Even human hypocrisy and lightness must have the limits of dignity. Unfortunately, man crosses every red line and behaves in a way that makes him ridiculous, unreal and laughable. As long as we live and our “fellow human beings” live around us, we evaluate, characterize and judge them usually without a trace of fair judgment.
Driven by envy, with passionate jealousy, even with hatred, we judge the progress even of our brothers, our friends, our fellow men for their progress, for their successes and achievements. Worse still, we see our professional rival, our competitor, and even our neighbor. That’s how they taught us to label our political opponents, the fans of another sports team.
As the practical and parsimonious Latins say, Homo homini lupus est, put it, simply, man for man remains a wolf. We set up conversations and adorn with myriad and vulgar epithets those we envy, most of the time without knowing them, without having lived with them, thus out of an ignorance and an envy that breeds hatred towards a fellow man.
Costas Simitis ruled Greece as Prime Minister from 1996 to 2004. He was a rationalist, academic and politician, who had within him the vision of modernising the country and aimed to tear down the old partisanship, i.e. the Greek political gangs, and to put forward a Greece where everyone (yes, everyone) could have a role and opinion and govern in their own way.
Educated at the European universities of Germany and England, he brought to Greece, as Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis does today, experiential liberalism, as first formulated by the democratic Left in the late 1980s, and was not a static nor an autonomous theory, but an adaptation to new events, focusing on the European model and as a version of democratic socialism. At least this comes out of his writings, but mainly from his actions, achievements that left his imprint on the modern national history of our country.
I had the pleasure and privilege to experience up close the course and development of the Greek economy, the major projects, his vision, the diligent welfare of the governments of Costas Simitis and to meet closely and fraternally with his key Ministers, as Founder and Director of the National Center for Hellenic Studies and Research. Next to him stood his Ministers Chrysochoidis, Venizelos, Diamantopoulou, Pachtas, Niotis, Papazoi and her partner Mendoni, Sifunakis, Petsalnikos, Laiou, and the Presidents of the Republic, Stephanopoulos and Papoulias, to name a few, who stood by the vision of EKEME, visited this academic institution, experienced the work of this entity with their own eyes and believed in its establishment and mission in Australia.
They endowed it with their favour and intellectual partnership, supported it financially, and established it to emerge as the largest archival and research center of the history of Hellenism in the Diaspora (1997-2008). A large part of the huge archival collection is still kept at La Trobe University.
Costas Simitis, as Prime Minister, and his team set up in eight years a new Greece, a new political world, a Greece that had tremendous economic growth, climbing among the first 30 countries of the planet; a Greece that escaped from its rural roads and third world infrastructure and created the huge public program, with huge and ultra-modern highways that interconnected Greece and launched its economically.
He established a Greece that bridged the Peloponnese with Central Greece, a Greece of Europe since 2000; a Greece that promoted Cyprus in the United Europe and gave it a voice, opinion and vote; a Greece with huge infrastructure projects for the Olympic Games which was received by New Democracy in March but also all those countries that did not believe that all projects would be ready for August 2004.
After March 2004 he resigned the leadership of his PASOK Party and retired with dignity. He shut himself in silence. He wrote his autobiography, he published treatises in booklets on the economy and the course of neo-liberalism. He did not take part in any political rally, he no longer had a dividend in what followed afterwards. He received arrows and insults without answering. He was attacked enviously by newspapers, televisions, by his former and others younger critics, all of them from Tzohatzopoulos to Tsipras.
Serious and mild-mannered with dignity and prestige and bearing the stamp of his works, he expected his works, and history, to judge him, not his ridiculous critics. As in the case of Eleftherios Venizelos, who was so fiercely, unjustly and enviously criticized, he was ultimately judged by the history and his works. His critics will soon take their envious attacks, along with their silence to their graves. The work left behind by Simitis, who even became “a Jew”, will remain to teach.
Dimitris Efthymakos, a prudent journalist of the electronic newspaper Protagon, testified, among other things, about the late Simitis, the following, which I borrow to close this note.
Twice he spoke publically to all of them. One in 2008 who took to the floor of Parliament and warned that we were at the front door of the IMF, to be subjected to mass fire and endless derision. Three years later, everything turned out exactly as he said. And the second time he spoke was a year ago, when he again warned (PASOK this time) that opportunities come once and if they are not seized, the bird flies. History has not yet ruled on this warning, but here it is. For the rest, from 2004, when he retired until his death, every adventurer, every irrelevant and every political fraudster, felt the need to throw an anathema at the “olive tree”, the “accountant”, the “traitor of Imia and Madrid”, the “thief of the stock market”, the “short evil man”, the “prime minister of thieves and miserables”. All the beautiful and creative and productive things of his tenure, about which we hear and read in today’s posthumous announcements, had disappeared from the face of the earth for twenty whole years. Only the negatives floated.
And suddenly, one Sunday morning, everything became honey-milk. I have no objection whatsoever to anyone taking stock of the life of a political figure and making it negative, problematic or even diabolical. Each of us has his opinion and we are in a country where we still speak freely. What demonizes me, however, is, while he lives, to be spat in his face in groups and, as soon as he dies, to bow the knee reverently, beginning the praises for his offering. Such hypocrisy is literally intolerable.
*Professor Anastasios M. Tamis taught at Universities in Australia and abroad, was the creator and founding director of the Dardalis Archives of the Hellenic Diaspora and is currently the President of the Australian Institute of Macedonian Studies (AIMS).
