History is not a narrative of innocence, but a field of conflicting interpretations and interests. Whoever fails to recognize the role of power behind its masks risks becoming a mere spectator in a play that directly concerns them.
The “good cop – bad cop” technique is well known. It is a psychological strategy used in negotiation or interrogation with the aim of manipulating the subject. The bad cop is harsh, threatening, enraged. He provokes fear and panic. In contrast, the good cop is kind, affable, shows understanding, and offers trust. The goal is always the attachment of the threatened individual to the good one—the ally, the friend—the extraction of mutual concession, and the anticipated support and protection he seems to provide.
On our historical site, we have expressed in detail and repeatedly our view of power structures, which do not differ much from the Good Cop and Bad Cop model. Here too, the objective is manipulation, the subjugation of the subject by one means or another—the harsh or the soft.
Democracy, indeed, performs better in the role of the “good” compared to other regimes. Yet all of them, regardless of the name they promote or are given by others, are forms of power. And this is the most essential point that the citizen must recognize when their differences are being analyzed.
All the rest is “theater”—a performance, plays with different titles. Only the naïve or those with vested interests fail to understand—or pretend not to understand—that the entire game of power is played through the talent its agents possess as actors. And, in contrast to others that lack precisely this art—the art of acting—Democracy excels in its role.
Today in Greece we have the anniversary of the establishment of the dictatorship of the colonels, which overthrew the then constitutional monarchy. Let us, however, briefly and without the grandiloquence of Goebbels-like figures—who both then and now worship the same “Mammon”—see what the truth is and what kind of abolition of Democracy we are talking about.
The “career soldier” Georgios Papadopoulos, leader of the 1967 dictatorship coup, was in no way worse than Konstantinos Karamanlis of that era, whose so-called democratic regime did not differ in the slightest from the subsequent one—that of the junta. Besides, the dictator himself, before rolling out the tanks, openly and proudly declared himself Royalist, Right-wing, and a supporter of Karamanlis.
Georgios Papadopoulos and all the other young men of the dictatorship came from that very faction. Their difference was that in the royalist Democracy of King Paul and later Constantine, the ERE party would win elections because it was voted in by “trees and stones.” The Palace’s and Karamanlis’s tanks existed then as well. They were simply stationed in the barracks, since the “dirty work” of supporting the Karamanlis regime was carried out by the ballot boxes.
Otherwise, in Greece under the monarchy, with the ERE party in government during those “stone years,” “everything was overshadowed by fear and crushed by slavery.” Exile islands, convictions, deportations, torture—anyone not royalist and right-wing was an enemy of the nation, a traitor to the homeland, its sacred and holy values.
And when that regime risked collapsing with the electoral victory of the Center Union of Georgios Papandreou, it was these same people who brought out the tanks—the staunch military men, royalists, right-wingers—to save precisely the faction that has always and fanatically sworn by the triptych “fatherland, religion, family.”
Nothing is more historically evident than this truth. The rest—the… detailed and profound political analyses—we shall leave, on a day like today, to the “good cop”: the professional politicians and journalists who take pride in their faith in Democracy.
The best of political systems—not because a better one has not yet been found, but because it possesses a troupe in which truly talented actors excel. In contrast, of course, to all the other… traveling companies.