Waiting for democracy: Political crisis and the discursive (re)invention of the ‘national enemy’ in times of ‘Grecovery’

Abstract

This article seeks to identify the polarising rhetoric adopted by Greek mainstream political parties during the era of ‘Grecovery’. The article focuses on the war of words between New Democracy, the leading party of the coalition government, and Syriza, the main opposition party on the occasion of the fourth anniversary of the murder of a 15-year-old schoolboy, Alexandros Grigoropoulos, by a police officer and the subsequent riots of December 2008 and the authorities’ closure of the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation (ERT). It draws on the political statements of two political parties – New Democracy and Syriza – and emphasises direct reference to the Greek civil war (1946–1949) and parallelisms of the current political climate with the colonels’ dictatorship (1967–1974). In focusing on those obscure pages of Greek modern history, this article analyses the discursive construction of collective memories of two different political poles and examines how the Greek left and right wings legitimise and redefine their political identities through the prism of their divided past. Using the discursive strategies of the discourse historical approach (DHA), the article illustrates how the DHA can reveal silencing strategies that lead to the discursive construction of the distinction between ‘Us’ – ‘democratic patriots’ and ‘Them’ – ‘enemies of the Greek nation’. Finally, recontextualisation in political rhetoric is highlighted as one of the ways of (re)constructing the tension and dichotomy between leftists and rightists. A systematic and explicit discourse analytic methodology of political rhetoric, that is based on history and (re)shapes collective memories, leads to an interdisciplinary approach that brings together and connects political rhetoric, argumentation and critical discourse analysis.

Keywords

Argumentation Aristotle civil war collective memory dictatorship discourse historical approach Greek political crisis left-wing and right-wing dichotomies legitimation political rhetoric recontextualisation topoi

Introduction: Excavating national and political dichotomies in times of crisis

The 17 June 2012 national elections in Greece brought new dynamics to the country’s political landscape. The two pillars of the Greek contemporary political system, the conservative New Democracy party and the centre-left PASOK party, saw a sharp fall in their electoral percentages, while the radical-left party Syriza got the highest share of votes in its history and came close to winning the election. Polarising discourse and political extremism dominated pre- and post-election periods. Moreover, extremism is linked not only to the entry of the Neo-Nazi Golden Dawn to the Greek Parliament, but also to the polarisation and political division expressed by statements from the main party of the coalition government, New Democracy, and those of the official opposition, Syriza. Two characteristic examples of polarising discourse used by these two political parties are the fourth anniversary of the ‘December 2008 revolt’ and the closure of the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation (ERT) in June 2013. These two cases were selected because they explicitly show how the two parties’ discourse polarised the climate even further, compared to pre- and post-election times, sharpened the mentality of conflict and reignited memories of division. In particular, the statements of the two political parties regarding the anniversary of schoolboy Alexandros Grigoropoulos’s murder in December 2012 openly referred to the Greek civil war (1946–1949), and were based on parallelisms between the coalition government and the military dictatorship (1967–1974) in the case of ERT’s authoritative closure.

The two political parties’ reference to the two extreme poles and the division between rightists and leftists – or ‘Greek patriots’ and ‘enemies of the Greek nation’ – awakened dark memories in a society that has experienced traumatic events in its past, such as a civil war and a military dictatorship that divided the Greek people. According to Wodak and De Cillia (2007), all societies have experienced dramatic events, create many diverse narratives about them and seek a single or unifying narrative that should be hegemonic. This narrative draws on collective memories and usually has a strong impact on the discursive construction of national identity. As they note,

historical narratives are constantly discursively and visually (re)constructed, changing and shifting, due to contexts and diverse, often contradicting and conflicting, political interests. Hence, there is not one single past, nor a unique narrative; quite on the contrary, many narratives, which are in conflict with each other for hegemonic status. (pp. 338–339)

One of the main aims of this research is to discuss the two parties’ (New Democracy’s and Syriza’s) narratives in relation to obscure chapters of modern Greek history and to reveal the discursive reconstruction of the political distinctions or conflicts between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’.

This article therefore investigates aspects of polarising political rhetoric and how this reconstructs dichotomies between the left and right wings, and reinvents the collective memory of civil war and the colonels’ dictatorship in times of crisis. Emphasising political dichotomies, I briefly summarise the socio-political context relating to the Greek civil war (1946–1949) and the colonels’ junta (1967–1974). Strategies of legitimation (Van Leeuwen, 2007; Van Leeuwen and Wodak, 1999), the hegemonic discourses of the two political poles (left and right wings) and the reshaping of collective identity through the prism of discursive distinction are examined in this article and constitute its theoretical part. Thereafter, the discourse historical approach (DHA) of critical discourse studies (CDS), its discursive strategies, especially argumentation strategies, Aristotelian topoi and the concept of recontextualisation, are presented here and introduce the DHA as an adequate theory and methodology to illustrate inclusion/exclusion mechanisms and explain political identities’ (re)constructions. Finally, I illustrate the discursive distinction between ‘Us’ – ‘democratic patriots’ and ‘Them’ – ‘enemies of the Greek nation’, via the aforementioned examples of polarising rhetoric that still dominates the official statements and parliamentary debates of the leading party of the coalition government, the right-wing New Democracy, and the main opposition party, the left-wing Syriza.

