I remember very well the day when my
first publication circulated; it was a Friday, because the right wing political
weekly Politika Themata (Political Matters) appeared on Fridays. The article's
title (in English translation) was "A Permanent War: between Iraq and
Iran"; it covered four pages (p. 25-28). It has to be reminded that the
entire weekly did not exceed 70 pages, so it was a relatively lengthy text. The
article was introduced to the readership by a special note written by the
editor-in chief Kostas Kyrkos, who was brother of the famous Greek
Euro-communist parliamentarian Leonidas Kyrkos; it was also featured in the
Contents of the weekly where my personal picture was added next to the title.
Cover pages of Politika Themata; Personal picture in Diyarbakir (with Dicle/Tigris River as background; May 1984, 10 months before my first article was published)
Personal picture in Savur, a small village near Midyat, in Mardin province, SE Turkey (May 1985); for an article that I published in Politika Themata (1 to 7 November 1985) about "The Daily Life in Savur" I obtained the Abdi İpekçi 2nd Prize of Journalism 1986. The delivery of the awards took place in Athens (March 1987); at the right end of the picture: Andreas Politakis, the founder of Abdi İpekçi awards.
The weekly Politika
Themata had been launched before 12 years, at the time of the Greek Junta, by
the Greek statesman (repeatedly minister and premier for the period 1980-1981)
George Rallis, who used it as a political tool of the Greek conservative and
right wing politicians in order to prevent the political adhesion of
influential Greek statesmen to the politicization effort undertaken by
President George Papadopoulos and Premier Spyros Markezinis. The title of the
weekly was an echo of a book that featured collected works, texts and speeches
(1941-1950) of the former Greek premier George Papandreou (Publishing house Aetos).
https://www.lavyrinthos.net/p/195436/politika-themata-tomoi-panodeto.html
Back in the 1980s, it
was neither common nor easy for someone to pay a visit to the premises of a
renowned weekly, submit a long text and the associated pictures, and expect to
see it published. The rather minuscule milieu of the Greek press was at the
time the realm of the highly ideologized sociopolitical elite, which ruled a
rather marginal country with few interests outside its borders. Publishers and
editors-in chief did not want to offer non-ideologized information,
uncontrolled knowledge, and details beyond the very limited circle of
political-international interests.
In 'Oikonomikos
Tahydromos', you could publish only if you were the nephew of a deputy in the
Greek Parliament or the cousin of a journalist employed there. In 'Politis' or 'Anti',
the idiotic or paranoid editors-in chief would give the "imprimatur"
only if your description of a historical fact involved the fundamental terms of
their, otherwise ridiculous, leftist jargon. Although there was not even a
single Greek Iranologist or Orientalist, all those sluggish parasites had their
managerial (or rather dictatorial) positions only to act in the most partial,
sectarian, and biased manner they could. The absolute nothingness and the
overwhelming uselessness of today's Greece find their roots in the insufferable
situation that prevailed among those idiots back in the 1970s and the 1980s.
Politika Themata and
Kostas Kyrkos personally were the exception that confirms the rule. In our
first meeting in early April 1985 (in his office on the ground floor of a residential
condominium building in Ypsilantou street, Kolonaki; in the backside of the British
Embassy), he highly evaluated my graduate studies in Athens (1974-1978), my
postgraduate studies in Paris (1978-1981), London (1981-1982) and Brussels
(1982-1983), my researches in Damascus (1983-1984), Jerusalem (1984), Baghdad
(1984-1985) and Iran (1985), and my doctoral studies that had just started in
Germany.
I must admit that,
without knowing the entire situation that I was facing (and which I already described),
I had tried to make everything more difficult for me, and I handed over to Kostas
Kyrkos a very long text (anything between 15000-20000 words), which would be
impossible to be published all at once.
The article took five
fascicles to be published, week after week; it covered the weeks 12 to 18 April
(with 4 pages), 19 to 25 April (p. 26-28), 26 April to 2 May (p. 26-28), 3 to 9
May (p. 28-29), and 17 to 23 May (p. 57-58), making a total of 14 pages of the
weekly review (in black & white).
