In his address, Dimitris Koutsoumbas, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the KKE, noted, among other things: “One might say that the decision to hold tonight’s event here at the Kaisariani shooting range, at the ‘edge of the world’, as the poet wrote, shortly before this year’s May Day, was not ours alone. It was demanded by the gaze, the bearing, and the pride with which the 200 heroic communists marched toward their deaths, executed at this very site 82 years ago. (…) We witnessed this extraordinary heroism captured in images for the first time, in the shocking documents that came to light last February and inspired awe, admiration and pride throughout our country.
Their image has become immortal and has rightly been established as a monument of modern Greek history.
We can imagine that this is how the hundreds of our comrades executed here during the Occupation —especially during that first ten-day period of May 1944— would have marched; as did the thousands who fell in the battles of the National Popular Liberation Army (ELAS) and later the Democratic Army of Greece (DSE), and those executed by the Greek bourgeois state throughout the 1940s, when the Greek bourgeoisie came face to face with its own demise.
These images and their example moved, pierced, and shook society as a whole, every person of good will. They spoke to the hearts of ordinary people, of the youth.
They exposed, in the starkest terms, the hollowness of the unhistorical theories of the ‘two extremes’, which equate communism with fascism —monstrosities concocted by well-paid bureaucracies in Brussels and echoed by governments, bourgeois parties, a handful of academics, and their well-paid parrots.
Yet now, following the publication of these photographs, when the MEPs of the KKE submitted a question to the Commission precisely on these theories and on the need for the German state to finally pay the war reparations it owes Greece, the Commission declared itself ‘not competent’. And what did it request? That the KKE’s question be withdrawn.
They do not, however, claim a lack of jurisdiction when it comes to equating the executed with their executioners: the unyielding heroes born of our people’s struggle with the snakes waiting for the order to pull the trigger! Nor when they equate the Nazi Wehrmacht with the liberating Red Army, which entered Berlin at this time in 1945 and raised the red flag with the hammer and sickle over the heart of the Nazi beast. Clearly, they have yet to come to terms with it.
The photographic documents of the 200 of Kaisariani captured, as nothing else could, the two worlds locked in irreconcilable conflict at that time. On one side stood the people in struggle, fighting for freedom from occupation and capitalist chains —those who suffered under the bourgeois state both before and during the occupation. On the other side stood the executioners of the 200: the Nazi occupiers and the Greek bourgeois state that handed over the imprisoned communists to them”.
The GS of the CC of the KKE also referred in his speech to contemporary political developments and to the great struggles of the working class and other popular strata, including the significant mobilizations of the farmers, as well as to the significant strengthening of communist forces within the trade unions. He added: “The struggles waged in recent years prove that the government faces a powerful opponent. Anyone who pretends otherwise does so simply because they do not wish to see this opponent —this movement, this popular resistance— breathing down their neck.
We will do everything in our power to ensure these struggles grow stronger still: to continue making life difficult for the present and any future anti-people government; to contribute to improving the lives of the many today, until they become a great, surging, nationwide river that will sweep them away tomorrow and open a radically different path for our homeland and our people.
If, 140 years ago, on May Day 1886, workers demanded an eight-hour working day, today there are all the conditions for workers to work fewer hours while enjoying stable and permanent employment: a seven-hour day, a five-day week, a 35-hour working week, free healthcare and education, and the right to leisure, culture, and participation in social life. Yet instead, we see these achievements exploited for the relentless pursuit of profit, military competition, and the exploitation of workers.
For all these possibilities to serve the people, the ‘root of all evil’ —capitalist ownership and power— must be abolished. This is the source of injustice, exploitation, and war. It suffocates the immense potential created daily by workers.
The demand of our time is for social ownership of the means of production —in industry, ports, factories, and transportation— so that they serve the needs of society rather than the profits of the capitalists. So that wealth passes into the hands of those who truly create it, through a centralized, scientific planning of the economy, that makes use of all the country’s productive potential with the aim of improving the people’s lives (...)
We are following in the footsteps of the 200 and we will be victorious!
With the KKE at the forefront, powerful, steadfast in every trial, ready to answer history’s call for socialism!”