From civil war to debt crisis: The return of Greece’s divided past

In this section, I present some key aspects of the political conditions in Greece from the end of Nazi occupation (1944) until the colonels’ dictatorship (21 April 1967). A detailed examination of the ideological polarisation that has dominated Greek politics for more than 50 years is, of course, beyond the scope of this article. Instead, what I discuss here are some of the main points of the dichotomy between the left and right wings that, historically, have characterized, and still do, the political reality in Greece. What I should also mention here is that there is no single or unifying narrative of those troubled decades. Rather, the two opposing ideological poles battle to legitimise their narratives as the only historical truth (see Panourgia, 2009: 117–123).

The prelude to the Greek civil war occurred during the last few months of Nazi occupation of the country (1943–1944), in which struggles ensued between EAM-ELAS (the National Liberation Front–National Popular Liberation Army) and security battalions (tagmata asfaleias), recruited by the Athens government and the German Occupation Forces, consisting of Greek armed forces whose role was to fight against the left-wing EAM-ELAS resistance movement. EAM-ELAS was the main movement of the Greek resistance; ELAS was the military arm of EAM that was controlled by the Greek Communist Party (KKE). The dichotomy of the nation and the violent struggles reached their peak on Sunday 3 December 1944, some months after the liberation of the country; bloody struggles erupted in Athens after government soldiers, backed by British forces, opened fire on a large peaceful demonstration, organised by EAM, against the order for disarmament of the left-wing forces (Margaritis, 2005: 68–73, vol. I). Those struggles saw 28 deaths and led to heavy fighting between ELAS and governmental, nationalist forces aided by the British. This marked the start of the battle of Athens (Panourgia, 2009: 63–66). The fighting went on throughout December, ‘Dekemvriana’,¹ and revealed the class and political polarisation created by Nazi occupation and the subsequent political instability (Chatzis, 1978: 165–170, vol. II).

Following Dekemvriana and the retreat of ELAS, the rearmament of paramilitary groups by the Greek government and British forces continued (Mazower, 1997), while in February 1945 ELAS entered into negotiations that led to the so-called Varkiza Agreement. As Panourgia (2009) explains:

The agreement (that was signed on 12 February 1945) demanded the complete disarmament of ELAS and all other paramilitary groups, amnesty for all political offences, a referendum on the question of the monarchy, and a general election as soon as possible […] Of the demands of Varkiza, the only one that was kept was the disarmament of ELAS, a condition that amounted to its termination. (p. 78–79)

The Varkiza Agreement was followed by ‘white terrorism’ (1945–1946) against thousands of pro-communist and leftist civilians, who were tortured or killed by national guard military and paramilitary forces (Chatzis, 1978, vol. II; Mazower, 1997; Panourgia, 2009). The political gulf between the left and right wings deepened during the next few months and was accompanied by a schism in the centre which was caused by the success of the People’s Party in the national election of 1946, the establishment of the Tsaldaris government and the holding of a referendum on retaining the monarchy and the return of King George II (in September 1946), who symbolised the anti-communist fight (Chatzis, 1978, vol. II). The Tsaldaris government had already proceeded with the resolution of 18 June 1946 that officially outlawed the left wing and legitimised a pogrom against leftists. Thus, a new round of violent struggles between leftist resistance groups and rightists started in the summer of 1946, and civil war broke out (Margaritis, 2005: 156–166, vol. I).

The Greek civil war was fought from 1946 to 1949, between the Greek government army and the ‘Democratic Army of Greece’ (the DSE), which was the military branch of the Greek Communist Party. This led to the final dominance of the right-wingers in the summer of 1949 after the Grammos-Vitsi battles. According to Margaritis, officially, the story of the civil war remained untold from 1949 until 1974; it was, however, present in the divided Greek society of the 1950s and 1960s, in the state’s attempts to fight the ‘communist threat’, and during the colonels’ dictatorship of 1967 to 1974 (2005: 25–33, vol. I).

After the end of the civil war, political instability again characterised the Greek political situation. Meanwhile, Greek society was still split between supporters of the right-wing government and its power and those who were feeling nostalgia for EAM’s activity. The results of the 9 September 1951 national election represent this climate, insofar as no party had an absolute majority in Parliament; the right-wing party of General Papagos won the election and the newly founded left-wing party EDA (the ‘United Democratic Left’) succeeded in entering Parliament (Linardatos, 1977: 290, vol. I). The political tension continued (in eight national elections from 1950 to 1964) and was accompanied by violent struggles between police forces and anti-government protesters, the parliamentary ‘elections of violence and fraud’ (1961) and the growth of right-wing paramilitary groups that aimed to fight the ‘communist enemy’. The paramilitary terror resulted in the murder of a number of leftist civilians and politicians, such as the EDA’s MP Gregorios Lambrakis, in Thessaloniki in 1963 (Panourgia, 2009). In this polarised climate, the organised terror against the left continued. An instance of this climate, Panourgia claims:

was the case of ASPIDA ‘Save Fatherland Ideals Democracy Meritocracy’ officers (1965), when a group of centrist army officers was accused of having formed a left-wing, antiroyalist organization of that name, which was planning to take power through a coup. The attempt never took place and never had been planned. Nevertheless, the officers were tried for ‘treason against the Greek state’ and for ‘following a known communist,’ namely, Andreas Papandreou.² (p. 123)

On 21 April 1967, during political tensions, a group of far-right army officers led by George Papadopoulos, a member of the paramilitary organisation IDEA (‘Sacred Bond of Greek Officers’), instigated a coup d’etat and legitimised a real witchhunt against ‘enemies of the Greek nation’, the ‘red peril’ (Linardatos, 1977: 430–442, vol. V).

