The Junta, the Polytechnic and Goebbelism:
What is the Reason for Forging the History of the Junta?

by Olga G. Yeritsidou

Last Monday was invited to a television discussion panel on the events of the Polytechnic Uprising and in general in regards to the surrounding atmosphere of the time and the off-stage forces involved in the whole affair. At least that is what the invitation said and it was on the basis of that call that I accepted it. Let us note at this point that this particular television show and its host are supposedly very ʽpro-resistanceʼ, against the regime, etc., and in general shows itself to be different from the official pro-government parrots of the type of major anchormen of prime time news zone in mega channel, etc. Of course, the whole ʽdifferenceʼ is a bit unorthodox and rather utopian given that the owner of the ʽresistanceʼ channels is not out of the big channel owner cartel, with whatever this may mean. There I witnessed a gross and blatantly pro-junta propaganda attempt which was targeting the people who DID NOT live under the junta or witness the Polytechnic events, and which could even put Gruefsky, T. Dragona and Repousi to shame in re-writing history. What we should think about is what purpose exactly does this attempt serve, and this is what I shall explain in this article, because we have been given a pretty good warning of what they are preparing for us.

If one watches the particular show, he or she will probably arrive at the following conclusions, if the person has only superficial knowledge or complete ignorance of this particular chapter in Greek History: he will feel that the Colonelʼs junta of 21 April 1967 was … ʽsheer happiness for the countryʼ (just like everything else inflicted on the Greeks during the post-war period…); that Papadopoulos was a saint, Ioannidis a simpleton caught in his sleep and taken for a ride as he was inexperienced in murky dealings, the juntaʼs army was a romantic love-struck force who treated everybody with honour and dignity, putting to shame even the best boy scout; the students in the Polytechnic were, on the other hand, armed murdering maniacs who truly endangered the lives of the snipers on the roofs surrounding the Polytechnic, just as they did for the lives of all those soldiers machine-gunning them down from inside their tanks; while the then police force attacked the junta army totally unprovoked hitting them with clubs, cracking the skull of the officer in charge of the army special forces (obviously despite the presence of a helmet on his head) surreptitiously creeping in from behind, for unknown reasons, since everyone was acting under no orders from their headquarters. The tank used to storm the main gate of the Polytechnio had to be used in lieu of earth-moving equipment, which, acting in completely suave and subtle moves, ʽhelpedʼ a demonstrator step down from the gate pillar by simply pushing the pillar off balance a little, because naturally nothing was in fact torn down.

Of course whoever hears such nonsense and possess simple common sense and some rudimentary experience from society and the presence of organized/para-state he or she will surely understand that things are not likely to have happened this way and that the whole effort was a crude attempt at pulling our legs. But whoever was alive and present during those times and was NOT a junta sympathizer or a junta crony, or in anyway a collaborator of the 7-year dictatorship and of all that followed under the façade of democratization, which seemed to apply only for party members, regardless of political stance or colour, must have been deeply offended and incensed after seeing the nonsense projected by the parastate to such an extent. But in that particular discussion panel, it was only I that fit the offended and incensed observerʼs description, as all the rest, either in their claimed capacity during those years or by means of their statements (because many blatant lies were shamelessly said that night that can be easily proven as such), they all must have in one way or another belonged to the junta sympathizing bloc, and thus appeared to be incensed at even the thought of rejecting or castigating the Colonelʼs junta. Regarding the youth who had assembled in the Polytechnic area in the thousands, as I have described in my previous article, but as so many co-Greeks have stated in writing, the invective against them commenced almost immediately at the start of the talk show: just because a bunch of their descendants and implanted anti-Greeks ameliorated their later traitorous actions with an aroma of so-called ʽanti-junta resistanceʼ so that they could buy themselves more time in the scene, a classic practice applied by all collaborators across the generations from the Mavrokordatos family in 1821 to the Aggelopoulos family in 1940 and of course including every Laliotis, Damanaki, Tzoumaka, etc in 1973, a whole generation of millions of Greeks who have rejected the junta and who celebrated in toto when such junta supposedly fell, is summarily characterised as corrupt and a destroyer of Greece.

