Endoxa, Regimes of Truth, and Hatred Rhetoric: Examining Golden Dawn’s Online Media Discourses

Drawing upon the notion of hate speech—and soft hate speech, more specifically—this chapter aims to bring to light the discursive strategies that constituted Golden Dawn (GD)’s cultures of violence in their public appearances and justified hatred against the perceived “Other” (such as the migrant worker and leftist/communist trade unionist “Other”). To do that, this chapter presents an analysis of GD’s online media and records of their interventions during multiple crises in Greece. In particular, it maps how GD’s leadership built on assumptions of distinction from their political, cultural, and/or class “Others” to subtly justify discriminatory hatred against them. To that end, it follows the premises of the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) to Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), Foucault’s concept of regime of truth and the Aristotelian concepts of topos and endoxon.