Children of the Dictatorship

Children of the Dictatorship Student Resistance, Cultural Politics, and the “Long 1960s” in Greece Kostis Kornetis berghahn N E W Y O R K • O X F O R D www.berghahnbooks.com Chapter 4 Cultural Warfare Chapter 4 engages with the dialectical relationship between culture and politics. As ideological reasons alone do not account for the creation of the Greek student movement, the chapter explores the roots of its cultural background, as well as the ways in which the latter in turn reinforced student combative- ness. It examines new trends in cinema, theater, music, aesthetics, and ev- eryday life in an attempt to explain how new cultural identities were shaped. It turns to alternative forms of culture that were created in juxtaposition to the Junta with an interest in how several countercultural elements acquired political signifi cance over time. Th is section also addresses the role of female students in both the student body in general and in the movement in par- ticular, in an attempt to account for continuities and ruptures with the past. Lastly, references are made to the contested issue of a belated “sexual revolu- tion” and private going public. Media and Publishing Strategies Just like any other authoritarian regime the Colonels tried to achieve near complete control of the mass media in order to ensure an informational monopoly. Preventive censorship was in operation up to 1969, and no printed document could circulate without the authorization of the Censorship Of- fi ce. Th is created a vacuum of alternative information and intellectual culti- vation, as the heavy weight of voicing opposition fell on clandestine papers. Inevitably, the very moment the regime allowed relative freedom of expres- sion, parts of the press began to express a mild critique of its governance, breaking its “information monopoly.”1 Since 1967, Greek writers had refused to publish anything as a means of demonstrating passive resistance through silence. “Refusing to submit your writings to be examined by the police authorities and the censorship offi ce is after all an issue of self-respect and self-dignity,” said writer Spyros Plaskovi- tis in talking about this period.2 Th is proved to be a controversial decision that contributed to the lack of the circulation of any alternative and hetero- dox ideas during the fi rst years of the dictatorship. In fact, Filippos Vlachos, Cultural Warfare | 159 the founder and director of the publishing house Keimena [Texts], appeared extremely critical of this tactic years later concluding that “silence was also convenient … an escape, not resistance.”3 Whereas antiregime artists continued to protest by refusing to write, publish, or exhibit, some journalists devised a range of strategies to counter the eff ects of censorship. Integral to their creativity in resistance was the fact that repression helps to create new sorts of knowledge and diff erent ways to communicate a message. According to Michel Foucault, “Censorship not only cuts off or blocks communication, it also acts as an incitement to discourse, with silence as an integral part of this discursive activity.”4 In this sense, erasure can be enabling as well as delimiting. Comic strip artists, such as Bost, Kyr, and Kostas Mitropoulos, who collaborated with the major dailies of the time, were among those who managed to undermine censorship most successfully through references, allegories, and innuendos that were confusing to the uninitiated but easily discernible to the ones looking for a hidden message.5 American writer and Athens resident at the time, Kevin Andrews argued that people who were hastily reading these cartoons in the papers “almost had the sense of participating at the cost of a couple of drach- mas, in resistance activity.”6 Th e press was a major factor in the dissemination of information and the development of the awareness of the political situation in Greece under the Junta. In so far as the press fully covered the court-martial trials and published complete trial transcripts, it provided an opportunity for students to learn about resistance eff orts. Th e pleas of the accused off ered them the opportunity to defend their actions while condemning the regime and re- porting having been tortured. Th e press also off ered detailed, often provoca- tive full coverage of student mobilizations. Th e Athenian and Salonicean dailies Ta Ne a and Th essaloniki dedicated a daily column to student issues (both using as their logos images associated with May ’68), which served as means of constant update on student mobilizations. Minas Papazoglou’s column in Ta Ne a, titled “Youth and Its Problems,” promoted the antiregime students’ demands and criticized the appointed student councils during the spring and summer of 1972. Th e column also published letters of protest by antiregime students. A series of journalists writing for Th essaloniki