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We link with our humanities and idiosyncratic past done anniversaries. This is however we learned and this is however we live. Anniversaries mean we person yearly intersections with pleasant and unpleasant events of our past successful the people of the calendar year.
For the pleasant, we clasp yearly celebrations successful grant of our successes and for the unpleasant, we contemplate our disasters. But they besides mean that the transportation with our representation is made done references lone to events and not to their time. Our shallow transportation with anniversaries is the vigor that, ultimately, deprives us of the cognition of the discourse that gave commencement to those events that accompanied and that absorbed them.
History is not a blank expanse of insubstantial that begins its text with an event. History is composed of parts that represent interconnected wholes. No lawsuit arises from a virgin birth. Our motivation transportation lone with events deprives us of the understanding of our changes and the developments they caused successful our history, and by hold successful our lives. Praise and criticism, which annually verbalize the dimensions of events, person nary applicable effect successful the enactment of a structured, synthetic and functional memory.
Anniversaries relation arsenic ex station facto wishes and accounts of losses oregon arsenic intelligence erasures of the damages suffered, without seeking the essence of the events they mention. Despite the symptom of memory, the “use” of the lawsuit invalidates its humanities epoch and makes it vulnerable to interpretations that ultimately sideline disasters and weaken intelligence exaltation.
On Tuesday, it will beryllium 59 years since April 21, 1967, when a radical of Greek colonels overthrew a caretaker authorities a period earlier scheduled elections. Our representation and our references to that time person agelong since cooled down. Those who retrieve the junta, and those younger radical who did not acquisition it oregon adjacent its aftermath, when they think astir it they bash so done its main events.
Indicatively, they subordinate it with the time the tanks rolled into cardinal Athens and dismantled the state, with November 17, 1973, when the constabulary and service brutally invaded the Polytechnic University of Athens where students had barricaded themselves; and with July 24, 1974, the time the junta collapsed. The astir delicate will subordinate it with torture and with the wide consciousness of repression.
At the aforesaid time, there are laudatory comments and opinions circulating from some quarters astir the “good things” the dictatorship brought, such arsenic security, sleeping with the windows open, economical and governmental peace. Of course, the governmental unrest that the junta “calmed” with tanks, was calved two years earlier April 21, 1967, by state and parastate mechanisms, portion of which yet carried retired the coup. In different words, the aforesaid radical who incite unrest, then showed up arsenic the bearers of stability.
The contented with the junta is not to respond to its praisers. These radical would not person been convinced of its wickedness adjacent during its seven-year rule. The contented is for us to support firmly successful our minds the agelong concatenation of afflictions that the junta brought and established oregon intensified successful our country.
The origin of the coup was not the nonexistent communist threat, but the panic that the information of centrists and center-leftists – who had been sidelined aft the civilian war – successful nationalist beingness brought to the then constitution and the king, adjacent though they were intelligibly loyal to the bourgeois regime.
We should feel, among galore different things, arsenic destructive consequences, the abolition of hierarchy, the distortion of patriotism, the maltreatment of power, the vulgarization of the tsamiko creation by the colonels, the publically imposed atrocious taste, the sterile people songs, the destructive involution successful Cyprus and the Turkish invasion, the disorganized urbanization, the proliferation of an municipality structure that canceled the quality relation of cities, motivation education, the consolidation of fearfulness and snitching, the unarmed quality of the 1973 Polytechnic uprising, its dozens of dead, absorption heroes Spyros Moustaklis, and Alekos Panagoulis, the very problematic catharsis and attribution of responsibilities aft the extremity of the junta, and unfortunately, much, overmuch more.
If indirect absorption was besides calved done thought, wit and art, that is similar raving astir ingenuity successful cooking, arsenic a effect of shortage and famine.
But fto us besides support successful caput the misuse of absorption later, successful the information of democracy, by those who did not hazard their lives oregon the information of their families during the junta, the improper distortion of the absorption by terrorists when ideology had been afloat restored, the post-junta militant question that wrongly insisted connected not appreciating democracy.
While the service has returned to the barracks, our nationalist representation has not been fed and renewed by contiguous monuments against the dictatorship. The celebrated engraver Tassos did not go the Theodoros Vryzakis and Nikolaos Gyzis of our modern times.
Tassos Sakellaropoulos is simply a historian, and caput of the humanities archives astatine the Benaki Museum.
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