By Alexis Papachelas

The past decades have seen the rise of a new species of guilt-ridden leftist. I am not here talking of the one-time left-winger who has made fortunes and feels guilty for having betrayed his more revolutionary ideas. The leftist I am referring to here has a penchant for breaching every possible norm of behavior by invoking the same-old, tired mantra: “We battled,” “We went into prison,” “We took part in the Polytechnic uprising.” This leftist creates the perfect alibi by making everyone else feel guilty.

He thinks along conspiratorial lines, he follows the most slippery political paths, he is the toughest genre of a capitalist. He is notoriously murky yet effective. He will easily violate any moral law. If he is a civil servant he will readily take a bribe. And all those years inside the party have made him a great sycophant. Most of these people are deeply cynical. They will always come up with a convincing theorem to justify the most brutal of acts. That’s how, in the 1980s, corruption was somehow recast as an almost fair way to redistribute income.

Past credentials enabled many such figures to go into politics. The Polytechnic sparked the political careers of many so-called leftists – people who sang the heroic anthems of a heroic past by day and then indulged in the most extravagant lifestyles by night. Hypocrisy doesn’t bother these people, who force guilt trips on those who disagree with them. The Right has been reduced to apologizing by default.

Note that this group of leftists does not concern the overwhelming majority of people who were jailed and tortured. These humble folks turn red when they think of the past, and turn away in shame when they think of their ex-comrades. A man’s tortured past cannot be an alibi for immoral behavior. It’s not hard to tell a true, if disillusioned revolutionary, from a career militant who slam critics as reactionaries.