Lest we forget.......

Kadhaffi is at this very moment mercilessly slaughtering his own people with the help of imported thugs. The depravity of this act ranks high up there among the most vicious in the annals of human beastliness. It ought to be classified as an act of outright insanity. And the incoherent megalomania of the "brother leader's" rant on television yesterday was a shocking testimony to this.

It is useful recalling certain facts involving this monstrous personality, facts that shed light upon Greece's parlous state at the moment. Kadhaffi was the inspiration of the radical wing of the military mafia that established the dictatorship in 1967, and under the leadership of Brigadier Ioannidis pushed out Papadopoulos and assumed control for a few disastrous and blood-soaked months in 1973. One would assume that his star would wane with the fall of that regime. But alas that was not meant to be.

The klepto-socialist crowd led by A. Papandreou assumed power in 1981 by duping broad segments of the population (eager to be duped by any left-sounding charlatan anyway) with promises of "anti-imperialist" feats of glory. And immediately the new government established intimate relations with Libya. High ranking politicians and businessmen associated with the ruling "socialist" party established a dark web of connections with the Libyan regime, through which rumor has it that millions flowed into their pockets. And we all know that reality in Greece is much worse than any rumor. The right hand man of Papandreou in the dubious interlock with Kadhaffi is currently the president of the republic, periodically spewing pieties about the moral foundation of politics and the spirit of sacrifice that will get us through the crisis.....

In 1985 A. Papandreou himself paid a state visit to Libya accompanied by a fanfare of lying rhetoric about Libyan support for Greece's "rights" on the international scene (meaning Cyprus and Turkey) -a support that had never been expressed, and moreover would have been the kiss of death given the international climate at the time. Mendacious propaganda was also put about concerning huge investments that Libya was prepared to make to shore up the Greek economy. The Greek economy was also tottering at the time and was soon to be saved from bankruptcy through an emergency line of credit from the European Community (plus a hefty devaluation of the drachma). These were the first fruits of A. Papandreou's wasteful and corrupt economic management, which made the economy the private preserve of a clique of party apparatchiks and trade unionists thus laying the foundation for the utter economic and moral ruin that we are living through today. So the alleged Libyan rivers of gold were necessary in order to bamboozle the common folk and obscure from them the rapid descent of the country into a hell of rapaciousness and economic dislocation. During that visit an economic agreement was indeed signed that vaguely promised Libyan investments of up to one billion dollars in the coming years. This was advertised as a great achievement of the wise Greek leader through a nauseous campaign in the state-controlled media at the time. Needless to say, not a single cent of that billion ever materialized.

There was also another side to that masquerade of a visit. While in Libya A.Papandreou declared how impressed he was by the "democracy of the masses" that the mentally unhinged Colonel had established. He also had the temerity to claim that his "Jamahiriya" was the reincarnation of ancient Athenian direct democracy!!!! This outrageous elevation of Kadhaffi to a modern Pericles did not shock or disgust anyone at the time. The slimy journalistic establishment already feeding frenziedly on the state coffers thrown open for them by the Papandreou regime just fawned upon his inane pronouncements, without the least trace of that nationalist ire that they would exhibit in the nineties when the perfidious West tried to steal our civilization away in the case of Macedonia. But of course lucre goes a long way to assuage the malleable consciousnesses of our rotten opinion leaders.

Going to bed with Kadhaffi was presented by these apes as a robust demonstration of anti-westernism. And this at the very moment when the Libyan regime was veering off into multifaceted support for terrorism world-wide. All this had the political effect of isolating Greece within the European Community. Under Papandreou the country was forging a decisively anti-European profile in international affairs, at the very moment that it was being integrated into European institutions and becoming dependent upon the flux of European funds for the spectacular improvement of its standard of living.

This suicidal stupidity had already been demonstrated in 1983 when Papandreou was chairing the European council and in the matter of the Korean civilian airliner downed by the Soviets he came out with a declaration justifying the Soviet atrocity to the utter consternation of the rest of Europe. The "wisdom" of our great leader, then, amounted to spitting on the hand that feeds you. This lesson has been thoroughly learned by our current politicians in and out of government who are in competition amongst themselves about who is to insult and attack most vociferously the international institutions that are keeping this country alive.

Kadhaffi's days are numbered, although in the space of these few days thousands more innocent people are going to be mowed down by his assassination squads. But I am afraid that the spirit of Kadhaffism will live on.... Not in Libya surely, where the killer's beloved "masses" have tasted the bitter fruits of his bizarre "philosophy". But in other places and in other minds, where like a hungry garbage container all the detritus of 20th c. history, such as nationalism, Stalinism, anti-Semitism etc., has found friendly refuge.