Dialogues between Psychoanalysis and Architecture [1 ed.] 1032388005, 9781032388007

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Duty to Revolt

Digital Activism and Society: Politics, Economy and Culture in Network Communication The Digital Activism and Society: Politics, Economy and Culture in Network Communication series focuses on the political use of digital everyday-networked media by corporations, governments, international organisations (Digital Politics), as well as civil society actors, NGOs, activists, social movements and dissidents (Digital Activism) attempting to recruit, organise and fund their operations, through information communication technologies. This series publishes books on theories and empirical case studies of digital politics and activism in the specific context of communication networks. Topics covered by this series include, but are not limited to • the different theoretical and analytical approaches of political communication in digital networks; • studies of sociopolitical media movements and activism (and ‘hacktivism’); • transformations of older topics such as inequality, gender, class, power, identity and group belonging; • strengths and vulnerabilities of social networks.

Series Editor Professor Athina Karatzogianni

About the Series Editor Athina Karatzogianni is Professor at the University of Leicester, UK. Her research focuses on the intersections between digital media theory and political economy, in order to study the use of digital technologies by new sociopolitical formations.

Published Books in This Series Digital Materialism: Origins, Philosophies, Prospects by Baruch Gottlieb Nirbhaya, New Media and Digital Gender Activism by Adrija Dey Digital Life on Instagram: New Social Communication of Photography by Elisa Serafinelli

Internet Oligopoly: The Corporate Takeover of Our Digital World by Nikos Smyrnaios Digital Activism and Cyberconflicts in Nigeria: Occupy Nigeria, Boko Haram and MEND by Shola A. Olabode Platform Economics: Rhetoric and Reality in the ‘Sharing Economy’ by Cristiano Codagnone Communication as Gesture: Media(tion), Meaning, & Movement by Michael Schandorf Chinese Social Media: Face, Sociality, and Civility by Shuhan Chen and Peter Lunt Posthumanism in Digital Culture: Cyborgs, Gods and Fandom by Callum T.F. McMillan Media, Technology and Education in a Post-Truth Society: From Fake News, Datafication and Mass Surveillance to the Death of Trust by Alex Grech 3D Printing Cultures, Politics and Hackerspaces by Leandros Savvides Environmental Security in Greece: Perceptions From Industry, Government, NGOs and the Public by Charis(Harris) Gerosideris Fantasy, Neoliberalism and Precariousness: Coping Strategies in the Cultural Industries by J´er´emy Vachet Crisis Communication in China: Strategies Taken by the Chinese Government and Online Public Opinion by Wei Cui Digital Politics, Digital Histories, Digital Futures: New Approaches for Historicising, Politicising and Imagining the Digital by Adi Kuntsman and Liu Xin

Forthcoming Titles Digital Memory in Brazil: A Fragmented and Elastic Negationist Remembrance of the Dictatorship by Leda Balbino Algorithmic Governance: Institutional Design and Organisational Innovations by Ioannis Avramopoulos Fractal Leadership: Ideologisation from the 1960s to Contemporary Social Movements by Athina Karatzogianni and Jacob Matthews Massively Marginal: Kuaishou as China’s Subaltern Platform by Dino Ge Zhang, Jian Xu and Gabriele de Seta

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Duty to Revolt: Transnational and Commemorative Aspects of Revolution EDITED BY GEORGE SOUVLIS University of Ioannina, Greece

AND ATHINA KARATZOGIANNI University of Leicester, UK

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

Emerald Publishing Limited Emerald Publishing, Floor 5, Northspring, 21-23 Wellington Street, Leeds LS1 4DL First edition 2024 Editorial Matter and Selection © 2024 George Souvlis and Athina Karatzogianni. Individual chapters 1-14 © 2024 The authors. Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited with the exception of chapter 15, Discussing with Roger Hallam, Environmental Revolutionary and co-Founder of Extinction Rebellion © mέta via metacpc.org. Reprints and permissions service Contact: www.copyright.com No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying issued in the UK by The Copyright Licensing Agency and in the USA by The Copyright Clearance Center. Any opinions expressed in the chapters are those of the authors. Whilst Emerald makes every effort to ensure the quality and accuracy of its content, Emerald makes no representation implied or otherwise, as to the chapters’ suitability and application and disclaims any warranties, express or implied, to their use. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-80382-316-4 (Print) ISBN: 978-1-80382-315-7 (Online) ISBN: 978-1-80382-317-1 (Epub)

To Roger Hallam, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion.

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Contents

About the Contributors

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Chapter 1 Introduction: Duty to Revolt – Transnational and Commemorative Aspects of Revolution Athina Karatzogianni and George Souvlis

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Part 1: Historical Focus Chapter 2 Colonising the Past: The Greek Revolution as an Archetypal Instance of Cultural Imperialism Rosa Vasilaki

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Chapter 3 Revolutions and Constitutionalism in Africa: The Duty to Revolt in the Sudanese and Congolese Constitutions Dunia P. Zongwe

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Chapter 4 Anti-colonialist Memory, Culture and Politics in Ireland Niamh Kirk and Seamus Farrell Chapter 5 Building the New Person: The Greek Revolution in the Mountain Readers Eleftheria Papastefanaki, Christos Papathanasiou and Nikos Vafeas

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Part 2: Commemorative Focus Chapter 6 The Revolutionary Subject and Its Affective Modalities: Love-Duty, Sacrifice and the Heroic Panos Kompatsiaris Chapter 7 Herstories: Activism, Detention and Torture Bev Orton and Alexander D. Ornella

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Chapter 8 Commemorating the Revolution as a Duty to Obey: From the Rehabilitation of Gregory the V to ‘Greece 2021’ and the ‘Do-It-Yourself’ Bi-centenary 111 Tassos Kostopoulos Chapter 9 1821 Tweets: Networks and Ideological Discourse Around the Greek Revolution Bicentenary Panos Tsimpoukis and Nikos Smyrnaios

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Chapter 10 Digital Storytelling From Below: Revolutionary Athens Through a Kaleidoscope 145 Andromache Gazi, Theodoros Giannakis, Ilias Marmaras, Yiannis Skoulidas, Yannis Stoyannidis, Foteini Venieri and Stewart Ziff

Part 3: Contemporary Focus Chapter 11 Firefund.net: An ‘Online Translocal Connection’ of Anarchist(ic) Social Movements Stamatis Poulakidakos Chapter 12 From Anti-Gentrification to Fab Lab Community: Spatialisation of Conflicts, Contentious Politics and the Limits of Techno-Politics in Urban Areas Leandros Savvides Chapter 13 Depictions of Emotions in News Media’s Visual Framing of Small-Scale Protests in Greece Anastasia Veneti

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Chapter 14 From Duty to Impulsion: Obstacles to Organising Future Revolutions Robert Latham

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Chapter 15 Discussing With Roger Hallam, Environmental Revolutionary and Co-Founder of Extinction Rebellion Athina Karatzogianni and Jacob Matthews

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Index

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About the Contributors

Seamus Farrell holds a PhD from Dublin City University (DCU) on the topic of ‘A Political Economy of Radical Media’. In addition to research on radical media and politics, Seamus is interested in critical perspectives on Irish development, having worked on the Repast: Conflict in Europe Project. Andromache Gazi is a Professor of Museology at the Department of Communication, Media and Culture, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens. Her research interests include the ideological manipulation of the Greek past in museums and beyond, museum history, the theory and practice of exhibitions, museum text, memory studies, oral history, public history and public archaeology. Publications include the edited volumes National Museums in Southern Europe. History and Perspectives, Athens 2012 (with Alexandra Bounia) and Oral History in Museums and Education, Athens 2015 (with Irene Nakou). Theodoros Giannakis has studied painting, sculpture and new media at the Athens School of Fine Arts. He has graduated from the MFA programme in Digital Media Management at London Metropolitan University in London. Since 2017, he has been working on a doctoral thesis at the Department of Visual Arts of the Athens School of Fine Arts. Alongside his artistic and curatorial practices, he has acted as a visual artist, game designer and art director in independent video game productions, television and cinematographic productions. Athina Karatzogianni is a scholar who specialises in critical theory, digital media and political communication. She is currently a Professor in Media and Communication at the University of Leicester. Karatzogianni has published extensively on a range of topics related to digital media and activism, including the relationship between social media and political change, the rise of digital populism, and the ethics of online communication. She is a leader in the field of digital media and activism, and her work has contributed significantly to the understanding of the relationship between technology, politics and social change. This bio was produced by Open AI’s ChatGPT. Niamh Kirk is a Lecturer in Data Journalism and Social Media and Course Director of MA in Journalism at the University of Limerick. Her research interests are at the intersection of digital media, regulation and sociopolitics. Panos Kompatsiaris teaches cultural and media theory at HSE University in Moscow and is a research fellow in media sociology at IULM in Milan. He is the

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author of The Politics of Contemporary Art Biennials (2017) as well as of several articles on art, theory and cultural politics. Tasos Kostopoulos holds a PhD in Modern History at the University of the Aegean. He is currently working in the Institute for Mediterranean Studies, as Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded programme MACAUTH. Screening Souls, Building Nations. Macedonia(s) as a Laboratory for Balkan-wide Authoritarianism. As journalist by profession for almost four decades, he has published seven books on history, all of them in Greek, and 38 scientific articles or book chapters in Greek, English or French. His interests evolve around the questions of nationalism as a sociopolitical project, social movements and conflicts, minority assimilation and ethnic cleansing, political violence and ‘deep state’ politics. Robert Latham teaches in the Department of Politics at York University, Toronto. His recent publications include Organizing ‘Anti-Capitalist Internationalism in Contemporary and Historical Perspective’ (in Rethinking Marxism); Challenging the Right, Augmenting the Left: Recasting Leftist Imagination (co-edited); ‘Neoliberalism’s Zeitgeist: The Untethered Disposition of Capitalism’, (in New Political Science); ‘Contemporary capitalism, uneven development, and the arc of anti-capitalism’ (in Global Discourse); and The Radical Left and Social Transformation: Strategies of Augmentation and Reorganization (coedited). Ilias Marmaras is a media artist born in Athens. He studied Plastic Arts, Urbanism and Philosophy at the university Paris VIII. He is a co-founder of the Media Arts collective Personal Cinema (http://personalcinema.org/). He works as documentary director, game designer and researcher. Jacob Matthews is a Professor of Information and Communication Sciences at the Culture and Communication department of Paris VIII University. Former Director of the Cemti lab, founded by Armand Mattelart in 2000, he is now a researcher at the Labsic team of Sorbonne Paris Nord University. He has specialised for the last 15 years in the socio-economics of the web and culture industries. His research also covers the following fields: analysis of web discourses and practices, ideological production and leadership, star system and the industrialisation of culture and communication. Alexander Darius Ornella is a Senior Lecturer in Religion at the University of Hull. In his research, he is interested in the complex relationship between religious language, iconography and practice and socio-cultural-political narratives. He recently published a paper on the practice of sport as political practice of remembrance and how the religious dimensions of such practice can foster or prevent political debate and political critique. Bev Orton is a Lecturer at the University of Hull. She was the expert consultant on GlobalGrace https://www.globalgrace.net/working with sex workers in Cape Town, South Africa, Yaliwe Clarke and Sara Matchett, at the University of Cape Town and with the Sex Workers Advocacy and Education Task Force (SWEAT).

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Eleftheria Papastefanaki teaches and works as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Crete. She received her BA in Philology from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and she completed her postgraduate and doctoral studies at the Department of Philosophy and Social Studies of the University of Crete. Her research interests focus on history of educational ideas (19th–20th), history of women’s education, women’s movement and political activities, history of socialism and communism (the movement of ideas) and social history of Greek civil war (1946–1949). Christos Papathanasiou is PhD Student in History of Education at the University of Ioannina. His research interests focus on the depth analysis of the Greek school textbooks of primary Education. In particular, he has been engaged in the study of the school textbooks of the Regime of Ioannis Metaxas (1936–1940) and broadly into the period of Inter-war in Greece (1919–1940). He has also involved with the exhibition of the Hellenic Parliament ‘Ioannis Kapodistrias (1776–1831): his course in time’. Stamatis Poulakidakos is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication and Digital Media, University of Western Macedonia (UOWM). He specialises in media monitoring, propaganda and quantitative content analysis. He has authored the book ‘Propaganda and Public Discourse. The presentation of the MoU by the Greek Media’ (Athens: DaVinci Books) and co-edited ‘Media events’ A critical contemporary approach (London: Palgrave-McMillan). He has published papers on political communication/political marketing, propaganda, refugees/immigrants, social media and social movements. Nikos Smyrnaios is a Professor at the University of Toulouse, France where he teaches theory, history, sociology and economics of the media and the internet. He has published numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals and book chapters in English, French and Greek and has presented at international conferences on the political economy of communication, digital journalism and the political use of social media. He is the author of Internet Oligopoly: The Corporate Takeover of Our Digital World, 2018, Emerald. Leandros Savvides (PhD Critical Management Studies, Leicester, 2019) is currently a special teaching staff at the Cyprus University of Technology, at the Department of Communication and Internet Studies. His primary research interests are theory of science and technology, cultural politics, the emergence of citizen science and civil society interventions in shaping technology and vice versa. His book ‘3D Printing Cultures, Politics and Hackerspaces’ (2021, Emerald Publishing Ltd) is an ethnographic study that examines the bourgeoning 3D printing culture (narratives, grassroots innovation, urban techno-politics) outside the professional lab in Hackerspaces, Makerspaces and Fab Labs. Yiannis Skoulidas is a programmer and game developer with vast professional experience in computer software and hardware (since 1986), multimedia, audio, video, website and book production (since 1995) and 3D game development (since 2003). Notable projects include: RevAthens 1821 (revathens.transludic.net) 3D