But this practice has not been unknown to us! We felt it on our skin since 2009, when, to expedite the advent of WMF and the troika in this country, the corrupt, anti-Greek traitor G. Papandreou threw upon the Greek People all the characteristics of his own brood and shameful clique, in the most typical portrayals of the killer blaming the victim. It is not therefore a phenomenon that restricts itself only to the issue of the Athens Polytechnic, but one that characterizes a more general practice of the totalitarian-minded and the supporters of repression in their attempt to exploit the sense of justice and dignity of the Greeks to their best advantage and force the Peopleʼs subjection to punishment and slavery to restore damages from the serial and heinous crimes committed each time and era by this class of traitors.

Why is this attack against the memory of the Polytechnic so vile, heated and rabid? What interests does it serve? What is the real issue at stake with the Polytechnio Uprising that they fervently wish to cover up, and on the one hand, the so-called ʽleftistsʼ reduce it to a party fiesta attempting to monopolize it by pushing away every single one not belonging to their party (i.e., everyone not manipulable and controllable by them, democratic and humanitarian Greek, who of course comprise the majority); on the other hand the so-called ʽrightistsʼ undermine the Polytechnicʼs memory with so many gross and uncouth lies, which if we were to watch them in a film, we would reject the whole thing as lacking any sense of script consistency).

I call them ʽso-called leftists and rightistsʼ because those party mongrels serve the same monster and aim at the same target: divide and rule and institutionalizing a totalitarian, suppressive regime and anti-hellenism regardless of the label attached. Both kinds of party mongrels are equally threatened by the Polytechnic Uprising and we shall presently see why, which is verifiable by every co-Greek, by checking, inquiring and researching freely the issue nowadays.

In the discussion panel at the television talk show I had said that I would say a few things, epigrammatically, about the Polytechnic and the junta and then I would rest my case and leave the panel and the whole charade and circus of misinformation whereby they were trying to pass as huge first-time revelations, and indeed as fearsome to the system (!) (note: this is defined in mass psychology and communication research as sensationalism and consists of presenting a truly useless piece of information as possessing great and vital informative value, or of a lie which by means of an underhanded overstressed impressionism gets registered in the subconscious as something important amidst a similar bombardment of stimuli). They did all they could to preclude me from saying all these things, and because many co-Greeks have asked me to say them anyway, I do so in writing in the present article:

1. The Polytechnic Uprising was the official burst of a reaction brooding for at least the two previous years by the Greek People against the junta. This brooding of discontent found both literary and artistic expression but also could be seen and felt in the escalating ever-present political discussions and attitudes. The comedies and theatrical shows of the time can bear witness to these facts. This two-year old anti-junta sentiment was officially supported and fed by the year-old anti-junta stance of the Greek People expressed in their everyday lived reality. We should at this point define as ʽPolytechnic Uprisingʼ the sum total of the official uprisings and reactions that started at least with the Athens Law School in February 1973.

2. the Polytechnic Uprising was in fact a sitting demonstration, reminiscent of the Ghandi type and was treated in a similar way by the totalitarian regime, since such regime was financed and controlled by colonialists / imperialists of various calibres. There was NO violence, there were no hooligans, and mainly, it WAS NOT PARTY-DEFINED. In short, there was no ʽleftʼ or ʽrightʼ in the Polytechnic, but only anti-junta Greeks. So it is utterly offending to see that there have been attempts to usurp the Polytechnic Uprising by any which political party.

3. Dictator Papadopoulos did not protect the people from poverty, the reign of the big capital and whatever else he hopes to achieve in his ʽspeechesʼ: The Thasos oil reserves were handed over to the Americans and he gave full authority to Tom Pappas and his ESSO-PAPPAS company to elevate himself into the feudal lord of Macadonia, despite the score of incurred financial scandals for which he never had to answer to anyone. Papadopoulos is responsible for the scam of the internal loan when he literally embezzled and squandered peopleʼs money. He instituted new financial dynasties and buttressed the old ones in position, by extending unheard of privilege and uncontrollable power. He installed foreign powers on Greek soil, he certainly did not oust them and of course he was in no way opposed to being dependent on those powers, while his close connections with the Palace before the dictatorship as much as with the Papandreou family are officially recorded as historical fact. Whoever wants to truly examine history will find much corroboration on the above and many other related issues that I will not make reference to at this point and time. I will refer however to the fact that many junta cronies and secret junta-sympathizers, despite the huge defence spending, had to turn people back from the call to arms in 1974 under the feeble excuse that there were no guns in the army depots and Greece did not possess the necessary armaments.