According to Linardatos, one of the reasons for the coup d’etat was the fact that right-wing governments after 1944 never separated themselves from the extreme right wing; quite the contrary – in fact, they privileged collaborators of the Nazis, supported paramilitary groups and cultivated an anti-communist fight, especially after the electoral win of EDA (it came in second place and became the leading party of the opposition) in 1958 (pp. 445–446, vol. V). The ‘white terror’ against leftists continued in the 1950s and 1960s, but talk of the civil war was absent until the end of the colonels’ regime. After the transition to democracy in 1974, the war was recognised by the Greek authorities, but as a terrible mistake – as a war that was caused by foreign powers or agents: the English and the Americans, according to the left wing, or Soviets and Slavs, according to the right wing (Margaritis, 2005, vol. I). In other words, there were no references to a civil war or class struggle in the history books, which were mainly based on the winners’ revanchism that emphasised Greek resistance against foreign enemies and ‘communist bandits’ (Gavriylidis, 2007: 110–114). Only in 1989 did the coalition government, that comprised New Democracy and part of the divided Greek Communist Party, pass a law that recognised the war of 1946–1949 as a civil war and not a ‘communist insurgency’ (N. 1863/89), a concept that dominated right-wing discourse.

After 1989, many historians, journalists and politicians with different political and ideological backgrounds emphasised aspects of the civil war, some of them insisting on calling it a ‘communist insurgency’ and others focusing on the mistakes of political leadership, especially those made by the communist party (Gavriylidis, 2007). The different historical narratives regarding the battles of 1946–1949 and the persistence of political dichotomies demonstrate that the Greek civil war remains a trauma. It challenges a collective memory that was established through the prism of ‘national reconciliation’ and still dominates political discourse. The fact that the leading conservative party of the 2014 coalition government, New Democracy, has reintroduced terms from the civil war and that the main opposition party Syriza replies in kind to New Democracy’s statements legitimises the political polarisation of the past and reawakens two antithetical political/collective identities and two opposite imagined communities, as I intend to show in this article.

Theoretical and methodological considerations

Legitimising antithetical collective/political identities

Berger and Luckmann (1966) describe in detail the meaning of legitimation. As they say:

Legitimation as a process is best described as a ‘second-order’ objectivation of meaning as it produces new meanings that serve to integrate the meanings already attached to disparate institutional processes. The function of legitimation is to make objectively available and subjectively plausible the ‘first-order’ objectivations that have been institutionalised.

They further explain that

legitimation is not necessary in the first phase of institutionalization, when the institution is simply a fact that requires no further support either intersubjectively or biographically; it is self-evident to all concerned. The problem of legitimation inevitably arises when the objectivations of the (now historic) institutional order are to be transmitted to a new generation […] when the unity of history and biography is broken. In order to restore it, and thus to make intelligible both aspects of it, there must be ‘explanations’ and justifications of the salient elements of the institutional tradition. Legitimation is this process of ‘explaining’ and justifying.

Legitimation justifies the institutional order by giving a normative dignity to its practical imperatives. It is important to understand that legitimation has a cognitive as well as a normative element. In other words, legitimation is not just a matter of ‘values’. It always implies ‘knowledge’ as well. (pp. 110–111)

Following the above definition of legitimation, Van Leeuwen (2007) introduced a framework for analysing the language of legitimation and developed four major categories: authorization, moral evaluation, rationalization and mythopoesis. Using a diverse collection of texts, comprising children’s books, teacher-training texts, brochures for parents and media text, Van Leeuwen analysed the construction of legitimation in discourse on the basis of the institution of compulsory education (pp. 91–94). The legitimatory role of recontextualisation is also highlighted in the analysis of legitimation insofar as it involves the representation of a social practice in order to legitimise a bureaucratic political decision (Van Leeuwen, 2007; Van Leeuwen and Wodak, 1999; Weiss, 2002). Van Leeuwen and Wodak (1999: 96–98) also distinguish four main transformations that are connected to recontextualisation: the rearrangement of elements, the deletion of elements, the addition of elements and the substitution of elements (see also Georgakopoulou, 2014).

According to Wodak and de Cillia, ‘arguments, topics, narratives, events and appraisals change when transmitted from generation to generation, from one public space to a different sphere and so on. Arguments decontextualised and recontextualised thus gain new meanings’ (p. 345). Hence, recontextualisation can be investigated by emphasising the mixing of elements of the new, recontextualised text with elements of the old text, such as arguments, rhetorical devices and topoi (Wodak, 2008; Wodak and Fairclough, 2010). Moreover, as Wodak and Fairclough (2010) note, ‘through processes of recontextualisation, hegemonic ideologies are disseminated throughout the policy fields’ (p. 25). Recontextualisation is employed in my analysis as it illustrates the dominant ideologies of the two parties and interprets topoi and arguments through different historical times, genres and contexts. In this article, I focus on two categories of legitimation (Van Leeuwen, 2007): (1) authorization, and especially impersonal authority (p. 96) that can here be called the authority of a political party, and the authority of tradition (Van Leeuwen, 2007) which in this case is expressed by the party; and (2) mythopoesis (pp. 105–107), referring to the different parties’ narratives on the civil war and the colonels’ dictatorship, which unify members of the party and exclude ‘others’.³

