In the bright light of Attic day, private citizens are gunned down in traffic jams or on crowded pavements. Yet their assassins always make their getaway, not in Chicago-style limousines but, most often, on second-hand stolen ‘ducks’, as motor scooters are called in Greece. This is the November 17 style.
Part of the notoriety of the movement is due to the statements which it drops like site-pieces on the tarmac beside its bullet-ridden victims. These documents are usually referred to by the police as ‘literary’, though the forces of law and order seem to be as inept in defining literature as they are in tracking down the authors. Frankly, there is as little chance of November 17’s winning the Nobel Prize for Literature as there is of our prime minister’s bagging its prize for peace.
No doubt these very windy November 17 statements have been studied carefully by graphologists and psychiatrists. Usually the pieces begin by explaining why so-and-so has been “justly executed”. Soon, however, they turn into long analyses of the state of the national economy. They are well-researched, but so thick is their economic jargon that far from arousing workers to revolt, they are more likely to put them to sleep.
The attitudes of these ‘prose-poems’ are certainly left-leaning and anti-Western in general; anti-American specifically. The criticism of the economy, however, is not radical. It is rather moralistic and doctrinaire. Its attacks on capitalism could have been written a century and a half ago.
So often have these manifestos used the classical phrase ‘lumpen grand bourgeois class’ that its acronym, transliterated from the Greek as LMAT, has become a kind of household word which is aimed against local yuppies or shouted at Mercedes roadhogs.
Generally, November 17’s view of conservatives is one of contempt. Hatred is reserved for PASOK socialists who, it claims, have sold out to the forces of the capitalistic West by staying in NATO and the EEC, and its leaders taking up the LMAT lifestyle which it once campaigned so piously to overthrow.
Specialists in the field suggest that November 17 nostalgically yearns for the principles of PASOK’s predecessor PAK when its socialism was still ‘virgo intacta’.
Its attacks on the communists are equally bitter. They are accused of complicity and hypocrisy. If, in these documents, anything could be construed as paranoid, it is the suggestion that the communist parties are a “leftist alibi” secretly endorsing “rotten banana republicanism”.
One sometimes gets the impression from these statements that the communists and PASOK are in cahoots with decadent Western capitalism and that only Mr Mitsotakis (as usual) has been left out of the joke.
The documents dramatize the belief that the whole power and economic structure of Greece is geared to a giant rip-off, placing the people’s rightful earnings into Western banks not only for the purpose of private enrichment but in order to keep Greece, through increased bank loans, subservient to the West and to whatever power elite happens to be ‘in’ at home. “Today’s state of the economy,” the Angelopoulos murder statement said (1985), “is not the result of adverse events but a specific policy which has been followed for decades.”
Even of the Integrated Mediterranean Programmes, which many have seen as something the socialists have done for the ‘little guy’, November 17 says: “PASOK as soon as they smelled the funds, fell on them like vultures to pocket them.”
Who, then, comprises the November 17 movement and what does it mean? Some say that it is very small, but maybe not all that small. That its leader is 50 though maybe closer to 60. That he studied economics in the USA at a school in the West during the ’60s, but then maybe in the East during the ’50s. That he and his wife have separated on the gender issue, but that maybe he is a bachelor. One thing known is that all these documents have been written on the same typewriter and that the ribbon needs changing. And another is that the murders have been carried out with the same .45 calibre pistol. And a third is that the ringleader is certainly no gentleman – unless, of course, she is a woman. Meanwhile, as the bloodhounds are still stalking their prey after 12 years, the police might at least shorten the long red light interval on Kifissias Avenue at the Athens College turn-off or else the LMAT of the northern suburbs are going to be seriously reduced in number.
