P. Baltakos, general secretary of the government declared himself to be an “anti-communist”. “Of course I am an anti-communist, this was how I was born, this was how I was raised and this is how I will die”, was the statement of the general secretary of the government Panagiotis Baltakos in response to a question as to whether he would call himself an anti-communist. And he added that “communist obsessions, which have never been successfully implemented anywhere, have made the country suffer.”

Of course P. Baltakos knows that an anti-communist is not someone who disagrees with the communists and is opposed to the positions, ideology and activity of the Communist Party, holding to his own political positions, but someone that considers that it is correct and necessary to use open slander and naked violence against the KKE.

And as is well-known, Greece and the Greek people have not suffered from communism, as is mentioned, but from a rotten exploitative system which the general secretary of the government himself serves. They have also suffered and bled due to anti-communism, which is expressed by Mr Baltakos and led to imprisonments, exiles and executions.

Certainly P. Baltakos is not ignorant of the fact that the 7 year military dictatorship in the period 1967-1974 and the Metaxas dictatorship (1936-1940) were anti-communist and attempted to eliminate the communists and other militants that resisted with torture, prison and exile. That the Nazis of the criminal organization “Golden Dawn” are also anti-communists. That the governments of bourgeois parliamentary democracy expressed and express anti-communism in order to treat the labour and people’s movement with savage repression and intimidation for the imposition of reactionary decisions in favour of big capital.

However, this statement is not isolated. In a related statement the Health Minister A. Georgiadis said that he is “sick of communists”, while the deputy minister for foreign affairs, K. Gerontopoulos, a member of a government that has dealings with the new government in Ukraine in which Nazi and nationalist forces participate, in reference to the events in this country and its residents who have a Greek background remembered the… “massacres” of Stalin!

The coordination of the government officials in blatant, vulgar and primitive anti-communism is demonstrating in practice that the smashing of the people’s rights and the servicing of the monopoly interests go hand in hand with the attack on the labour-people’s movement and its history. It even demonstrates the government’s anxiety about the fact that the workers, the popular strata, the youth in their large majority and regardless of their political identity, appreciate the irreplaceable role of the KKE, trust it and place hopes in it. They understand that anti-communism is not only hostile and a threat to the communists but also to the people and their rights.

At the same time the journalist G. Pretenteris claimed in his intervention on the issue that “to discuss in 2014 if someone is a communist or anti-communist is like arguing over whether, the iconoclasts or those who worshipped the icons were right. For better or for worse the issue was settled globally more than 25 years ago.”

Nevertheless, if this is the case, then why are anti-communist memoranda of the EU repeatedly being voted through? Why are there extensive anti-communist TV programmes concerning the 1940s, the Soviet Union, Stalin? Why does anti-communism permeate the school curricula and indeed in line with EU directives? Why does there exist this entir industry of novels, films with an anti-communist content? Simply because they have nothing else to spend their money on?

Of course not, because the spectre is still haunting the nightmares of capitalism. Because the beast is not dead. The bourgeois have not learnt from their own history. The defeat of the French Revolution led the Holy Inquisition to declare with relief in 1815 that they strangled the baby at birth, but in 1848 the revolutions swept over Europe…