The legitimation of two different institutional discourses, one of the leading party of the coalition government and the other of the main opposition party, can be linked to the cultivation of two distinguished collective memories. As Olick (2005) explicates: ‘collective memory is a reflexive process in time in which people create meaning not only by remembering a particular past, but by remembering and reviving previous ways of remembering’ (p. 333). In addition, collective memory is based on specific events that are important for the historical sequence of a particular group and the concealment of other events that are characterised as negative and challenge the collective identity of that group (see Heer and Wodak, 2008; Wodak and De Cillia, 2007). According to Fligstein (2009):

Collective identities refer to the idea that a group of people accept a fundamental and consequential similarity that causes them to feel solidarity amongst themselves. This sense of collective identity is socially constructed, by which I mean that it emerges as the intentional or unintentional consequence of social interactions. Collective identity is also by definition about the construction of an ‘other’ and is anchored in sets of conscious and unconscious meanings that people share. (p. 127)

In the next few paragraphs, I examine whether and how the hegemonic discourses of the two mainstream political parties regarding the dark pages of modern Greek history legitimise the divided past of the nation and lead to the discursive construction of two antithetical collective identities that are shaped through historical enmities. In other words, this article investigates the dismantling or destructive macro strategies used in the discursive formation of a national identity that emphasise intra-national political and historical differences and challenge the unification of the nation (see Wodak et al., 2009: 33–42) in a time of crisis. To analyse political statements, I integrate some aspects of the discourse historical approach developed by Ruth Wodak and her colleagues.

Discourse historical approach and the discursive construction of the historical/political ‘Other’

The DHA seeks to identify particular discursive strategies that are involved in positive ‘Self’ and negative ‘Other’ presentation and which reveal the main elements that establish the discursive opposition between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ (Reisigl and Wodak, 2009; Wodak, 2001). In the following analysis, I emphasise referential or nomination strategies which focus on membership categorisation devices, such as biological, naturalising and depersonalising metaphors, metonymies and synecdoches in order to represent social actors and especially in-groups and out-groups; predicational strategies which connect the already named social actors with negative and stereotypical attributions; and argumentation strategies which are based on topoi and through which positive and negative attributions are justified and legitimised with the establishment of out-groups and in-groups and metaphorical devices (Reisigl and Wodak, 2009; Wodak, 2001). Topoi play an important role in the in-depth analysis of fallacious arguments that, in this case, are adopted by political parties in order to divide the members of one ideological pillar from ‘others’, that is ‘national enemies’. The argumentative construct of topoi distinguishes the DHA from other ‘schools’ of CDA (Reisigl and Wodak, 2001, 2009). Their meaning, however, remains somewhat ambiguous, inasmuch as they seem to be linked more to Toulmin’s model and less to Aristotle’s thought and this exposes the DHA’s use of topoi to some criticism (Boukala, 2013). For this reason, some clarification regarding the notion of topoi and the relation between argumentation and the DHA are necessary for the theoretical substantiation of this article.

The criterion of Aristotle’s dialectic is topos. Topoi are the arguments that humans use when they argue for the ‘truth’, and they are related to endoxa and predicables (see Rubinelli, 2009). The aim of Aristotelian dialectic is the verification of commonly accepted opinions and the production or legitimation of ‘knowledge’. Dialectical topoi are means and places for the development of dialectic syllogism (1992: A1), while topoi in Aristotle’s Rhetoric are means of persuasion. In Rhetoric B23, Aristotle categorises topoi that apply to all subjects in common. According to Rubinelli (2009: 84), these topoi are ‘argument schemes, they are all devices for arriving at a certain conclusion about a case’. While they are not all of universal applicability, they can be applied to every rhetorical case. In other words, ‘they are universal in the field of rhetoric’ (Rubinelli, 2009). Aristotle not only lists these topoi, but also explains them in depth and distinguishes topoi, between ‘topoi of probative/real enthymemes’, such as the topos of cause and topos of the consequential, and ‘topoi of fallacious enthymemes’, such as topos of the aftermath and the topos that accepts as a cause something that is not a cause, where enthymeme is a deductive argument that has to include a statement that is usually expressed by the conditional ‘if … then … ’ (2004: B23–B24).

A topos, indeed, is not only an argumentation scheme, but also a syllogism that leads the orator to a ‘conclusion’ that can always be rejected or defended. As Kienpointner (2001) notes:

topoi are on the one hand search formulas, that is, devices for finding relevant arguments within the set of possible arguments that are called endoxa, and on the other hand probative formulas which grant the plausibility of the step from the argument(s) to the conclusion. (p. 18)

As various scholars have claimed, Aristotle’s topoi are argument systems (Kienpointner, 1997, 2001; Rubinelli, 2009; Walton, 1996; Zompetti, 2006). From my perspective, topoi have an encoding/decoding function that can help researchers to recognise arguments and study them critically. For this reason, topoi can be useful in the systematic analysis of various discourses, especially political discourses, and can illustrate legitimation. I agree that topoi are ‘search formulas’ (Kienpointner, 1997, 2001), but they are neither specific nor limited and cannot be memorised; quite the contrary, in fact – they should be evaluated in every case so that the researcher has the opportunity to examine accepted or hegemonic knowledge that is developed via different rhetorical tropes, such as metaphors. In this case, topoi permit the in-depth analysis of arguments that two opposite political pillars use in order to (re)shape narratives regarding divisive moments of modern Greek history and to (re)construct the political ‘other’ or ‘national enemy’ in times of crisis.

