“I’m the embodiment of every fascist’s fantasy. I’m a Jew, a communist – and a heretical communist, a Trotskyist, at that. I don’t fit anywhere. The only thing I happen not to be is homosexual.”

My old friend Savvas Michael-Matsas – activist, internationally respected writer on philosophy and literature, general secretary of the Greek Revolutionary Workers’ party (EEK), utopian thinker, fiery speaker and wild white-haired survivor of 17 courses of chemotherapy (“No compromise with death”) – is on trial in Athens on Tuesday, 3 September, for “libelous defamation,” “incitement to violence and civil discord”, and…