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Mobile app. AthensVirtual (athensvirtual.gr) 3D Game Space. SmartHotelRoom (deplaced.gr/immersive-locality) Augmented Reality 3D Space. CARGONAUTS (cargonauts.net) for Western Sydney University. BANOPTIKON (banoptikon.mignetproject.eu) for the European research programme MIG@NET. George Souvlis is an Adjunct Lecturer in the Department of History and Archaeology at the University of Ioannina, Greece, and a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Sociology at the University of Crete, Greece. He is the Co-director of the Seminar Series Politics of Liberation. He is editor of the book, Voices on the Left (Red Marks) and the co-editor of the volumes Back to the 30s? Crisis, Repetition and Transition in the 20th and 21st centuries (Palgrave) and Radical Journalism Resurgence, Reform, Reaction (Routledge) and of the special issue of Re-assessing the Metaxas Dictatorship (1936–1941) – Greek Fascism or Old-Style Authoritarianism published in the Journal of Fascism. Yannis Stoyannidis is a historian. He teaches as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Archival, Library and Information Studies in the University of West Attica. He graduated from the University of Thessaly and the University of South Wales (UK). He has participated in research programs concerning social and modern history, industrial heritage and archives management. His publications discuss the management of cultural remnants and archives, modern history, urban heritage and social history of medicine. Panos Tsimpoukis has a Masters Degree in Biology from the University of Ioannina Greece. He has worked as a scientific journalist for the Greek press for several years. Currently he is a PhD candidate in the University of Toulouse, France, where he studies social media debates and press coverage of controversies around technologies such as Artificial Intelligence. Nikos Vafeas was born in Athens in 1970. He studied Sociology at Panteion ´ University and then followed postgraduate studies in History at the Ecole des hautes e´ tudes en sciences sociales in Paris. He received his PhD from the European University Institute of Florence in 1998 (Dissertation topic: ‘Pouvoir et conflits dans l’ Empire ottoman: La r´evolte de 1849–1850 dans la Principaut´e de Samos’). He is currently an Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science of the University of Crete, where he teaches Historical and Political Sociology. Rosa Vasilaki holds a PhD in History from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and a PhD in Sociology from the University of Bristol. She is the founder and co-coordinator of DISSENSUS-social research group which produced large-scale research on the Far Right, published in 2021 as ‘Mainstreaming the Far Right in Greece: Gender, Media, Armed Forces and the Church’ with the support of the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung – Greece Office. She is also the co-coordinator of the global seminar ‘Politics of Liberation’, also supported by the RLS. Anastasia Veneti is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Media and Communication, Bournemouth University (UK). Her research lays at the

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intersection of media and politics, including political communication, digital political campaigning, media framing, protests and social movements, visual communication and photojournalism. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6449-9830. Foteini Venieri is a museum studies researcher with a focus on museum theatre and the promotion of performing arts in the interpretation of cultural heritage. She holds a PhD on museum theatre, and has conducted postdoctoral research on the concept of dialogue in museums. She has designed and performed museum theatre performances, and has taught modules on museum theory, museum learning and museum theatre at several universities. Stewart Ziff is a new media theorist, practitioner and educator. He is a Game developer and Founding member of the media arts collective Personal Cinema. He has held professional appointments in academia and industry, as an Associate Professor of New and Emerging Media at Georgia State University, as graduate faculty at Parsons School of Design (The New School) and the School of Visual Arts, New York, as Systems Architect for the new Hayden Planetarium (American Museum of Natural History) and as technical Director at the DTV R&D lab at MTV. Dunia Prince Zongwe is an Associate Professor at the School of Law, Alliance University, India; and an Adjunct Associate Professor at Walter Sisulu University, South Africa. As an author, an academic, and a consultant, Dunia specialises in human rights, development and international law, focusing on Africa and the Global South. He has published four books and about 62 research outputs, consulted for many organisations, presented lectures at more than 70 conferences and received several merit awards. He earned his doctorate in law at Cornell University.

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Chapter 1

Introduction: Duty to Revolt – Transnational and Commemorative Aspects of Revolution Athina Karatzogianni and George Souvlis This edited book collection engages leading and emerging scholars from history, political science, sociology, and media and communication to investigate transnational, commemorative and contemporary communication aspects of revolutions in various countries around the world. It is a book of 15 chapters providing an interdisciplinary, and comprehensive contribution to the study of historical revolutions and their commemoration, as well as contemporary protests and uprisings and how they are communicated today in everyday networked media. It is the first of its kind in the English-speaking world taking this interdisciplinary approach across historical time on this subject, because it brings together leading and emerging scholars in several fields in history and political science, as well as digital media and communication studies. It involves collaboration across disciplines as it engages scholars from across the social sciences, arts and humanities. These researchers use diverse techniques from ethnography to archive to communication, sociological (interviews), cultural and visual analysis, as well as digital methods (data analytics, digital game production). The project comes out of ‘The Duty to Revolt’ conference held online over two full days on 25–26 March 2021, on the bicentenary of the Greek Revolution of 1821. The Duty to Revolt conference was organised by Athina Karatzogianni, Raul Carstocea (University of Leicester), Ioanna Ferra National Research (University Higher School of Economics, Russia), Christos Kostopoulos (Curtin University, Malaysia) and George Souvlis (University of Ioannina, Greece). We were excited to kick-start the conference with a revolutionary greeting from Roger Hallam (co-founder of Extinction Rebellion). Additionally, to our wonderful contributors to this volume, we are grateful for the intellectual exchange to the following conference participants who presented their work: Andreas Lyberatos (Panteion University & Institute of Mediterranean Studies/ FORTH, Greece); John Christopher Kern (Independent Researcher, USA); Noel O’Sullivan (University of Hull, UK); Andrei-Dan Sorescu (UCL School of

Duty to Revolt, 1–11 Copyright © 2024 Athina Karatzogianni and George Souvlis Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited doi:10.1108/978-1-80382-315-720231001

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Slavonic and East European Studies, UK); Tanja Nijmeijer (ex-FARC combatant, Colombia); Zakia Shiraz (Leiden University, Netherlands); Eugenia Siapera (University College Dublin, Ireland); Yiannis Mylonas (National Research University Higher School of Economics, Russia). Throughout the nineteenth century, revolutionary movements united intellectuals, artists, dissidents and significant segments of the population in joint crusades in the name of justice or liberation, against empires and aristocratic elites, often across class, religious, race and national lines. The wave of revolutions that kicked off with the American and French revolutions continued in Haiti, and with the decolonisation of South America, eventually reached the Balkans with the Serbian revolution(s) of 1804–1815, and the Greek Revolution of 1821. This book takes the bicentenary of the Greek Revolution as a foundational historical departure point to investigate historical continuities and discontinuities in transnational and commemorative aspects of revolutionary wars. In the case of the Greek Revolution, both popular romantic support for a ‘just cause’ associated with a Christian population and its imaginary civilisational connection to Ancient Greece, and elite anxiety about the destabilisation of the Ottoman Empire occurred simultaneously in France, Russia, Germany and England. Pro-Greek foreign fighters from different parts of Europe arrived in Greece embracing the ‘Freedom or Death’ call of the revolution – or what was partly, but not exclusively a revolution – importing the new discourse for equality, liberty and universal rights of the Enlightenment: a grandmaster discourse at the heart of global ideological critique wars even today. Concomitantly, the Greek revolution witnessed the transition to political modernity, as well as imperialist and anti-imperialist interventions for nation-state-building, the latter still, in functioning terms, an ongoing struggle in contemporary Greece 200 years later. The historical event itself reverberated through the Balkan region and influenced the development of nationalisms far and wide in the European context and beyond. Commemorating any revolution of this kind is likely to encourage nationalist, populistic reactions and attempts at recuperating the radical subversive nature of every revolution – whether bourgeois or stemming from ‘the wretched of the earth’ – so that it serves contemporary state-boosting communication strategies. With the Greek revolution as an inspirational conatus, however not limited to it, our contributors in this book are academic colleagues, artists and practitioners who engage with the following themes in a broader discussion of how the duty to revolt reverberates and is romanticised transnationally, and subsequently how revolutions are commemorated and constructed for public consumption today: (1) Transnationalisation of revolutions: The ideological conflict between radical supporters of revolutions and conservatives opposing revolutions in the name of preserving the status quo often results in opposing transnational networks organising and mobilising activists across ethnic, national, class and race lines. In this respect, the Greek Revolution and other ‘nationalist’ liberation

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movements included a significant social component, and other emancipatory agendas, often obscured by the focus on nationalism and statehood. (2) Romanticisation of revolutions: The materialisation of ideological support when foreign fighters feel the duty to revolt and travel to a country undergoing revolution is a phenomenon witnessed throughout history. Historical experience of this phenomenon is extensive and truly international, and yet it is rarely given sufficient attention. (3) Communication and commemoration of revolutions: Transnational communication networks create possibilities both for emancipatory movements and nationalist resurgence, with the boundaries between the two often blurred. Furthermore, the audiovisual and artistic commemoration of revolutions is a thematic of great interest, especially in periods of global crisis and national uncertainty. For the first two parts the volume engages with scholarship by historians, political scientists and sociologists, while the third part involves scholarship by political communication and digital social researchers.

Summary of Contributing Chapters The first part of the book, Part I: Historical Focus, starts with Rosa Vasilaki and her chapter ‘Colonising the Past: The Greek Revolution as an Archetypal Instance of Cultural Imperialism’. She argues that modern national identities evoke the past to construct a sense of continuity, uniqueness and purpose to their contemporary citizens. Greece is perhaps one of the most telling instances where representations and perceptions of the past have overdetermined the way modern Greece sees itself and is seen by others. These perceptions of the ‘glorious ancient past’ have not been shaped by Greeks only, but also by the appropriation of ‘ancient Greece’ by the West, in its effort to delineate a distinctive and cohesive Western identity. Yet, Vasilaki asks: How are we to understand this persisting invocation of the past in the era of revolutions, the era of national self-determination, of print capitalism, of the Gnostic Revolt brought about by the forces of the Enlightenment? Why did the break with the ‘barbaric’ past (the existing tradition of the Ottoman reality) in the name of a ‘civilised’ future (the ‘Hellenic’ tradition to be constructed) necessitate legitimation by a kind of ‘enlightened’ past, that is, the one represented by the ‘glorious Greek Antiquity’? How can we make sense of such contradiction and what made it so efficient in concealing its antinomic character and exercising its persuasive power? Vasilaki puts the thesis forward that the Greek Revolution – as a symbol of both this antinomy as well as its resolution – was made possible because of a peculiar ideological operationalisation of the ancient past: in fact, via its colonisation. Not only this, but Vasilaki believes that we can use Greece as an entry point to examine this peculiar kind of colonisation, namely the colonisation of the past, as an architype to construe the mechanics of western cultural imperialism and its dominance across the modern world.

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Dunia P. Zongwe in his chapter ‘Revolution and Constitutionalism in Africa: The Duty to Revolt in the Sudanese and Congolese Constitutions’ appraises the principle that every citizen has a duty to revolt against individuals who seek to access power by force or to exercise it in violation of the constitution. Because the prospect of people exercising this duty of revolution (DoR) may constrain a government from using its powers to coerce people in a manner that jeopardises their rights and interests, the DoR can fulfil the goals of constitutionalism. Nonetheless, Zongwe argues that the contents and contours of the DoR remain so vague that invoking it in the specific context of Africa can further destabilise a continent that already shelters some of the world’s most unstable countries, such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and South Sudan. If not tightly circumscribed, the DoR can even – and ironically – serve opportunists as a pretext to topple a democratically elected though ineffective government for their own, selfish purposes. Realising that the DoR can lend itself to abuse and that it can cause tremendous – if not permanent – instability in conflict-prone countries, this chapter pays rapt attention to and strives to identify the circumstances where such duty should arise. To specify the events that should trigger the DoR, Zongwe’s work illustrates the governance problems that plague fragile states like the DRC and South Sudan, and that pave the way for individuals to attempt to access power by force or exercise it unconstitutionally. Moreover, it dissects the DoR and elaborates on it by studying the DoR enshrined in the constitutions of the DRC and South Sudan, reflecting on the rationale of the DoR by comparing it to that of non-violent resistance and civil disobedience. Lastly, Zongwe’s work thinks the DoR through a number of scenarios where people can invoke that duty legitimately. Niamh Kirk and Seamus Farrell in their chapter ‘Anti-colonialist Memory, Culture and Politics in Ireland’ investigate controversial aspects of Ireland’s ‘Black and Tans’ commemoration on Twitter, focusing on contemporary anticolonial discourse in protest against state narratives of inclusion. ‘Decade of Centenaries’ refers to 10 years of commemorative events spanning Ireland’s Rising against the British Empire (1916) to the formation of the Irish and Northern Irish states (1926). Part of the official approach by both states to the ‘centenary commemorations programme’ is to focus on inclusivity and recognition of shared experiences of the conflicts by various communities on the island. However, there was intensive and pervasive public criticism of the inclusion of an event to mark the Royal Irish Constabulary, part of which were the ‘Black and Tans’, a British military force whose brutality to civilians and Irish revolutionary fighters was infamous. Over two weeks social media users debated and discussed Irish colonialism explicitly and the dominance of the criticism resulted in the withdrawal of the ‘Black and Tans’ commemoration. Niamh Kirk and Seamus Farrell ask: Given the focus on peace, reconciliation and cooperation following the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, why was there such a backlash to the suggestion of a common commemoration event? The Irish public’s reaction to the inclusion of a colonial force in commemorations suggests that the experience of colonial violence may have been forgiven, but not forgotten, and the appropriate response is not neutral but overtly anti-colonial. This chapter explores

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anti-colonial discourse around the ‘Black and Tans’ controversy that explicitly rejected official state revisionist narratives of ‘inclusion’. Using data derived from Twitter, it explores the emergence of contemporary anticolonial discourse in protest against state narratives of hospitality. It undertakes an in-depth analysis of some of the key themes emerging, including the representations of family experiences in historical memory, as well as of colonial forces, together with self-reflection on the role of Irish people in empire building. Kirk and Farrell argue that this commemorative controversy involves anti-colonialism as an ideological position which goes beyond resisting and rejecting colonialism, because it activates de-colonialism and public contestation in Irish political culture. Eleftheria Papastefanaki, Christos Papathanasiou and Nikos Vafeas (‘Building the New Person: the 1821 Greek Revolution in the Mountain Readers’) focus on the way the presentation of the 1821 Greek Revolution in the Mountain Readers sought to forge students’ identity, so as to meet the WWII Greek resistance coalition, known as the National Liberation Front (EAM)’s dual objectives: the liberation of Greece from the Axis occupation and socialist transformation. The Greek Revolution is one of the key thematic units of the readers in which the EAM-led resistance is often presented as a revival of the 1821 struggle and in a manner internally linked with the formulation of an alternative national narrative that sought to combine reference to the nation with the idea of social change from a socialist perspective. This, in turn, reflected, by and large, the Third International’s analysis about the transitory stages of social transformation and the dynamic of WWII resistance movements. In this context, the need to legitimate and justify their own contemporary political choices led to an ideological use of history and to the reconceptualisation of the nation’s building blocks. National Resistance, qua ‘New Greek Revolution’, provided a vantage point of looking at history that broke away from the interwar perspectives of Left historiography. During the 1940s, the Greek Revolution was attributed exclusively to the lower strata who had revolted against the Ottomans, on the one hand, and the Kotsabasides and the compromised bourgeoisie, on the other. The ‘people’ and no longer social class became the key explanatory category for its interpretation. Papastefanaki et al. demonstrate in this chapter that The Greek Revolution and EAM-led resistance became the two moments of a national narrative, which, bypassing the intermediate ‘hateful history’, ran like a red thread through the Mountain Readers and constituted the axis around which the past was incorporated in children’s national and political socialisation. The first part of the chapter sets the historical context of the Readers’ writing and briefly presents the official Party historiography developed in the 1930s and 1940s. Then, it explores the way the Greek Revolution appears in the Readers, and in relation to the official Party historiography and the corresponding Left historiographical production of the time that sought to account for the development of the Greek social formation. On this basis, it identifies the attempt, manifested in the Readers, to construct a new person who, both heavily draws upon the legacy of the Greek Revolution – the crown of national narrative – and adopts radical and emancipating positions that overcome the boundaries of dominant national ideology.

