Statement of Mikis Theodorakis on the anticommunist memorandum

The Council of Europe has decided to change History. To distort it by equalizing the victims with the aggressors, the heroes with the criminals, the liberators with the conquerors and the Communists with the Nazis.

It considers that the biggest enemies of Nazism, i.e. the Communists, are criminals and indeed equal to the Nazis! And it even worries and protests, because although the Hitlerites were condemned by the international community, nothing as such has happened yet with the Communists.

For this reason it suggests that this condemnation takes place now by the Plenary Session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on the 24-27 of coming January.

Meanwhile, it worries because “public awareness of crimes committed by totalitarian communist regimes is very poor”. And also because still “Communist parties are legal and active in some countries, even if in some cases they have not distanced themselves from the crimes”.

In other words, the Council of Europe is announcing in advance the future persecution of European Communists that have not yet made a recantation, such as those demanded in the past by the henchmen of Gestapo and the torturers at the camp of Makronisos.

Perhaps tomorrow they shall decide to outlaw the Communist Parties, half-opening this way the door for the ghosts of Hitler and Himler to pass, who, as it is well known, begun their career by outlawing the Communist Parties and by locking up the Communists in death camps.

However, in the end, they were drowned in the very blood of their victims, those 20 million dead of the Communist Soviet Union and so many other hundreds of thousands of Communists who gave their lives, as it also happened in Greece, by putting themselves at the front line of national resistance movements all across Europe.

However, those gentlemen of the Council of Europe, in their wish to resurrect methods condemned in the consciousness of History and the Peoples, they come second, since they have already been overrun by their great brother, the USA, that exterminate entire peoples using Hitler-like methods, as in the case of Iraq which they have left in ruins full of American prisons, where thousands of innocent victims are tortured daily in a horrific and obvious manner.

For this great crime against humanity, as well as for the contemporary Hitlerite torture camp at Guantanamo, the Council of Europe has absolutely nothing to say.

So how can anyone believe that they are honestly concerned for human rights, when even within their own home, Europe, they have allowed for CIA planes, filled with people without any rights, drive them in special prisons in order to be tortured?

Such citizens cannot be prosecutors. At the Court of History that one day will pass sentence on the countless crimes committed by their big brother, from Vietnam to Chile and from South America to Iraq, they will be on trial on the count of toleration, if not collaboration to those crimes.

Unfortunately today I am obliged to speak more in the name of the dead than in the name of the living. Therefore, in the name of my dead Communist comrades, those who have gone through the Gestapo, the death camps and the execution sites in order to defeat Nazism and celebrate Liberty, I have but one word to address to those “gentlemen”: