Lefteris Sklavos RIP (Dimitri Toumbanis) A Light Amongst the Darkness of the Left

Lefteris Sklavos RIP Part One
A Light amongst the darkness of the Left





Born into a working class family in a South Athenian suburb of Dafni during the cauldron of WW2 in July 1940 when Athens was under a starvation blockade alongside his sister. Dimitris father was taken away by the German occupation and sent to work in a concentration camp. After the war he managed to walk back and make it home intact only to suffer the continued conflict of the Greek civil war. The dead bodies, the starvation blockades, his fathers disappearance and later arrival made an impact on the young Dimitri.

At a young age he got involved in politics after learning a trade (mechanic, lathe operator making olive oil pressing machines in last decades of his life) during which time he was associated with Michel Pablo. A voracious reader in his spare time, he met many of the engineers Pablo had sent to fight in the Algerian War of Independence and was quickly politicised in particular in the mid 1960’s when the struggle for civil rights became a dominant theme for the Left. In the July events of 1965 Dimitri was always present having now joined a new group Ergatiki Protoporia which was led by Lukas Karliaftis. Lukas had building workers associated with him and Demetri was from the mechanics union. The 1960’s were a period where workers took on the bosses and won despite having lost the civil war. Main reason was the Left wasn’t allowed or able to emigrate as they couldn’t obtain passports. I remember being told that Dimitri liked to see what was outside and once boarded a train from Athens ending up in Switzerland, had some hassle trying to get back but that was a learning curve when he escaped from the Junta.




Leftist student Petroulas killed by riot police in the July days of 1965

As Editor of their journal he was solely responsible and would thus face imprisonnent when the Colonels took over in 1967. Breaking with Greek tradition he didn’t wait to get caught and be inactive in a police cell and made a run for it escaping to Britain. Via Lukas he had got into contact with Healy and the International Committee of the 4th International and when in the UK claimed asylum and ended up working there as an engineer in exile till 1974 when the Junta fell and he made the journey back home.

Between 1967-74 Dimitri published a Greek paper in exile ‘Ora tis Allagis’ Time of Change and was involved in doing lots or research on the Greek Civil War refuting the general thesis of ‘plague on both your houses’ by the Lukas faction and gaining a following via Healy. But Healy wasn’t what he claimed to be and in order to ensure the survival of his highly inflated organisation sold his soul to the Devil, removing the working class elements inside his organisation (Thornett faction of car workers at Cowley now BMW) and co-opting celebrities from the acting world (Redgrave) and adopting the nascent Arab bourgeoisie to keep the daily paper afloat by christening people like Arafat as leaders of the Proletarian Revolution in the Middle East.

A big dispute with Healys organisation was over the nature of the Greek Junta and how long it would stay in power. After the Polytechnic events in November 1973, Dimitri correctly predicted the fall of the Junta within a year and made preparations to that effect. They purchased the first printing press of the Left and managed to set it up in Athens before even the KKE. Healy wasn’t obviously happy that local organisations were acting independently from his orders. So in usual Healy fashion he organised an internal coup and removed Dimitri from the post of General Secretary.

Dimitri worked as an engineer in and around Finsbury Park in North London those days in the late 1960’s and always had fond words of respect for British workers in particular their respect for organisation and timed breaks. At the time jobs were plentiful and enough was made to be able to survive. Healy at the time had a lot of workers and this milieu was something Dimitri felt at home in, but his heart was always set on Greece. Healys gruelling regime of early morning paper sales burnt many a comrade, but Dimitri had boundless energy even managing to having a son whilst in exile.

Such was the widespread belief at the time that the fall of the Junta would bring about change that Dimitris paper then called ‘Socialist Change’ we had the word ‘Change’ ‘Allagi’ as the main slogan of the up and coming PASOK movement whose leader Papandreou outflanked the KKE. Such was the respect for Dimitri that Papandreou himself personally sent the current clown George Papandreou (who brought the IMF into Greece) to learn some basic politics. They allowed him to follow lectures and he wanted to take part in putting up posters but was so useless he couldn’t carry a bucket and the posters with the glue and would be all over the place and he didn’t last long. A total abysmal failure continued on into the present day.

Throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s in whatever strikes Dimitri was involved in supporting (Eskimo, OTE etc.) he only ever knew victories despite the pessimism of the KKE and all its attempt at derailing struggles. Indeed one must note that the KKE originally stated the occupation of the Polytechnic was an inside job run by police agents. When the mass movement developed after that and the global powers provoked the loss of Cyprus, Dimitri argued workers have go to war if called for, but stated the ruling class wouldn’t want an armed population in conditions when the movement was on the up. When the first American diplomat was killed by a newly formed ‘terrorist’ organisation as a means of curtailing the Left, Dimitri was arraigned by the police and answered accordingly when asked does he have any knowledge regarding 17th November. He answered Yes. Look at the secret services. They duly released him.

