History’s silence is complicity. A historian who remains silent bears responsibility equal to that of one who deliberately falsifies history.
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Fragmentary Historical Truths on the Occasion of the Prime Minister’s Statement Regarding the Murder of Vagia Nestoros in Thessaloniki
Referring to the murder of Vagia Nestoros in Thessaloniki, the Prime Minister declared:
“Just as November 17 was dismantled and Golden Dawn was brought down, so it will be with these cowards who pretend to be revolutionaries. The perpetrators will be found and punished.”
1.
Terrorism has always been the Right’s strongest political card. Yet, for a variety of reasons—above all as a convenient diversion—it has consistently been attributed to the Left.
During the German Occupation, the Right, represented by collaborators with the Nazis and members of the Security Battalions, and later during what is commonly called the “Greek Civil War” (which, in my view, was not a civil war at all but a popular uprising and Greece’s only genuine social revolution), the Right once again acted through organizations such as the Chites and the MAY units, doing what it had always known best: terrorizing, torturing, murdering, and displaying severed heads on stakes.
Having emerged victorious, they continued, through the same assortment of collaborators and criminals, to commit the same crimes in secret. At the same time, the official Right-wing state conducted military tribunals, executions, torture, and political exile, carrying out what amounted to a political purge—not merely proclaiming, as in earlier times, “Let no Turk remain in the Peloponnese,” but ensuring that not even a third cousin of a communist political exile living in the Eastern Bloc could escape persecution.
During the years of Karamanlis’ National Radical Union (ERE), once there were no longer Leftists left to execute legally, people were denounced to the gendarmerie, beaten, and saw their homes and property burned. One could scarcely find refuge if one happened to be even the nephew or godparent of a communist. The same fate could befall someone merely because, as a neighbor, they did not attend church on Sundays or failed to hang the national flag from their balcony on national holidays. “Fatherland, Religion, Family”—these were the ideals in whose name the so-called patriotic conservatives butchered those they branded as “anti-Greeks” and “communist bandits.”
2.
Following the restoration of democracy and the legalization of the Communist Left, the organizations collectively described as the “Armed Popular Struggle,” including Revolutionary People’s Struggle (ELA) and November 17 (17N), began their activities.
Responsibility for these organizations was now placed almost exclusively upon PASOK and the extra-parliamentary Left. For years, the Right insisted that Andreas Papandreou himself was the leader of November 17.
Even after the organization was dismantled in 2002 and the identities of its members became publicly known, the Right never apologized to the late PASOK leader, despite the fact that Andreas Papandreou had already passed away in 1996.
As late as 2016, Konstantinos Mitsotakis stated, in conversations recorded by Alexis Papachelas and published in the book Konstantinos Mitsotakis in His Own Words, Volume II: 1974–2016:
“November 17 represented the hard-line PASOK in its initial phase. I have absolutely no doubt about that. Andreas was not the leader of November 17. Perhaps—and on this I am not certain—he simply tolerated it, without wishing to know too much about what was happening.”
It is worth repeating this because it goes to the heart of the matter. Mitsotakis made these remarks in 2016, long after virtually everyone in Greece knew both what November 17 was and who its members had been.
For decades, similar positions were also expressed by the Stalinist faction of the Communist Party (KKE), with Mikis Theodorakis being among the most prominent voices. The celebrated composer, in the final years of his life, became not only a collaborator and minister in a Right-wing government but also an ally of nationalists and extreme-right demagogues exploiting patriotic sentiment.
Unfortunately, Andreas Papandreou himself also made the mistake of identifying his longtime friend, political scientist and economist Yiannis Tsekouras, as the alleged leader of November 17.
Tsekouras stated in an interview with Eleftherotypia in 2001:
“Certain individuals deliberately misinformed Andreas Papandreou because they wished to remove me from the party. Our relationship remained purely political and very good until the spring of 1975. Afterwards, I observed a gradual change in his attitude toward me, most likely due to information he was receiving from various quarters whose aim was to distance him from whatever influence I was supposedly exercising over him.”
3.
The only genuine campaign of indiscriminate, collective terrorism in post-dictatorship Greece has been carried out by Neo-Nazi organizations.
In the early years, they planted bombs in cinemas and on buses. One of those involved was Nikos Michaloliakos, who later became the parliamentary leader of Golden Dawn.
This brazen Neo-Nazi criminal did not remain in prison for even a year, because the then Prime Minister and leader of New Democracy, Konstantinos Karamanlis, was determined to prevent any association between the Right and terrorism—which, as noted earlier, had always been portrayed as the exclusive domain of anti-Right organizations.
4.
Historically, the peak of Neo-Nazi terrorist violence in Greece began in 2008, when police officer Epaminondas Korkoneas fatally shot fifteen-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos in Exarchia.
From that point onward , the same Neo-Nazi space has been responsible for the deaths of more than sixty Greek and foreign nationals, primarily migrants, while carrying out violent assaults, severe beatings, and widespread destruction of homes and property affecting more than 3,500 victims—including the present writer, who states that he has suffered physical and other attacks.
5.
The violence perpetrated by the so-called “troublemakers” or hooligans acting under the banner of anarchism—primarily during demonstrations, where they throw stones, Molotov cocktails, and improvised explosive devices—has, up to the present, not resulted in fatalities.
It remains to be seen whether those responsible for the murder of the innocent woman in Thessaloniki—whose tragic misfortune was that she was the mother of New Democracy official Aphrodite Nestoros—belong to that same milieu.