21.04.1967 | Δικτατορία συνταγματαρχών
Η κυκλοφορία των εφημερίδων εξακολουθεί.
* * * * *
From the very first hours of the coup and before disappearing, I let my team know that, being no longer with them, they were at liberty either to cease publication or to go on putting out our newspapers, if they felt that they had to do so in order to provide for the four hundred families of our staff, which would have remained otherwise unemployed at the very time when their unions would have been the least able to help them.
I respect the reasons which led them to this excruciating decision just as I respect the reasons which may have led other publishers to suspend publication of their own papers.
[…]
And if censorship were to be abolished and you yourself liberated, would you take over again the editing of your newspapers?
Certainly not. Abolishing certain measures would be of no importance so long as a democratic constitutional system were not to be reestablished. Under such conditions, any «freedom» of expression granted would be futile just as much as a sham. As a liberal publisher, I would refuse to participate in such a mockery, which degrades the very meaning of journalism.
Αντίγραφο δακτυλόγραφου (4 φύλλα) της συνέντευξης ΧΔΛ στον Observer: Christos Lambrakis, The Big Lie Crumbles, Observer Foreign News Service, No. 24367, October 13, 1967
και «Jailed IPI member rejects sham liberty», IPI Report. Monthly Bulletin of the International Press Institute 16/7 (November 1967).
As I stated in my Observer interview, my team made its initial choice while I was still in hiding. Even if had had the physical possibility to personally state my own views (which were that we should pursue publication of our papers), that would have been made impossible without the approval and active support of our every senior staff-member involved.
However, I strongly believed, then as now, that one could fight the dictatorship just as effectively from inside Greece as from abroad. That one had to bid one’s time and tread very carefully, was unavoidable.But in the course of the following seven years, we were time and time again proved right, when no other voice remained insule Greece but ours to prompt the Greek people to take a stand against the junta and ruin its plans : – among other instances, a) by giving full and ex- tensive coverage to the trials of political prisoners b) by being a permanent forum for all strands of liberal opinion, running articles by people like George Mangakis (while he was in prison), George Koumandos, Iangos Pesmazoglou, Dimitris Tsatsos, A.Peponis and many others who were actively fighting the junta, c) by giving as full and extensive coverage as possible to attacks against the dictatorship coming from abroad d) by denouncing the Papadopoulos referendum of 1973 e) by waging a systematic campaign for holding free elections in students unions, bar association etc f) by undermining the efforts to legitimize the junta through the Markezinis governmentetc etc.
[…]
Our fight gained momentum and gradually found its fullest expression not only in our articles, comments, cartoons, campaigns, etc but also in the collaboration and signed articles written by fearless liberal personalities in the political, legal and economic field.
ΧΔΛ συνέντευξη στον Robert McDonald.