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Part II: Commemorative Focus begins with Panos Kompatsiaris and his chapter ‘The Revolutionary Subject and Its Affective Modalities: Love-Duty, Sacrifice and the Heroic’ explores what he calls the ‘affective modalities’ of the revolutionary subject, namely the investments in revolutionary affects, involving love as duty to a higher vision, the sacrifice for this higher vision and the moment of the heroic as a constellation of intransigent actualities and mnemonic topoi. Revolutions, whether big or small, progressive or reactionary, customarily emerge in response to social, economic and political crises; crises are moments when ‘strong’ collective affects, such as disgust, anger or humiliation, are channelled into political narratives, potentially repositioning political belonging. From the point of view of revolutionary modalities, crises are then the ideal battlegrounds for crafting affective investments to this or that cause. Crises bring violence, destitution and fear; they demoralise, dehumanise and diminish bios to bare life. Every crisis, however, is also a temporal conjunction in which feelings and emotional states are sharpened to unimaginable degrees; as such, crises and their narratives cultivate bonds and mnemonic topoi that can be used to exercise future visions. Thinking through the affective dimensions of political belonging and revolting, Kompatsiaris takes on board Kollontai’s idea of love as a duty to the collective and as a higher revolutionary vision contrasting it to commodified notions of love as an individual path. The chapter investigates the modalities of sacrifice and the heroic as vehicles for combating oppressive structures from an internationalist perspective and identifies examples related to historical socialism and the revolutionary imagination arising as responses to social and economic crises, as well as examples from the current Russian war against Ukraine where the heroic has been mostly mobilised to enable state-sanctioned narratives. Kompatsiaris argues that an internationalist socialist viewpoint should assess the affective substratum of the revolutionary subject that cultivates bonds, affinities and visions of political mobilisation. Bev Orton and Alexander Ornella in their chapter ‘Herstories: Activism, Detention and Torture’ investigate the ‘herstory’ of Black women as one of sexualised forms of political violence which was used by the apartheid government in South Africa to control women: A herstory of violence, oppression, exploitation, victimisation, imprisonment and police brutality against women. Orton and Ornella argue that there is a need to reassess the cultural politics of commemoration in relation to women’s activism during apartheid and their conflicting identities as women, mothers and political activists. Joining nationalist struggles enabled women to question gender roles, hoping to gain personal as well their country’s liberation. Multi-disciplinary women-led activist communities and organisations provided a space of protest and refuge. Theatre is a key forum to realise women’s contribution to the struggle against apartheid and ‘a space to speak’. Theatre enables communicating the ‘herstory’ of apartheid activism, by not only acting as a form to document the reality of women’s experiences, but also acting as a means to imagine different realities, their subjugation by oppressive political and societal conditions as well as demonstrating their ingenuity and agency in surviving detention and torture. The Apartheid Museum in Guateng is well-known, highly visible, whilst the public memorial to the memory of women’s

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role in the struggle, the Monument to the Women of South Africa, Imbokodo, is located at the Union Buildings in Pretoria and is invisible to the public, because of the inaccessibility of the Union Buildings, trivialising and erasing women’s political legacy and agency in post-Apartheid South Africa. Tasos Kostopoulos in his chapter ‘Commemorating the Revolution as a Duty to Obey: From the Rehabilitation of Gregory the V to “Greece 2021” and the “Do-It-Yourself” Bicentenary’ argues that although fairly emblematic as a reflection of the successive mutations underwent by Greek nationalism since the creation of a Greek nation-state, quinquagenaries and centenaries of the 1821 Greek Revolution have in fact been celebrated not as official tributes to a revolutionary event (i.e. to a victorious mobilisation of the subaltern in order to change their fate by recourse to the most radical means), but as opportunities for a symbolic confirmation of the established order and social hierarchies. In 1871, the pompous translation of Gregory the V’s relics from Odessa to Athens marked the end of an era, when Greek irredentism was understood as a process of social emancipation, and the beginning of Hellenism’s identification with the counterrevolutionary breed of ‘Greek-Ottomanism’, i.e., a ‘temporary’ defence of the Empire’s upper classes against the social threat incarnated by the emancipation of the Balkan Slav peasantry. In 1921, the centenary of the Greek revolution was celebrated with the filming of the unfinished semi-documentary ‘The Greek Miracle’, funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where 1821 and the ongoing Asia Minor Campaign were projected as constituent parts of an eternal fight of Greek Christendom to reclaim the Lebensraum and the resources necessary for its elevation to the status of a European power; the sole mention to ‘revolt’ in the film’s script referred to the Turkish national movement. A militarist approach was also discernible in the 1930 centenary, when a ‘Book of Sacrifices’ was published with the names of soldiers and officers of the standard Army – not revolutionaries of any kind – who had been killed on duty since the creation of the Greek nation-state. In 1971, commemoration of 1821 was amalgamated with the celebration of the 1967 military coup, ostensibly also a ‘revolution’. In 2021, the initial proclamation of the Mitsotakis government for a ‘development of national narrative leading to a unified image of the country’ and a comprehensible ‘re-branding of the Greek state’ suffered a severe blow from the COVID-19 epidemic and subsequent lack of public funds. The solution finally advanced, of a ‘do-it-yourself’ commemoration delegated mostly to local mayors and associations looking to upgrade the position of their hometown in the national Pantheon, led to a conformist re-enactment of the Greek Revolution as a mythical non-political event, defined by a ‘racial’ temperament that has more to do with Zorba the Greek than with any kind of social, political or intellectual upheaval. Panos Tsimpoukis and Nikos Smyrnaios in ‘1821 Tweets: Networks and Discourses around the Greek Revolution Bicentenary’ examine the reproduction of a polarised political culture in the digital public sphere. In order to best celebrate the momentous occasion, a special committee called ‘Greece 2021’ was formed to organise the national festivities to commemorate the Greek Revolution in March 2021. The bicentenary celebrations took place amidst restrictions due to the pandemic, criticism of government manipulations and specific media practices

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in their attempt to associate the heroes of the revolution with figures of the contemporary political scene. The present chapter demonstrates that the Twitter platform functioned as an arena where users, attempting to impose their own reading of reality, highlighted that there is a clash within the ruling elite and its supporters between ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’, ‘cosmopolitans’ and ‘nationalists’. Overall, Tsimboukis and Smyrnaios find that the network analysis highlights a double polarisation among Greek Twitter users who posted about 1821. On the one hand, a large pole on the Right of the political spectrum that represents more than half of their sample. This pole comprises three main sub poles: an international-official sub pole, a neoliberal sub pole and a nationalist-conservative sub pole with close connections to the xenophobic far-right. On the other hand, there is a much smaller leftist pole. The discussion about the bicentenary that took place on Twitter was characterised both by presentism, that is determined by social and political issues of the present time, as well as ‘ideological battles’ around historiography that express political divisions that run through Greek society. The study confirms that 200 years after the 1821 revolution, Greece is still a divided country: the divisions are political (between nationalist conservatives and cosmopolitan progressives), but also cultural (East/West, US and Europe/ Balkans and Orient). Andromache Gazi, Thodoris Giannakis, Ilias Marmaras, Yiannis Skoulidas, Yannis Stoyannidis, Foteini Venieri and Stewart Ziff, in their chapter ‘Digital Storytelling From Below: Revolutionary Athens Through a Kaleidoscope’, provide the theoretical and design background to the REVAthens project, which was develop to create an encounter between today’s visitors and the life of unknown Athenian residents of the time of the Greek Revolution. The Revolution of 1821 was a milestone in the formation of the Greek nation-state and the subsequent construction of the official national narrative and identity. Traditionally, historical biographies of the period constitute in their vast majority an image of unreal heroes, an image of emblematic and timeless figures of the Greek nation that the biographers do not integrate organically into the society of their time and as such, they have become ‘heroes’ with non-historical characteristics. In the context of ‘history from below’ and the turn towards a more inclusive history, REVAthens, funded by the Hellenic Foundation for Research & Innovation (ELIDEK), creates an encounter between today’s visitors and the life of unknown Athenian residents of the time. Scenes from the everyday life of people living in Athens during that time are activated on the visitors’ mobile devices through geolocation. Social history, museum theatre, game elements, environmental art and 3D reconstructions are combined in the form of a ‘digital pocket theatre’ offering customised visitor experiences and alternative readings of the era. The outlines the design process focussing on the construction of historical subjective narratives. In the third and final part of the book, Part III: Contemporary Focus, Stamatis Poulakidakos in his chapter ‘Firefund.net: An “Online Translocal Connection” of Anarchist(ic) Social Movements’ analyses the crowdfunding platform firefund.net. Crowdfunding has emerged in the last decade as one of the most successful ways to support financially a wide range of projects. Apart from its already proven usefulness in a wide variety of profit-driven projects, crowdfunding has

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been used as a tool to support non-profit causes as well, like the ones set within the context of social movements. According to the ‘about us’ page of the website, ‘Firefund is a platform that seeks to encourage cooperation within this diverse field of revolutionary movements. We want to encourage, inspire, empower, support, include, exchange and work together within the movements, fighting for a world beyond oppression and unequally distributed rights, wealth, and power. We want to facilitate and escalate the work of the social movements by connecting struggles through crowdfunding and crowdsourcing’. Given this ideological imprint, Poulakidakos, through the implementation of quantitative content analysis of the projects seeking to be crowdfunded in firefund.net investigates: what kind of projects Firefund.net hosts; in which ways these projects can be characterised as ‘revolutionary’; how diverse these crowdfunding efforts are in terms of their aims and their geographical diversity; and how many projects, among the ones presented in Firefund.net, are in a direct way public-oriented. The chapter’s theoretical background comprises theories related to the social activist uses of crowdfunding, as well as approaches focussing on anarchist ideology. Leandros Savvides in his work ‘From Anti-gentrification to Fab Lab Community: Spatialisation of Conflicts, Contentious Politics and the Limits of Techno-politics in Urban Areas’ investigates the emergence of revolt-like interventions against anti-working class plans of gentrification, in relation to the emergence of the maker culture, where technology and making are explored outside the professional lab, predominantly in Hackerspaces, Makerspaces and Fab Labs. Such spaces have emerged during the times of global capitalist crisis; they constitute important sites in the development of open-source hardware and software, and provide conducive conditions for the spread of locally created technology to and often beyond technologically informed publics. Such spaces can be both used as de-politicised DIY urban practices and as powerful tactics in the service of social movements. Specifically, this chapter examines the case of Fabulous St-Pauli, where a revolt against plans of gentrification convergences activism and the maker culture within capitalist realism. Why has such a movement drawn praise from both proponents of neoliberal institutions such as the EU and anti-gentrification, anti-fascist and pro-immigrant activists in urban cities? Drawing on the findings of my research in the city of St Pauli, Savvides argues that the politics of Hackerspaces/Makerspaces and Fab Labs constitute sites that disclose contradictions as sites of capital realisation within cities. They are becoming spaces of contesting the dominant paradigm, but also reflecting the societies within which they operate. Users become developers themselves who simultaneously reinvent forms of consumption, processes of learning and re-conceptualising the relationship between science and craft, productivism and play, authority and informal horizontal learning. The city is our factory emerges as a key theoretical pillar of the idea of spatialisation of conflicts, engaging in contentious politics of hacking with a look at the failures of capitalism. Anastasia Veneti in ‘Depictions of Emotions in News Media’s Visual Framing of Small-Scale Protests in Greece’ emphasises that the photos that accompany the news are important as they help us discover different angles of a news story. In the case of protests and demonstrations, images are of a dual importance. On the one

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hand, they serve as vehicles for visibility and on the other hand, they are endowed to communicate the feeling and the vibration that consist crucial elements of any such action. Nonetheless, while much has been written about mass demonstrations, there is paucity in research about small scale protests. This chapter discusses and highlights the above through the use of a case study: a small-scale protest in Greece by school teachers that demonstrated against impeding dismissals in 2014. Two set of photos are analysed and juxtaposed: the photo-reportage of Greek mainstream newspapers and the photos of a freelance photojournalist. Further to the selection process of the particular protest images by the mainstream media, Veneti also examines the way that human feelings are portrayed in demonstrations – focusing here on frustration, anger, determination and sorrow. The analysis of news photography demonstrates how the selective portrayal of a Greek protest contributes to dominant news framings on both informational and symbolic levels. Robert Latham in his contribution ‘From Duty to Impulsion: Obstacles to Organising Future Revolutions’ argues that we do not have mobilised anti-capitalist consciousness of meaningful extent and thus we cannot build substantial organisations upon it, and from the other side, we do not have substantial organisations of meaningful extent that can work to help foster anti-capitalist consciousness. Latham points out that whatever one’s views are on vanguards, traditional parties, horizontalism, or the role of mass spontaneity, there is no bypassing the mass/organisation duality. If anything, given the formidable challenges posed by contemporary capitalism, left organisation is more necessary than ever. At the very minimum there is need for organisation to help advance anti-capitalist mass consciousness, providing it with focal points for positions and programmes of action: there that there is no notable approach in the Marxist tradition that eschews organisation. Even council communism, which placed emphasis on workers organising themselves into councils to govern all aspects of political-economic life, saw organisation dedicated to mobilising workers for this outcome as necessary. Rosa Luxemburg, who is often associated with an emphasis on the spontaneous action of workers, was clear that it is the interaction of that spontaneity and left organisation that is central to the advancement of anti-capitalism. Latham proposes that this organisation-consciousness problem would be broken if we had, even just step by step, consciousness and organisation developing synergistically: a process that might be at times accelerated by deep crises. In the final chapter of this collection, Athina Karatzogianni and Jacob Matthews discuss ideology, organisation, mobilisation and strategy with Roger Hallam, ‘Environmental Revolutionary and Co-founder of Extinction Rebellion’. The interview is included in this volume because it shows vividly how a contemporary revolutionary’s thinking around the designing the revolution came about, as well as core ideas of his conceptualisation of the environmental crisis, the urgency with which people need to exercise their ‘Duty to Revolt’, and strategies for mobilising and organising the revolution.