‘Hoods’ and ‘traitors’ in Greek political discourse: The discursive reconstruction of the ‘national enemy’

Focusing on some of the DHA’s discursive strategies, I will seek to answer the following set of questions and analyse subsequent political statements and thus illustrate the discursive dichotomy between ‘Us’ – ‘Greek patriots’ and ‘Them’ – ‘enemies of the nation; that is, based on historical distinctions between the left and right wings.

How are social actors – on the left and right – referred to linguistically (nomination strategy)?

What positive or negative characteristics, values and features are attributed to the linguistically constructed social actors (predication strategy)?

By means of which arguments, argumentation schemes (topoi) and rhetorical tropes (metaphors) do politicians from the two parties try to justify and legitimise their historical opposition to the tactics of the other party (argumentation strategy)?

I analyse statements from the two parties about the December 2008 anniversary which were presented in the Greek media and characterised by bisectional discourse, and excerpts from the party leaders’ speeches on the ERT’s shutdown that illustrate the polarised climate.

December 2012: Remembering December 2008 or December 1944?

A 15-year-old schoolboy, Alexandros Grigoropoulos, was shot dead by a police officer in the Athenian neighbourhood of Exarchia on 6 December 2008. Following his murder, there were massive riots and violent struggles, and polarising discourses from the main political parties about the ‘December revolt’ led to the realisation that muted stories of the past regarding political and class dichotomies had always been part of the present. In December 2012, a few days before the fourth anniversary of the ‘December 2008 revolt’, the Greek debt crisis was linked to a socio-political crisis and the country’s divided past returned in full force and was expressed through statements from New Democracy and Syriza that were presented in the Greek media.

The statement by Syriza’s youth wing (5 December 2012)⁴ regarding the anniversary of the murder of Alexandros Grigoropoulos was as follows:

The fourth anniversary of the date that the fifteen-year-old schoolboy, Alexandros Grigoropoulos, was shot dead by a special guard of the Greek Police is tomorrow. The uprising of December 2008 was a whole generation’s enraged response against the system of exploitation and violence; it was a struggle for hope and the right to life. Today as the coalition government fights against the youth and the working class and youth unemployment continues to rise, the struggle for hope and social emancipation is the only solution. We need no more pretexts. The exhausted government of the memorandum must be overturned right now. Let’s consign it to history.⁵

There are two opposing social actors here: the government (and its apparatuses, such as the police) and society. The government is described as the ‘exhausted government of the memorandum’ and is implicitly linked to troika or the foreign agent/enemy. Class distinction dominates the above statement via the representation of a government that acts against the working class and youth and bases its power once again on a ‘system of exploitation and violence’. The members of Syriza use metonymies (references to government) and a war metaphor (struggle for hope) and develop their arguments through the Aristotelian topos of the aftermath that relies on the conditional: ‘if the government acts against the people then the people should overturn it’. They create an in-group of the Greek working class and youth and an out-group of the government, police, foreign agents and, indirectly, financial elites. In this way, they emphasise the existence of a current class struggle that came to light in December 2008. Furthermore, reference to the murderer of Grigoropoulos as a ‘special guard of the Greek police’ implicitly intensifies the distinction between those in society fighting and the state police, and this is connected to historical pogroms against the left wing by post-civil-war Greek governments and their military and paramilitary mechanisms. Thus, Syriza’s statement goes beyond memories of ‘December 2008’ and resurrects collective memories of the violent distinction between left-wing resistance and the right-wing state, and legitimises, via the impersonal authority of the party, a ‘struggle for hope and social emancipation’ as the ‘only solution’ to a new form of right-wing government and its foreign agents.

New Democracy validated a civil-war atmosphere in its response (5 December 2012):⁶

The fifth column of Syriza is uncovered. They are bringing out the hoods and arming themselves with Molotov cocktails with the aim of burning Athens and pillaging private property again. The MPs of Syriza act like hooded traitors of the Nazi occupation by turning people against policemen and their families. The hooded traitors of Syriza can be sure that the Greek government and Greek citizens will not allow the extremists to achieve their goals […] No hoods will conceal them.

Civil-war terms, such as ‘hoods/hooded’, ‘fifth column’ and ‘hooded traitors’ that aim to pillage private property, which imply bandits’ activities, are mentioned in the above statement. Syriza’s members and supporters are labelled ‘hooded traitors’ and depicted as acting against the Greek nation, the guards of the nation – the government and the police – and Greek ‘patriots’. According to the above extract, Syriza’s ‘betrayal’ is a common strategy of the ‘red terrorism’ that was evident not only in December 2008, but also during Nazi occupation. In addition, New Democracy portrays Syriza as ‘extreme’ and as constituting the arbitrary theory of the two extremes⁷ which dominates the party’s discourse, as evidenced by the above extract. In particular, New Democracy builds its rhetoric and political argumentation against Syriza on the basis of this theory, tries to display the commonalities of the extremism of both the left wing and the far right, and presents supporters of the government as the only ‘Greek patriots’.

