Special Correspondent

Copyright: www.rieas.gr

Among the many unenviable records Greece holds one prominent one is the Greek media’s amicable relationship with publishing and publicizing terrorist proclamations, thus giving the terrorists’ verbal offal maximum cost-free exposure.

The recent resurgence of domestic terrorist activity, and the concomitant resurfacing of terror screed writers, has rekindled this relationship. With the Internet providing instant access to self-publishing, a tool that did not exist in the old “glory days” of the 17 November terrorist gang (17N) and its cousin, the now defunct People’s Revolutionary Struggle (ELA), many of our “neo-terrorist” cells have quickly emerged on anarchist sympathizer Web pages with their torrent of mental invective replete with threats of mayhem and shooting, or other, death. But the allure of the traditional print press has apparently not abandoned this new wave of unreformed, Web-based terror pistoleros who, just like their older murderer predecessors, hold on to the illusion that “the masses” host a ripe revolutionary mood (or, at least, want us to believe they do).

The current crop of terror cells makes full use of modern technologies. Gone is the old 17N typewriter (never recovered by the authorities) and in comes the laptop and rants burned on CD, ghoulishly placed on the grave of the 15-year old student whose shooting by the police last December ignited the worst riots Greece has seen since the end of WW2. At least two newspapers, one weekly, the other a high-circulation left-of-center Athens daily, have picked up the baton as the terrorists’ press platforms. The killing of Officer Savvas by the Sect of Revolutionaries last month was quickly followed by yet another computer-generated spillover of “revolutionary” pseudo-analysis that found its way to the major circulation daily’s printed pages right away.

Nobody among the Greek media seem disturbed by this casual, business-as-usual spreading of the terrorists’ bloody message. Television talking heads, and their counterparts in the print press, appear not the least concerned with the deeper implications, not to mention the morality, of such willing, conscious, unfailing, and widespread sustenance of terrorist propaganda masqueraded, of course, under the one-size-fits-all excuse of “the right of people to know.”

None from among the Greek media seem preoccupied with the question of what this “right” exactly entails and why an anonymous screed by cold-blooded murderers, threatening others with violent death, warrants such unobstructed propagation throughout the country. None from among the Greek media seem concerned with the impact of making public these criminal rants upon the victims’ families – who, by the way, have never won such free and ready access to print and broadcast media as the killers.

Such no-questions-asked, matter-of-fact printing of terrorist proclamations constitutes another deeply disturbing mutation of Greek “democracy.” The silence of Greek “intellectuals,” politicians, “concerned citizens,” “opinion makers,” and the litany of “analysts” on this unquestioned acceptance of the proverbial “banality of evil” as a legitimate component of a “democratic” discourse is even more telling of the severe moral, attitudinal, social, and political problems Greece faces as she descends deeper in her crisis of institutions and founding principles.