April dictatorship: The prevalence of arbitrariness

The dictatorship, as we all know, is a very difficult, very complex intervention, full of unexpected and traps, the fullest to the fullest for both the organization that accepts it and for those who decide and execute it. The dictatorship means the abolition of constitutional legality and the prevalence of arbitrariness. That is, under its regime, all of us, young and old, lords and beginning, are outlawed. Our freedoms are abolished and, together, the permanence of civil servants, judges, university professors. All of our political rights and our personal security are still abolished. Gotzamanis and Pitsokos have the power to get into your house at night, pick you up from bed, throw you in a car and take you in a dire direction. And don’t dare to complain and say:

– How do you treat me that way? Do you know who I am? I am an academic. I am a general with national titles. I am a former prime minister.

Because Gotzamanis and Pitsokos have nothing to start in the slaps. All you have to do is slaughter, make your cross and let go of God’s mercy.

« TO VIMA », 20.2.1966, Historical Archive « TO VIMA » & « TA NEWS »

The dictatorship still means that some persons, who no one voted for, manage national wealth, at their free judgment, without being able to control them. For this reason, a general suspicion surrounds services, institutions, organizations. Suspicion and buccal. It also means that the nation is moving in dense darkness towards the unknown. How do our national issues are dealt with, no one knows, no one asks. Where are we going? What awaits us? What contracts and conditions are signed? What commitments are taken on? What future is preparing for the place, for our children? Don’t talk, you don’t have a reason. You will work, pay taxes and believe what the National Foundation tells you.

For all these reasons, those who start making a dictatorship, knowing what they are risking, always strive to be covered in advance with some excuses. They are preparing their mitigators for the event that they may have been in the need to someday an apology. We are threatening, they say, a great national danger, we must save our homeland at every sacrifice. Or there is a revolution and we have the right to defend ourselves. Or, still the economy collapses, our life paralyzes, famine comes. Or, finally, the state has fallen into incurable rule and is going to dissolve. So let the laws temporarily burn. Salus populi suprema lex esto.

Is there any such reason that could give a moral justification to a dictatorship in Greece today? Justification even one -sided, even if sophisticated?

(…)

« TO VIMA », 20.2.1966, Historical Archive « TO VIMA » & « TA NEWS »

A dictatorship today in Greece would have no real justification. Those who would have resorted to such a honorable passage should know that they would remain uncovered in the consciousness of the place, without mitigating. However, the prospects of a dictatorship, under today, would be much more worrying than in earlier times.

In a previous article (« To Vima », January 27, 1966) I talked about the danger of Greece to change into a European Vietnam and I do not want to return to this nightmare. But there is another possibility. The place suffers from immediate, vital, emergency problems, as it is unemployment, underemployment, the misery of certain social strata, the lack of coordination and organization, the migration, the reduction of the population, the delay of education and our anachronism in general. These problems are in danger of our national status and not by fantastic threats. In order to live the nation and to progress, he must come out of the impact and the phobias of the over -conservatism he possesses us, and find bold solutions to his problems. So if a dictatorship abolishes free political life and convinces us that nothing is done by the smooth democratic methods, then it is likely that the impeccable need for historical evolution is likely to ask for another way out. And to find it in the dictatorship itself, that is, its younger executives, which will be more sensitive to the call of the times. And then we may fall asleep one night like obedient nationals of a Metaxas dictatorship and hear the next morning, from the radio, that something changed in Greece, at night, and that we are ruled by young people with new slogans and unknown directions.

Let all these detainees think well. Let our allies also think about them. We ask for nothing but freedom, legitimacy and wisdom.

*An article that was previously published in the theme of the Historical Archive and is republished today on the occasion of the sad fifty -eighth anniversary of the April dictatorship. The above excerpts come from an article by George Theotokas, entitled « The Dictatorship » and the characteristic « diversion of subsequent » subtitle. This article was published in the newspaper « To Vima » on February 20, 1966, just a year before the April 21, 1967 coup.

Those referred to by Theotokas Gotzamanis and Pitsokos were incitement to criminal acts in that turmoil, and more specifically on May 22, 1963 (Spyros Gotzamanis was involved in the assassination of his associate with EDA Tsarucha).