New Democracy’s representatives support their arguments through the topos of (Syriza) threat that relies on the conditional: ‘if Syriza has threatening consequences and acts against social stability, then the Greek government and society should isolate the party’. The topos of history is described on the basis of the argument that: ‘because history teaches that specific actions have specific consequences, one should perform or omit a specific action in a specific situation comparable with the historical example referred to’ (Reisigl and Wodak, 2001: 80), and historical analogies that distinguish the Greek government, police and rightist Greeks from Syriza members or, implicitly, ‘communist bandits’ of the civil war are also subsumed in the above statement. Hence, New Democracy not only revives civil-war distinctions, but also justifies and legitimises the historical position of the right wing via mythopoesis and the authority of tradition, which rely on the representation of the police and right-wing governments as ‘Greek patriots’ that traditionally protect society from the ‘red threat’.

The war of words continues in Syriza’s response:⁸

The fifth column of memorandums and banks and the front end of the coalition government are uncovered. They are those who lead society to poverty, unemployment and suicides and the youth to insecurity and migration, those who try to criminalise political struggles and instil fear into everyone who fights for their dignity. The MPs of memorandums feel nostalgia for civil war, call Syriza’s MPs traitors and indirectly support fascism and Golden Dawn. The memorandums’ hooded traitors can be sure that the youth and the working class will not allow New Democracy’s extreme policies to lead to the destruction of society. We will not fall back because of fear, terror and suppression […] They are stealing our future; the time for making them something from the past has arrived.

Once again, civil-war terms (fifth column, hooded traitors⁹) dominate a political statement, but this time there is a recontextualisation of the terms, given that they are used to describe a current ‘civil war’ that distinguishes the banks, government and troika (memorandum hooded traitors, fifth column of memorandums) from the Greek left and to tell Greek civilians that they should fight against ‘extreme policies’. Indeed, the reference to a government that tries to criminalise political struggles and supports fascism is explicitly linked to the pogroms against the left wing before, during and after the Greek civil war. Syriza, finally, once again uses the topos of the aftermath and emphasises the class struggle between ‘Us’ – the Greek people and ‘Them’ – the government that consists of MPs who ‘feel nostalgia for civil war and fascism’ and its allies (Golden Dawn and foreign banks). In this way, the party authorises a leftist reaction against a government that spreads ‘fear, terror and suppression’ and revives memories of dichotomies.

The discourse analysis of the previous examples illustrates that the two political parties openly used civil-war rhetoric, went beyond references to the ‘December 2008 revolt’ and tried to constitute their current ideological positions via historical dichotomies. The recontextualisation of civil-war concepts and the use of polarising discourse lead to the constitution of different in-groups and out-groups that are relevant to each party’s ideological background and collective memory. The distinction between ‘Us’ – ‘Greek patriots’ and ‘Them’ – ‘hooded traitors’ is developed by the use of different argumentative devices. In particular, Syriza distinguishes an in-group of working class and youth from an out-group of the Greek government and foreign agents of the troika, while New Democracy uses a dichotomy between Greek civilians/government/police and Syriza’s members/supporters who are represented as ‘communist bandits’ and indirectly as ‘terrorists’. Thus, the two parties reintroduce ideological ‘enemies’ that label ‘hooded traitors’ and intensify historical divisions.

Political authorisation via black TV screens

On 11 June 2013, the Greek coalition government, without warning, shut down the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation (ERT). The Greek government’s decision to ‘pull the plug’ on one international and three national TV channels, numerous local radio stations and the website of ERT, to disband its symphony orchestra and choir and to dismiss more than 2000 journalists and technicians was in contradiction to the government’s ‘Greekovery’ – a concept that was introduced by the prime minister and means the recovery of the Greek economy and the ensuring of political stability. Moreover, the sudden disappearance of the ERT signal and the black screens stirred up memories of the military dictatorship (1967–1974) and the junta’s imposition of the armed forces TV station (YENED) which played a biased role during the dictatorship. After the announcement of ERT’s closure by the authorities, thousands of people demonstrated outside the building of the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation and showed their opposition to the government’s decision. ‘Bread, Education, Freedom’ was the main slogan used by the assembled people, who adopted the slogan made popular during the Athens Polytechnic students’ uprising against the military dictatorship (1973) and added to it: ‘the junta didn’t end in ’73’.¹⁰

The emergency government decree to close down Greek state broadcasting and the announcement of a ministerial decision to shut down ERT and replace it with a new entity caused a political crisis in Greece. The president of Syriza, Alexis Tsipras, in his statement (11 June 2013) regarding the ERT issue,¹¹ noted:

This is a coup d’état. This is a coup d’état against not only the employees of ERT but also against the Greek people, who pay for public television and have the right to objective and pluralistic information. They lie to the Greek people that they care about prodigal administration. They lie, decide on and order a shutdown of public television as if it were their own property […] They gag public television for two reasons, because the troika imposes; the troika orders the human sacrifice of thousands of employees because they want to transform public television into a new YENED, like the one that used to transmit only pro-government programmes during the colonels’ dictatorship […] This is an illegal decision. They do not have the right to keep public television off the air.

We call on the Greek people to react against this decision. The transmission of public television is a matter of democracy […] The troika and the Greek memorandum government are the ONES that must shut down, not public broadcasting.