Greece enters the EEC in the early 1980’s and Dimitri followed the tradition of the old pre Junta Left which was vociferously against joining, criticising the fake left for taking part in Euroelections whose sole purpose was the erasure of national sovereignty. After the split with Savvas Matsas in the mid-1970’s they orientated towards KKE (interior) interior the precursor to Syriza, as they had dropped hard lie stalinism and allowed some form of discussion but under conditions when the revolutionary ebb from the fall of the Junta was setting in, it was just a continuation of the old politics with the facade of democracy. Almost three decades later when politics even for the far left had become the search for a money tree, nearly all groups joined Syriza setting the scene for its rise to power and it eventual sell out of the aspirations of the Greek people.

Having been in contact still with Alan Thornetts breakaway group in the UK -WSL and having gone to a couple of conferences abroad the degeneration of the British far left to personal identity politics was proceeding apace (a feature seen in Athens some three decades later) when they adopted transvestites in pubs they hanged out in and philosophised about the global gay revolution.

At every difficult juncture Dimitri returned to the classics of marxism to see if they held any positions on the topics in disupte and loe and behold he found texts and comments written by both Marx , Engels Trotksy which once reprinted were considered anathema by his political adversaries and granted an early ‘phobic’ label for raising one iota of criticism. These phobic labels were to follow him to the rest of his life.

Being in touch also with Wohlforth, the other Healy protege in the USA he helped translate and published Wohlforths seminal work ‘The Structural Assimilation of Cuba’ burying another tenet of Healyism which maintained that no social overturns could occur on the back of the old ex-USSR.


VN Gelis

Greek Elections Singular Logic & Leftists Part Two

Part Two:






Singular Logic (electronic vote counting company rules)
Electoral shenanigans. Countless are the conflicting numbers between what the local polling stations provide in terms of votes and what the result is at the end. Lets look at some of the dodgy numbers
How many are registered to vote in:

1985 8,119.410
2019 9,961,718
Births over deaths in last 35 years

difference +1,842,308
increase 22.69%


Births over deaths in last 35 years roughly 1/1 ie no net gains or losses eg 1997 there were 92000 births and 92700 deaths ie. negative growth

The only explanation for the above is that migrants make up the new numbers or the fluctuate numbers accordingly when required via electronic vote counting. One must also add to the above that according to another government agency over 1m Greeks have left Greece since 2008. So what percentage of the actual electorate is Greek? Below 70%

Only during 2019 over 200k Albanians gained Greek citizenship. According to votes in a Greek prison over 85% voted Syriza and their composition is around 85% migrants (including those who gained Greek citizenship. So that would imply the figure of 25% of newly added citizens over the last 35 years are primarily voting for globalist outfits that promise them all and sundry. Hence is the real division in Greek politics between ‘left’ and ‘right’ or between indigenous and migrant arrivals?

Globalist Leftists
AntarCIA, LAE, Zoi, EPAM what all the little Syriza satellites didn’t expect was a return to Syriza by a section of its old supporters only because they believe a) they differ politically from Syriza b) they are special. The mas of people who returned to Syriza after the Euroelections didn’t believe that ND was anything special or to be trusted. They wanted to give Syriza a bloody nose for all its about turns but that didn’t warrant its total wipe out inferring to ND that we are still here and will fight to maintain our gains (however meagre they are).


Lets take one by one.

LAE.
They allegedly broke with Syriza in August 2015 by not voting for the 3rd Bailout but having voted for the continuation of the 2nd. When Tsipras didn’t put them on the electoral lists theystood in the following elections just missing entrance into Parliament by 0.1%.

Abstained from Macedonian protests remembered them too lately got hammered in Euroelections spent two years campaigning against home repossessions alleging mass evictions are occurring thus being an extra arm of pressure for Syriza in getting people to pay their debts, in the meantime the daughter of Lafazanis in the City Plaza occupation by German sponsored NGOs involved in population replacement.

One of their ex-members Costas Lapavitsas wrote a typical careerist piece whereby he bears no responsibility for the capitulation of Syriza despite being an MP for them until August 2015. When Varoufakis signed an extension of the 2nd MoU in February 2015 then introduced Capital Controls Lapavitsas said nothing. Mr Drachma as he was known forgot to mention it during the critical period. Now his whitewashing of his own role an the fact he writes a whole piece and forgets to mention the fake migrant crisis at all is amazing.

AntarCIA
essentially campaigned for its fake anti-EU agenda but was instrumental in campaigning prior to the elections for a heroin trans activist thief who died trying to rob a jewellry store. Syriza co-opted most of its agenda so even its own followers made a run for it and it collapsed in the elections.

