These days, SYRIZA's youth organization organizes in Athens its annual festival called “Sputnik”. What do social democrats have to do with a name that is so closely related with the Soviet Union?
The answer can be found in the attempt of SYRIZA to manipulate working class people by using for its festival a name that symbolizes one of socialism's great achievements, the conquest of space.
Nonetheless, anti-communism remains a fundamental characteristic of social democracy's ideological and political identity. Through the years, despite its rhetoric, SYRIZA has proved its anti-communist, strongly anti-soviet political nature. That is why, the program of its youth festival includes the screening of a fiercely anti-communist film, the 2006 German movie “Lifes of Others” (Das Leben der Anderen) which, in fact, vilifies the Democratic Republic of Germany as totalitarian, anti-democratic state where everything was under the surveillance of the government.
But what's even worse is the choice of the guest who has been invited by SYRIZA's youth to talk for the film against the backdrop of the recent Greek spyware scandal. The guest is Nikos Marantzidis, a notoriously anti-communist professor of political science whose works are characterized by an almost obsessed enmity against the KKE and the Greek communist movement.
SYRIZA's anti-communism is definitely not a surprise. For example, back in May 2019, the party's leader and then Prime Minister of Greece, Alexis Tsipras, had signed a despicable declaration during the EU Summit in Romania. Among others, the blatantly anti-communist document which had the signature of Tsipras was reading: “Thirty years ago millions of people fought for their freedom and for unity and brought down the Iron Curtain, which had divided Europe for decades. There is no place for divisions that work against our collective interest”.
After all, Synaspismos, the political predecessor of SYRIZA, was one the forces which were enthusiastically welcoming the counterrevolutionary changes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the beginning of 1990s, hailing the “new era” that was supposedly beginning for the people around the world.
Pity that traitor Mikhail Gorbachev isn't alive anymore, so he can be invited as a major speaker at SYRIZA youth festival...
But what's even worse is the choice of the guest who has been invited by SYRIZA's youth to talk for the film against the backdrop of the recent Greek spyware scandal. The guest is Nikos Marantzidis, a notoriously anti-communist professor of political science whose works are characterized by an almost obsessed enmity against the KKE and the Greek communist movement.
SYRIZA's anti-communism is definitely not a surprise. For example, back in May 2019, the party's leader and then Prime Minister of Greece, Alexis Tsipras, had signed a despicable declaration during the EU Summit in Romania. Among others, the blatantly anti-communist document which had the signature of Tsipras was reading: “Thirty years ago millions of people fought for their freedom and for unity and brought down the Iron Curtain, which had divided Europe for decades. There is no place for divisions that work against our collective interest”.
After all, Synaspismos, the political predecessor of SYRIZA, was one the forces which were enthusiastically welcoming the counterrevolutionary changes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the beginning of 1990s, hailing the “new era” that was supposedly beginning for the people around the world.
Pity that traitor Mikhail Gorbachev isn't alive anymore, so he can be invited as a major speaker at SYRIZA youth festival...