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Conclusion Already in the 1960s and 1970s, Jean-Paul Sartre, Philippe Gavi and Pierre Victor were publishing their discussions in books, such as It Is Right to Rebel (1974 [2018]: 236, Routledge), together with Guevara’s formula: ‘the duty of every revolutionary is to make the revolution’. Victor: . . .I say we’re preparing for revolution by making revolution. Sartre: That’s right. Victor: That’s the deep meaning of Guevara’s formula: the duty of every revolutionary is to make the revolution [. . .] Sartre: I agree but we will be able to do without the politicians at the exact time the revolution is being brought about. Victor: What does that mean? Sartre: That means, from the moment capitalism has ceased to exist as capitalism. Victor: You mean the communist society. Sartre: Yes, in the communist society. In this spirit, we hope that this edited collection can act as a contemporary catalyser for discussing the duty to revolt and to ‘make a revolution’, taking into account transnational, commemorative and communication/organisation historical continuities and discontinuities of revolutions past, present and future, which our contributors bring together into this book.

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Part 1 Historical Focus

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Chapter 2

Colonising the Past: The Greek Revolution as an Archetypal Instance of Cultural Imperialism Rosa Vasilaki

Introduction Modern national identities evoke the past to construct a sense of continuity, uniqueness and purpose to their contemporary citizens. Greece is perhaps one of the most telling instances where representations and perceptions of the past have overdetermined the way modern Greece sees itself and is seen by others. These perceptions of the ‘glorious ancient past’ have not been shaped by Greeks only, but also by the appropriation of ‘ancient Greece’ by the West, in its effort to delineate a distinctive and cohesive Western identity. Yet, how are we to understand this persisting invocation of the past in the era of revolutions, the era of national self-determination, of print capitalism, of the Gnostic Revolt brought about by the forces of the enlightenment? In short, why did the break with the ‘barbaric’ past (the existing tradition of the Ottoman reality) in the name of a ‘civilised’ future (the ‘Hellenic’ tradition to be constructed) necessitate legitimation by a kind of ‘enlightened’ past, that is the one represented by the ‘glorious Greek Antiquity’? How can we make sense of such contradiction and what made it so efficient in concealing its antinomic character and exercising its persuasive power? This chapter argues that the Greek Revolution – as a symbol of both this antinomy as well as its resolution – was made possible because of a particular ideological operationalisation of the ancient past: in fact, via its colonisation. Not only this, but this chapter also submits that we can use Greece as an entry point to examine this peculiar form of colonisation as an archetype to construe the mechanics of western cultural imperialism and its dominance across the modern world. To do so, this chapter draws from philosopher Michael Oakeshott and his notion of the ‘practical past’ – that is the reading of the past according to the political expediency of the present – to create the necessary conceptual framework within which to examine the peculiar operationalisation of the past in the case of fabrication of Greek Antiquity. Second, it addresses anti-Eurocentrism as a Duty to Revolt, 15–27 Copyright © 2024 Rosa Vasilaki Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited doi:10.1108/978-1-80382-315-720231002

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problematic, as the key through which we can shed light to the processes which led to these specific readings of the past. Third, it engages with the construction of the specific readings of ancient Greece as an originary tale of Europe or the West and how such reading serves to give primacy to white, Christian, European/ Western history, politics, economics, knowledge or to put it otherwise, the way in which the West has built its supremacy by claiming a specific reconstruction of the ancient Greek past. Lastly, the chapter refers to the main consequences of such expropriation of the Greek past by the West and of its imposition on the country from above. It also introduces a hypothesis: that we can use the case of Greek antiquity as an archetype, as a lens through which we can dissect the ways the colonisation of the past determines the conceptual present of the colonised.

The Practical Past In March 2021, a few days before the celebration of the bicentenary of the Greek War of Independence, this cover (https://www.avgi.gr/koinonia/382223_bimagazino-entyse-ton-mitsotaki-iroa-toy-1821) was set to appear for the weekend edition of one of the most influential newspapers in Greece. The cover, which was meant to commemorate what this volume aims to examine and reflect upon – that is the meaning of revolts, revolutions, nationalism, the construction of new political subjects in modernity and so on – depicts some of the most famous heroes of the Greek National Revolution in the form of some of the Greek and European leaders of today, with the current Greek Prime Minister taking the front seat to lead Greece to the heights of European grandeur. There are many ways to read this picture, this representation of the past, but I will stick with the one that seems to me the most pertinent for the endeavour this chapter has undertaken: that is, to demonstrate a particular use of the past, its colonisation for the purpose of creating hierarchies of civilisations, hierarchies of races, hierarchies of nations and of their histories, and what concerns this contribution particularly, hierarchies of knowledge. Hence, the way I propose to read this ludicrous yet telling magazine cover is via a concept introduced by Michael Oakeshott (1933, 1983), the ‘practical past’. The case in point is a magnificent example of deployment of the practical past, of a history that is supposed to give ‘lessons’ to today, of the idea of a ‘living past’ that is supposed to guide the present. The practical past, the one that writes history from the standpoint of today, invites us to ratify, to glorify, to warrant, not the past, but the present. Such is the case in point where we are invited to see the past, the glorified moment of national revolution as an effort which implicitly – yet teleologically – leads from General Makriyiannis to Prime Minister Mistotakis, from the national heroine Bouboulina to national socialite Yianna Aggelopoulou. This crude instrumentalisation of the past is, of course, not new in political propaganda and no government in Greece has resisted the temptation of evoking convenient aspects of national history to legitimise its trajectory to power and construct its own historical mission.

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However, the practical past is not a sin exclusively committed by politicians: historians commit the same mistake by reading the past through the lens of today. This is to an extent understandable as it is the present, or otherwise, the social context which forms our epistemological standpoints and their concomitant questions, aporias and dilemmas. However, what is the limit between a critical questioning of dominant modes of reading the past and the instrumentalisation of the past for the purpose of satisfying the political needs of the present? In other words, where is the limit between intellectual inquiry and political expediency?

Anti-eurocentrism as a Problematic This reference to the practical past was necessary before submitting the argument of this contribution because at first sight, one could argue that what is submitted here, i.e., the examination of the colonisation of the past, makes the same mistake. Postcolonial studies – whose birthplace is India – and more recently decolonial thinking which developed in Latin America, but also significant contributions from Africa, have taken historical inquiry by storm. The radical questioning of the source of knowledge in modernity, the popularisation of the Foucauldian thesis that power and knowledge are inextricably related, and the rise of standpoint epistemologies have all contributed to the crystallisation of new approaches to knowledge production, which could be described by the broad term ‘anti-Eurocentric critique’. The critical thrust of these converging approaches – albeit their diverging epistemological underpinning and their diverging orientation with regards to overcoming the deadlock of Eurocentric thought – could be summarised as follows: (1) They contest and attack the very foundations of Eurocentric or Western social science and their foundational categories, such as modernity, the Enlightenment, reason, progress, even cherished political concepts and values, such as democracy, equality, human rights and so on, because they see these concepts as instrumental in producing hierarchies about the world (e.g. Bhambra 2007, 2010; Chakrabarty 2000; Connell 2007; De Sousa Santos 2002; Prakash 1990; Said 2003 [1978]; Sayyid 2003; Spivak 1990; Subrahmanyam 1997). One central tenet within this line of thought is that the emergence of Western science as the authoritative source of knowledge in modernity cannot be thought as a neutral development because this process produced hierarchies of knowledge (science over religion), hierarchies of culture (the Western over the Oriental) and of historical eras (civilisation over ‘barbarity’), and in that sense, it also produced inequalities. The disenchantment with modernity and the deconstruction of Western colonial power produced a significant realignment of positions in the relationship between power, knowledge and location. As domains of knowledge undergo reorganisation, postwestern thinking challenges the established order of knowledge and questions the hierarchical boundaries of the West versus the East, and more broadly, the West versus the Rest. The anti-Eurocentric

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problematic derives from such reconsideration of ‘Western’, ‘modern’ knowledge, which is thought as sustaining its primacy by inflicting a kind of epistemic violence over other ways of knowing the world. It is not hard to discern that such hierarchies are still operational today nor it is hard to see the kind of work they perform in warranting the present: from the War on Terror and the ongoing dismantlement of Arabic societies to the unfolding of the refugee and migrant drama, binary oppositions such as the West vs the East, the civilised vs the barbaric, the developed vs the backward, the liberated entrepreneurial woman of the West vs the subordinated and deplorable woman of the Rest of the World, are familiar tropes in the ways politics is conducted today, as we speak, not in some distant past. (2) Besides contesting the neutral or value-free role of such concepts in structuring the past and in warranting both historical and contemporary inequalities, these approaches, the postcolonial and decolonial one, propose in different degrees to read the past through the lens of the foundational event of colonialism and they also propose ways of developing new constitutive vocabularies, in a way, they aspire to re-found social sciences either by drawing from local/indigenous knowledge as the decolonial strand does (e.g. Mignolo and Walsh 2018), or by focussing on the relational history between the coloniser and the colonised, as approaches based on hybridity do (Mbembe 2021). My own effort to introduce the colonisation of the past as key in understanding the foundational processes through which hierarchies acquire their status in modernity, and, consequently, to understand how the past was operationalised at the time, is, naturally, inspired by this broadly anti-Eurocentric tradition, which seeks to question and historicise the genealogy of our concepts and values as well as the conceptual grammar of our own epistemic languages. Nonetheless, despite these conceptual affinities the perceptive introduced here differs in that it takes distance from those trends which read history by attempting to transpose preoccupations and concerns belonging to the present on the historical agents of the time. Various histories which operationalised identity markers, such as gender or race for instance, gave us a new understanding of the past, as opposed to the various modernisation and failed modernisation stories, and sought to bring to the fore the subjugated histories, hidden by the very processes of becoming a modern nation-state. But along with these efforts, a new ‘practical past’ emerged: one that historians and social scientists seek to apply to the past the political expediencies of the present. Hence, various historical figures and events (e.g. Papadaki’s [2016] postcolonial reading of Adamantios Korais) were interpreted in innovative yet rather monosemantic ways, as agents of inequality, as having failed to advocate or bring about a more equal society, less racist, less sexist, less homophobic, less classist, less anti-Semitic, less Islamophobic, less anthropocentric and more attentive to animal rights and so on. The list has the potential to grow exponentially as our own societies and the claims to knowledge and the public sphere are getting more democratised.

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Yet, this is not what I propose here: I do not propose to read the Greek War of Independence through a postcolonial lens that would focus, for example, on the ways nineteenth-century Greece functioned as a colony, or the ways it still acts as a neo-colony. This is not an argument that would seek to give space to silenced voices, not a history from below that would give visibility to the everyday heroes of the Revolution, albeit recognising the epistemological cum political significance of such intellectual efforts. What I propose here is to see the case of Greece to be born, the case of Greece as imagined by Europe, which supported Greece’s claim to independence, as an archetypical instance of colonisation of the past, as an archetype of colonising the histories (and, as such the present too) of many other countries, which found themselves subjugated to the forces of colonial expansion.

From a Relational to a Purist Conceptualisation of the Past It is by now a truism to say that the European powers did not support the Greek Revolution because they were moved by the struggle of Greeks, of those Ottoman subjects, which were considered quite backward by the very European standards of the time, but because of the particular significance ancient Greece held for the European imaginary (Heraclides and Dialla 2017). It is this imaginary that I want to dissect here – necessarily in a schematic way due to space restrictions – because it can allow us to understand the role that ancient Greece played in the production of knowledge about the world at the time, in the colonisation of the past which was later exported to the rest of the world. In other words, I submit that instead of reading Greece through the examples of India, Latin America, Africa or what has been recently called the ‘Global South’, to reverse the perspective and to use Greece as an entry point to understand how knowledge about these countries, areas and lands was produced by examining the colonisation of the past in Greece, or the fabrication and instrumentalisation of Greek Antiquity. First, let us examine what the archetype was and what kind of effects it produced. Martin Bernal’s seminal and quite controversial work Black Athena (1987) which narrates the ‘fabrication of Greece’ as he names the first volume of his work, can be quite illuminating in that respect. Bernal’s Black Athena argues for the Afroasiatic roots of the ancient Greek cosmos, however, what is more interesting for the argument submitted here is the way he demonstrated the ideological and political processes which led to an epistemic shift of major significance for the emergence of modern Eurocentrism, for the modern birth of the ancient Greek ideal as we know it. In a nutshell, as Bernal shows, up until the beginning of the nineteenth century, a very different representation of ancient Greece to the one we know of today – what he calls the ‘Ancient model’ – was in use: the conventional view at the time considered Greek culture arising as a result of colonisation, around 1500 BC, by Egyptians and Phoenicians who had civilised the native inhabitants. This ‘Ancient model’ emphasised the relations that ancient Greece maintained at the time with the civilisations in close proximity, and most notably with the Egyptian and Semitic ones. It was a relational model based on