EPAM – Kazakis
They had reached a high in previous elections of around 100k but after years of dissaray their vote imploded. They joined with a farmers pro EU outfit called AKEL but they allegedly are against the EU. In other words there is no point in taking anything they say for granted if they are to stand in the elections they will stand with anybody hence their vote reflected that collapsing to such a point they proved their pointlessness.

Conclusion
Faced with an elecctoral wipeout most of the pro-Syriza outfits had their followers voting for Syriza. After all not much separates them and as those that voted understood their vote is pointless it would weaken Syriza in relation to ND and that would not serve their globalist agendas as ND base still pays lip service to the nation, the state and the family, unlike Syriza.

Pro-EU Neoliberal Syriza bites the Electoral Dust Part One

Neoliberal Syriza bites the Electoral Dust



Syriza loses the elections but with margins that are marginal in relation to to the votes achieved in 2015. It only loses 150k votes but the margins are big enough as ND gains 770k and around 8% difference between the two parties. The voting electorate approximately 50% of the total electorate wanted to primarily penalise them on two specific issues: unfettered immigration and the Prespes Agreement as this was shown in the voting patterns in the Thessaloniki region and the Aegean islands (Lesvos, Samos etc.) The vote was worse for Syriza during the Euroelections but picked up for the national elections six weeks later which begs the question why the snap elections?

An analysis of the voting patterns in particular the Greater Athens region shows that in poorer districts Syriza beat ND which is logical as people have a short memory as the last time they were in power in a coalition with PASOK they oversaw mass sackings and wage and pension cuts. People felt that under the electoral system as presently exists the choice is limited. They wanted to penalise Syriza but not enough to grant ND absolute electoral immunity. ND did gain an absolute electoral majority and did go from 18% in 2012 to 39% in 2019, leaving everyone with the idea that it actually gained new followers not just an electoral swing. Looking at its pre-election rallies they were essentially non existent and the actual tone of the elections were almost silent which i’snt the character of Greek elections ever.

The GD Circus…
Its rise was predicated by the specific social conditions in the actual centre of Athens whereby unfettered immigration in the early 2000 era led to mass disturbances in an area known as Ag. Panteleimonas. It went from 0.1% to around 7% but its rise was cut short when they refused to back Samaras collapsing government and they were blamed for the murder of a rapper. At the time there was an international hue and cry that Greek Nazis were about to march to power raising the ‘far left’ profile of Syriza which was fighting allegedly to keep Greece on a democratic pro-austerity pro- EU path. The call for bans of GD were made precisely to ensure no Greeks ever complained that their country was being overrun by all and sundry under the guise of fleeing war zones, so many in fact that over 70 nationalities were registered as arriving!

GD and its leader Mihaloliakos are Deep State USA from the era of the 1960’s Colonels Junta. They never had any intention either of either rocking the boat or doing anything that went against the establishment apart from allowing pent up feelings to be vented. Now they didn’t get in or agree to not get in as they didn’t meet the threshold of 3% for a few hundred votes as allegations have surfaced that Mihaloliakos agreed to this as a quid pro quo of not allowing too many of its members to be prosecuted now they don’t have parliamentary immunity anymore. The ridiculousness of this outfit is the belief that it could actually reach power based on its ridiculous slogans of fighting and burying ‘bolsheviks’ and tainting all those in Syriza as being hard left ‘communists’ when they were Merkelites pure and simple.

KKE
Another state funded pointless organisation that exists only due to the civil war era and government subsidies. It achieved just around +15k votes more than its historic low of 277k in the Troika decade of austerity losing around half its electoral base. Its leader having come out against both the Greek Referendum in 2015, against Brexit in 2016 and against what they term the ‘capitalist Drachma’ in support of the Euro, they exist only to exist as they have a large parasitical organisation they have to fund which does nothing.

During the last ND-Samaras government they helped derail the Steelworkers strike alongside GD that stood on its strike platforms for which they probably got a backhander allowing them to sell government tv licences granted to them or buildings they owned in the centre that are bought by the state and now being in a bind they have had to produce their newspaper missing out their Sunday edition which used to be the recruitment one. Now the government has announced they want to end the asylum from police interference in the Universities (granted through struggle after the Polytechnic Rising in 1973) so as to try to control uncontrolled criminality by migrant blow ins who sell drugs and cigarettes, the KKE will probably aid ND in controlling any resistance to these measures.

What we notice is that Greek peoples rights are curtailed constantly due to migrants. They cant go out at night in certain areas, old people are frightened of going to the bank alone or coming home, now students lose their rights to study without police interference as the state itself allowed uncontrolled immigration into the country. In this game the Greek people lose and the rent a mob migrants are used to justify anything in line with the globalist parties that make up the Greek Parliament


ND
Will govern like May in the UK. Will be anti-racist pro -trans and will be implementing the next phase of the programme agreed by Syriza and Merkel. Merkel was already quoted in Kathimerini on 11th July that ‘Mitsotakis must stick to the programme’. Syriza will obviously help where it can in particular in specific areas: in foreign policy and how it impacts on Greek society.

