Here is the reaction of a lady to my article “Misanthropy, Conservatism, and the Referendum in Greece” of July 7, 2015:
Vicki July 7, 2015 7:21 pm
So you are calling me an asshole and expect me to participate with you? I don’t vote for liars and lazy politicians s – so stay all warm and cuddly with your brainwashed buddies who do not understand as I do that a participatory society means thinking for yourself and taking action to raise the living quality for the whole community. Have fun spreading your meaningless rhetoric around the Internet . People who care communicate . . . have fun trying to ruin our lives in Greece – I bet you don’t manage to accomplish your cruel intentions
I shall try to answer to Ms. Vicki as accurately as I can.
– She writes: “So you are calling me an asshole…”
The text in my article she answers to is: “So in December 1974, there was a referendum in Greece to decide on this. The Greeks that voted for the King, that is the Greek ‘conservatives’, as expected, were 31 %, which means that the percentage of assholes in Greece remains constant; close to 33%.
So, Ms. Vicki admits that she is a ‘conservative’ and that she voted for the King.
– She writes: “I don’t vote for liars and lazy politicians…”
- If her remark refers to “liars and lazy politicians” in general, she should be congratulated, as she expresses a rather universal, honest, and accurate opinion. However, given that she has, already, admitted that she is a ‘conservative’ and a ‘royalist”, does that opinion include the ‘conservative’ politicians and the ‘royals’, the par excellence ‘politicians’ among whose other activities included were for example the selling of Greek infants to US citizens for a couple of thousand dollars per infant by Frederika the mother of the King who was deposed through the referendum, and for whom she voted?
- If her remark refers to the leftist politicians of SYRIZA, which I think is more probable, then she has to explain to us how does she know that the doctor who was hollering at the top of his voice against that accusation spewed by Theodorakis, a newly ‘created’ politician, in a recent session of the Greek Parliament. An accusation repeated by Ms. Vicky verbatim.
– Ms. Vicki goes on by advising me to:
“[S]tay all warm and cuddly with [my] brainwashed buddies …”
Once more, the remark of Ms. Vicki is accurate! My brain has been washed. Only, there is a slight difference. My brain was washed by me.
Here is the dirt that I have washed off my brain:
* At age ten, in 1940, I washed off my brain all the dirt of irrationality, hypocrisy, and dishonesty that was being attempted to be printed on my brain by the Greek state through the Greek Christian Orthodox Church. Observing the old men, their faces full of hate and venom, that filled the pews in my neighborhood church, ‘Aghia Zonee’ [Sacred Belt (!) of Mary, the mother of Christ] I concluded that something was going wrong in that place. Also, the ridiculous environment at Sunday school was enough to wash off any residual dirt. Personally, I consider this as my first conscious act of anarchism based on the anarchist tendency which is innate in all human beings.
* At age fifteen, in 1945, just after the Nazi occupation I washed off all the slime that had accumulated in my brain as a childish fan of soccer and of competitive sports. Later I understood that soccer, etc. constituted not only a stupid way of spending one’s time but also a potent tool in the hands of the rulers in controlling the unwashed masses. Yet, I have to admit to Ms. Vicki that only three years later at eighteen, in 1948, I “sinned”. I took part in a soccer game between the School of Mathematics and the School of Chemistry of the University of Athens. This is a serious matter. We all at some points in our life behave as assholes. This condition for normal persons can last from a few seconds up to twenty four hours at the most. For ‘conservatives’ it lasts for a lifetime.
* At age seventeen, in 1947, one year before graduating from high school, I finally washed off all the patriotic, nationalistic, ancestor-worship, and ‘chosen people’ garbage which most societies instill in their children.
