by Olga G. Yeritsidou
Today, on the eve of the Polytechnic Uprising and the murder of my father George A. Yeritsidi by the state, which has always been nothing but the para-state which has unleashed an anti-Greek propaganda at a huge scale in its effort to eradicate the true identity as well as the very existence of the Greeks, I consider it imperative to narrate the events as they truly took place, as I am both a blood relative of the victim and an eye witness of the events. But also in my capacity as a social scientist, with experience in analyzing propaganda and its structure, I shall proceed to explain why this Anniversary of the Greeks has been the target of attack by everybody at least since 1985. This attack has now been expanded on other anniversaries, glorious or inglorious, which however document both genocide attempts at the Greeks as much as evidence for the peopleʼs heroic, continuous and steadfast resistance against anything fascist, totalitarian, tyrannical and inhuman. This is not to do, in other words, with a special case, and we therefore should not see it as such.
Let us take things from the start: there are certain indisputable facts that the organized party propaganda, starting with the Communist Party (KKE) and PASOK (who, in seamless cooperation right after the start of the transition period, fully exploited the Anniversary and transformed it into a party fiesta, systematically and actively, thus divesting it from its true character, just as the junta had tried to associate itself with the Greek identity and Flag in the hopes that the Greeks will shake off this junta-linked identity and thus cut themselves off from their roots in their effort to dissociate themselves from anything reminiscent of the junta). Those parties fanatically monopolized the celebration of the Anniversary and still today they are trying to do the same flaunting those ridiculous party flags and open stalls full of party-led propaganda material, but not a word on the real historical events and the Legacy left to us by the Polytechnic Uprising:
To start with, the Polytechnic Uprising DOES NOT concern just that particular Saturday, neither was the whole affair a momentary takeover by a bunch of kids, nor were those kids and the other persons locked inside the Polytechnic alone or stranded from the rest of the Greek People. On the contrary, the takeover of the Athens Polytechnic School held for as long as it did (almost a week) and as a result the dictator was forced to bring in armor and use a tank to storm through the outer gate and put an end to the takeover, ordering the army to fight the unarmed precisely because the Polytechnic demonstrators had the full support of the Greek People: I was 18 years old then and I can still remember the people starting to gather around the area on Tuesday, in small numbers at first, but very supportive to the students locked inside, to offer food and supplies, to spread the leaflets handed out to them by the students through the railings (I was one of those passing by who were asked to hand out leaflets and did so), to supply them with medicines when they asked for it and provide for whatever else they asked for.
On Wednesday, people thronged at and around the Polytechnic in the morning. There was a pandemonium by Greeks who had decided to go downtown to offer their support and help to the students. On Wednesday afternoon the place crawled with police. The police cordoned off the Polytechnic but they still allowed people to pass through and approach the railings just as it did on the previous Tuesday and Wednesday morning. But its presence was deliberately made very conspicuous in the hope that the people will get scared just because the police had encircled the place, installed there to watch, record and report on the people.
But instead of being scared, the Greek People on Thursday and Friday literally flooded the Polytechnic area to such a degree that the police could no longer be distinguished, although of course they all held their positions. And here lies the crucial fact that afterwards all the parties, spawns of fascists, collaborators and traitors, have so zealously tried to twist and make us forget:
The only flags flying in the Polytechnic were the Flag of Greece and the sign of Peace, just the one the murdered EDA deputy Gregorios Lambrakis had as well, the one that frightened the regime so much. The songs heard at the time were the ʽXasteriaʼ, the Greek National Anthem mainly and systematically, while the rest were a potpourri of the banned songs by Theodorakis. Nothing to do with any party was there with the students of the Polytechnic and no one cared to promote any party interest, even those moles who had been sent in there on purpose, because it was understood by all that this unfolding event would need to be cashed in immediately in the future and be exploited and usurped (note the case of Damanaki, and her demand that she were at the mike, unjustifiably and completely arbitrarily). Apart from those traitors who were in the making then and who also did not dare do anything else but join forces with the rest of the students then, no one dared to pose any demand except the ousting of the dictatorship and whoever foreign power was enforcing it (the US among others), and the restitution and safeguard of Human Rights of the Greeks.
The students then, in other words, were no different from those demonstrators of today who throng at the mass rallies holding only Greek Flags, and it is only then that those rallies are massive and populous, while every other party or union-led demonstration is by comparison a trickle. But the same thing happened to the demonstrators of today as it happened then: breaking the mass rally in two squares, with all sorts of parties and particles trying as best they could to usurp the rally for their own ends. When none of these efforts bore fruit, the police stepped in that Wednesday at Syntagma Square and dispersed the crowds turning the centre of Athens into a gas chamber, unleashing frenzied riot police with clubs afterwards.
There were no chemicals or riot police back in 1973 so they used tanks and machine guns. On Friday morning, the then assembled people around the Polytechnic had reached the Alexandra and Panepistimiou avenues, when the first snipers made their appearance. There was a surge of joy that had infused everyone carrying on the demand that the junta be ousted.
Suddenly the night of that Friday fell and the people went home (they could not fit in the courtyard of the Polytechnic and none expected what was coming). I remember how I was stuck to the small portable radio and was pressurizing my father to drive us downtown. I was cross at my father then because he refused and then I could not understand why. He had told me then with sorrow filling his eyes that ʽthese kids are now being used. Iʼll explain laterʼ.