4. to extend his stay in power and to stop the Greek People from reacting even for a while, Papadopoulos invested in a score of communicative tricks which however brought no change in the Greeksʼ everyday reality, ranging from super-patriotism fiestas to permitting lawless and uncontrollable construction which of course was a cover up for huge scandals, environmental degradation and destruction and contracting high interest loans on the back of the Greek People, and whose dividends he enjoyed as if he had paid for them out of his own pocket, or as if it was not something that the Greek State was obliged to do. This practice initiated a pattern of state spending that was continued unabated after and during the transitional government, and thus no difference can been seen in that sense between the two eras. The cherry on the cake, and the very thing that afforded Papadopoulos an extension of the tolerance but not of the acceptance of the Greeks, was the fact that he ʽoustedʼ the king. Naturally the king had to go, and all of us Greeks wanted that, since kings and royalty had been imposed on us and we then needed to keep throwing them out, but the dictator ousted nothing except the formality of royalty, since neither the palace cronies lost any power nor privilege from those catachrestically enjoyed during royalty. There was a case, in other words of a colpo grosso in communicative politics of the junta and nothing more, as is easily surmised from the way the Greek state treats (in both the junta and post-junta periods) the ousted ex-royalty who still dare have a coat of arms bearing the name of Greece. Do we really know if their royal proceeds were also cut off (as well as those of their collaborators) regardless of how they have been renamed?

5. The presence of foreign power agents ranging from Americans to Israelis and others did not suddenly start with Ioannidis or during the days before the Polytechnic Uprising, as they now are trying to present, but it can be seen right after the civil war era, where agents roamed all over Greece, and of course during the riots including the assassination of Gregoris Lambrakis. There is a multitude of reports describing the covert operations by agents and installed assets working on behalf of foreign powers and against the Greeks at situm, i.e., on Greek soil. Who would be gullible enough to think that all those agents magically disappeared when the palace-fed dictator Papadopoulos with the complacence of the party leaders of the time (P. Kanellopoulos, G. Papandreou, K. Mitsotakis, and the rest of the boys) imposed his coup, since no one of them wanted elections nor the possibility to be voted in by the people on a platform which would be immediately dishonoured (see G. Papandreou Aʼ as well as G. Papandreou Bʼ in our days) at a time when the People was very excited about 1-1-4 (the 120Σ equivalent of those days) and regarded everybody possible or proven traitors as is the case today, but also murderers and Nazi collaborators after the Lambrakis and Mertenʼs cases?

These I had to say about dictator Papadopoulos and his ʽsuper-humanitarianʼ and ʽsuper pro-Greek junta (!) they so fervently are trying to sanctify and instead unload all the ills that were caused and handed over to Ioannidis, who manages for the first time in history to be simultaneously the blood-thirsty, foreign agent AND a gullible, inexperienced little man who was caught at unawares and was made a full use of! Not even people with double personality disorder can stand up to such a range of action under the same identity and personality. Of course Ioannidesʼ dictatorship did not catch Papadopoulos at unawares, but it was a simple case of handing the baton as instructed by their bosses in an attempt to hide the fact that a few thousand people doing a Ghandi-type demonstration (i.e., a sitting, peaceful demonstration and refusal to obey until the dictatorship fell) could actually topple a fully-armed totalitarian regime. Together with him, Turkey was also made use of, which as a country is known to have clear government allegiances geopolitically.

But one fact remains clear: the Polytechnic and the whole preparation by the Greek People culminating in the Uprising cut the feet of whoever was the true dictator then short, and for this reason the next dictator was named ʽprime-ministerʼ and was hastily flown in from Paris to gain time to arrange the scene for the first ʽfree electionsʼ which enjoyed the same transparency as the referenda arranged by the junta itself.

The Polytechnic Uprising causes disease to the present regime which fervently wants to turn iteslf into an unhindered junta so that they will not be even in the least restricted by the Constitution which at any time and moment can ignite a true commitment (depending on how much the judiciary are worrying about their own hide) or Human Rights, so that this regime can serve unhindered and by means of uncontrollable violence and commit criminal deeds by means of heavy arms, not just chemical spraying and clubbing, the interests of the countries that feed on our soil, and of those companies that dream of the return of the work conditions imposed in the 1940s by Hilter on the occupied areas…where development was indeed made under very competitive market conditions since workers were simply not paid wages and when they got sick or were deemed less productive, they were simply disposed of and others took their place.

How can the junta they have in store for us ever be successful if the People, that is, the Polytechnic generation and its children, does this again at national level?

Translation courtesy of Michael T.