Now, Ms. Vicki expands her advice to include my ‘buddies’. Notice that Ms. Vicki, a patriotic Greek lady, uses the Anglo-Saxon term ‘buddies’, which is ‘baby talk’ for the word brother, adopted in 1850 according to the Merriam. As an anarchist I have no buddies. Probably what she really meant was ‘comrades’, a word she avoids to use as it brings to mind the [expletive deleted] commies. Anyway, anarchists consider their fellow-humans as real “comrades” worthy of respect and of solidarity. The fact that ‘conservatives’ place themselves out of the society of normal humans, is a problem that they have to resolve themselves.
An anarchist is by definition a “warm” person. However, the use of the adverb “cuddly” by Ms. Vicki is a bit strange, given that it means “kiss and fondle amorously”, according to an Oxonian definition.
– Ms. Vicki continues by writing that my “buddies” [and I] “do not understand [as she does]” what “a participatory society means”.
This time to verify the correctness of her ‘conclusion’ Ms.Vicki, a serious person, will have to make an effort.
I suggest that she should go to Kiafas Street, a tiny street slanting from Akadimias street just opposite the “Zoodohos Pigi” church, and visit the bookstore named EPIKENTRO [Epicenter]. There she would meet Manoli, a really exceptional human being, and ask him to give her a book bearing the title PARECON in Greek. Then she can order at her neighborhood bookstore the book “Symmetochiki Oikonimia” [Participatory Economics], by Robin Hahnel, published by “Exarcheia Press”.
– The next target of Ms. Vicki is what she labels as “[my] meaningless rhetoric around the Internet”.
I guess Ms. Vicki does not use the term “rhetoric” in the usual Anglo-Saxon sense of “skill in the effective use of spoken or written language”. She rather uses it as an insult. This time Ms. Vicki is wrong.
During my stint as a child attending mass in my neighborhood church as a ten or twelve-year-old I had an interesting experience. At some point there was a new preacher who gave the Sunday sermon. The man was not the usual mild-mannered refined theologian. He was a hillbilly-type of a person, probably from Lidoriki the birthplace of my father. From the first Sunday, at some points in his sermon he used the word “only”. In Greek the word “only” is “mono” [hence: “monotheism”, “monotonous”, etc. in English] or in less refined language the word becomes “monacha”. So, at those certain points the new preacher instead of “mono” or even “monacha” used with great emphasis the hillbilly idiom “manacha” [accent n the final “a”] by changing the “o” into “a”. The result: the congregation was rapt at the oratorical greatness of the man. So, he was classified as the greatest orator [“rhetor” in Greek], ever to appear in that church. Of course, the sermon was the same jeremiad as repeated for centuries. In case Ms.Vicki, a refined lady, misjudges the quality of my old neighborhood church and its congregation, she should know that just opposite the gate of the church lived Xenopoulos one of the greatest writers of modern Greece.
My thoughts at the time: how come the hillbilly by changing the sound of “o” into that of “a” won grown-up people as an orator.
Decades later the comments of Noam Chomsky on oratory and orators confirmed the correctness of my original thoughts.
A couple of decades before the orations of the Greek hillbilly theologian, Ernst Franz Sedgwick Hanfstaengl, a 6’ 7” [2.005 meters] tall aristocratic Bavarian, after studying at Harvard he returned to Germany in 1921. One year later, in 1922, the US Military Attaché in Berlin told Hanfstaengl that “He should attend a gathering where a certain [person] would give a speech” adding that “The fellow [the orator] has the right melody on his tongue”. After hearing the speech Hanfstaengl said about the orator that he was a “higher carat diamond who needed only to polish his ideas…” The fellow was Adolf Hitler. The aristocrat, Harvard man, and personal friend of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt discovered a … “diamond”.
Finally Hitler after using Hanfstangl as the Foreign Press Secretary for the Third Reich, in 1937 ordered his “execution” by assigning, the by then 50-year-old Hanfstaengl , to parachute over the civil war “red territory” in Spain.
I think that after the above explanation, Ms. Vicki understands my position about the value of “rhetoric”, etc.