He did not let me go downtown then but he did, never to return.
My father was no simple man. He was a Fighter since his early age and he had never compromised his principles. In the revenue service he was working in, he crossed swords with the then powerful association of the Kavalla tobacco manufacturers, and had to suffer cruel consequences and persecution because he confirmed all of their dues, debts and taxes rather than accept a bribe of 5,000 golden sovereigns to cover the whole thing up. He used to say that this was the money of the people. However the tobacco taxes were frozen and ten years afterwards, I remember him returning home embittered to tell us that the whole debt had been written off and that the tobacco manufacturers never had to pay their dues to the Greek People, around the beginning of the junta period. This is just one example, because my father used to help and support every Greek Fighter in deed, asking nothing in return. On the contrary, he was always a fighter behind the scenes and for this reason he was well known to the para-state but remained ʽanonymousʼ to the People.
He drove downtown that fateful Saturday never to return, leaving me alone amidst others to figure out by myself what these words of his meant, and to watch them become reality up until our days. These kids were exploited: they usurped their pure offer to the Country which they sealed with their own blood. With this usurpation, the ever-present totalitarian dynasts and their brood managed to install the traitors of the transitional period into position, silently straggling and persecuting the true Fighters of the Polytechnic piecemeal, just as in 1940 and afterwards they usurped the epic of the Greek People to settle the children of the collaborators, who are there still today to exploit the institutions and capital of the Greek Nation and of the Greeks themselves.
On Saturday afternoon (5:00 pm) we were summoned to the General Hospital (today called ʽGenimatas Hospitalʼ) to locate my father. After we managed to secure a special permit to drive downtown (as there was a curfew on) we drove there and because no one had bothered to tell us how or where he was, we were forced to search all rooms filled with wounded from the Polytechnic. All the rooms of the hospital were filled by blood-dripping people abandoned on stretchers who had been given only emergency first aid in a hurry (the blood had perforated the bandages and was dripping down mainly from heads and some limbs in most cases). My father was nowhere to be found and for this reason we had to pass by and check all rooms three times to make sure that we had not missed him because there were many wounded who had all their face covered up.
At the end we reached the operating room because we could not imagine that he was dead. The operating rooms were working at full blast and we had to wait outside till the surgeon in charge noticed us and asked us to step into his office where he announced to us that my father was dead and sent us to see and officially identify his body at the morgue where all the dead of the Polytechnio Uprising had ended. I did not get in there because I could not stand to see him lying dead. My mother got in a young woman and got out an old lady in a hysteric rage and traumatic shock.
And then the whole charade of the so-called inquiry started that culminated at the junta trial for the Polytechnio dead, to which I took the stand as a witness and had to face the proceedings which are not related to the issue of the Anniversary of the Polytechnio Uprising.
It is therefore indubitably clear that there were both dead and wounded all of whom had come from the Greek People who had supported and condoned the takeover of the Athens Polytechnic as they had previously also ratified and condoned the takeover of the Law School and the attempt of Alexandros Panagoulis to assassinate the dictator, and whose memory todayʼs traitors do not still dare to mar.
Why then all this heat and hatred and their frenzied efforts to re-write history as they seem fit?
If the Polytechnic Uprising had not taken place, they had hoped that the junta would eventually manage to don a democratic cover-up which would not have become the democratic aberration against which we are all fighting now, something resembling perhaps Spainʼs Franco regime followed by kingship. The big scam staged by PASOK, DNP and KKE which cost them a lot of money, extra investments and agreements and wheeling-dealing to achieve their targets, and the fascists around would not have to make themselves scarce and lie undercover in wait for the time of the green PASOK cronies to start to crawl out of their holes again having donned the socialist rhetoric which of course they never put to effect. They would not have been forced to allow the people to have the supreme sovereign authority even in theory, they would not have had to pay the union leaders to ridicule the demonstrations, the strikes and then the takeovers in a thirty-year effort to reinstitute the split between the hegemonic class by birthright and the arbitrary hegemonic class and their cronies and sidekicks as against the rest of the People to whom they have been trying to convey the notion that they have no Right to speak or claim anything.
Thus, the memory of the Polytechnio Uprising could not be allowed to exist unadulterated and undiluted: the official declaration of rejection and opposition of the Greek People against everything and anyone totalitarian, tyrannical, separating, anti-humanitarian. In other words, exactly what the Greek People is currently doing at least in theory, judging from the magnificent demonstration rallies of 2010, with all the ʽpro-nation aristocratsʼ of the political scene having again been forced to cast their masks and show their true fascist colors and their distance from the People who cannot tolerate the regime they want to enforce, which is the same as that of the junta and its bosses at the end of the junta period. That is why we were then punished communicatively with the Cyprus affair, when its loss was irrationally and unjustly associated with the Polytechnic Uprising, given that its loss had been pre-arranged by the traitors who had always been flaunting their ʽpatriotismʼ.
But we will not make the same mistakes twice and this time we shall extinguish the junta and scoop up all those who supported it directly or indirectly and shall protect our soil and People.
Translation courtesy of Michael T.