Eyewitness Account: Macedonia is Greek Rally Athens 4th February 2018

Eyewtiness Account Macedonia is Greek Rally Athens 4th February 2018
I was there with the Fascists!!!

It was 11 oc clock in the morning Sunday 4th February and I started to make my way to the rally for Macedonia which was occurring in Sindagma. I will not hide friends that somewhere inside me all these stories about Greek flags with Alexandra the Great and ancient Greek attire had frightened me, I was carrying some guilt inside me in case I ended up getting mixed up with fascist nationalists and mad paganistic 12 god believers and when I come home my father disowns me.

For so many years my father has been on the left and his son is running to rallies for Macedonia with Royalists and Golden Dawn supporters? My dad Kostas could easily have a heart attack. I risked it and went. Half shame mine half shame the company that dragged me there. If I see it being dodgy I said I would make a run for it. The big man himself Mikis Theodorakis would go there, he must know something.

I reach the final stop on the Metro to then go with with the crowd. What do I see? Masses of people, old, young, children, couples, parents with their young ones all with a flag in their hands and a smile with a decisiveness which was felt in the air. In the train there suddenly everyone was talking with each other cracking jokes, swore at the politicians, they felt they were all UNITED in one body, one indignation. This started to confuse me. So many years in the movement, demos and all, such homogeneity in an unknown and multicoloured mass I hadn’t seen again. I stop at Evangelismos station. I light a cigarette and go out on the streets. I stand for a bit in awe of the crowds which is densely packed and I ask myself will I ever get to Sindagma with so many people?

I start slowly pushing and being pushed realising that the mass of people has achieved a stable and sure pace not one of a walk nor one of group of friends which is going to a square or a concert but the decisive mass which is walking quickly decisively and with rhythm. Smiles everywhere, flags which blind you, selfies from mobiles alight. Old people in wheelchairs, mothers, children, priests with their flock, workers, unemployed, loving couples, lonely people all with a smile and with pride… which spoke by itself, first time all together without organisation, without political party flags and party instructors, without theories and little thought.. but a lot of heart and a flag for company… all went to Sindagma, which was bubbling. Even till now I didn’t know why and what, with whom I went and for what, but I went there.

The smile, the hope, the friendlisness in the faces and the decisive steps started to make me feel strange ‘different’ …I must have been turning into a fascist and didn’t realise it.

Getting closer I started to feel the pulse of the people> After one hour of pushing I reached the heart of the rally infront of the Unknown Soldier in Sindagma Square.

I stood among the crowd next to our group and I raised my eyes and saw the crane with the massive flag to be moving slowly and surely covering the sky and almost the whole square.

Next to me were a group of 14 year old and 16 year old youths. The microphones played Macedonia you are bright and other such songs which I had a long time to hear from when I was in school. The slogans were slow but stable about Macedonia and they played !!! Somewhere there suddenly we heard from the loudspeakers that Mikis is going on the stage and somewhere there the Square as a whole started playing Justice Sun and the 16 year old girl singing next to me with her veins exploding from her voice and we all sang felling that this land has common soul, common pain and one heart, one country.

Inside me were the words of Ritsos : That’s what we want. As we don’t sing to be different my brother from the world. We sing to join the world.
Somewhere there during Mikis first words the megaphones stopped to be hear as the people spoke shouting a warning:

-Thieves, traitors, politicians
-We wont back down until we are justified
The banner of the Cretans wrote –Popular Rule – National Independence

The grandfather from the Albanian front next to me in a wheelchair and his oxygen bottle in his hands cried, a little further a granny had caught a conversation to a policeman which guarded Parliament and distracted from the events had lit a fag and had taken his helmet from his head and was bending over to listen to a granny who was explaining why she came from Ipiros and I was asking … my God so many fascists in this country!!!

The speakers sand ‘When they tighten their hands the sun is sure for the world’
The worst of all? We all spoke ther as if we were for years friends and many asked where the KKE was and the Left and the lefties? They didn’t understand the word dogmatism and ideology but they shouted it. Others swore and spat “then in Varkiza and now once in Sindagma” Fascists those who want to struggle for a Free country, my God what am I living?

I learnt today that from the 1.5m ‘fascists’ that a county without territorial independence, without a flag with sold out politicians is no longer a country, its not longer a peoples nor a Nation.

Continue to believe comrades that from the 1.5 to 2m people are fascistic as they dared to raise the Greek flag, that which was raised by Karaiskakis as raising it Mikis Theodorakis started to sing and demand National Independence and Popular Rule

Mikis had no need to shout for Macedonia as he knows well that Macedonia is non-negotiable and Greek. It is a necessity to scream to the rotten political system that the people are HERE and are RULERS and they will defend their country in every way possible.

Whilst this nation is in a rage, for those of you who sit on Facebook and call him a fascist judging from the SKAI tv images the 10 dressed soldiers of Megas Alexandros as a bunch of Easter clowns.

Is that how you are directing this nation and its peoples towards Golden Dawn?
Goodnight comrades.
Goodnight Left

The people decide and you are absent from history. Unjustified absences once more

Ilias Giannotis