I cannot really claim I’m supporting the initiative. Persons I am with, such as Bhakdi and some MDs of the club MWGFD (Doctors and Scientists for Health, Freedom and Democracy), support it, so I am ready to do something, if needed. But I still have not understood more than that they want to stress the double meaning they see in ‘reformation’ (as reforming the church and reforming capitalism).
What the reformation yielded in the past 500 years was far less than what people needed. Luther himself was by no means revolutionary, not even progressive – as far as my poor history knowledge goes; I think, he was just defiant. Later, protestant pastors were the first ones to join Hitler and nowadays the ‘vaccination’.
It may be my fault, but I do not really know which demands the initiative has, other than any Merz or Mitsotakis would underline (‘justice’, ‘democracy’, ‘peace’ etc. – the way everyone means it).
Of course, I don’t have the better initiative concept. And the collection of demands (attached, possible red lines in red) I presented to two groups (for deciding, whether they would offer Maria (Karystianou) to cooperate at elections on this basis), would not discuss it: For Omades.gr I was suddenly a betrayer, and “Oliki Epanekkinis” (A comprehensive new start) have been postponing any conversation for several months now.
In other words: I do not care too much about what or whom I like or dislike, I rather try to ask concrete questions – with no success. And I do not know the concrete questions / demands of 31/10.
Aris Christidis
From W.H.
When he was here in Athens with Reiner Fuellmich in 2022 Dr. Bhakdi, like Reiner, said how moved he was to be present in “the cradle of democracy”. When my wife and I are in Athens, we live in a flat that is very close to the Acropolis, in the heart of the Acropolis tourist area, so we are very familiar with the spiraling hordes of “pilgrims” from all over the world, and increasingly from what used to be called “the Third World”, who are swarming to this shrine of democracy at a time when democracy is in shocking disrepute, attacked both by its enemies and by its groupies.
What can one say about this assertion? “In a dictatorship corruption at the top is the norm. In democracy it is generalized.”
It is a belief adhered to, mostly dogmatically, by what “we” (?) call “the right”.” My preference is to present it as a question and a “challenge”.
Some years ago, before the degeneration of the U.S. Democratic Party became so extreme that it was impossible to be associated with it any more, there was a discussion of democracy under the auspices of the now defunct Hellenic American Democratic Association (HELADA) in Athens, informal representative in Greece of U.S. Democratic Party voters (with a small input from more active cadres).
I made the point there that until the nineteenth century what in the twentieth was called socialism went under the name of democracy, with broadly accepted pejorative connotations. But when in the twentieth century positive connotations came to be associated with the term “liberal democracy” there was no corresponding transference that could legitimate the term “liberal socialism”.
Here in Aegina there have been by local standards large demonstrations with two epicenters: on the one hand the ruination of the local health center under the pressures of state level policies of privatization of the health system (these demonstrations have carefully avoided “conspiracy theory” analyses that bring up the 2020 and subsequent “COVID” atrocity [and by extension discussion of Reiner Fuellmich and/or [more recently] Arno van Kessel] and on the other the Tempi railway atrocity and subsequently criminal cover-up. They have been led locally by two women, both teachers – one state sector, the other a private entrepreneur, one a dedicated member of the Greek Communist Party, the other a granite-hard opponent of “party politics” who nevertheless, unless I am mistaken, would like to see Maria Karystianou (the very
high-profile bereaved mother leading the campaign against the Tempi atrocity and cover-up) involved in forming and leading a political party.
These two mobilizations should be collaborating in Aegina, but they are not and I am not confident that they will in future.
Would it be possible for the passage in Herodotus that throws a light on Persian discussions of democracy in antiquity to be brought to the attention of Dr. Bhakdi? The Greek historian Herodotus grew up in the Persian Empire, was evidently rather sympathetic towards Darius and – like the oligarchic elite of the time in Aegina, hostile to the imperialistic Athenian democracy – he presumably sided with Persia during the initial conflict between the Persian Empire and Athens [but not later, when Xerxes took over from Darius].
In my opinion Mrs. Karystianou’s blistering (and effective) attacks on Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis would be improved (through liberation from the reactive mode) if the evocations of democracy were left out. The morality-based petitioning reflex is not persuasive in today’s horrible situation.
If the aspiration is for equality between interlocutors, the would-be divide-and-rule response amounts to a rejection of the other side’s wish to be treated as an equal. And the ultimate perfection of divide-and-rule [and rejection of equality] is political marketing (give them what they want [as long as it is what we also want!]) The saga of the Greek-Australian political analyst Kosmas Samaras is a fascinating case in point. He and his collaborators have turned the Australian Labor Party (a very ‘woke’ Labor Party) into something approaching permanent pseudo-one-party domination of the Australian state of Victoria, and to an increasing extent Australia as a whole, clearly with the encouragement of the Chinese Communist Party, which evidently believes that today’s Chinese system provides better safeguards against corruption than Western “liberal democracy”.
When Yanis Varoufakis founded his pan-European citizens’ movement DiEM25 in Berlin in 2016, what he had in mind has clear similarities with the objectives of today’s Reformation 2.0 reformation-2.eu/
Varoufakis received exhortations at that time that he should be starting his campaign in Greece, and specifically in Aegina, which is one of his places of residence. Did his preference for Germany have anything to do with the fact that the German Federal Republic provided a
refuge for him and his parents’ family at the time that the 1967-74 junta was in power in Greece and social democrats (Brandt, Schmidt) were in office in Western Germany? In any case, as it turned out, it was only in Greece that DiEM25 (and the party that inevitably came to supplement it) acquired any parliamentary representation (albeit temporary).
After the beach meeting that DiEM25 held in Aegina in the summer of 2016, Yanis Varoufakis was invited to speak to HELADA in Athens. His unforgettable answer was (smilingly): “Why should I do that when I can speak on CNN?”
Nowadays he has moved his attention to BRICS.
What now?