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cultural exchange. As Bernal explains, this model had no major deficiencies or weaknesses in terms of explanatory power (Bernal 1987, p. 2). However, at the end of the eighteenth century, gaining gradually momentum during the nineteenth and culminating at the beginning of the twentieth century – which as we know was the peak of imperialist antagonism between European powers – a new model of representation was introduced, the one that he calls the ‘Aryan model’. As Bernal argues – based on a swiping account of various sources – the Aryan model, for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Romantics and followers of racist theories it was simply unacceptable for Greece, which was seen not merely as the epitome of Europe but also as its childhood, as an era of purity, to have been the result of the mixture of native Europeans and colonising Africans and Semites (Bernal 1987). Therefore, the Ancient Model had to be overthrown and replaced by something more suitable for the political expediency of the time. The new acceptable modern Aryan model claimed that there had been an invasion from the north – unreported in ancient tradition – which had overwhelmed the local ‘Aegean’ or ‘Pre-Hellenic’ culture (Bernal 1987). Greek civilisation was henceforth seen as the result of the mixture of the Indo-European-speaking Hellenes and their indigenous subjects. The novelty that this model introduced was the idea of ‘pure races’ and ‘pure civilisations’, since during the nineteenth century, when ideologies of racial classifications gained political momentum as well as scientific status, considered undesirable, if not disastrous, for races to mix; to be creative, to be worthy of great deeds and a great future, a civilisation needed to be ‘racially pure’ (Bernal 1987, p. 29). Within this nexus of power/knowledge it became self-evident that the greatest ‘race’ in world history was the European or Aryan one and it alone had the capacity – if not the right – to conquer all other peoples and to create advanced, dynamic civilisations – as opposed to the allegedly static and incapable of innovation societies ruled by Asians or Africans (Bernal 1987, p. 32). As ‘progress’ started to become the new dominant paradigm for societal status, dynamism and change were considered more valuable than stability, time and especially fast-paced, linear time became the main prism through which societies were accessed in the new developmental and stadial understanding of history. Together with that nationalism as an ideology was making tremendous breakthroughs in the ‘age of revolution’ (Hobsbawm 1996 [1962]), space also started to be seen in a different light: the soil and the ‘blood’, and together with it ‘races’ and ‘people’ were henceforth thought as an immutable essence, which needed to be preserved in a state of ‘purity’ at all costs. The ‘Aryan model’ did exactly that: not only it clearly separated the ‘dynamic’ and ‘creative’ West from the ‘static’ and ‘unimaginative’ Orient in terms of culture, but also separated Greece from its immediate neighbours – that is from the Near and Middle East and Northern Africa – tracing the biological origin of inhabitants of ancient Greece to the North. As such, the ‘Aryan model’ introduced the idea of ‘racial purity’ to the immense cultural capital represented by Greek Antiquity and allowed the West to claim a ‘pure origin’ in cultural cum biological terms. The global resonance of such shift in the treatment of other ancient civilisations, whose status had shifted as a result of the redefinition of Greek Antiquity is

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rather telling: some, like the case of India, found themselves on the ‘right side’ of the fence because of perceptions which aimed once more to legitimise European/ Western supremacy over the rest of the world: the passion of Romantic linguistics in the eighteenth century for ancient India was largely due to the perception that a fundamental relationship existed between Sanskrit and European languages (Bernal 1987, pp. 224–280). Similarly, others fell on the ‘wrong side’ of the fence: China’s representation, for instance, shifted from an enlightened and refined civilisation to a ‘society filled with drugs, dirt, corruption and torture’ (Bernal 1987, p. 29), while both the British and French empires had turned against China and while the Opium Wars were waging in the mid-nineteenth century. Egypt, a civilisation admired during the previous centuries, fell in disrepute increasingly during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and was henceforth seen by Romantic scholars as ‘essentially morbid and lifeless’ (Bernal 1987, p. 30). Yet, it was not only academics who henceforth saw ‘Egyptian culture as a static and sterile cultural cul de sac’ (Bernal 1987). As Bernard explains, a major source of hostility towards the ‘Ancient Model’ as a core influence on Ancient Greece was Christianity: ‘it is deeply significant that the Ancient Model was first challenged between 1815 and 1830, for these were years of intense reaction against the Masonic rationalism seen to be behind the French Revolution; and years of Romanticism and Christian revival. Further, as Christianity was identified with Europe, the two could come together with the notion of progress in a philhellenic movement which backed the struggle of the Christian, European and “young” Greeks against the “old” Asian, infidel Turks’ (Bernal 1987, p. 31). By the end of the nineteenth century, Egyptian had acquired pretty much the same characteristics that Orientalism and Eurocentrism of the time had started to attribute to Africans: ‘gay, pleasure-loving, childishly boastful and essentially materialistic’ (Bernal 1987, p. 30). Similarly with the case of Ancient Greece and therefore Europe and the West, which were now demarcated in terms of culture cum biology, Egypt followed the reverse process: new dividing lines emerged to separate the ‘dynamic’ civilisations from the ‘morbid’ ones, but also to separate the ‘superior’ white European race from the ‘inferior’ black one, to ‘prove’ that European blood was untainted from African or Oriental blood, and, hence to edify insurmountable barriers between Ancient Greece and its descendants (i.e. the European) from their cultural and historical larger context, that of Africa and the Near/Middle East. It is not a coincidental that a similar logic remained dominant throughout the first half of the twentieth century too. While interest in national histories and the national past was increasing along with the dark turn of Europe towards forms of authoritarianism and nativism, the span of antiquity spread from classical times to the prehistorical ones. The case of Minoan civilisation is among the most notable ones when it comes to the fabrication of an internalist account of Europe: an account where cultural influences from undesired people were dismissed for the benefit of narratives of autogenesis and Greek – and therefore European – uniqueness. Sir Evans’s ‘discovery’, if not fabrication, of Minoan civilisation is rather telling in that respect: by presenting Minoan Crete as the prehistory of Classical Greece and therefore the prehistory of Europe, he had created a

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narrative which was replicating the ‘Aryan model’ of classical Greece. In this narrative – which had long lasting effects – Crete is represented as this unique space, different from the rest of Eastern Mediterranean, free of external influences, capable of transforming even the slightest evidence of foreign trace into something uniquely European. In her compelling account of Evans’s Eurocentrism at work, Schoep (2018) explains that the specific characteristics attributed to the Minoan civilisation aimed at giving substance to the idea that Crete was the birthplace of a proto-European civilisation, which was entirely separate from the great Oriental civilisation of the time: ‘This myth of the European origins of modernity was accomplished by minimizing external Eastern influences, by recasting them as adapted and transformed by the Minoans to whom were attributed extraordinary creative powers, and by drawing on contemporary racial theories that considered certain regions around the Mediterranean to be inhabited by an ancient European population of the same racial makeup as the Minoans, such as the concepts of “Eurafrica” and the “Mediterranean race”’ (Schoep 2018, p. 6). Both ‘Eurafrica’ and the ‘Mediterranean race’ were constructions stemming from the ideology of racial classification which was rampant in the nineteenth century according to this logic then, influences from North Africa were accepted because the original inhabitants of the region were thought as belonging to a white-skinned predynastic population, similarly to southwest Anatolia which was considered to be populated by people who were racially European (Schoep 2018, p. 26). By the same token, influences from eastern Anatolia, the Levante, or Mesopotamia were minimised and dismissed as the specific regions were thought as inhabited by inferior races according to the racial classifications of the time (Schoep 2018). Again it is important to pay attention to the specific characteristics that Evans had attributed to the Minoan civilisation in his effort to create an originary story for Europe, one that would account for the miracle of ‘classical Athens’ down the line and for the miracle of modern Europe, even further down the line: ‘the European spirit of individuality and freedom’ (Schoep 2018, p. 11) which anachronistically projects to Minoan Crete the characteristics of modern Western Europe and the spirit of the Enlightenment served to establish European uniqueness, to warrant the authenticity of the ‘European spirit’ as well as to legitimise European colonialism as a mission civilisatrice. In this logic of European supremacy, Evans also dismissed the Phoenician system of writing as the oldest and most significant by claiming that ‘the Phoenicians did not do more than add the finishing touches’ to the Cretan prehistoric writing system (Schoep 2018, p. 10). Similarly, based more on ideology rather than archaeological data, Evans had created the theory of Crete as a partially matriarchal society, where women enjoyed a degree of social superiority, again as yet another degree of separation from Semitic and Indo-European people who were seen at the time as more patriarchal (Schoep 2018, p. 21). The same goes for the representation of ancient Eastern Kingdoms as ‘decadent, despotic, monolithic and stagnant’, and therefore as the opposite of progressive, democratic and egalitarian Europe (Schoep 2018, p. 20). Evans’s view of the Minoan civilisation as the ‘emancipation of the European genius’ (quoted in Schoep 2018, p. 12) or his statement that

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‘Crete stands forth again today as the champion of the European spirit against the yoke of Asia’ (quoted in Schoep 2018, p. 20) speak volumes not only of his own Eurocentric project but also of the heavy influence that such ideas exercised at the time. It goes without saying that from the fabricated whiteness of Greek marbles (Talbot 2018) to the whole tradition of classics – which incidentally undergoes a crisis of identity precisely because its ideological role in reproducing white supremacy is being discussed for the first time (Poser 2021) – the Aryan model, the model of racial and civilisational purity, the one of parthenogenesis of ancient Greece and thus Europe or the West, is the one that dominates both the public sphere and the academy. The fabrication of this kinship between ancient Greece and Europe (Appiah 2016) is so well embedded in the originary accounts of the West that the philosopher John Stuart Mill could talk about the Battle of Marathon, in which the Greeks defeated the first Persian attack in 490 BC, as one of the most important events in ‘English history’ (Appiah 2016). What the replacement of the Ancient model by the Aryan one – to use Bernal’s terminology – did was to recreate ancient Greece as an empty vessel, in which Europe could be born as an entity, as an intellectual force, or as the kind of power/knowledge, which would categorise, catalogise the world, which could divide between civilisation and barbarity, between noble and ignoble races, between subjects of freedom – that is citizens endowed with rights – and slaves.

Conclusion: Greek Antiquity as Eurocentrism What were the implications of such shift in understanding the past? What where the implications of moving from an understanding of the past as relational to the creation of a purist, white, self-generating past? What were the ramifications of this particular colonisation of somebody else’s past, its appropriation as their own originary story? We can discern three interrelated outcomes stemming from this intellectual project of Europeanisation of the Greek past: implications for Greece, implications for the colonised world, and implications for social theory and epistemology. The effects of this new model, of this archetype of Eurocentrism, on Greece itself were powerful and rather long-lasting: modern Greeks were led to see themselves as the guardians of this largely fabricated classical heritage, they found themselves permanently ‘under Western eyes’ and with a sense of dual responsibility: ‘a responsibility to prove to the classical Greeks that their modern descendants were worthy of them; and a responsibility towards the western Europeans to be worthy and able stewards of that heritage’ (Hamilakis 2007, p. 82). But it also gave birth to the dominant theory of an alleged split Greek identity according to which there are two political cultures in operation: a modernising/ reformist culture associated with the momentum created by the European Union and an underdog culture associated with populist rhetoric and the Orient (Diamandouros 1993), or between an Apollonian culture (henceforth European) and a Dionysiac one (henceforth Oriental) (Tziovas 1995, 2001). The anxiety over

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the West versus Oriental orientation of the country defined the political debates since the age of revolutions and the nineteenth century disputes between traditionalists and modernisers to the present day, and it is evoked at significant moments of ‘crisis’. For instance, the 2008 Athens riots were also framed by this dilemma, between a modern, Western, legalistic, orderly culture and the unruly, uncivilised, barbaric, underdog culture of rioters and protesters who tarnish the image of the country abroad (Vasilaki 2017). From this perspective, the 2008 events were interpreted as the outcome of absence or incompleteness of Europeanisation: as a lack of modernising reforms (Alivizatos 2009), or of social responsibility (Veremis 2008), as an effect of the underdevelopment of the civil society (Mouzelis 2008, 2009), or as symptoms of a problematic culture which institutionalises resistance and sanctifies lawlessness in the form of civil disobedience (Kalyvas 2008). The recent Greek economic crisis, roughly between 2010 and 2015, was also explained in terms of a clash between a Western enlightened culture where instrumental rationality prevails and an uncivilised, Oriental, ‘populist’ culture which needed to be eradicated for the country to progress. Let us note here in passim the deeply class-determined character of such divisions, namely, the wise Westernised elites versus the uneducated Oriental lower classes who are not even in position to understand what is best for the country (the infamous statement by ex-MP of the political party ‘Potami’, which was a main proponents of ‘Europeanisation’ Niki Liberaki that ‘Those who are poor are not evil, stupid or uneducated. They just make wrong choices at critical moments’ ahead of the 2015 referendum is such a case in point). But also, the very notion of the country’s ‘debt’ not only in financial terms but in moral ones too, as the ‘indebtedness’ either of the Europeans towards Greece, the ‘cradle of democracy and civilisation’, or of the Greeks themselves towards their ancestors (Hamilakis 2016), as a kind of shared ground between Greece’s most fervent defenders and its most ruthless critics (Plantzos 2019) exemplifies the immense – even overdetermining – symbolic power of ‘ancient Greece’. It goes without saying, that the very hierarchy between an enlightened European or Western and a backward Oriental identity is an effect of the logic of colonialism, the comparisons and analogies employed, the exquisite ideal that could only be achieved through the rationalisation and the modernisation of Greek life according to the European standards, belong to the language of colonialism. Yet, this purist, Europeanised ideal is significant not only because of its effect on Greece, but it is also significant because of its global resonance in the following sense: it was constitutive to the creation of racial categories of the time, and as such it did not only legitimise colonialism (in many cases that goes way beyond the WWII, like in the revisionist readings of colonialism today, e.g. Ferguson 2003 or Gilley’s revisionist account from 2017), but also because it was constitutive of internalist accounts of Europe, modernity and capitalism – both in Marxist and Weberian varieties (e.g. Anievas 2015; Bhambra 2007). An originary tale of Europe was created on the basis of this purified Greek past, which did not belong to the Greeks anymore: besides, if Greeks wanted to be allowed to partake in this originary tale, in this much-desired Western, modern, civilised identity ‘all [they] (. . .) have to do in order to be what they used to be, is to mimic the

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Germans’ as von Maurer, king Otto’s legislator had advised in 1836 (quoted in Panourgia 2004, p. 174). This new yardstick – under the name of Europe or the West, or modernity in social theory – whose conceptual articulation was made possible by claiming a purified, unique, autogenic ancient Greece – found uses across the colonised world of the time and is still very much alive, as a political tool of domination but, most importantly, as a tool of generating knowledge about the world. On the political level, the European reading of the past, produced effects of two kinds: first, countries like India or Egypt, for instance, were trapped, in a way very similar that Greece did, in the logic of measuring themselves against a golden past – glorified or fallen out of grace according to political expediency – also constructed mainly by Western scholars, and repeatedly reproduced by local scholars, a past that could never be revamped, let alone the much more complex relationship of Japan with its own past in constant comparison with Western ideals. Moreover, the new nation-stares which emerged after the anticolonial struggle embedded the colonial gaze, the colonial way of looking at their own past as a non-history, as exotic or touristified cultures which do not belong to civilisation, but also reconstructed their own histories, monuments, commemorations, national symbolic lives after European categories and criteria. The history of Ancient Greece is taught in schools around the world as Europe’s history, but also as a history which places everyone at a developmental course where Europe or the West (not Greece, whose Europeanness is a constant point of contention) leads the race and everyone else follows in line based on the extent they assimilate Western attributes. Greece in that sense is an archetypical case where a people was led to view their own history through Western eyes, before having the chance to address it in its own terms and perhaps the most blatant example of exclusion from one’s own past. The origins of modern Eurocentrism lie in the colonised Greek past: Europe is predicated on the ideological appropriation and reconstruction of a purist, absolutised, internalist and self-referential representation of Ancient Greece. To conclude, what this chapter attempted to do is to demonstrate – however schematically – the ideological construction, the nexus of discourses and intellectual moves which enabled the West to claim superiority and parthenogenesis. The fabrication of Greek antiquity, classical as well as pre-historical, was operationalised to create internalist accounts of Europe, to move away from conceptions of the past as relational and co-constitutive and towards a purist representation, which served to legitimise the new, modern hierarchies, the new classifications of races, people and cultures. In the face of imperialist, colonial expansion, which entailed, among other things mingling and proximity with undesired others, new artificial degrees of separation became necessary and the colonisation of ancient Greece at the time served – and still serves – precisely that purpose.