As for the adjective “meaningless”, which accompanies the word “rhetoric” of Ms. Vicki, I feel that the content my articles try to highlight [quakes, torture, militarism, the US Emperor, ‘conservatism’, war, the Nazis, etc.] is definitely not meaningless.
As for her accusation of “spreading … around the Internet” I think Ms. Vicki will be disappointed to learn that I use my laptop mostly as a typewriter and as a “post-office”. For example, it took me 13 [thirteen] years to learn, by chance, that my ZNet article “Of Pyramids and Skyscrapers”, of September 30, 2001, in which, as a civil engineer, I was explaining the 9/11 failure of the Trade Center towers, was discussed in the Internet.
– Ms. Vicki goes on with her advising, writing that I should “care” and “communicate”.
Of course, in this statement of hers there is the tacit assumption that she cares and she communicates. Also, there is the tacit assumption that I do not care or communicate. No need to comment.
– Finally, Ms. Vicki suggests to me to “have fun trying to ruin our lives in Greece” and bets on my [or our] incompetence to “accomplish” my [or our] “cruel intentions”. I guess that by ‘our’ she means SYRIZA of which she assumes I am a member. Ms. Vicki, I am not.
Let us examine the cruelty existing on this planet:
During the last few decades planetary cruelty was personified by;
* Reagan
* Clinton
* Cheney
* The Bushes
* Kissinger
* Negroponte [the Greek]
* Bolton
* Ms. Albright
* ConDolceza
* Tony Blair
* Wolfowitz
* Wolfang Schaeuble
* And on and on …
Ms. Vicki, an honest person, should ask herself: where does the power of these cruel and violent persons rest?
The answer: to the ‘conservative’ men and women of this planet.
Ms. Vicki admits that she is a ‘conservative’.
However for Ms. Vicki, as a Greek woman, there is a specific piece of information she did not learn at school, which however can be found today in non-‘conservative’ Greek families:
“[I]n Greece in 1947, where the US-run operations successfully demolished the anti-Nazi resistance and the political system and restored the old [‘conservative’, my note] order, including leading Nazi collaborators, at the cost of some 160, 000 lives and tens of thousands of victims of torture chambers, and a legacy of destruction yet [1993] to be overcome (along with great benefits to US corporations).” [Noam Chomsky, “Rethinking Camelot”, South End Press, Boston, 1993, page 41].
To finish this answer to Ms. Vicki: I have to thank her for offering me the opportunity to record the above information.
However, I have to ask her if in the act of writing her comments on my article she did that as an unwitting or a witting actor.
Bulletin about [not so strange] events in Athens
– In my ZNet article “Did the US Win the Greek Elections?”, of February 2, 2015, I expressed the opinion that SYRIZA was obliged to accept as Minister of Defense, who controls the Greek military, “an ideologue of the extreme Right”, to satisfy the will of the US Emperor.
I refrained to mention that the person chosen to control the police was in the same category. This person is named Jannis Panousis [pronounced Panoossees, accent on “oo”] a buttoned-down, ‘conservative’, dignified gentleman, and a university professor. Given that the control of the police is a tool of very immediate reaction in controlling the people, the ‘appointment’ of Panousis for this job was a must. The army constitutes the “final solution”. What follows its intervention is a dictatorship.
Today, the behavior of Panousis has so enraged the ‘normal’ Greeks, that it is considered a very serious matter.
– Alexis Metropoulos is also a serious, dignified, well-dressed gentleman, and a university professor. Today he holds the second position in rank under Zoe Konstantopoulou, the President of the Greek Parliament. His choice for that post is of similar quality as that of Panousis.
Of what I know the FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] was used in Greece for the first and last time by the leftist magazine “Anti” in 1980, thirty-five years ago to get files of US Agencies on “Anti’s” publisher, the late Christos Papoutsakis. I think that the potentialities of FOIA as a tool for understanding the political situation in countries like Greece by getting information about local individuals should be exploited at their utmost. Help from US lawyers, who belong to the left, could be of paramount importance for that purpose..