-Caveat Lector-
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/psy-op/message/11085
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Tue Jul 23, 2002 3:48 pm
Subject: Re: [psy-op] French Connections
What do you think about it?
In a message dated 7/23/2002 9:45:06 AM Pacific
Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
What can one say about the case of Giotopoulos,
the 65-year-old
Trotskyist now plausibly identified as the leader or
at least one of
the leaders of the recently busted (after 17 years)
November 17
Greek terrorist group. A character from a Conrad
novel, turning up
every morning at the library of the French
Institute in Athens to
spend hours studying newspapers and
magazines to see who most
deserved to be killed.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/psy-op/message/11101
From: "halva_gr" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Wed Jul 24, 2002 12:05 am
Subject: Re: French Connections
--- In [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> What do you think about it?
Firstly there is a typographical error: November 17 dates back 27
years, not 17 years. It had its origins amongst a group of expatriate
Greeks in Paris during the period when Greece was run by the
Colonels' junta. Ideologically it was influenced by the Trotskyist
and Maoist conceptions in circulation at the time of May 68 events
and it remained in a Third Worldist "anti-imperialist" mode for long
after different thinking had come to prevail not only in mainstream
politics but also in the extra-parliamentary "Left" (one must still
use this kind of terminology when talking about November 17).
November 17 pronunciamentos, which were always conveneniently
distributed after each of their strikes by sections of the mainstream
press, took on an increasingly museum-like appearance as the years
passed.
Given that it was known that the group originated where it did, and
that only 200 or so people would have had to be investigated for it
to be brought into the open, it is impressive that the group worked
with impunity for so many years, selecting a wide variety of
different targets as its victims, including people conjuncturally
inconvenient to the leadership of Greece's PASOK socialist party
(people not worthy of martyr status who it would have been nice to
see neutralised in other ways, but anyway that is how they were dealt
with). There was also a "collateral damage" of the innocent, not so
much at the beginning, moreso in later years.
In 2001 November 17 killed British Embassy official Stephen Saunders
and Scotland Yard was brought in (or brought itself in). They carried
out more systematic investigations of the original group in Paris.
Faced, it is said, with a United States ultimatum that the there had
to be arrests before June 30 this year, the Greek government
initiated,or was bestowed with the gift of, the bomb explosion in
Piraeus which led to the detention of the first November 17 suspect,
40 year old icon painter Savvas Xiros. This led to an avalanche of
arrests over the following weeks.
What do I think about it? For a start I don't have the nerves to
watch the endless television hysteria that has broken out in this
place. The "War AGainst Terrorism" is in town, and its Greek variant
is no more edifying than what will be familiar to Americans. The
aesthetics of it are the same. Greek private television was
introduced by a Communist-Conservative Right Wing coalition
government in 1989 and the enormity of the change it signifies is
only now becoming fully apparent. Elementary considerations of legal
propriety are being trampled underfoot.
The War against Terrorism has expelled from the media all other news
related to people's real interests. There is an extremely
unprofessional fanaticism abroad among journalists.
I singled out the personal habits of Giotopoulos, his haunting of the
French Institute library, because of its symbolism. The media think
they are burying "the Left" (particularly the Western-European-
inspired post-1968 Left with its self-image of being more radical
than the Communist Party). What they are burying is the fag end of a
tradition in any case more than ripe for burial, much of it (not
November 17 I might add) pursuing policies objectively favourable to
NATO in recent years, but not able to grasp the implications of this
and achieve autonomy within this new framework.
If, as is being hinted, the United States insists that any November
17 members suspected of having committed crimes against Americans be
tried in the United States, the repercussions of this controversy
could be very profound. The Greek political class will try to resist.
Will some clear-thinking Greeks begin to see the logic of building
links with American viewpoints such as those expressed on this forum?
The "French" orientation that has hitherto been predominant in the
Greek intellectual Left is an obstacle to that happening. On 16th May
last I listened to Dominique Vidal at the French Institute in Athens
explaining for an hour and a half how the more extreme "conspiracy
theories" circulating concerning 9/11 were implausible and that yes
there was a history of association between the Bin Ladens and the
Bush family, but that what happened must have been as much a surprise
to George W. Bush as it was to everyone else. He drew the analogy
with Stalin's inability to believe that his friend Hitler had invaded
the Soviet Union.
I spoke to Vidal afterwards. I asked him if he was familiar with
Ruppert and he said he was. I told him that I thought in three months
time it would be impossible for him, Vidal, to persist in what he was
now saying about the "conspiracy theorists", burying the Ruppert
viewpoint. He merely smiled and shrugged Gallicly. He was right and
I was wrong.
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