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Oakeshott, M. (1933) Experience and Its Modes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Oakeshott, M. (1983) On History and Other Essays. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Panourgia, N. (2004) ‘Colonizing the Ideal: Neoclassical Articulations and European Modernities’, Aggelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities, 9(2), pp. 165–180. Papadaki, L. (2016) ‘O Adamάntio§ Koraή§ kai h ‘Ekpolitistikή Apostolή’ th§ Ellhnikή§ Paideίa§. Mia Meta-Apoikiakή Anάgnvsh’, Modern Greek Studies Online, 2(A), pp. 1–40. Plantzos, D. (2019) ‘We Owe Ourselves to Debt: Classical Greece, Athens in Crisis, and the Body as Battlefield’, Social Science Information, 58(3), pp. 469–492. Poser, R. (2021) ‘He Wants to Save Classics From Whiteness. Can the Field Survive?’, New York Times Magazine (Accessed: 08 May 2022). Prakash, G. (1990) ‘Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from the Indian Historiography’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 32, pp. 383–408. Said, E. (2003)[1978] Orientalism. London: Penguin Books. Sayyid, B.S. (2003)[1997] A Fundamental Fear. Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Islamism. London: Zed Books Ltd. Schoep, I. (2018) ‘Building the Labyrinth: Arthur Evans and the Construction of Minoan Civilization’, American Journal of Archaeology, 122(1), pp. 5–32. Spivak, G.C. (1990) ‘Poststructuralism, Marginality, Postcoloniality and Value’, in Collier, P. and Geyer-Ryan, H. (eds.) Literary Theory Today. New York: Cornell University Press, pp. 198–222. Subrahmanyam, S. (1997) ‘Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia’, Modern Asian Studies, 31(3), pp. 735–762. Talbot, M. (2018) ‘The Myth of Whiteness in Classical Structure’, The New Yorker (Accessed: 08 May 2022). Tziovas, D. (1995) ‘H Dytikή Fantasίvsh toy Ellhnikoύ kai h Anazήthsh toy Ypereunikoύ’, in Episthmonikό Sympόsio Έuno§-Krάto§-Eunikismό§, 21–22 Ianoyarίoy 1994. Auήna: Etaireίa Spoydώn Neoellhnikoύ Politismoύ kai Genikή§ Paideίa§, pp. 339–361. Tziovas, D. (2001) ‘Beyond the Acropolis: Rethinking Neohellenism’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 19(2), pp. 189–220. Vasilaki, R. (2017) ‘“We Are an Image from the Future”: Reading Back the Athens 2008 Riots’, Acta Scientiarum. Education, 39(2), pp. 153–161. Veremis, T. (2008) ‘Atomikή kai Syllogikή Eyuύnh’ [Individual and Collective Responsibility]. Available at http://news.kathimerini.gr/4dcgi/_w_articles_politics_ 1_14/12/2008_296061

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Chapter 3

Revolutions and Constitutionalism in Africa: The Duty to Revolt in the Sudanese and Congolese Constitutions1 Dunia P. Zongwe

Introduction A group of armed soldiers bristling with guns appeared on the national broadcaster on 23 January 2022, in Burkina Faso, announcing that they had deposed President Roch Kabor´e. Although the majority of the Burkinab´e had elected President Kabor´e, the soldiers claimed that he failed to protect the people from the jihadists, who now control most of this West African country (see Burkina Faso’s Coup and Political Situation 2022). If anything, this coup d’´etat shows that, though doctrinal writings, international norms and national constitutions forbid people from accessing state power by force, the mere fact that a person has ascended to the throne democratically does not guarantee that his subjects will always accept his rule and refrain from unhorsing him. In a very practical sense, a leader who exercises his power against the wishes of his people or by offending the constitution should expect that his people will seek to dethrone him at any point during the currency of his term (see Locke 1690, sec 149). However, the heart of the problem lies in the truism that no constitutions, no rules provide people with clear guidance as to the exact time and the circumstances where citizens ought to move against a political leader who acts in illegitimate ways. Not even the well-established principle of popular sovereignty guide people in this matter (Besides, except for constitutions such as those adopted in South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), constitutions do not expressly entitle the citizenry to rebel against an illegitimate ruler.). This is where the social contract theory comes into play. According to the social contract theory, the legitimacy of a government rests on the consent of the governed. A government that acts ‘contrary to the trust reposed in [it]’ (Locke 1689, sec 149) or that fails to fulfil its obligations under the social contract will trigger citizens’ right to alter or abolish it (see also Hinnebusch 2020, p. 1). The social contract theory holds that people have the right to revolt Duty to Revolt, 29–47 Copyright © 2024 Dunia P. Zongwe Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited doi:10.1108/978-1-80382-315-720231003

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against a government that acts against the interests of its citizens or breaches the terms of the social contract (Rousseau 1762 (1923), pp. 14 and 228–229). Hence this chapter appraises the principle, as informed by the social contract theory, that citizens have the duty to revolt against individuals who access or exercise power by force or by violating the constitution. It studies and compares the curious cases of the South Sudanese and Congolese constitutions to shed light on the duty to revolt (or ‘D2R’). Through those case studies, the chapter also identifies circumstances where such duty arises. The duty to revolt rests on three premises, at a minimum. First, popular sovereignty is what ultimately makes, remakes or unmakes polities; and as such it underpins the duty to revolt (see also Rousseau 1762, pp. 25–29, equating ‘sovereignty’ with ‘the general will’). Second, the duty to revolt presupposes a thicker concept of citizenship and, in the specific circumstances of Africa, the inclusion of duties in that concept, especially the duty to revolt. Finally, insofar as the texts of nearly all constitutions preclude any person from upending the constitutional order, the duty to revolt assumes that violating the letter of the constitution prohibiting the overthrow of the constitutional order is necessary to precisely – and ironically – preserve the spirit of the constitution. This duty to revolt features in the scholarly literature, but its application in African contexts raises some particularly vexing questions. Given that the continent already houses some of the world’s most unstable and fragile states (see The Fund for Peace 2022), the question becomes whether performing the duty to revolt will not further destabilise already unstable and fragile states. Roughly one week after the coup that forced out President Kabor´e, journalist Toulemonde (2022) exclaimed that Africa’s is ‘a continent of putschists’, remarking that the past 32 years have witnessed. . . 32 coups. In Burkina Faso, two coups took place in 2022 alone. Since this apparently noble duty to revolt can destabilise putsch hotspots, political scientists and constitutionalists must demarcate the line between permissible and non-permissible avenues for revolution. In this chapter, I endeavour to untangle this dilemma through a ‘republican’ contract. The ‘republican contract’ provides a more suitable framework for African states like the Congo and South Sudan to evaluate government legitimacy and determine the duty to revolt. It emphasises citizen duties and community values instead of the individualism that pervades modern constitutionalism and without undoing those states. By combining cardinal elements of contractarianism and republican constitutionalism, the republican contract offers a morally and constitutionally defensible basis for asserting the duty to revolt, specifying the situations warranting it, and ultimately bringing forth a just political order, a new dawn, a future bright.

Governance and the Social Contract Why should political theorists worry about the duty of revolution? Or simply put, why should they worry about the absence of any such duty? In short, without the

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duty to revolt, a leader who has gained political power in a country would be able to use his or her constitutional access to power to rule arbitrarily and thus hold his entire people hostage. Alternatively, a person who may have toppled a government, perhaps through the duty to revolt, would not be allowed to stay in power even if he or she rules in line with his or her people’s expectations. The foregoing shows that the duty to revolt performs an essential function and occupies a central position in any genuine democracy or in a country that strives to achieve such a democratic system. This question boils down to governance and its legitimacy. The social contract theory better explains the right of citizens to turn against an illegitimate government, as it focuses on the idea of the withdrawal of consent as a catalyst for revolt. A cornerstone of normative political science (Revkin and Ahram 2020, p. 2), this theory originated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the philosophical ideas of Thomas Hobbes (1651), John Locke (1690), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762). Hobbes (1651, pp. 80–81) believed in the idea of a ‘contract’ as a means to avoid the state of nature, which he viewed as violent and chaotic. For their part, Rousseau (1762, pp. 18, 22–23, 25–29, 32–33, 49, 51, 54–56, 90–92) and Locke (1690, secs 96–99, 112, 140, 142, 175, and 227) believed in ‘the general will’ and ‘consent of the people’, respectively, and in the idea that governments should act in the interests of the majority (see also Revkin and Ahram 2020, p. 2). Today, scholars utilise this theory to assess the legitimacy of governments (see, e.g. Revkin and Ahram 2020 and Hinnebusch 2020).

The Social Contract The social contract theory postulates that the legitimacy of a government derives from the consent of the governed. This means that, if the government reneges on the terms of the social contract, as determined by the citizens, then the citizens have the right withdraw their consent and to revolt against that government (see Hinnebusch 2020, p. 1). A second tenet of this theory maintains that the social contract creates a mutual obligation between the governed and the government, with the latter being tasked with protecting the rights and interests of the former. If the social contract no longer serves the interests of the governed, it can be modified or dissolved.

The Duty to Revolt in the Constitution This chapter spotlights the DRC and South Sudan to enlighten the duty to revolt as oriented by the social contract theory. These two countries in Africa stand out as exceptional because their constitutions expressly provide for the right or duty to revolt. Through these case studies, I aim to clarify for policymakers, scholars and activists the circumstances where the duty to revolt arises and the possible consequences of performing this duty. Crucially, the two cases buttress the ‘republican contract’ I advocate.

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Moreover, studying these two countries also underscores the delicate balance between protecting the interests of citizens and maintaining stability within the state. The case studies serve to illustrate how exercising the right to revolt can lead to further instability in fragile states, and how this exercise throw up important questions about the responsible and judicious invocation of this duty.

Congolese and South Sudanese Political Contexts The DRC and South Sudan have both undergone profound constitutional changes over the past few decades. The Congo has produced several constitutions since independence from Belgium in 1960, with its latest constitution being promulgated in February 2006 after the people adopted it through a referendum conducted on 18 December 2005. The 2006 Congolese Constitution brought about several dramatic changes, notably the establishment of a state based on four institutions (the presidency, the government, the legislature and the judiciary), and an extensive catalogue of human rights and fundamental freedoms in order to foster peace and prosperity. The state of South Sudan, on the other hand, formed as a result of a US-backed peace agreement signed in January 2005, aimed at ending decades of war between the Khartoum-based Sudanese government and southern rebel groups. The country officially gained independence on 9 July 2011, after the people of South Sudan voted by a referendum held in January that same year to secede South Sudan from the rest of Sudan. The first and current constitution of the world’s newest country got signed on 7 July 2011. The South Sudanese Constitution acts as a ‘transition constitution’, pending a final constitution. The 2011 Transition Constitution has organised the state as a presidential republic, and it contains a bill of rights. Despite their dissimilarities, the DRC and South Sudan both struggle to maintain stable and functioning polities, despite having relatively new constitutions that protect human rights and aspire to stabilise and pacify their environments. Both have largely not succeeded in providing basic services to their citizens. The Congo has grappled with widespread corruption, civil strife and political instability, while South Sudan endures ongoing political conflict and communal violence. As a consequence, the two countries contend with extreme humanitarian emergencies: The ongoing civil war has displaced an estimated 4 million people (out of population of 11.5 million) in South Sudan (World Health Organization 2023); continuing rebel activity and mass atrocities in eastern provinces in the Congo have exacerbated the humanitarian disaster there and prompted Catholic Church Pope Francis to describe this catastrophe as ‘a forgotten genocide’ (Al Jazeera 2023).

The South Sudanese Constitution The South Sudanese Constitution places a duty on the peoples of South Sudan to revolt against their rulers if they access or use political power in a way that

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contravenes the letter or the spirit of the Constitution. Specifically, Article 4 of the 2011 Constitution, entitled ‘Defense of the Constitution’, stipulates that: (1) No person or group of persons shall take or retain control of State power except in accordance with this Constitution. (2) Any person or group of persons who attempts to overthrow the constitutional government, or suspend or abrogate this Constitution commits treason. (3) Every citizen shall have the duty to resist any person or group of persons seeking to overthrow the constitutional government, or suspend or abrogate this Constitution. (4) . . . The Congolese Constitution Like the South Sudanese Constitution, the Congolese Constitution also enshrines the duty to revolt. Article 64 of the Congolese Constitution obliges Congolese citizens to resist and revolt against the government if an individual or a group of individuals come to the throne or use governmental power in a manner that offends the terms or the spirit of the Congolese Constitution. Article 64 of the 2006 Congolese Constitution lays down that: All Congolese have the duty to oppose any individual or group of individuals who seize power by force or who exercise it in violation of the provisions of this Constitution. Any attempt to overthrow the constitutional regime constitutes an offence against the nation and the State, an offence which is not subject to the statute of limitations. It is punished in accordance with the law. Longstanding, veteran opposition leader, Etienne Tshisekedi, appealed to the duty to revolt several times when he fought against efforts by the regime of Joseph Kabila to overstay or delay the elections. Ironically, the current President, who is Etienne Tshisekedi’s son, has used his mandate in such a fashion that some members of the opposition accuse him of a dictatorial drift – the same sort of behaviour that led his father to conjure Article 64 and the duty to revolt. Parallels Between the Two D2R Clauses The two constitutional clauses follow a similar four-pronged format: (1) unconstitutional access or exercise, (2) affirmation of duty to revolt, (3) attempts and (4) punishment. The two clauses first prohibit the access or exercise of state power in defiance of the Constitution; they then criminalise any attempt to overthrow a constitutional government, or to suspend or abrogate the constitution; they create a duty to revolt; and they finally punish any attempt to overthrow the constitutional order, or to suspend or abrogate the constitution.

