Did historical oblivion swallow the dictatorship?

Today is April 21st. It is fifty-seven years since the day on which free will, free thinking, institutions and any kind of hierarchy were abolished in Greece, by a coup d’état of sworn army officers. From the day on which a regime of absolute arbitrariness, insulting consciences, political repression, torture, psychological violence, confinement, imprisonment, exile was installed. The country entered a spiral of fear, inaction, nullification of the spirit.

The dictatorial regime disguised brutality and oppression with a cloak of cheap “civilization”, with a sloppy, shallow and sterile “Greekness”.

For more than seven years, a dictatorial state has obsessively aimed at canceling the moral, intellectual, verbal development of Greek society. A development that had been achieved with great difficulty in the post-war twenty years. Every little or big, personal or state brutality was applied by the dictatorial regime to undermine democracy, to declare it dangerous for young men and women, incongruous and useless to Greek men and women, to identify democracy with the oppressive Eastern regimes.

The bloody resistance of the youth against them starred. Adults took the risk and stood decisively against brutality and selfishness and vulgarity. The two occupations of the Faculty of Law, the Navy Movement, the unarmed uprising of the Polytechnic University, Alekos Panagoulis and Spyros Moustaklis awakened consciences and courageous thoughts.

The dramatic curtain was closed by the destruction of Cyprus and Hellenism there.

Then, the democratic paternalism of Constantinos Karamanlis gave shape to democracy. The sworn Greek officers went to prison and Greece started wounded trying to cover the political and moral damages that took us away from the right reason, from Europe.

The above words are enough, very briefly, to present the dictatorship of 1967, the consequences and the end. They are not enough to explain why we are moving away from the sense of evil that happened in 1967, from the betrayal of democracy. They are not enough to explain why democracy does not appeal to younger generations. Because it’s taken for granted to obsolete. Why is history not fascinating, the rational study of conflict?

Has the anger passed? Has the need for punishment passed? Is democracy integrated into our being? Do we turn our thoughts away from the unpleasant? And yet, without the last thought, the proposed solutions remain in theory and do not smell either the needs or the galloping cancellation.

Education and democracy neither bring anything new nor help social advancement or professional recognition. This is an aphorism we informally think about or at least accept with bitterness and insecurity.

The dictatorial regime disguised brutality and oppression with a cloak of cheap “civilization”, with a sloppy, shallow and sterile “Greekness”.

Insecurity because, the older ones, we were born and formed through education, through Europe, through the West and finally through History. Directly or indirectly, the past has been a criterion of instructions and respect.

When you also had political interests, then you had to know a little about the history that gave birth to the era you lived in, in order to stand in political debates and conflicts. To understand literature and cinema. Even to laugh at jokes you hear in groups. Was history a language of communication for the fifty years of Postcolonialism? Are the political conflicts of the Post-colonial period over and did she leave with her the tools of our understanding?

Bitter? Maybe. They say nature abhors a vacuum and we fill it with frills, let’s suppose… History participated in our imagination. In the right criticism, in the emotion and in the anger. As a state we had coordinated the current with history. Everyone knew her, better than the official story.

However, memory, and therefore history, can, if organized, become part of the strategy of life, a conscious part of reason and not of impulsive emotion.

As long as history served the conflicts and antagonisms of a politically fluid society, it was believed that (armed) knowledge made its opinion omnipotent.

However, if history helps in anything, it is a field of substance and bridge with what has already been done. It is the bridge of why. A reason that builds, a reason that seeks traces of honesty with honesty. If truth is not attainable and acceptable, its sister, honesty, stands by history and its great telescope with which it studies the past. Dehistoricization lacks this. It takes the honesty out of our tools. Dehistoricization gives the illusion of freedom and light steps. It is not honesty that wears iron shoes in the past. It is the selfish use of it.

In schools where letters, numbers and history take place, for the yesterday they had and for the tomorrow they will have. In these schools where learning and education are served correctly, not as an end in themselves but as a resource for tomorrow which is always unknown. In these, happily existing schools and their existing and sincere teachers, the anniversary of April 21, 1967 gives meaning and a search for why.

Mr. Tasos Sakellaropoulos is a historian.