Polish Trip.
When developments in Poland and the crisis there reached levels of systemic collapse of the old Stalinist order, Dimitri took time from a Summer break, driving up from Greece with some others and observing it for a whole month, visiting many places, including many factories. From these experiences he became convinced that the problems of the Stalinist order were ones of democracy. There was nothing coming from the bottom up and the system was invariably tied to an authoritarian political order whereby the ruling party was always right, never wrong and anyone who disagreed with it, or demonstrated against it, was labelled a...Counter-Revolutionary. This was also an invaluable lesson as the Greek KKE defended all acts by every Communist Party against its own people under the guise that they were…saving socialism. It became an irony of history when a few years’ later, in 1989, the KKE governing with (the historic Capitalist party) New Democracy, caused the formation of a ‘left’ faction, its youth wing and a few MPs e.g. Kostas Kappos (who produced a pamphlet defending Jaruzelskis... socialism) waffled on about no internal democracy in the KKE and that governing with New Democracy wasn’t right…though Jaruzelski’s tanks were.
Not only had Dimitri taken a close look at developments in the ex-USSR, but he correctly predicted that Gorbachev's Perestroika was the end of the Stalinist era, whilst erstwhile ex-comrades like Savvas Michael (who, as an agent of Healy, stole the printshop) fawned over Gorbachev and then literally salivated at the rise of Yeltsin as if it was the arrival of The Messiah. This was just a precursor and part of a general trend within the final turn of the KKE towards the USA’s unipolar World Order and all its satellite groupings followed suit. What actually produced a limited hesitation was the fall of Yugoslavia.
During the 1980’s, Dimitri published a paper ‘Ergatiki Drasi’ (‘Workers’ Action’) and although I came from a different group i.e. Lukas Karliaftis, made a serious contribution to the understanding of the nature of the State of Israel, calling it out as a US airbase in the Middle East, which was at first a point of division, though later resolved. Unlike all other groups, Ergatiki Drasi always had original headlines, never the same sterile nonsense one gets from the brain dead left. For a number of years Dimitri and comrades ran a typesetting outfit in order to produce a paper at low or minimal cost and used to run many meetings and public campaigns around Omonia station (when its population was mainly Greek in composition). This was the period in which Dimitri had influence in the building workers’ union as one of the main oppositions against the domination by the KKE.
Collapse of Albania
When the Berlin wall came down and it became common knowledge that there was nothing holding citizens of Eastern Europe moving west, this is precisely what happened. Hundreds arrived from Albania looking dishevelled and malnourished. Like everyone else, Dimitri was concerned and got involved in trying to provide relief for them. After a few years, it became known via building workers they were being used as cheaper labour and many KKE building workers, who became contractors, were using them against other Greeks. In fact, many of the Albanians were hard core anti-communists who moved West just to make a fast buck, not interested either in Greeks or Greece in general, and certainly not interested in maintaining any of the conditions of labour. There obviously was a marriage of convenience at play here. The KKE in its turn to the West found appropriate individuals to justify this turn and at the same time generated some income.
During this period, as always, Dimitri returned to classical Marxist texts and in particular Engels and the Condition of the English Working Class and the sections that explained the arrival of the Irish and their impact on English workers. This created uproar in the leftists who adopted Albanians as if they were the instrument with which a revolution would occur for the rights of labour when in reality they were the instrument to destroy the rights of Greek labour. What preceded the view with respect to Albanians was the arrival of Kurds from Northern Iraq. They were all pro-NATO and wanted America to invade Iraq.
Pablo returns
Although now in his latter years, Pablo returned to the struggle yet again, setting up a Committee to Defend Iraq from US Sanctions and got involved defending the Serbs from the US-German NATO sponsored collapse of Yugoslavia, in both of which, Dimitri was involved. Pablo was given a difficult time by his erstwhile Western comrades Mandel, Healy, Lambert and Cannon, only because he meant what he said, contributing directly to the downfall of French colonialism in Algeria, like no other and this obviously affected them as they didn’t want their existence affected by dangerous issues like underground printing presses, illegal arms factories, distribution of fake currencies and passports to maintain the Algerian resistance alive. So when Pablo had his French citizenship revoked and was incarcerated in a Dutch prison, this was well and truly beyond their political horizon, as Dimitri kept telling me. Many years later during a publication of a book on European Revolutionaries and Algerian Indpendence by British historians, a relatively unknown British MP John Baird saved Pablos life by saving him from being deported to Greece where he would have been imprisoned.
Pandelis Pouliopoulos Society
In the 1990’s a few Greek leftist groups set up the Pandelis Pouliopoulos (first Secretary of the KKE) society. Dimitri took an energetic part in this, in honour of the great man killed by Occupation Troops during WWII. This committee, whilst researching and publishing historic materials regarding Pandelis Pouliopoulos, also focused on the NATO war in Yugoslavia. From this, two distinct tendencies began to emerge, a pro-NATO, anti-Serb, pro-Albanian wing and a pro-Yugoslav, pro-Serb, wing. Inevitably these two could not be contained in the one organisation after one wing signed a pro-UN, pro-NATO, declaration in support of foreign troops arriving in ex-Yugoslavia. This was a first for groupings of the Far Left in Greece and set the scene a decade or so later for their overwhelming support for mass replacement migration and their vehement hatred of everything and anything which had ‘Greek’ associated with it.
Mass imported migration
Concerned by the rise of illegal labour and its dominance in industries which, as they became a majority, were now essentially non-unionised, Dimitri wrote a seminal piece which set the scene for the last phase of his life, setting up a discussion forum and site called Patriotiki Aristera – ‘Patriotic Left’. Ahead of his time once more, it was the recent General Elections (for which he was too ill to take notice), that many of the organisations and parties ran on a ‘patriotic’ ticket when, in reality, they are all hard core globalists.
The political legacy that will be left is the work within the Citizens Committee in Agios Panteleimonas Square, that which launched the issues there onto a national level and essentially brought the two ‘extremes’ to the fore: Syriza and Golden Dawn, both parties which had minimal political influence in the 2000 decade.
The Citizens in Agios Panteleimonas were concerned their square had been taken over by drug addicts, alcoholics and perverts and that foreign nationalities were running the show. They wanted it to go back to how it was when kids played in the squares free from abuse, theft and rape. Women took control of the conflict as they were facing the brunt of the effects of imported ‘Multiculturalism’ and for over three years there were protests, police riot charges and the arrival of both the Greek version of Antifa and their twin on the other side the Retro-Fascists. It is an irony of history that the KKE required the services of Golden Dawn in 2012 when it was selling out a steelworkers’ strike, but allegedly condemned any association with...Fascists