That article had
nothing in common with any typical piece of reportage that was published at the
time in the Greek press about worldwide important events and international
affairs. It had nothing in common with the miserable geopolitical analyses
currently published in Greece by uneducated idiots who write or speak only to
repeat the nonsense that their respective employers hire them to diffuse. Above
all, it showed clearly to every reader that the author was someone who
- had in-depth studied
the historical background of the wider region;
- understood the burden
of History on modern developments;
- had spent some time
in the mountains, the regions, and the lands he spoke about;
- was familiar with the
local culture, behavioral systems, values and faiths;
- fully perceived
History as the deeds of peoples, not elites or rulers; and
- was not a Greek.
There was an
irrevocable truthfulness in that article; without having planned to do so, I
wrote in a way, which made it very clear to the attentive readers that there
are no subjective opinion, no personal truth, and no national interest. The
reality is an objective situation and the only to grasp the truth are those who
manage to get rid of their ego, delete their past, eliminate their convictions,
sympathies and preferences, and thus perceive facts and situations in an
objective, material and transcendental, manner.
I did not write the
article, intending to reflect these concepts and ideas, but they permeated
every single paragraph of my text. There was nothing of a Greek in the author
of that first article of mine. It could have easily been elaborated by a Russian,
a Chinese, a Tajik, a Turk or a German. There was absolutely nothing in the
text that could indicate my Greek citizenship. To be exact, due to my
dedication to the topic, 28 years of personal life had vanished so that the
burden of millennia is revealed to the readers in a simple and pedagogical
manner.
It was not the style of
a remote scholar who writes exclusively for peers; it was the compassion of a
writer who wanted to share with his readers
a) the infinite love
that he felt for the places, the lands, the people, the faiths, the traditions,
and the mentalities that he described, and
b) the extreme
indignation that he experienced for the absent culprits, who -based in faraway,
ominous and cursed lands- triggered the unnecessary war , by adequately fooling
a person who was unfit to govern a country (Iraq), let alone conquer
another.
Referring to 'love' and
'indignation', I may look to some people as contradicting myself and as denying
what I wrote earlier; but this was not so. The "infinite love" that I
felt was not mine; I did not arrive in Iran with that feeling. On the contrary,
it was the love that the land and the people of Iran ignited in me; it was
merely the result of their amiability. Similarly, the "extreme indignation"
was the reflection of the pain caused by the war and all the murderous and
heinous acts that are compose what we call 'war'.
Certainly, at the end, I
was greatly satisfied because the shrewd, well-educated, and open-minded
editor-in chief easily noticed, highly appreciated, and appropriately
highlighted, in the last, fifth, part of the article, my conclusion; I ended
the very long analysis by stating that, even in the era of advanced military
technology, the most determinant factor in a war is still the human being. That
was my joyful culmination which so much pleased Kostas Kyrkos and most of the
readers.
The article was not
written in Athens before the day I submitted it in early April 1985; it was
written mainly in March 1985 in various cities in Iran (Shiraz, Hamadan, and
Tehran) and in Turkey during my return trip to Greece. The largest part of that
article was incorporated in the very lengthy entry "The Iran-Iraq
War" that I published in the Greek encyclopedia Hydria (1989). The entry
is available online here: https://pubhtml5.com/jxyro/rjbs/ and https://www.academia.edu/49277254/Περσοϊρακινός_Πόλεμος_The_Iran_Iraq_War
About Politika Themata
(in Greek) and cover pages of the weekly review:
10 Περιοδικά της μεταπολίτευσης, που άνοιξαν τα παράθυρα του μυαλού μας
πριν κλείσουν για πάντα τα δικά τους
https://apotis4stis5.com/vintage/20043-10-periodika-tis-metapoliteusis
https://parelthon.gr/product/περιοδικό-πολιτικά-θέματα-αριθ-11-εποχή/
(no 11; 20 August 1974)
https://paliovivlio.gr/politika_themata
and
https://paliovivlio.gr/politika_themata/16463/POLITIKA_ThEMATA_No_515.htm
(no 515; 21-27 September 1984)
https://metabook.gr/books/politika-themata-teukhos-795-291052
(no 795; 1990)
====================================
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