In his Ohi Day address, Mr Karamanlis gave emphasis, as he often does on this occasion, to history: the need to reaffirm national identity through its great examples; the decisive role played by the military in the past; the alternation of unity in times of war with wretched backsliding in times of peace. He warned that the need for defense was so great today that it did not allow for party factionalism or experiments in foreign policy. “The nation’s history is the best lesson for its citizens”.
The negative reference to “experiments in foreign policy” did not seem to go down well in government circles. “We have never commented on statements made in the past by the president; we will not comment on them today, said the government spokesman.
Now, if some publicists who do not keep national issues closest to heart were hoping for some mischief to come of this, they were deluded. If there is any dissension between president and government it lies at a higher level. It has to do with the definition of history itself.
If the president was implying that recent adventures in foreign diplomacy were not in keeping with the nation’s role in history, then the government clearly sees history differently. According to it, every experiment, every visit of the prime minister’s to foreign capitals is drenched in history. And there it is, still wet, in tomorrow’s newspapers — and right in the headlines just to prove it. Sometimes, it even gets into the international press, together with pictures, which makes it even more historical.
Mr Papandreou’s is instant history, history in-the-making, history clearing away old cobwebs for the future. Obviously, this kind of history needs the widest coverage since politics and publicity are about synonymous these days. Being ignored is no way of winning high marks in history books. For Mr Karamanlis, history is the wisdom gleaned from a careful study of the often hard, sometimes glorious lessons of the past. So when the Prime Minister is called, say, “the bridge between Europe and the Middle East,” historians looking forward see vistas of detente, peace and goodwill, while those looking back remember Xerxes’ feeble construction being smashed up on the rocks of the Hellespont.
Mr Karamanlis’ long term approach to history is well documented. In fact, the day after his Ohi Day address he met with the archaeologists who are magnificently restoring to history the distant past of the president’s beloved Macedonia. During this meeting, he made a telling remark. “The cultural sector,” he said, “is the only sector in which Greece can compete with the big and wealthy countries.” Here seems to be a clarion call for cultural experiments rather than foreign policy ones.
These two great, but very different, views of history are in need of synthesis. Melina, for instance, should at once commission a composer — Mikis Theodorakis comes to mind — to write a Te Deum for the Peace of Elounda (AD 1984), just as Handel was, to commemorate the Peace of Utrecht (AD 1714). So, should the Chad agreements fall by chance on stony ground, as the Peace of Utrecht certainly did, at least we will still have something historical to sing about.
History doesn’t have to be about succeses — its pages are filled with failures — but it does have to be remembered.
Mr Papandreou, however, is a statesman of many devices. How often he has pulled a bunny rabbit out of what a rapt audience believed was just a piece of empty headgear. Is it possible he is still a good half-lap ahead of us? Can one credit the rumor — that on his recent wanderings to lotus-eating Libya, to Poland set between the Scylla and Charybdis of the superpowers, to the siren-singing Syrians, there was, sitting in the back of the aircraft, among the journalists, a blind old man with a lyre whose songs of there exploits will delight the spirits of outer-space creatures long after those of Handel and Theodorakis have been stilled? For the historical futurists, anything is possible.
There is a third way of viewing these mighty things, however modest, that may be worth mentioning. After all, it may be just simple , untrumpeted events, attesting to survival and continuity, which are the most significant, as evolution itself suggests. If so, the truly historic event last month did not take place by the beach at Elounda but in a church in Thebes.
There, on Sunday, November 11, 122 godparents witnessed the baptism of the Chloros quintuplets: Phaedon-Nicholas, Kriton-Alexander, Kimon-Sergios, Plato-Dimitri and Hera-Maria. So there it all was: antiquity, Orthodoxy, the present and the future, joined together in a single, joyous moment in time. It even got a nice notice in the papers. To give the press its due, much history is recorded there. The question is, on which page? One hopes our leaders of state took note of it.