followed the same pattern in their regular feature “Th e Students’ Column.” Accord- ing to a US report, Th essaloniki was an “anti-American [and] anti-regime” publication with “strong infl uence among younger leftists and students.”7 Chrysafi s Iordanoglou, a law student in Salonica, emphasizes, “If this communication medium with the journalism it represented had not existed, it is doubtful that the student movement of Salonica would have survived.”8 Another typical pattern of Th essaloniki was to present the student unrest in 160 | Children of the Dictatorship Figure 4.1. Headline of the antiregime daily Th essaloniki reading “Freedom … Freedom,” and with small letters in the subtitle “in Spain.” Th is was a typical strategy of the newspapers during the Junta, testing the boundaries of censorship. (Source: Th essaloniki newspaper) other countries with large headlines, extensive photographic material, and direct allusions to the Greek situation. Typically, a large headline would read “Th e Militaries Are Panicking” or “Th e Student Revolt Is Spreading,” and with tiny letters underneath one would read “in Italy” or “in Spain.”9 It is not at all surprising that Th essaloniki’s director, Antonis Kourtis, was constantly warned and fi ned by the regime.10 As was the case with students elsewhere, Greek students read the papers voraciously in order to fi nd out what was going on in the world in a period of dramatic events, from the Vietnam War to the Middle East crisis, and also to read accounts of events in which they themselves had participated, resulting in a rather self-refl exive position. Giannis Kourmoulakis observes: “Messages were coming, even if curtailed, but they found fertile ground and they touched us. And somehow we started as well little by little also to get revolutionized” (Kourmoulakis, interview). As we have seen, the dictatorship’s liberalization experiment proved to be crucial for the development of the student movement, contributing to a signifi cant change in the political and social climate of the country. One major reason for this shift was the production and circulation of books, a defi ning factor for the enhancement of antiregime consciousness among students. Th e critical silence-breaking moment in publishing was the publica- Cultural Warfare | 161 tion of the Dekaochto Keimena [Eighteen Texts] (1970), which followed a 1969 dramatic statement by the Nobel Prize–winning poet George Seferis condemning the Junta at the BBC—the fi rst public condemnation from within Greece made by a respected, noncommunist intellectual.11 Th ese eighteen allusive literary texts were written by well-known intellectuals who avoided naming the Greek Junta outright but used, in the words of one of the contributors, “innuendo, transposition and … metaphors which the reader could easily understand, but for which it would be diffi cult for the authorities to prosecute.”12 Four short stories, for example, referred to a fi cti- tious Latin American country under dictatorship called “Boliguay.” Th e experiment was followed by the publication of Nea Keimena [New Texts] and Nea Keimena 2 and the journal I Synecheia [Continuity] by the same circle of intellectuals, including a number of left-wing writers.13 In April 1973 one of the contributors to this symbolic rupture, the poet Manolis Anagnostakis, appeared self-critical about the years of artistic silence: What could be … the picture—if any—that today’s twenty-year- old youths, who were 14 then, might have of the condition of our cultural and political landscape before the April coup? If we talk to them … about the Spring that was about to bloom on our intellectual horizon, what mechanisms of representation do they have to follow us? With what depot of nonexisting experiences would they grasp what the three-year relentless silence meant, and how would they be convinced about the necessity of the intellectual tran- sition to a specifi c moment in time from speechlessness to direct discourse?14 Th e publication of Eighteen Texts coincided with the regime’s decision to open itself up, suspending preventive censorship and abolishing the last blacklist of books in 1970. Up to 1969, the only publishing houses that had been established and whose books became points of reference (Keimena, Kal- vos, Stochastis) focused on classical political thought and literature. Th e soft- ening of censorship led to a spectacular increase in domestic cultural output, however, and publishers found a way out of the previous stagnation. From late 1970 to late 1971, 150 new publishing houses were opened, and 2,000 new titles were printed in inexpensive paperback editions.15 Th is overproduction of publications aimed to encourage critical thinking in young readers, which could help them to understand existing realities. Books were needed that would provide a “practical perspective” or a way out of the political impasse.

Load more