Syriza’s leader openly refers to a coup d’état and the decision of the government to create biased, pro-governmental broadcasting that would be a new YENED. Tsipras’s references to ‘a new YENED’ and to the colonels’ slogan ‘(we) decide and order’ are recontextualisations that address the collective memory of the Greek junta and implicitly introduce analogies between the colonels’ dictatorship and the new memorandum epoch. Utilisation of the pronoun ‘they’ replaces the government and its allies (troika) and underlines the distinction between ‘Us’ – Syriza and the Greek democratic people, who should react against this governmental decision, and ‘Them’ – the enemies of the nation and their foreign allies, who attempt to conduct a new coup d’état. The dichotomy between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ is also highlighted by the verbal selection of ‘they lie’ and ‘they gag’ and the use of hyperbole such as ‘troika orders human sacrifices’.

Repetition of the metonymic nomination ‘public television’, referring to Greek people’s property and freedom of expression/information, intensifies the opposition between the in-group of Syriza and the Greek people, and the out-group of the Greek memorandum government and its allies, insofar as it describes ERT as public property and underlines the ideological bases of Syriza which are connected to the welfare state and the public sector. Tsipras’s arguments are further developed by a combination of the topos of history (see earlier) that brings back collective memories regarding the dictatorship and the Aristotelian topos of syllogism that starts with something specific and concludes with something general, which in this case can be paraphrased as ‘If the Greek government closes down public television, then the Greek people should react against the general policy of the memorandum government’. Thus, analysis of the above statement illustrates that Syriza’s president justifies and legitimises a reaction against an authoritative government decision on the basis of a collective memory and his authority as president of the leading left-wing opposition party.

The Greek prime minister, Antonis Samaras, later (12 June 2013) replied to the decriers of that governmental decision in his speech at the annual meeting of the ‘Athens Chamber of Commerce and Industry’:¹²

We are not shutting down public television; quite the contrary, we are now about to have real public television […] Now that the sinful ERT is finished, the hypocrisy that brought Greece here can be shown. We are going to create real public television. What you can see now is the last spasm of a regime that is about to collapse. There was a witch-hunt against the current Greek entrepreneurship that lasted for many years. It was difficult for someone to talk about entrepreneurship before and we had to fight to change this.

The prime minister uses many metaphors and repeats the personal pronoun ‘We’ in order to show the difference between the present and the past, or between the in-group of ‘Us’ – the government, New Democracy members and supporters who are interested in Greece’s development, and the out-group of ‘Them’ – the left-wing and working unions who serve a corrupt regime. The two social actors are not labelled here; however, references to entrepreneurship and previous political decisions illustrate the neoliberal identification of Samaras’s government and his attempt to create a division between his government and previous (socialist) governments which produced a corrupt public sector and a ‘sinful ERT’ that are still defended by Syriza. Hence, on the occasion of ERT’s shutdown, the Greek prime minister emphatically presents the main value of his government (entrepreneurship) and his ideological differences from Syriza and the ‘privileged, catastrophic regimes’. This distinction is further developed by the Aristotelian topos of the consequential, that is condensed here as ‘if the closure of ERT is an example of successful entrepreneurship, then it can be criticised by supporters of previous corrupt regimes’, and the topos that accepts as a cause something that is not a cause that is based on the conditional ‘if the transmission of ERT is connected to the previous lack of enterprise, then it should be shut down’. In this vein, Samaras legitimises, via mythopoesis, the government’s policies and the general or arbitrary distinction between ‘Us’ and a vague ‘Them’. However, the prime minister’s views seem inconsistent with his neoliberal values as he mentions that his government’s intention is to establish ‘real public television’, in this case to serve the public sector.

Consequently, Samaras’s references to a corrupt regime which imposes a ‘witch-hunt . . . against entrepreneurship’ and the intimation that Syriza is about to continue these tactics insofar as it defends the ‘sinful ERT’ orchestrate the theory of the ‘neo-communist or Syriza threat’ which economically endangers the country – although in this case, Samaras underlines the economic threat that Syriza poses, while Tsipras focuses on the political threat that comes from authoritarian governmental actions.

Conclusion

The discourse analysis of these political statements illustrates how the two main parties in the current political scene in Greece revive the historical dichotomies of the past and particularly the way in which the leading party of the coalition government, New Democracy, reintroduces the ‘red peril’ and legitimises the ‘theory of the two extremes’ and its neoliberal policies. As Wodak and De Cillia (2007: 356) argue, ‘the discursive construction of identity narratives which link the past with the present and the future necessarily involves a quasi-coherent, teleological argumentative sequence of events, which proposes explanatory devices for traumatic experiences and does not list the perpetrators’. In the statements shown, the perpetrators are directly referred to as political ‘others’ via historical references to the country’s divided past. The two parties intend to constitute an imagined community of those who share the same ideology and to stigmatise the opposing ideology via the reintroduction of political divisions and on the basis of a threat from the ‘national enemy’. On the traumatic terrain of civil war, the post-civil-war epoch, the colonels’ dictatorship and a witch-hunt against the left wing, the two parties endeavour to revoke antithetical collective memories and legitimise their present political activities through the historical authority of each political pillar.

Different topoi and the recontextualisation of past divisions illustrate the discursive reconstruction of political dichotomies. The discursive reintroduction of the distinction between ‘Us’ – ‘Greek patriots’ and ‘Them’ – ‘traitors’ or ‘national enemies’, the legitimation of the party’s political actions and reactions, and the reinvention of a traumatic past in the era of the Greek debt crisis are revealed through use of the DHA in manifold ways. The two political parties, New Democracy and Syriza, seem to adopt the Orwellian party slogan that ‘who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past’ and attempt to legitimise the present and define the future via collective memories and political dichotomies of the past.

