On heroism

The following text was written by a Greek comrade, Stergios, as a comment to one of my posts back in 2010. The title here is mine, as is the translation to English.

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My sensitivity to your text derives from your words: "when I was young, I thought revolutionaries were special people". I don't remember where and how I published what I am drawing on in my response. It is an extract from a larger, unpublished text I wrote on the basis of a conversation I had with my son (I showed him your post and he smiled, pleased) years ago. That conversation had to do exactly with what your post discusses, the idealist and the dialectic conception of heroism. My son underestimated the struggles of his own generation (on the basis of their results) and thought that "he has done nothing", while for my generation, of the 1960s and 70s, he thought everything was marvelous... "but, you were heroes", he told me!!!

My reaction to this was an immediate dialectical analysis of heroism in its fully human dimension, in contradistinction with the idealist conception of heroism, which regards heroism as something superhuman. The point of my whole argument was that heroism is a possibility in us as we are. 

Self-defense as an ethical act of the highest order

Sometime ago, a comrade--an unemployed construction worker who lives in one of the poorest refugee homes near the border with the occupied part of Cyprus--asked me what I thought people like Nikos Belogiannis (pictured laughing during his trial, second to the left) thought and felt as they faced the firing squad. "What was it that allowed them to face self-sacrifice of the highest order with a smile?", he asked me. He wasn't looking for an answer; he said he wanted me to think about the question myself.

I thought about the question on and off, for some time now. And when I tried to think about it I realized I had to reject some of the easiest answers, the ones very often reproduced in the media and in "public opinion" about men and women like Nikos Belogiannis. The media, when it doesn't slander communists, likes to portray them as latter-day saints, who were capable of self-sacrifice because they held an incredibly idealistic belief in the salvation of the class, and so saw themselves as its anointed martyrs. But Belogiannis, and the vast majority of those who underwent torture, imprisonment and execution, were atheists and materialists. They did not believe in any afterlife, and they did not believe they would be "recompensed" in some spiritual sense. Fotis Aggoules, a worker-poet of the 1930s who underwent prolonged imprisonment, put it succinctly: "Don't expect us to bend/for we have loved life too much." Resistance is not only not renunciation of earthly pleasure, it is lust for life.