks', too.
_
Yeah. Cheers. THOMAS, VOICE-OVER: Schlubs like us have always had
a hard time competing against the rich and successful.
In most countries, though, this just means you drive a shittier car.
Here in the new Chinese economy, it means you're up against guys
who can afford to put up billboards advertising their wealth,
like this guy did.
This is your place.
This is extremely nice.
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THOMAS: Can you explain why you put up that billboard?
Did you get a lot of feedback from it? Did you meet anybody?
_
I imagine there are probably a lot of weirdos.
_
Everything we hear about young people and love in China,
it always comes back to this supposed gender imbalance here.
Do you think that contributes to how hard it is for guys to find girls?
_
Heh! Interesting. Which soap opera was it?
_
It's "Growing Pains," isn't it? With--it's a family with 3 kids in it.
The Seaver family. The Seaver, yeah!
Yeah, OK. It's "Growing Pains." Michael, Mike.
That's the family you want to have. Yeah.
THOMAS, VOICE-OVER: So while the average kitchen appliance repairman is lucky
not to get laughed off stage by his town's leftover women,
China's princelings not only get their pick of the litter,
they can afford to pay the fines to have the American TV family
that's off limits to everyone else.
This is the madness that One Child has wrought,
and it's what happens when you attempt social engineering on a scale this large.
The next thing you know, you've got a womanless countryside,
desperate parents fighting each other in the park
for their kids' dwindling shots at marriage,
and the literal welfare of the older generation
resting on the shoulders of a bunch of only children.
Have any interest in me? No.
No? Not interested? Oh, no. I understand.
The financial meltdown that hit America in 2008 kicked off
a global economic crisis that has had far-reaching aftershocks
that are still being felt today.
Europe, for example, continues to suffer more than we have here in America,
with out-of-control debt and crippling levels of unemployment.
This has led to massive unrest, especially amongst young people.
Europe's youth have taken to the streets
and are demanding increasingly radical changes.
So I went to Greece and Spain, two of the countries that have been hardest-hit,
to see just how young people there are dealing with the crisis.
[Crowd chanting]
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SHANE, VOICE-OVER: Young people in Spain are furious.
Their government's reaction to the global economic crisis
has been to enact severe austerity measures
that have attacked health care, education,
pensions, and other social welfare programs,
which made people mad enough, but if you add this to the fact
that almost 50% of the country's young people are unemployed,
then you have a powder keg that is perpetually waiting to blow.
_
Spanish youth are arming themselves,
and they're organizing across the country,
all with one aim: to destroy the status quo.
_
We met with one of these organizations
called Youth Without Future, just as they were gearing up
to cause chaos on a day of general strikes
called to protest these austerity measures.
_
Now, this was just the first taste of what we were in for,
seeing college-aged kids who should have been planning their night out
instead calmly planning to destroy a city.
_
__
_
Youth Without Future is actually one of the groups
that helped set up the Occupy movement in Spain, which, in turn,
was the inspiration for Occupy Wall Street here in America.
And on this night, their mission was to take to the streets and working in conjunction
with other radical youth groups and unions to shut Spain down.
SHANE: So you believe that you have to protest and you have
to do actions because you're without future. Yeah.
_
Wanting to get more of a handle
on just how things got so bad in Spain,
we talked to the former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund,
Ken Rogoff, who's now a Harvard professor,
to get his take on why all of this is happening.
ROGOFF: What we're worried about in Europe today is that
these kind of numbers that we're seeing,
particularly in Greece and in Spain,
they just haven't been seen since the Great Depression--
25% unemployment in Spain
and even double that looking at youth unemployment.
So it's really horrific what's going on,
to their young people, to their economies.
_
ROGOFF: I think the antibanking is much more universal.
You see that around a lot of the world,
and I think that anger is a sentiment that, one,
is fairly universal and does need to be addressed.
[Siren]
ROGOFF: There's this feeling that something happened and no one was punished.
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SHANE, VOICE-OVER: The Youth Without Future activists we were following
had gone out to the streets of Madrid to disrupt things as much as they could
so it would multiply the effects of the general strike the next day.
And they must have done a pretty good job because when the strike hit,
it completely paralyzed the city.
[Distant whistles blowing]
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SHANE: So this general strike has not only shut down Madrid,
it's shutting down all of Spain.
But it's not just here.
In 23 countries across Europe, they're shutting down motorways,
railways, airports, even subways.
It's designed to literally stop Europe.
_
Ignacio Escolar, a renowned Spanish journalist,
explained to us his views
on why things are getting so out of control.
_
[Whistles blowing]
_
__
_
[Boom]
_
SHANE, VOICE-OVER: And as the protests in Spain spiraled out of control,
I realized just how angry the people really are,
to what extreme lengths they're willing to go,
and that this isn't going to end any time soon.
The most important thing to understand about a financial crisis
is that it does not go away quickly.
They're doing things to sort of stay afloat,
but not to fix the root of the problem.
_
ROGOFF: They're treading this very cautious path,
which involves a lot of belt-tightening.
This idea, "well, if we just wait, in a decade it'll be better."
I think they've been overly cautious,
thinking they can just throw the weight of the adjustment
on the unemployed, particularly on young people,
year after year after year.
But it certainly, you know, provides the seeds
of these more extreme views, these more extreme parties.
Part of what we're worried about in Europe today is
that we are likely to see bigger ramifications
of this extremism than you might imagine.