Footnotes

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

Websites

http://www.enikos.gr/politics/102390,H_Neolaia_toy_SYRIZA_gia_ton_Grhgoropoyl.html

http://www.enikos.gr/politics/102407,ND:h_5h_falagga_toy_SYRIZA.html

http://www.enikos.gr/politics/102436,Neos_gyros_antipara8eshs_SYRIZA-ND.html

http://left.gr/news/altsipras-praxikopima-enantia-ston-elliniko-lao-kleisimo-tis-ert

http://www.kathimerini.gr/4dcgi/_w_articles_kathremote_1_12/06/2013_504131

Author biography

Salomi Boukala has worked as an international news specialist for various media in Greece and still contributes to Greek newspapers. She was awarded her PhD from Lancaster University and the Department of Linguistics and English Language. Her research centres on issues of European identity and Greek media discourses, with particular reference to the discursive construction of supranational and national identities and the representation of the ‘Other’. She has also worked as a research associate for the Academy of Athens on the ‘Greek media representation of migrants’ project. Her research interests include critical discourse analysis and the discourse historical approach; argumentation strategies; hegemony and hegemonic discourse; identity politics and media studies.

References

Aristotle (1992) Topics. Athens: Kaktos (in Greek).

Aristotle (2004) Rhetoric. Thessaloniki: Zitros (in Greek).

Berger

Luckmann

(1966) The Social Construction of Reality: The Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Garden City.

Boukala

(2013) The Greek media discourse and the construction of European identity: Supranational identity, fortress Europe and Islam as radical otherness. PhD thesis, Lancaster University, Lancaster.

Chatzis

(1978) The Glorious Revolution that Was Lost 1941–45, vol. II. Athens: Papazisis (in Greek).

Fligstein

(2009) Euroclash: The EU, European Identity and the Future of Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gavriylidis

(2007) The Continuance of Civil War with Different Means. Athens: KΨM (in Greek).

Georgakopoulou

(2014) Small stories transposition and social media: A micro-perspective on the ‘Greek crisis’. Discourse & Society 25(4): 519–539.

Heer

Wodak

(2008) Collective memory, national narratives and the politics of the past: The discursive construction of history. In: Heer

Manoschek

Pollak

(eds) The Discursive Construction of History: Remembering the Wehrmacht’s War of Annihilation. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–13.

10.

Kienpointner

(1997) On the art of finding arguments: What ancient and modern masters of invention have to tell us about the ‘Ars Inveniendi’. Argumentation 11: 225–236.

11.

Kienpointner

(2001) Modern revivals of Aristotle’s and Cicero’s topics: Toulmin, Parelman, Anscombre/Ducrot. In: Bertocchi

Maraldi

Orlandini

(eds) Papers on Grammar VII: Argumentation and Latin. Bologna: CLUEB, pp. 17–34.

12.

Linardatos

(1977) From the Civil War to Junta, vols I, V. Athens: Papazisis (in Greek).

13.

Margaritis

(2005) History of the Greek Civil War 1946–1949, Vol. I. Athens: Vivliorama (in Greek).

14.

Mazower

(1997) Policing the anti-communist state in Greece 1922–1974. In: Mazower

(ed.) The Policing of Politics in the Twentieth Century: Historical Perspectives. Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp. 129–151.

15.

Olick

(2005) In the House of the Hangman: The Agonies of German Defeat, 1943–1949. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

16.

Panourgia

(2009) Dangerous Citizens: The Greek Left and the Terror of the State. Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press.

17.

Reisigl

Wodak

(2001) Discourse and Discrimination. London: Routledge.

18.

Reisigl

Wodak

(2009) The discourse-historical approach. In: Wodak

Meyer

(eds) Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis, 1st edn. London: SAGE, pp. 87–121.

19.

Rubinelli

(2009) Ars Topica: The Classical Technique of Constructing Arguments from Aristotle to Cicero. Berlin: Springer.

20.

Van Leeuwen

(2007) Legitimation in discourse and communication. Discourse & Communication 1(1): 91–112.

21.

Van Leeuwen

Wodak

(1999) Legitimizing immigration control: A discourse-historical approach. Discourse Studies 1(1): 83–118.

22.

Walton

(1996) Argumentation Schemes for Presumptive Reasoning. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

23.

Weiss

(2002) Searching for Europe: The problem of legitimisation and representation in recent political speeches on Europe. Journal of Language and Politics 1(1): 59–83.

24.

Wodak

(2001) The discourse-historical approach (DHA). In: Wodak

Meyer

(eds) Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis, 2nd edn. London: SAGE, pp. 63–94.

25.

Wodak

(2008) The contribution of critical linguistics to the analysis of discriminatory prejudices and stereotypes in the language of politics. In: Wodak

Koller

(eds) Handbook of Communication in the Public Sphere. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, pp. 291–316.

26.

Wodak

De Cillia

(2007) Commemorating the past: The discursive construction of official narratives about the ‘rebirth of the second Austrian Republic’. Discourse & Communication 1(3): 337–363.

27.

Wodak

Fairclough

(2010) Recontextualizing European higher education policies: The cases of Austria and Romania. Critical Discourse Studies 7(1): 19–40.

28.

Wodak

de Cillia

Reisigl

. (2009) The Discursive Construction of National Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

29.

Zompetti

(2006) The value of topoi. Argumentation 20: 15–28.