We sat down with Strickland for some insight into the book.
Q: You’re from the Dallas area. How did you end up reporting on politics in Greece? What got you there?
A: "Well, I started my journalism work covering Israel and Palestine and lived in the Middle East for about seven years. In 2015, what we called the “refugee crisis” in Europe began. Nearly a million people passed through Greece that year. I had been covering conflict and displacement in the Middle East for around four years already by that time, so I followed the refugee journey as people made their way toward Europe. The war in Syria was a big part of that mass exodus. In late 2015, I was reporting on the Greek islands and on the borders across the Balkans as displaced people tried to reach Western Europe.
"I was really inspired by the solidarity and humanitarian outpouring I saw at that time, especially in Greece. Activists were taking over abandoned buildings to give refugees and migrants places to stay. Humanitarians were setting up self-organized kitchens to cook for people on the move.
"It felt incredibly important to me. At the same time, the displaced people eventually hit a roadblock when the borders began to close. Add to that the risks of the journey they were making: exploitation by smugglers, dangerous terrain and sometimes violence at the hands of anti-immigrant vigilantes."
Q: You covered these issues in your daily reporting at the time, but what prompted you to start writing this book?
A: "Around 2018, I just had this heavy feeling that so many people’s stories would be lost if I didn’t put them into something more substantive and lasting.I had to finish my previous book first, and then the pandemic happened, and I couldn’t go back to Greece for a couple of years. Eventually, I returned to Athens in late 2022, and I spent about a year and a half completing the reporting and research for You Can Kill Each Other After I Leave. It took me quite a long time to finish the book, but I’m glad that it worked out the way it did. In the end, I was able to understand this long period of mass displacement and far-right vigilantism more than I would’ve had I rushed to finish it."
Q: In your previous book, The Marauders, Standing Up to Vigilantes in the American Borderlands, you deep dive into militias in border towns in Southern Arizona and delivered an eye-opening account of the harsh tactics of the vigilante anti-immigration militias there. How are these two books connected?
A: "Truth be told, this book is set in Greece, but the issues it looks at are relevant in so many countries around the world right now."Greece went through an intense period in which a neo-Nazi party exploited discontent over the country’s economic crisis in order to blame refugees and migrants. That probably sounds familiar to American readers. There was an astounding amount of violence: Far-right mobs stabbed and killed people; others attacked migrant workers in agricultural fields, beating them with clubs or pelting them with stones.
"Now, that neo-Nazi party – the Golden Dawn – has been banned and designated a criminal organization. Still, the country’s right-wing government has made a harsh crackdown on migration a centerpiece of its policy agenda, and its migration policies overlap, in some ways, with the far right’s ideas about migration and borders. In fact, at different points, militia-like groups that hunted migrants appeared on the Greek border with Turkey, and they didn’t look that different from the kind of militias I reported on in The Marauders.
"Beyond that, the parallels are even more unnerving: the anti-immigrant right is in the Oval Office in the U.S., and in Greece, a far-right activist who has long railed against migration is now in charge of the country’s migration ministry."
Q: Why the title, You Can Kill Each Other After I Leave?
A: "The title comes from something I heard at a protest in March 2018. A neo-Nazi group had firebombed the Afghan Community of Greece’s office in Athens, and refugees and solidarity activists staged a small protest against the attack not long after. As they were gathered, a group of Greek men across the street started yelling at them. They were complaining about refugees and Islam and everything else you’d expect from people who would be offended that migrants would speak out.
"A police officer was standing around, checking his watch.
"I heard a refugee ask him to step in and de-escalate the tensions, and the officer responded, 'You can kill each other after I leave, but just wait until I’m gone.'”"I wrote it down because it seemed to sum up so much of how the government there viewed the issue of the far right harassing refugees and migrants."
Q: A theme that runs through a lot of your work is the plight of immigrants risking their lives to get across borders. In Texas, we focus on just one specific border. In your work, what have you found to be Texans' greatest misunderstanding of the immigration issue?
"It’s exactly that, the risks people take. To reach Europe, people often take dinghies — these are really flimsy, often inflatable boats — across the sea with the hopes of finding refuge. They’re fleeing war and economic collapse and all sorts of hardships. To reach the U.S., people cross an incredibly militarized border and sometimes walk for days in the desert.
"No one, as far as I can tell, does this unless they think it’s absolutely necessary to ensure their survival, or the survival of their children, for instance. That is so crucial, in my opinion, to understanding why someone would make a journey that carries potentially fatal risks.
"Because you or me or anyone else, we’d do the same thing if we were convinced it was the only way to save our children. In that sense, these are normal people like anyone else, and they want the same thing everyone wants: a stable life free of war and violence."
Q: In your reporting over the past 10 years, how has fascism evolved, both in Greece and in America?
"You can see it any time you turn on the news. In 2013, Greek neo-Nazis were stabbing people in the streets. In 2017, American white nationalists were marching in places like Charlottesville, unleashing violence on the people who came out to protest against hate and fear. Flash forward to now, and right-wing politicians in the U.S. and Europe have moved much further to the right, especially when it comes to migration. In that sense, I feel that what were once considered mainstream conservative parties have taken the border-related ideas of the fringe far right, stripped them of the outwardly fascistic language, and molded them into policy. That might sound hyperbolic, but I don’t see any other way to describe, as is the case in Greece, extrajudicially expelling people from the country by pushing their boats back into international waters (often causing shipwrecks), or, as is the case in the U.S., shipping people to a foreign prison without due process."
Q: Can you explain the title of Chapter 2, "We Were 1,000 and They Were Tens"?
A: "That title came from a quote by a Greek investigative reporter who had been an activist during Greece’s student uprising against the country’s military dictatorship in 1973. This was a pivotal moment. The country had been under the control of what is known as the Regime of the Colonels. These students rose up against that dictatorship and occupied a university campus in Athens. A small group of fascists gathered to rally in support of the regime. They were standing on the other side of a line of police, chanting and tossing stones at the student activists. (One of those fascists, by the way, later founded the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party.) This reporter, when recounting the incident, told me, “We were 1,000, and they were tens.” I thought this was really interesting and telling.
"The portion of any given population that actually supports fascism is usually comparably small. Most people want to live a dignified and free life."