SHANE, VOICE-OVER: One of the bigger examples of extremism
that Professor Rogoff is referencing
is happening in Greece...
where the economic situation is even worse than in Spain.
And as a consequence, there are almost daily riots.
So we're here in Athens, Greece,
which is ground zero for the global economic crisis
and, as such, has seen a huge increase in radical right-wing
and also left-wing parties.
There's literally riots every day.
We're going to one now; These are the police
who are going to probably fight the Communists.
♪
[Man shouts, two gunshots]
SHANE, VOICE-OVER: Greece is literally tearing itself apart.
Right-wing groups, left-wing groups,
anarchists, and police are all fighting pitched battles
through the streets of Athens.
One group that particularly exemplifies this extremism in the country
is the ultra-right-wing Golden Dawn.
Once just a peripheral party having a reputation
for being little more than neo-Nazi thugs,
they're now in control of around 10% of their country's parliament,
and their popularity is growing.
_
SHANE, VOICE-OVER: Golden Dawn blames Greece's troubles on immigration
and, much like other far-right groups throughout history,
are not afraid to use violence to advance their political goals.
Now, the Golden Dawn view what is happening in Greece effectively as full-on war,
so we had to be vetted by their security
before being allowed to visit one of their political headquarters.
He also wanted to be very clear with us
what the political philosophy of the Golden Dawn was before we went any further.
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You want to keep the Greek race clean.
_
Right, but also, if you send a lot of the immigrants back
to Somalia or Afghanistan,
they might be killed.
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To get them out. Yes.
SHANE, VOICE-OVER: So after we talked with their security,
we were finally okayed to go to their HQ.
When we got there, they let us in on why security is so tight.
SHANE: So before this building, you were in another building.
_
Wow.
_
You must be strict because you've already been bombed before in the past.
Ten times you've been bombed.
How do you keep the headquarters from getting attacked?
_
Black metal, you know? Yeah, sure.
_
The Golden Dawn black metal collection.
And what are the books?
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World War II and Nazis and...
_
No, no. I understand.
And what's here?
_
And this is a ceremony in Athens?
And it's the same as the old German salute.
_
Ancient Greek?
So these are Ancient Greek symbols
and the Ancient Greek salute.
_
Sure, sure, but you have to understand, if you see the flag or you see the--
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SHANE, VOICE-OVER: And as they grow in power, it seems that the Golden Dawn
have realized that they have to get better at their PR.
And now, almost at every turn,
they'll distance themselves from being seen as Nazis or even Fascists.
However, this all seems a little absurd,
since their party is admittedly based on a hatred of immigrants
and keeping the Greek race "clean."
They also carry a flag which is remarkably similar to the swastika,
still practice the infamous Nazi Sieg Heil salute,
not to mention distribute books by the old Nazi Minister of Propaganda,
Joseph Goebbels.
Now we were confused as to all these apparent contradictions,
so we asked to meet with the parliamentary representative
so they could better explain them to us.
SHANE: Now, in Parliament,
what's the classification for Golden Dawn?
So you have Christian Democrats, you have Socialists,
you have Communists?
_
What about people that say that Golden Dawn
isn't Nationalist but more Fascists?
_
Right, right. So Golden Dawn won't change,
will stay Nationalist, will stay strong, will fight.
_
Right.
SHANE, VOICE-OVER: When she says the Golden Dawn will fight
in the streets, she means that literally.
And now the Golden Dawn not only have political power in Parliament,
but are also reportedly getting more and more support
amongst the ranks of the police, who, in some cases,
have even joined in their racist beatings.
_
[Siren] SHANE: How many fights in Athens are there in a year?
Too many. Really?
_
Really?
SHANE, VOICE-OVER: The level of political violence in Greece is staggering,
with almost daily clashes between rival political groups.
The Golden Dawn's main opponent in most of these clashes are the Anarchists.
Now the Anarchists are very wary of talking to us,
knowing that we had already met with the Golden Dawn,
but finally agreed to talk to us, only if we met in a public place
in a politically neutral area, and only if we agreed to hide his identity.
So here we are in downtown Athens.
So there's a lot of Anarchist stuff here,
there's some Communist stuff.
This one says, "Anarchy Equals Freedom."
The Anarchists are fighting the Golden Dawn and the Fascists.
_
And how do you fight them?
_
So the government and the police are supporting Golden Dawn.
_
SHANE: So it's a running street fight in Athens
between the Golden Dawn Fascists
and the Anarchists, just fighting all the time.
_
SHANE: And why do you think there's been a rise
in, let's say, Anarchist groups like yourself,
or Fascist groups like Golden Dawn?
_
Right.
_
So, in Nazi Germany you had the Depression,
Great Depression, prolonged economic crisis;
you have the rise of the Nazis.
Here you're saying we have a prolonged economic crisis,
so the Fascists are rising.
_
And do you see the situation is going
to get better or worse in the next little while?
_
SHANE, VOICE-OVER: And it's not just Greece that's melting down.
All across Europe, people are rising up.
And, as the economy continues to suffer,
especially for young people, it's only going to get worse.
ROGOFF: What are the long-term consequences of having
a whole generation that didn't get into the labor force?
They suffer their whole lives.
I don't know how it's going to play out.
I think there's a lot of uncertainty hanging over Europe.
I don't think many Americans know that Europe is bigger,
economically, than the United States,
and if Europe were to have a real economic meltdown,
which is linked to a political meltdown in a way,
it's gonna blow up...
and, boy, we would feel it.
Sync & corrections by honeybunny www.addic7ed.com