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Table 1. Indicators of Governance. Object

Indicator

Country Score Indexed

Comments

Democracy Freedom in the World, DRC 19% Not free Freedom House (2022) S Sudan 1% Not free; tie with Syria as least free countries (out of 210 countries and territories) 20% Ranked 166th least Corruption Corruption Perception DRC Index (CPI), transparent (out of 180 Transparency countries) International (2022) S Sudan 13% Ranked 178th least transparent, second most corrupt; tie with Syria Fragility Fragile States Index, DRC 6th most fragile state The Fund for Peace (out of 179 states) (2022) S Sudan 3rd most fragile state (tie with Syria) after Somalia and Yemen (i.e. most fragile)

The Congolese and South Sudanese constitutions penalise conduct beyond the mere access or exercise of state power in violations of those constitutions; they do not confine themselves to constitutional violations. Indeed, apart from attempts to suspend or abrogate the constitution, the two D2R clauses criminalise any attempts to overthrow a constitutional government. Both the Congolese and the South Sudanese constitutions refer to the ‘duty’, but they differ on the object of the duty. The Sudanese Constitution creates a ‘duty to resist’ (art 4(3)) whereas the Congolese Constitution imposes a ‘duty to oppose’ (art 64 para 1). Likewise, constitution-makers in South Sudan and the Congo have framed these D2R clauses in slightly yet significantly different manners. To start, the respective constituent assemblies framed the duty to revolt as ‘a duty to resist’ in South Sudan and as ‘a duty to oppose’ in the Congo. Some critics may argue that neither concept encapsulates any obligation to revolt or rebel. At the very least, a duty to oppose suggest political opposition, an obligation to organise politically to oppose an illegitimate government. But that is still a far cry from a duty to engage in armed insurrection or rebellion to provoke a revolution. In addition, the South Sudanese Constitution affirms the prohibition on unconstitutional access to power directly, as a stand-alone constitutional duty (art 4(1)).

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Table 2. Categories of D2R Circumstances. Exercise Legitimate

Access Legitimate Nonlegitimate

Coups never justified; D2R absolute Coups hard to justify; D2R weak

Non-legitimate

Coups moderately justified; D2R strong Coups always justified; D2R absolute

The Congolese Constitution, however, prohibits such access indirectly, as the object of the duty to revolt. Third, though both constitutions proscribe and penalise any attempts to topple constitutional governments, the South Sudanese Constitution also criminalises and punishes attempts to suspend or abrogate the Constitution. By contrast, the text of the Congolese Constitution remains silent on constitutional suspensions and abrogations. This silence may imply that the constitution-maker in the Congo did not necessarily intend to preclude a government, legitimate or not, from suspending or abrogating the Constitution. Fourth, the scope of the D2R clauses differs as well. The South Sudanese Constitution only forbids attempts to depose a ‘constitutional government’ while its Congolese counterpart extends to a ‘constitutional regime’.

Governance: A Legitimacy Crisis The concept of ‘legitimacy crisis’ speaks to this chapter as it describes a situation where the government has failed to fulfil its obligations under the social contract and its governance is seen as unacceptable by the citizens. This breach of the social contract can result in the citizens questioning the legitimacy of the government and its authority to govern. When the government reneges on its obligations under the social contract, it infringes on the rights of the citizens. This breach of the social pact creates a legitimacy crisis and sparks off the citizens’ duty to revolt against that Hobbesian ‘Leviathan’. If the government violates the social contract, the citizens have the right to dissolve it and establish a new one that better serves their interests (see Hinnebusch 2020, p. 1; Rousseau 1762, pp. 14 and 228–229). By doing so, citizens can restore their rights and ensure that the government remains accountable to them.

Poor Governance The D2R pertains to the constitutionality of access and exercise of power. The exercise of power is generally affected by capacity, accountability and abuse issues.

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To identify the moment when the people may have withdrawn their consent from a government and when they can conjure the D2R, citizens, politicians and scholars may read and rely on certain key indicators. In particular, those indicators (for example, indexes and ratings by Freedom House, Transparency International, and the Fund for Peace) unambiguously point to poor governance in the DR Congo and South Sudan (Table 1). These indicators reveal acute deficits in democracy, transparency, and capacity. Given those indicators, the bottom line is. . . triggering the D2R in those two vulnerable countries (i.e. DRC and S Sudan) will increase their vulnerability. Hence the question: How can policymakers, scholars, constitutionalists, lawyers and activists define D2R in a manner that strengthens constitutionalism in those vulnerable states without increasing their vulnerability?

A Legitimacy Crisis I posit that poor governance leads to legitimacy crises. A crisis of legitimacy, also known as ‘legitimacy decline’ (see van Ham et al. 2017) refers to the ‘disaffection towards institutions, politics and politicians’ (Heiss 2017, p. 470). One such key institution is the government. Poor governance could justify people in defying a government. Every political institution needs diffuse popular support. However, poor governance does not always motivate the D2R. Legitimacy, on the other hand, always does. In fact, I agree with Backer (2009, p. 676) and Mac Amhlaigh (2016) in positing that legitimacy acts as ‘the very foundation’ of constitutionalism and the common denominator of its different conceptions. In the digital era, legitimacy also plays out in front of the keyboard and at one’s fingertips, as dramatised by the Arab Spring – a D2R moment propelled by social media. Thus, ‘digital constitutionalism’ articulates limits on the manner in which people exercise power in a networked society (Padovani and Santaniello 2018). Similarly, legitimacy relates to democratic governance. Seeing that democratic governance reinforces the social bond that exists between the government and the governed, the electorate expects that public policies and programmes should reflect majorly appropriate citizens’ demands and aspirations made upon the political system (Omodia and Aliu 2013). Unfortunately, political leadership on the African continent often displays blatant personalisation of power; and predatory, parochial, prebendal and patrimonial dispositions (see Omodia and Aliu 2013). Naturally, legitimacy poses more problems in undemocratic and authoritarian settings. While some scholars (e.g. Fombad 2011; Omodia 2018) have called on courts to serve as the last line of defence to arrest the authoritarian resurgence in Africa, the bitter truth is that, in those settings, judges and the courts typically lack the institutional independence from the executive, especially when a country is ruled by a junta, as in Mali, Guinea and Burkina Faso.

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Scholars have identified several clinical signs of a legitimacy crisis. To begin with, declining popular support and trust in the government often signal a legitimacy crisis. So do citizens when they take to the streets to protest against the government and its policies. Third, an economy that performs poorly, with high unemployment, inflation and low economic growth, can set off a legitimacy crisis. Political instability, including frequent changes in government, coalition-building difficulties and general chaos in the political arena, can signify a legitimacy crisis. Depicting the European Union as suffering from a legitimacy crisis, Murray and Longo (2018) singled out internal bickering among political leaders, defective governance and lost or decreased ability to solve problems. Last but not least, a government that routinely tramples on its own constitution or laws, or that fails to enforce them, may arouse a legitimacy crisis.

Governance Crises in Westphalian States The social contract theory, which holds that the legitimacy of a state’s power resides in a hypothetical agreement between the state and its subjects, does not account for the D2R in states created as a result of colonisation, where the peoples have not yet forged a nation or a cohesive whole. This is because colonial regimes often imposed borders and created ‘states’ after a Westphalian model without regard for ethnic, cultural, or linguistic identities of the peoples within those borders (see also Achebe 1983). As a result, these states typically live through histories of violence, exploitation, and oppression, which makes it hard to construct a social contract based on mutual consent and trust (Fanon 1963). This awareness calls for a republican vision of the social contract, as it backs up efforts to forge a common citizenship, a nation-state. My idea of a ‘republican contract’ stems from republican constitutionalism and proposes a solution for colonial contexts such as those in which the Congo and South Sudan emerged. Unlike the social contract theory, which fails to account for the duty to revolt in states resulting from colonisation, the republican contract recognises the history of violence in those states and acknowledges the difficulty in basing such societies on the proverbial social contract. However, the idea of a republican contract, advanced not for conservative but for progressive goals, complements the social contract theory by putting forth a framework for these countries to build a just and inclusive political order. It seeks to promote civic equality, secure individual rights, and nurture a sense of belonging among all members of the community, thereby laying the foundation for lasting and functioning democracies.

The Republican Contract: Citizenship and the Duty to Revolt After the nexus between governance and government legitimacy, the next question is, Where will the duty of revolt be from? The answer to this question is citizenship and, more precisely, the republican contract. The ‘republican contract’ idea, which emanates from republican constitutionalism, underlines the duties of citizens in weaving a common citizenship and

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aiming for the common good, rather than solely focusing on individual rights. In tune with the African conception of human rights (Mutua 1995, pp. 344–345), this concept prioritises the community and promotes civic mindedness, including the duty to revolt against unjust rule.

Citizenship and Treason Who Is a Citizen? The whole concept of citizenship can be construed strictly or broadly. In its narrow sense, ‘citizenship’ merely refers to the administrative and constitutional act of recognising a person as belonging to a certain country and, for that reason, conferring on that person specified rights and obligations, for example, the right to vote, to run for political office, to travel with that country’s passport, or to invoke diplomatic protection should anything life-threatening happen to that person while abroad. However, the duty to revolt rests on the larger understanding of ‘citizenship’. In this broader sense, a ‘citizen’ is a person who has embraced his belongingness to a given country and who has accepted a number of responsibilities and duties that flow from this rendering of citizenship. As understood through the duty to revolt, citizenship comes close to patriotism and, at core, some sort of indefectible allegiance to that country. This thick concept of citizenship is eminently political. It is a cry for better days, a call to arms, a call to defend the country, its values and whatever it stands for by any means and by offering one’s own life in an uprising, if necessary. Duties of Citizens The duty to revolt mainly implies the idea that a ‘citizen’, in the broad sense, shoulders a catalogue of duties. In the Western liberal tradition, emphasising on duties may sound like a paradox. After all, the theses of scholars like John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau really aimed at liberating the individual from the powers of the state, rather than obliging him or her to serve his or her country. It is in this fundamental respect that the African notion of rights and human rights differs from the individualism that characterise Western political, constitutional and legal thought (see especially Mutua 1995, p. 363). For Talisse (2014, pp. 99–100), the deeper question relates to why, in certain instances, citizens must prioritise their civic duties over other duties, such as religious or moral duties. Republican constitutionalists would reply that the D2R prevails over other duties where bad governance or tyranny breaks the social contract. This Republican emphasis on duties also encourages people to recognise that groups of ‘people’ have rights as well. And, this is important when reflecting, interpreting and expanding on the principle embedded in the duty to revolt. Treason Conceiving revolt as a duty has far-reaching, vexed consequences that seem to impede people from implementing this duty. First off, who is the right holder? Is

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every individual both a right holder and a duty bearer? Can anyone be sued, prosecuted, blamed for not performing the duty to revolt? And, if so, what specific crime does such omission amount to? Unlike Article 64 in the Congolese Constitution, Article 4 of the South Sudanese Constitution specifies that contraventions of the prohibition on unconstitutional access and exercise of power amounts to treason. Connecting that prohibition to the crime of treason opens up enlightening vistas on how to properly interpret the D2R. The ways in which lawmakers have defined ‘treason’ have differed across jurisdictions and periods, but at its essence this offence conveys the idea of betraying one’s regime or nation, by aiding an enemy or by attempting to overthrow the government of one’s state (Larson 2006). Treason is the prime example of ‘crimes against the state’ (Head 2011), distinct from the common category of inter-personal crimes (Dudai 2021). Casting the failure to perform one’s duty to revolt as treason evokes the image of Judas. It turns the offender into a snake, a conspirator or a deserter, and a back-stabber. On the other hand, some citizens may refrain from complying with their duty to revolt if the contexts endanger their lives, for example, during civil strife. This shows that, at the end of the day, treason (or its criminalisation) boils down to survival: of states, of nations, of political regimes, and even of the traitors themselves.

Duty to Revolt Based on what has been said in the previous sections, I can now come up with the elements that constitute the duty to revolt or the duty of revolution. The first one is that revolution is a duty, not a right. This implies that, in the face of unconstitutional access or exercise of power, people have no choice but to rise in arms against the government and the rulers. Of course, this aspect of the duty poses major problems because, if a person refuses to perform his duty to revolt, what mechanisms exist to enforce this duty? If no mechanism exists, then the duty to revolt becomes meaningless and open to abuse and manipulation. The other elements of the duty to revolt can be identified by examining their incorporation in specific constitutional provisions. This chapter zooms in on the duty to revolt as expressed and enshrined in the constitutions of South Sudan and the DRC.

The Core Idea While some people talk about a ‘right’ to revolt, others like the Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara appealed to a ‘duty’ to revolt (see Melkote 2022). The 1776 US Declaration of Independence proclaimed that revolt constituted both a ‘right’ and a ‘duty’:

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In US foreign policy, liberals and neoconservatives alike insist that it is the duty of the US to back up those making revolutions in other countries (Hendrikson 2014, p. 53). Unlike the old view that anarchy leads to tyranny, these new foreign policy experts believe that the revolutionary destruction of an old order paves the way for democracy (Hendrikson 2014). Crucially, the concept of the ‘duty to revolt’ in the conditions of colonial states like the Congo and South Sudan can be better understood through a republican interpretation of the social contract theory. This republican vision of the social contract places emphasis on citizens’ duties, including the duty to resist injustice, instead of exclusively concentrating on the rights of individuals. From the perspectives of moral philosophy and constitutionalism, the duty to revolt should arise from a republican interpretation of the social contract because it draws upon the fundamental principles of republican constitutionalism, which prioritises civic virtue, the common good, and the protection of individual rights and liberties. By framing revolt as a ‘duty’, and not merely as a ‘right’, the republican contract shifts the focus from an individual’s right to resist to a group responsibility to uphold justice and strive to preserve the commonwealth. Nonetheless, things get more complicated for the D2R when a regime seizes power as a result of a civil war or ethnic conflict. In such predicament, identifying ‘the general will’ or ‘the people’ will daunt activists, rebels, and insurgents because those wars characteristically pit two or more segments of society or ethnic groups against one another, as it did in 1994 during the Rwandan genocide.