ND pursued a policy of trying to gain back ‘far right’voters that it lost first to LAOS then to GD over issues related to crime and immigration and to allegedly go against Syrizas cultural programme in support of LGBT, migrants etc. But this is all for show. As on none of the major issues does ND disagree ie. Prespes, migration centres, crime etc. For show they can of course pull out the bike squad police as they did under Samaras who became famous in chasing protestors but also in doing migrant checks in the city centres. But the uncontrolled immigration was never really criticised by ND as evidenced when riots broke out in places like Kos they were nowhere to be seen.

Illuminating is an article that appeared in all places from the zionists in Haaretz showing the real neo-nazi roots of New Democracy as opposed to GD who weren’t even around in the period where collaboration with the 3rd Reich, when they mention that at the end of the ‘1950’s came the Max Merten scandal when the Nazi commander of Thessaloniki (aka Sallnika) who was responsible for the transfer of 45k Jews to death camps, was given an amnesty by the then Prime Minister Karamanlis following a controversial trial in which he was sentenced to 25 years hard labour.” 9th July Achilles M Peklaris

Karatzaferis who went to set up LAOS had within his midst three characters who were characterised by severe anti-communism allegedly anti-migrant and pro- privatisation: Voridis, Georgiadis and Plevris. Loe and behold all three are now with Mitsotakis and two of them have become core government ministers the lawyer by trade Voridis Agricultural Secretary and the book seller Georgiades the Minister of Development. The ‘old wine in new bottle in a nutshell, people with no knowledge of anything given ministries they have no clue about in that sense maintaining a dishonourable tradition.

Greece’s new Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, is the son of a former prime minister. His older sister was Foreign Minister of Greece and his cousin is the New Democracy mayor of Athens. Mitsotakis clan are one of the main factions in ND have no real national rootws or power base within any electoral area despite originating from Chania and being related to Eleftherios Venizelos who expanded Modern Greece in the Balkan wars. They are known as blackmarketeers in ancient minoan artefacts in the big auction houses around the world and are very close friends with the Bush clan they supported the supranational interest of the transnational elites. But this elite is now split between a globalist and a nation state based faction. Mitsotakis new government is Soros infested along with a Bilderburg presence.

According to the Vima Newspaper based on British Foreign Office releases Mitsotakis (the father) was a British spy handing over information to the Brits as he was a lawyer acting for Greeks under the German Occupation authories during the war.

https://www.tovima.gr/2013/02/25/vimagazino/oi-polles-zwes-toy-kwsta-mitsotaki/

Having joined Enosi Kentrou the Union of the Centre (Papandreous grandfather party in the mid-1960’s) during the struggles for post war democracy against the Cold War state he collapsed the government paving the way for the Colonels Junta. And subsequently after being exiled in Paris and returning to Greece with the fall of the Junta he worked with Mikis Theodorakis and the Americans to forestall the possibility of a left wing turn of Greece (as noted in Theodorakis speech at the inauguration of the ‘Spitha’ movement). The son who is the current PM was a minister under Samaras and spent most of his time sacking government employees the most famous case being those of the cleaners in Parliament, school caretakers and Council police. Mitsotakis was so far up Merkels rear he came out at the other end creating the conditions for the ‘left’ role of Syriza but when it came to the 3rd Bailout both Syriza and New Democrcy voted for it….

Prior to being elected Mitsotakis announced tomorrrow ‘we will have clear skies and a new dawn of development will occur’ whilst also stating in a Cabinet meeting we ‘aim to build bridges not walls’. No sooner had the words been spoken Mitsotakis was faced with a weather wars attack Halkidiki leaving 7 dead, most of the steel electrictiy pylons uprooted from a concrete base and hundreds of thousands of hectares of farm produce destroyed. This all occurred after he announced he would be directly in charge of the Greek secret service (obviously to try an control foreign infiltration which has been an issue since the Karamanlis govt was overthrown by the USA over Southstream)

Mitsotakis is trying to ride a horse once more at both ends, pro-USA and pro-Merkel. But Merkel seeks open borders and the massivee destruction of all Greek entrepeneurial activity to buy everything for peanuts and to flood Greece with migrant blow ins from her pal Erdogan. She also seeks the co-management of the Aegean sea and its energy resources and her point man in Greece the ex-PM Simitis wrote that in an article in Greece and was reprimanded by Pyatt for it (who then mysteriously fell of his bike first breaking both legs then not breaking them but his hip) which also happens to be the Syriza position with the infamous slogan they have ‘the Aegean belongs to its fish’ whilst at the same time having no issue selling off mineral deposits to multinational corporations like Total or Exxon with Israeli security thrown in.