Ancestry 16 - Yiannis & Vasiliki: Political Compliance

 The political activity of the few petty-bourgeois intellectuals of semi-rural areas, like grandfather, during the German Occupation and the Civil War years, had begun to fade in the memories of fellow countrymen and colleagues. For the sake of his family and his own life, under the weight of the political developments in post-civil war Greece and the world, as projected through state propaganda filters and as perceived by citizens with a relatively narrow point of view, grandfather would gradually water down his radical leftist views. Some, however, still lurked in his conscience when, after the defeat of fascism, the USSR emerged, for many of his generation, as a beacon of an "actually existing socialism" and a global superpower. He retained some broad socialist convictions and values, despite the personal and family ordeals, the exile and the quarrels with the other side of the fence, despite the heavy shadows cast over lives by the ubiquitous National Security, despite an alien to his political past and forcibly obtruded ruling ideology. However, Mr. Yiannis, for the public eyes at least, would sail to moderate ideological and political shores.

In truth, a similar change in the perceptions of politics and political bias affected most local participants in the post-war dramas. The pillories, the People's Courts, the arrests and executions, were events unfathomable to their children and grandchildren, although they had a marked effect well into the maturity years of grandfather and many others around him. English translation. Magnesia and the surrounding villages made a predictable conservative turn, its people unconscious of the growing conservatism in their political minds and oblivious of what this might entail in post-war Greece. Things were going relatively well, so to speak. Everything seemed to fall in place, barring, as always, the occasional isolated tragedies of human existence in its microcosms. These tragedies, however, were "dictated by fate" or by an invisible hand of God, as the common folk often believed. Why should they try to change, adhere to progressive forces, transformative of the socioeconomic system, and take a leap off the mainstream into an uncertain future? Why should let anything disturb their "peace, order, and security"?

Ordinary people of the lower strata, especially in the countryside, became by and large politically inert or depoliticized, and, of course, political inertia and depoliticization are both inanimate souls of conservatism contrary to political activism. In years of adversity, they would rather safeguard their daily jobs, most of them in fields and shops or the factories that were springing up in the vicinity, a privileged minority in government positions, all furnishing small but regular incomes. In any case, most of the countryside folk did not possess a concrete ideological basis, some not even the intellect let alone a sophistication, to analyze, beyond the superficial and frivolous debates in cafés, complex economic processes and a political reality that stretched far beyond the boundaries of their villages and even their country. In elections, they sided with one of the legalized, mainstream parties, either like football fans supporting a club, without a well-founded rationale and driven primarily by instinct and emotion, or for the simple reason that their father supported the said political party, or because they were too credulous in believing the enticing, yet often implausible, pre-election pledges of politicians, or by reciprocating with their vote a favor by a politician, which was done or promised to be done. An ideological and political reconciliation took place through everyday life, family life, the trivial traditional social interactions, weddings, christenings, funerals festivals, as well through their daily toil in workplaces. Either way, in grandfather’s village in the outskirts of the big city, sizeable class divergence and a consequential struggle from excessive inequality did not occur; nor an unbridled greed against the welfare of the local community by individuals was evident. Mr. Yiannis realized that he was devoid of power and will to contribute in transforming Greek society or shaping the local mentality or altering historical prejudices as he might have wanted or, without expressing an ideological or political party affinity, might have envisioned in his youth. But he was frequently critical of both the established social norms and the locals’ indifference or reactionary conservatism. Greek civil society, the village and schools where he worked, the educational system in which he joined as a docile functionary, the State above all, were all well-formed and established forces not to be reckoned with: forces exerted by the centers of political power and the ruling class; more so given its under-developed economy and strong dependence on economic poles outside Greece for its modernization and growth.  English translation. 

Thus, Grandfather and his village community became conformists. His attention turned to his family and work at school, until his retirement shortly after I was born. From the years of his professional rehabilitation, as teacher and headmaster at the school of Ampelokipi and, finally, shortly before retirement, as an inspector in schools in central Macedonia, a thick dossier survived with a collection of school works from the top pupils of the classes he taught (in geography, in arithmetic, in essay writing) and the several speeches he delivered on historical anniversaries and in school assemblies with "parents and guardians", providing further evidence of his conformism at work and in politics. He had succumbed and his alignment (forced or volitional) with the established national ideology and narrative, without the slightest of deviations from government mandates, tied always to the historically distorted nationalistic and anti-communist chariots, became complete. The petty-revolutionary, the quiet proponent of the Greek Liberation Front, the progressive left-wing "enlightener" of the village during the first months after liberation had put on a conservative façade, at least when under the public eye, and fully complied with the establishment directives. For some time, in the post-war years, he might have voted for the “Unified Democratic Left” party, and other center-left legitimized groups. In domestic discussions, he might have praised (always with due care) left-wing politicians of his time. He used to buy inconspicuously the only legal left-wing newspaper from kiosks in the busy Thessaloniki city center, cautiously wrapped by mainstream conservative papers, like "Macedonia", under his arm. In the privacy of his room, seeking pluralistic worlds news briefings from alternative channels, he secretively tuned his age-old radio by the couch into Slavic-language radio stations, on the other side of the Iron Curtain, whose news and announcements, strangely enough, he generally understood. Such trivial digressions, like keeping an open mind to non-mainstream information had no significant resonance, but they were constituents of a rather closed-in-itself whole, hermetically sealed from the world outside.English translation. 

With the priests and the church kept no open accounts beyond the absolute minimum necessary his role as school headmaster required. (He had to shepherd the pupils of his school class to the mandatory Sunday mass and make some dry and routine remarks to pupils, parents and local dignitaries on religious holidays.) Vasiliki, perhaps because of the multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism of the city she was born in and brought up, was neither a devout religious woman, nor did she regularly attend to the local church, nor did she hang icons of the Jesus Christ or Virgin Mary at noticeable places in the house. At least at home, Mr. Yiannis harbored an aversion, occasionally expressed as contempt towards everything related to the Greek Orthodox church doctrines and its ministers. In that respect, he remained faithful to the ideas of his youth, that is, to atheistic or agnostic notions.  His covert anti-church sentiments certainly influenced Vasiliki and their daughters, and, further down the generation ladder, myself and Brother –in as much as fragmentary opinions picked up early childhood can affect one’s beliefs. In public, in religious holidays, liturgies that his school was decreed by the Ministry to attend, christenings and weddings, whenever he was not assigned to deliver the customary meaningless speech, he presented himself discreetly in the background, keeping a good distance from priests and deacons, however, wary not to give rise to any malevolent whispers. A few might have still remembered his pro-communist past associated that in Cold War Greece has been associated with atheism. At his work, he transformed himself into the archetype of a teacher whom the state, which, though initially reluctant, had entrusted him to indoctrinate children within a framework of firmly established national and religious dogmas.