- Chapter 8. 1974–2007: After History
- » Explosive Genealogies
The dismantling of 17N has reopened a public discussion in Greece regarding a slew of old, controversial questions: the relationship of this group to the traditional Left; the relationship of the traditional Left to armed struggle, self-defense, and terrorism; the relationship of political and social memory, as experienced by the members of 17N, to their affiliation with the Left. The relationship 17N claimed with the historical past of the Left in Greece can help us to understand how the translation of history and historical experience into violent political action takes place.
The experience of the civil war has often been credited as the location in which the ideologies that animated the actions of 17N developed. The effects of such an experience are felt and lived for generations, and it is to them that 17N spoke. The thread that 17N spun between its actions, the legacy of the Nazi occupation and its collaborators, the Resistance movement, the civil war, and the Greek junta can be translated into other, homologous narratives, located in other histories, that have animated armed or otherwise violent action in the context of what we have come to accept as liberal democracies.
But these connections are not made only by 17N. At the height of the first trial of 17N, when testimony was being heard about the assassination of Pavlos Bakoyiannis—the son-in-law of the leader of the Right-wing party New Democracy and a politician in his own right, who had been trying to bring about a rapprochement between the Right and the Left—I was discussing the case with my parents in the presence of some old family friends. As I was complaining about the travesty of justice during the trial, my father, mistaking my consternation over the juridical process for support for the members of the organization, lashed out in a manner that I had not seen him use in over twenty years.
“Why did they kill Bakoyiannis?” he asked.
I said I did not know; I only knew what they had said about this particular case in their circular at the time, something that was theoretically and conceptually nebulous enough not to give a recognizable reason.
“They are no different from OPLA,” my father continued. “Why did OPLA kill Maratos in '44?” he asked.
Again, I said that I had no idea why OPLA had killed Maratos. To me, Iason Maratos was just a name on a street sign on the way to my English class. I had wondered about it, but had never asked anyone. I always assumed that it had to do with the Maratos house standing at the end of the street. I promised my father that I would check in the Archives of Social History (the ASKI) to see if anything appeared there.
My father was dismissive. “You won't find anything anywhere,” he said. “They came and picked him up and killed him, and that's how our leventes [“brave lad,” used here sarcastically] ended up in Averof.”
This was the first time that I heard how my uncle Stéphanos had ended up on death row. I asked what the connection was.