NEWS

Let them talk and sink

Authorities charged with handling the local terrorism issue are wrong in not allowing alleged November 17 leader Alexandros Yotopoulos, his alleged partners in crime Dimitris Koufodinas and Savvas Xeros, as well as all this group’s other «intellectuals,» to give interviews and declare as many manifestos as they wish. Should certain TV «channels» and journalists pounce on this lot, they will have made fools out of them within the first month, and, by the second, they will end up whinging on Anita Pania’s well-known junk-TV show. It’s also wrong for authorities to deny these figures exposure on windowed television debate and thus interaction with this colorful scene’s regular hosts and guests. Even the most embittered viewer would get a laugh out of it. Moreover, the authorities are also wrong to keep these suspected terrorists locked away in individual cells, rather than putting them away together and letting them solve their ideological differences and various other discrepancies. An amazing number of interview-manifestos – such as Yotopoulos’s controversial one published recently by a small provincial newspaper in Lamia, northern Greece – actually roam freely amid «revolutionary circles.» The interviewees come across as laughable imitations of Lenin. There is nothing new here. For decades now, a considerable number of individuals have gone on believing that revolution is knocking on our doors, or were convinced that their innocuous ideas comprise the framework of revolution as well as revolutionary theory. One of the most fundamental factors that established the myth surrounding November 17 was the group’s notorious run of public proclamations. We read them out of necessity and also paid close attention to details, not for the «revolutionary wisdom» they contained, but because they were written in the blood of innocent victims. It all sparked much speculation regarding which «intellectuals» lay hidden behind the proclamations, their political motives, and the political protection involved. And so, a labyrinth of a myth began to unfold – one that lasted, untouched, for 27 years. The reality of it all is what we all see: «fighters» like Savvas Xeros and the rest of the pack, and «intellectuals» the caliber of Yotopoulos, whose political stance Lenin would have swiftly categorized, condescendingly, as subjective politics. There are many who, for a variety of reasons including subjection to childhood trauma, continue to think about and want «revolution,» either through blackmail, use of «firecrackers» or selective murder. It’s immature political thought – or, rather, neither politics nor thought – perhaps forgivable at the age of 15 or 20, to believe that occupation and destruction of the Athens Polytechnic can be equated to the occupation and destruction practiced by instigators of the Russian revolution. But, thinking this way at the age of 60 is sheer perversion. This type and quality of «political thought» was never a problem, nor has it really created a stir. It’s nothing other than the political periphery of the left, which, through various identities – as is also the case with the periphery on the right – has occasionally made up the parastate’s nucleus. These «revolutionary thoughts» never troubled, which is why they weren’t purged, while members of this country’s entire leftist movement were being jailed and exiled. Pistols, robberies, murders, «firecrackers» and the means by which state authorities are handing the issue is the real problem. Now that they’re no longer armed with their guns, Mr Yotopoulos and all his other «intellectuals» can say and proclaim whatever they please. It’s the best way to let them fall into untrustworthy, ludicrous pits.

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