By George Koumoulli
“Don’t be glad you killed the beast. The bitch who gave birth to it is alive and in orgasm again.”
Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956)
The above quote of the famous German writer was essentially a comment on the celebrations after the end of World War II in 1945. The beast was fascism and the bitch was the political environment. How vindicated Brecht! As a result of the bitch’s orgasm, the beast was reborn in Europe. Alas! Thenumbers of election results in recent years speak for themselves. Fascism is here again. He turned again. Dangerous. Insidious. Furious.
The Europeans may have killed the beast they fought in 1945, but the Cypriots simply took it in 1974, through an olive branch. What’s worse is that the Cyprus bitch has had multiple orgasms in the meantime, having made her life a gift, mainly by the Ministry of Education, the Church, some parties and politicians and the “nationalist” football clubs. Perhaps that is why it should not be surprising that two candidates for the position of deputy president of DISY, Sotiris Sampson and Efthymios Diplaros, have adopted the junta, chauvinist and anachronistic triptych “Fatherland, religion, family”. The former has stated that this is his worldview, while Diplaros explained in an interview with “Politis” last Sunday that he adopts this motto.
This triptych was strongly supported by the fascist dictator Metaxas, by the bloodthirsty gang of the junta and by the criminal Golden Dawn and therefore evokes nightmarish connotations among democratic citizens. But questions arise about DISY, which boasts that it is a modern party. Indeed, it is worrying that two aspirants for the post of deputy party chairman are proving to be anything but modernizers.
Let us now analyze the triptych. What exactly is perceived by “Fatherland, religion, family”, was clarified to us by the spiritual parents of the triptych – Metaxas, the junta and Golden Dawn. Judging by their rhetoric, the word “Patris” has nothing to do with patriotism. On the contrary, they identified the homeland with a great intensity of intolerance towards individuals of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations that make one ruthless in using deceit or violence to achieve one’s goals. We saw this mentality recently in Greece where Golden Dawn in the name of the homeland committed heinous crimes. In short, fascists identify the homeland with nationalism/chauvinism, and homeland for them has nothing to do with patriotism based on affection, peace and equality, which is why patriotism acquires universality since it promotes peaceful coexistence among peoples.
Religion should not even be discussed in Cyprus, since our Constitution supposedly enshrines freedom of religion.
Freedom of religious conscience gives one the right to be irreligious, atheist or agnostic.
Encouraging one to follow an alpha religion is a kind of proselytizing and undemocratic.
Of course, in Cyprus (and many other countries), religious people claim to be more altruistic, compassionate, moral, honest and charitable than non-religious individuals.
But science strongly disagrees with this position: when we look at actual behavior, these claims fall apart.
Social scientists have examined multiple aspects of ethical behavior, from charity giving and exam cheating to helping strangers in need and collaborating with anonymous others. In a classic experiment known as the Good Samaritan Study, researchers tracked who would stop to help an injured person in an alley.
They found that religiosity played no role in helpful behavior, even when participants were on their way to talk about the parable of the good Samaritan! (See Darley, J. M., and Batson, C.D., “From Jerusalem to Jericho: A study of Situational and Dispositional Variables in Helping Behavior,” pp. 100-108.) Another example is Bill Gates who is an avowed atheist. Well, this “atheophobe” has donated more than $50 billion from 1994 to 2022 to eradicate disease, promote education, and promote gender equality, 30 times more than the amount of all the Churches in the world that have almost the total wealth of Gates. Financial Times, 20 December 2022).
The institution of the family is not in question. The family consistently appears as the par excellence value in the life of modern man and almost everyone states that they consider it the most important thing in their lives.
In modern societies the family must be equal. But the family, according to Metaxas, the junta and Golden Dawn, is understood ONLY in the context of the patriarchal structure, where gender roles are unequal and strictly delimited so that the woman is completely subordinate to men.
In summary, the triptych we are debating is a step backwards in bigotry and intolerance, chauvinism and ancestor-mongering, xenophobia and the war against the Enlightenment and the “gracious intellectuals”.
*Opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of CypriumNews.
