24.02.26 16:00
Takis Lagios
It was the year 1848, when the "Communist Manifesto" was published, beginning with the phrase "A specter is haunting Europe – the specter of Communism." Many years have passed since then, filled with uprisings, revolutions, struggles, demonstrations drowned in blood, world wars, exiles, imprisonments, executions; years filled with visions, high ideals, pride, but also with hatred and internecine strife.
This time, however, the specter haunting us is not that of communism, because communism, like every ideology structured upon exaltations and anathemas, fell victim to its internal contradictions, its mistakes, and the capitalist bourgeoisie's ability either to buy off or to distort and suppress people's consciousness.
The thing that's haunting these days, not Europe, which is plunged into its cerebral inertia, but Greece, is the well-shadowed ghosts of some great figures, who visited us out of nowhere thanks to a man who, while his purpose was to earn some money (what tragic irony), inadvertently awakened them. From now on, the ghosts of two hundred people who, while alive, put Greece above themselves will be haunting Greece. As will the ghosts of many others who shared the same sense of duty towards society and humanity.
Perhaps very few of them would have bestowed the description "communist" upon themselves. If someone asked them what they were, out of modesty, they would answer: "My comrades recognize me as a freedom fighter." It was the fascist state that easily labeled as communist anyone who spoke of equality, peace, fair distribution of wealth, anyone who opposed the exploitation of man by man, bigotry, anyone who didn't just mind their own business but fought for a better tomorrow, not only for themselves but for everyone else.
For tyrannical regimes, the word communist was the utmost anathema, a vile designation. The phrase used by the dominant Right, even in the early 1980s, still echoes in many ears: "He is marked," meaning someone who had a file with the Security Police as a communist. And they avoided him like the devil avoids incense. It didn't matter whether he was or wasn't a member of the KKE (Communist Party of Greece). From the moment he resisted, disagreed, or did not cooperate with the regime or the respective conqueror, he was an enemy, a Soviet spy, a defilement.
But fate is invincible. The inexplicable force that awakens consciences, and which some call historical memory, emerges at the most opportune moment, when conditions demand it, like oil which, no matter how much you stir it in water, always rises to the surface. It is historical memory that teaches us. Thus, some eighty years after their execution, the ghosts of those executed in Kaisariani emerged from the sarcophagus in which the modern Greek state has enclosed its contemporary history, and they taught us a whole lotta lessons.
The first thing they taught us was that above even ideas and ideals, there are behaviors. These people had learned to behave that way; they grew up that way. They were unwaveringly devoted to the duty with which History had bestowed upon them. They were integral, they were those who bade "farewell to Alexandria", to life, and went "with emotion but not with the pleas and complaints of cowards" to their death, at the same time sending to the deepest, darkest, eternal grave the abominable memory of their executioners, the collaborators, the black marketeers, the traitors, and the hooded informers, the cowards.
They taught us love for a free homeland, worthy of its history and the ideals described in the national anthem they sang before the final command was heard, and with these in their heart, they traveled to eternity.
The other important thing they taught us was dignity and pride, with the command to safeguard these values for ourselves and to transmit them intact to our children. They taught us a way of life. And looking at the photographs that captured that terrible moment, looking within yourself:
"Perhaps then you will have found the way in your own labyrinth. Perhaps then you will stand as a proud tree, at the crossroads of the world, with all rivers secretly reaching your roots. Perhaps then your children, along with all children, will catch up to Time and Life, one moment before Chaos."*
*From the poem by Rena Hatzidaki (Marina) "State of Siege."
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