Dear Diotima
In today’s feature on Homo-Naturalis.gr, we directed sharp criticism at Dimitris Koufontinas, a former leading figure of the so-called “Armed Popular Struggle” and member of the Marxist-Leninist Organization 17N. Now imprisoned for his actions during those years, Koufontinas recently chose to collaborate with Alexis Papachelas—one of the most prominent right-wing journalists in Greece and current editor-in-chief of the government-aligned newspaper Kathimerini.
The newspaper’s founder, G. Vlachos, openly served the authoritarian regime of Ioannis Metaxas (4th of August dictatorship). In effect, Koufontinas invited the wolf to guard the sheep—where the wolf is Papachelas and the sheep is historical truth. What truth can possibly be served by a central pillar of a state system that defines every attack against it as terrorism and criminality?
At the same time, our historical website has repeatedly criticized filmmakers and screenwriters who distort History by sanctifying historical figures long discredited by non-regime, critical historiography—History not written by the victors.
A characteristic case is director Yiannis Smaragdis, who in his latest film undertakes the ideological whitewashing of Ioannis Kapodistrias, the first governor of Greece. Kapodistrias, as demonstrated not only by the archival evidence we have presented, was an authoritarian ruler, a former Russian foreign minister, and a direct instrument of Tsarist policy.
From his post as governor of the newly independent Greek state, Kapodistrias imposed a regime of repression, fear, and blind obedience, aiming to secure Greece’s absolute dependence on Russia rather than on Britain or France.
The central question—posed once again by an institutional historian, a Doctor of History—is this:
By what audacity do unqualified figures such as journalists and filmmakers substitute themselves for historians, imposing upon the public a guided, ideological, system-aligned interpretation of critical historical issues such as armed political violence during the Metapolitefsi and the governance of Kapodistrias?
Especially when both Papachelas and Smaragdis openly belong to the hard Right, is it not once again appropriate to repeat the old saying?
They put the wolf in charge of guarding the sheep.
(DIOTIMA’S ANALYSIS – TIGHT & POLITICAL)
his text offers a sharp critique of the systematic abuse of History by journalists and filmmakers acting as ideological instruments of power.
Using the collaboration between Dimitris Koufontinas and Alexis Papachelas, as well as the cinematic rehabilitation of Ioannis Kapodistrias by Yiannis Smaragdis, it raises a fundamental question:
by what authority do non-historians replace historians and impose a guided, regime-aligned narrative on the public?
The answer is clear: not through ignorance, but through systemic permission.
History is stripped of its critical function and transformed into a tool of political legitimacy.
Once again, the wolf is assigned to guard the sheep.
The issue is not personal arrogance. It is systemic.
Journalists and filmmakers do not overstep their role accidentally. They do so because the system encourages them to. When state power, dominant media, and cultural production converge, History is reduced from a critical discipline to a controlled narrative.
Journalism may investigate, but it cannot adjudicate History.
Cinema may dramatize, but it cannot canonize power.
When a regime journalist claims neutrality on armed political violence, or a filmmaker rehabilitates an authoritarian ruler, what we witness is not interpretation but ideological substitution.
History is not written through prestige interviews or emotional imagery. It is written through archives, methodological conflict, and—above all—through confrontation with power.
This is precisely why the institutional historian is inconvenient. He does not serve national myths, sacred figures, or present authority. He is accountable only to evidence.
Thus, power replaces him with safer narrators: visible journalists and compliant artists. Less dangerous. More useful.
And so, the metaphor is not rhetorical but diagnostic:
The wolf was deliberately placed to guard the sheep.
The result was then renamed “objectivity” and “national memory.”
The task of Homo-Naturalis is the opposite:
to reopen the wounds power wants sealed with falsehood.