Re: <nettime> The Greek elections?

[Pavlos Hatzopoulos <phatzopoulos@gmail.com>]

I will burge in again, because Flick's analysis is too Greek to me.

The Kaisariani "monument" that Tsipras visited after his inauguration
as prime-minster is not really a "national" monument, it is not really
a monument at all. The event that occurred in this space is not
connected to Greek nationalist discourse, but to quite different
trajectories.

The 200 people executed by Nazi troops in Kaisariani in 1944 were all
communists. All of them were already imprisoned for being communists
for many years. Most of the 200 were first exiled by the Greek liberal
and right-wing governments of the early 1930s, then imprisoned by the
Greek dictatorship of 1936, then some were temporarily released to
fight against the Italian invasion in 1940, and then imprisoned again
after the German occupation. The execution took place on May day, and
the date was chosen on purpose to demonstrate their communist identity
of the victims. It was a retaliatory act after the communist
guerrillas of ELAS had ambushed and killed a German general in another
part of Greece. As a Greek daily newspaper reported on the next day,
just after the first execution "Greek volunteers" executed another 100
communists in a nearby area, on the basis that 200 communist bodies
were not enough for them.

The place of the execution was a stopping point of May Day rallies
-many of them banned by the Greek state- after the end of the Greek
civil war in 1949. In short, the event is primarily imprinted in the
history of the Greek communist left, and its remembrance does not
signify some liberal triumphalism again the defeat of Nazism, but is
more of a statement of the anti-communist foundations of the post-WWI
Greek state and the class antagonisms that this condition suppressed.

This is not to say that there are no strong nationalist and
anti-Semitic tendencies in the Greek communist left, or the Greek
social movements and certainly not to hide the fact that these
tendencies have even become dominant at certain conjunctures. But,
Syriza in its current form acts more as a mound against these
nationalisms. It remains to be seen if Syrixa can enable the
production of internationalist or translational becomings.


2015-02-05 22:47 GMT+02:00 Flick Harrison <flick@flickharrison.com>:

> Thanks for the insights, Felix; very helpful.
>
> But, to get argumentative a bit:
 <...>

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