Greek Fire: the Left's Innocent Victims

The Wall Street Journal had a long story over the weekend about the three Greek bank employees who were killed by Greek socialists rioting over the loss of their welfare state.

Above the seething streets of this ancient city, Angeliki Papathanasopoulou—four months pregnant and at work in a downtown bank—tried to soothe her fearful mother on the other end of the phone.

It was noontime on May 5, and the tension was palpable as angry crowds gathered in Athens's main squares, readying to protest deep spending cuts needed to earn an international bailout.

"Don't worry," Ms. Papathanasopoulou told her mother on that May day. "I'm on an upper floor." Besides, the 32-year-old was leaving work early at 3 p.m., for a doctor's appointment to learn whether the child she carried was a girl or a boy.

She never found out. Shortly after 2 o'clock, as the throngs marched past her building on Stadiou Street, hooded men shattered the window, poured gasoline on the floor and hurled in a Molotov cocktail. Toxic smoke filled the three-story bank, sending 24 people who worked there climbing out of windows or clambering onto roofs of adjacent buildings.

Ms. Papathanasopoulou and two colleagues, people who had watched her marry her husband nine months before, succumbed to the thick black fumes before they could make it out.

We keep hearing from the Left about how they have their boots on the neck on this or that corporate bad guy, about how they stay up nights making Molotov cocktails to benefit "the workers," about how they're all about afflicting the comfortable, etc. You know the litany. Yet, it's the workers who end up worse off when the Left has its way. If you are lucky, you end up like Ms. Papathanasopoulou's friends who had to choose between working for real wages overseas or staying home and living in a high tax/low employment welfare state. If you are unlucky, you end up dying in a bank branch because a bunch of rioters couldn't figure out that the "banksters" probably wouldn't be working at the teller windows in the middle of the afternoon.

The Left is not about fairness and equality. It's about revenge and envy. Yet, in order to achieve their cruel utopias, they must destroy more lives than just those among The Rich. There simply aren't enough rich people in the world to satisfy their bloodlust. Middle class strivers are in the cross-hairs, too.