Diary, IV, 769–851. Quoted in “Metaxas on EON,” www.themetaxasproject.com.
In November of the same year, Metaxas, following Hitler's example, auspiciously after Goebbels's visit, was the first Greek politician to create a youth organization, the EON (National Organization of Youth). The organization was divided into two groups, the skapaneis (literally, the “toilers,” those who work the land with an axe, skapánē), comprising children from six to thirteen years old, and the phalangites, adolescents and young adults from fourteen to twenty-five. By October 1939, through the systematic coercion and terrorization of the country, EON numbered seven hundred and fifty thousand members. Their uniform was distinctive, with blue shirt and riding trousers, white tie, white gaiters and belt, and a little two-pointed hat. The EON absorbed, forcibly, the Greek Boy Scouts, one of the acts that brought Metaxas to a point of friction with young Prince Paul, whose pet project was the Boy Scouts. In the end the prince became the head of EON, just as his young bride, Frederica, had been a member of Hitler's Youth. The stated objective of EON was the patriotic education of Greek youth, so EON administratively belonged to the Ministry of Education. Metaxas himself took charge of the Ministry of Education in order to oversee the project of re-educating the youth, a youth that he called his “pride [to kamari mou].” As in Hitler's Nazism, belonging to EON was not a matter of choice, or, rather, it was not altogether a matter of choice (indeed, in the end it was not a matter of choice at all). As Manolis Anagnostakis, the famous Greek poet of the Left, has noted, he joined EON, against strong objections from his family, who were all Centrists, because in the beginning EON gave away free tickets to movies and football matches. But his case was not unusual—most children and adolescents were required to join.
There is hardly a bourgeois family in Greece that does not have a photograph of one of their (then) young members in the EON uniform, often giving the Nazi salute. As a friend, now in her eighties, said: “It was almost impossible to avoid it. If you were not already organized in one of the movements of the Left [thus, already old enough to have been marked by the Special Security Police and already otherwise preoccupied through imprisonment, torture, and or exile], then there was no getting away from them.”
I had the same conversation with another friend of my parents, Mimis. “We were spared all that,” Mimis said, “because our father was a moderate.” He baffled me.
His wife, much younger than him, who was also present at the discussion, asked, “So, were you ever drafted into it or not?”
“We were spared all that,” he repeated.
I said that I knew from my mother (who was old enough at the time to be forced to join, whereas my father, who was seven years her junior, was barely old enough to be starting school) that the leadership of EON would go through school registers and systematically force children to join, although some, maybe a lot, joined of their own volition.
This matter resurfaced during the junta. At some point the junta established its own youth organization, the Alkimoi (literally, “those at the height of their youth”). At a large party given by my parents, I once overheard my mother (the eldest of all present and the only one who had experienced EON) telling the guests (all of whom had children the same age as my sister and myself) that maybe they should all register us with the Scouts so that we would not be conscripted into the Alkimoi. Such conscription never took place during the junta, since the junta was never the totalitarian regime that the Metaxas dictatorship was, but rather a brutal, authoritarian stratocracy haphazardly constituted of colonels interested in the exercise of power. Their lack of a project (in the sense that Metaxas had one) did not go unnoticed by the old Metaxians. “Those were shadow puppets [karaghiozides, meaning literally the figures of the shadow puppet theater in Greece and metaphorically inept, uneducated, but cunning],” one of my interlocutors said. (He had been a Chites himself during the German occupation). A more self-reflexive and self-critical appraisal of the junta was the common saying “Everyone has the junta that befits them.” On EON, see Liakos 1988, Balta 1989, Varon 2003. Of great importance is also the self-representation of latter-day followers of Metaxas as it is performed on their Web site, www.themetaxas project.com.
Manolis Anagnostakis (1925–2005) was a poet of “the generation of the defeat,” although he called himself a poet of silence. Born in Thessaloniki and educated as a physician in Greece and in Vienna, Anagnostakis gave up writing altogether when he decided that he had written enough. He was particularly disenchanted by the ways in which the Left kept destroying itself in vortices of paranoia and self-immolation, and most of his poetry deals with that disenchantment. The last poem in this book, entitled “Epitymvion” (“Epitaph”) was written for an old Leftist friend of his. On Anagnostakis see Calotychos 2003, also Lambropoulos 2006, Gourgouris 2006, Theodoratou 2006, the last three papers delivered at a conference in Anagnostakis's honor at Columbia University.
As Metaxas himself said at the First Congress of Regional Commanders of EON: “The schools, at the outset, were hesitant. Only the primary schools joined with a great, a magnificent enthusiasm. The secondary schools hesitated at first to aid us. …The reason for this is that at the national ministry of education there was originally a defiance, which gradually disappeared, but the tone was set. But the youth, little by little, without threats or violence, and only by persuasion, managed to win over and conquer the secondary schools almost entirely, teachers and pupils alike. …In the universities we encountered at the outset much resistance… as much from students as from a large proportion of the teaching personnel. Did you know this? Of all those who fought and who gave us our liberty in 1821, not one was an intellectual leader. I do not wish by this to belittle the value of intellectual work. But allow me to say that I consider it a secondary question in comparison to the importance of character. (Applause.) As for the teaching personnel, I admit that I found a certain resistance, not on the part of all, but of some. But since I assumed the portfolio of public instruction, I have found a greater comprehension and conviction, and even enthusiasm, so that I am certain all will go well” (“Metaxas on EON,” from the Metaxas Project, www.themetaxasproject .com, edited for grammar and spelling). The means of producing compliance in adults (and older adolescents) included beatings, torture, confinement, and exile.