The Sources of the Duty Where does the duty to revolt spring from? The D2R is not primarily a constitutional-legal (for instance, Rousseau), but a moral duty (for instance, Locke and Che Guevara) (see Melkote 2022). For some thinkers (Calvin), D2R comes from religion. D2R does not entirely originate from the constitution. General consensus exists that D2R flows from a higher source or authority. This implies that, even if the Sudanese or Congolese constitutions did not embody the D2R, that duty would still undergird those constitutions because they stem from sources other than the constitution, regardless of whether these sources ranked higher than the constitution. But if the sources of the D2R lie outside the constitution, what would justify that interpreters read that duty into the constitution? For Valenzuela (2009), the D2R is an actual duty completely grounded in historical experience. It does not

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rise frequently, but when the ruler performs tyrannical acts habitually (Mayhew 1965). However, when certain circumstances crop up, Mayhew explains that an individual can no longer choose to revolt, but has a duty to do so.

A Graded Approach Based on the D2R clauses of the South Sudanese and Congolese constitutions, I recommend a graded approach to the definition of the D2R. This recommendation sees D2R, not as a discrete concept, but a continuum, consisting of: (1) duty to oppose: symbolic, passive-aggressive actions that aim at signifying displeasure at violations of the constitution; (2) duty to resist: active steps taken to foil attempted or habitual abuse of power; and (3) duty to revolt: large-scale disruptions aimed at safeguarding the social contract and the constitutional order. In this definitional scheme, the ‘duty to oppose’ will apply to any violations of the Constitution that would not set in motion the duty to resist or the duty to revolt, for example, when an elected President fails to appoint a government timeously. Then, the duty to resist would kick in when any acts or statements disclose any intention to bypass the country’s constitutional requirements, for example, when the government announces that presidential or legislative elections will be delayed because it lacks enough funds or logistical capacity, as it happened in 2016 in the DRC during Kabila’s reign. As a last-resort measure, people can call upon the duty to revolt when a person or a group has accessed or exercised power in non-legitimate ways. In any event, this graded approach in defining and classifying the D2R should not be rigid. The paramount criterion for the D2R must remain the same: The abuse of state power must threaten the country’s constitutional order or a foremost value of the republican contract. Because of the normative supremacy of the constitution in almost all system of laws, throwing off a government should be a remedy of last resort. Moreover, to avoid deepening the vulnerability of fragile states, people should only deploy the D2R in exceptional, last-resort cases. But what is the last resort? It is the situation that obtains after citizens have exhausted their duties to oppose and resist. Indeed, the D2R should only apply for the most severe affronts to the constitutional order or society’s core values.

Circumstances Where Duty Arises: Access or Use of Power To avoid abuse or manipulation, policymakers, activists and citizens will need guidance. They will need to know when exactly they can take action, what circumstances will ignite their duty to revolt. In this section, I identify the

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circumstances where the duty arises. I draw the line separating legitimate uses of the duty to revolt from unlawful ones. More importantly, citizens and lawyers will struggle to determine ex ante when to oppose, resist or rebel against the government. In this section, I tentatively put forth the idea that, in weighing up the decision to revolt, the persons involved or the citizens must be guided by the reasonable prospects of the major part of the population supporting their revolt. That said, not all breaches of the social contract will automatically set off the D2R. Some terms do not weigh equally as others. For the duty to pitch in, the sovereign and its subjects would need to agree on the terms that go to the root of their pact. Thus, violating these fundamental terms will be considered material and would entitle citizens to stand up against the government.

Typology of D2R Circumstances As explained earlier, citizens may conjure the duty to revolt when a person or a group has accessed or exercised power against popular wishes. Specifically, they can rebel against the government when a person or a group of person has staged a coup against a constitutional government; suspended or abrogated the constitution; overstayed an elective mandate, or delayed it for no compelling reason; or when it has responded to mass protests with live bullets or deadly force. One could discern at least three broad categories of circumstances where the duty to revolt arises. I represent these categories of D2R circumstances in the quadrants as presented in Table 2. From this representation, it becomes clear that the duty to revolt will seldom favour dislodging a person who has acceded to and wielded political power legitimately. On the other hand, the D2R fully justifies the soldiers who ousted Burkina Faso President Paul-Henri Damiba because he himself became President through a coup and could not circumvent this security impasse that had made his predecessor so unpopular. Disturbingly, however, the same reasoning would likely apply to Ibrahim Traor´e, the army captain who brought down Damiba, since each coup weakens the state and makes it more difficult for the next leader to succeed where his predecessor failed. By inducing a series of coups, the D2R could further destabilise a country that could have otherwise escaped this vicious cycle. Nevertheless, the invocation of the D2R must be qualified. First, to prevent phenomena such as the vicious cycle outlined above, and populism or majoritarianism from thriving under the guise of D2R, constitutional lawyers and policymakers must ensure that they subject the D2R to the provisions of the constitution, but only insofar as it embodies the social contract. This assumes that the constitution itself must be legitimate. The legitimacy of the constitution does not emanate from its good clauses; it flows from the full participation of its people in all the processes: from the social and political debates at all levels to the adoption of the constitution (see Shivji, as quoted in Nchalla 2013, p. 15).

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The person invoking the D2R must rely on objective evidence produced by a third party, or an independent source. In other words, he or she must not be the same person as the one producing the evidence used to justify invoking the D2R.

By Force The first circumstance, and perhaps the most obvious, where the duty to revolt arises is a coup. When an individual or a group of individuals stages a coup, citizens have the obligation, legal and moral, to thwart it. The matter becomes more intricate when those who staged a coup acted by pleading the duty to revolt. Stated differently, the people who orchestrated the coup resorted to it because the former rulers so exercised power that they have fallen short of the expectations of the citizenry. One way to answer this question is precisely by resolving the second circumstance that triggers the duty to revolt, to which I now turn.

By Unconstitutional Means A situation that would oblige citizens to act against the rulers or the government occurs where the government no longer rules in conformity with the constitution or the social contract. For example, the duty of revolt can arise when a democratically elected President becomes a tyrant and begins to curtail political rights and freedoms, such as freedom of speech or assembly. The almost unsurmountable difficulty with this type of scenarios is that it will be near to impossible to determine objectively the very instant when the government crossed the line. This is because the bodies who should clearly indicate when the government has squandered its constitutional legitimacy are the courts. Yet, as is typically the case with autocratic regimes, the courts count among the first to be captured, bought or corrupted by the regime, such that the courts can no longer play their vital role as protectors of the constitution, guardians of rights and the constitutional order. If courts lose the ability to tell citizens when the government has gone asunder or awry, how can citizens know at what point precisely the government has lost its legitimacy? This constitutes the crux of this chapter’s inquiry and it is a multi-million dollar question. This chapter proposes to solve this dilemma through the Republic contract idea outlined in this chapter. At the same time, external indicators, such as the Mo Ibrahim Governance Index and Amnesty International’s Corruption Perception Index, could guide the decision to invoke the duty to revolt. But this does not entirely solve the core dilemma. A person or, more probably, a body will still need to be established who will indicate that the government has lost legitimacy. Among the candidate indicators are elections to appoint the rulers. If the government delays, cancels, suspends or refuses to accept the results of an election, this should be the indicator par excellence that a situation has triggered the duty to revolt.

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Parting Thoughts After elections, citizens may find themselves stuck with a leader who does not perform or live up to what the population should reasonably expect of him or her. Or the people may witness powerless an individual or a group access power by force. In all these situations, the people may have to violate the constitution to save the constitution. This seeming ambiguity stems from the fact that, on the one hand, the constitution forbids citizens from upsetting the constitutional order and, at the same time, a republican reading of the popular sovereignty underlying that same constitution entails that citizens ought to take the law in their own hands to defend the constitution. There lies the inner ambiguity of the duty of revolt. This ambiguity could be overcome if citizens can circumscribe the D2R by higher norms, outside the textual confines of the written constitution, but flowing from values that the whole of humanity could share. For that purpose, the D2R could borrow from republican constitutionalism some civic values, for instance, patriotism and selflessness to subserve the common good. In the Congo, South Sudan, and other countries in Africa, constitutionalists, policymakers and activists could add to that list the values championed by the pan-African philosophy of Ubuntu, namely personhood, humanity, humaneness, (group) solidarity, conformity, compassion, respect, human dignity and collective unity (see Mokgoro 1998, pp. 2–3; Mutua 1995, pp. 352–353 and 367–368). Values that would resemble the jus cogens norms found in public international law, for instance, the prohibition on genocide and racial discrimination, could prevent scenarios whereby a majority in society calls on the D2R to fight against citizens or rebels seeking to unseat a government that plans to commit genocide or to systematically discriminate against minorities. This chapter has investigated other limits on the duty to revolt in the context of African countries, focusing on South Sudan and the DRC. Although these two countries belong to the East African Community (EAC) since the DRC joined that regional economic community in April 2022, this similarity does not mean that the duty to revolt unfolds in the same fashion in those two countries. All the same, the DRC and South Sudan have constitutions that provide for the duty to revolt. This provision may seem odd given that the two countries are some of the world’s most unstable. South Sudan was born from secession after a longstanding conflict that with Sudan, leading to the secession, whereas the DRC suffered two forceful transfers of power in the first 50 years of its turbulent life. On the other hand, jurists could argue that it is precisely because both countries have suffered some of the bloodiest and most brutal dictatorships that the duty to revolt takes on the vital meaning that it carries in those two countries. Seen from this perspective, the constitutional duty to revolt in the Congolese and South Sudanese case studies can serve as examples and inspiration for the rest of Africa and the Global South. The ‘republican contract’ I advanced throughout this chapter proposes a more adapted framework for examining the legitimacy of governments in African countries such as the Congo and South Sudan, and for clarifying the conditions under which citizens may exercise their duty to revolt. I propose that, in

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contemplating the decision to revolt against the government, citizens and activists must remain mindful of the extent to which the contemplated revolt reflects the general will of the people and furthers the common good. While deliberating, the citizens concerned should take their cue from sure indicators, indexes and rankings (about governance, democracy, the rule of law, etc.), as well as from other means of feeling the people’s pulse. This perspective – building as it does on the social contract theory and complemented by a progressive vision of republican constitutionalism – puts the accent on the duties of citizens and uplifts the values of the community, as opposed to the sanctity of the individual. The republican contract thus offers a more comprehensive framework for gauging the obligations of citizens and the responsibilities of governments, and for determining the appropriate response to instances of injustice and oppression without threatening the very existence of the state. By grounding its principles in the axioms of contractarianism and republican constitutionalism, the republican contract tables a morally and constitutionally defensible basis for asserting the duty to revolt and for securing a just, lasting and inclusive political order. At any rate, the coups and regime changes in West Africa and in Sri Lanka (in 2022) have undoubtedly rendered the duty to revolt ripe for discussion and elevated this debate so as to make sure that today’s leaders will not turn into tomorrow’s hangmen. Through this chapter, I also hope to have helped reframe and rekindle the debate. D2R requires a vigilant citizenry, freedom of information, constitutional literacy (see Article 4(4), S. Sudanese Const.), and a robust civil society. Only such a citizenry can keep alive the spirit behind the duty to revolt and what I would call ‘the scarecrow argument’. In light of the D2R’s shortcomings, the ‘scarecrow argument’ is the D2R’s saving grace. It holds out the threat of a government overthrow as the sword of Damocles. It reminds leaders that, should they act against popular wishes, their own people will rise up in arms against them to depose them and break away from the bondage and hostage situation in which these despised leaders trap their citizens.

Note 1. I heartily thank both Athina Karatzogianni and George Souvlis for their patience as I took time and months to shape my thoughts and finalise this chapter. In particular, Souvlis’ insightful and thought-provoking suggestions have made this chapter a clearer and better one; and I am thankful to him for lending such a helping hand. Many thanks to Oleina Bhattacharya for her research assistance. The thoughts expressed in this chapter are my own, as are the errors and omissions.

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Bibliography Achebe, C. (1983) The Trouble with Nigeria. Enugu: Fourth Dimension. Al Jazeera (2022, 5 October) ‘Burkina Faso’s Coup and Political Situation: All You Need to Know’, Al Jazeera. Available at https://www.open.ac.uk/library/ referencing-and-plagiarism/quick-guide-to-harvard-referencing-cite-them-right (Accessed: 6 October 2022). Al Jazeera (2023, 31 January) ‘Pope Slams Foreign Plundering of Africa as He Arrives in DR Congo’, Al Jazeera. Available at https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/1/31/ pope-condemns-poison-of-greed-stoking-conflict-in-dr-congo#:;:text5The% 2086%2Dyear%2Dold%20didn,with%20blood%2C%E2%80%9D%20Francis% 20said (Accessed: 6 February 2023). Backer, L.C. (2009) ‘From Constitution to Constitutionalism: A Global Framework for Legitimate Public Power Systems’, Penn State Law Review, 113(3), pp. 671–732. Dudai, R. (2021) ‘Exception, Symbolism and Compromise: The Resilience of Treason as a Capital Offence’, British Journal of Criminology, 61(6), pp. 1435–1451. Fanon, F. (1963) The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press. Fombad, C.M. (2011) ‘Constitutional Reforms and Constitutionalism in Africa: Reflections on Some Current Challenges and Future Prospects’, Buffalo Law Review, 59(4), pp. 1007–1108. Freedom House (2022) Freedom in the World: The Global Expansion of Authoritarian Rule. Washington, D.C.: Freedom House. Head, M. (2011) Crimes against the State: From Treason to Terrorism. London: Routledge. Heiss, C. (2017) ‘Legitimacy Crisis and the Constitutional Problem in Chile: A Legacy of Authoritarianism’, Constellations, 24(3), pp. 470–479. Hendrickson, D.C. (2014) ‘The New Interventionism’, The National Interest, 133, pp. 53–58. Hinnebusch, R. (2020) ‘The Rise and Decline of the Populist Social Contract in the Arab World’, World Development, 129, pp. 1–9. Hobbes, T. (1994)[1651] Leviathan (E. Curley, Ed.). Indianapolis: Hart. Larson, C. (2006) ‘The Forgotten Constitutional Law of Treason and the Enemy Combatant Problem’, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 154(4), pp. 863–926. Lavi, S. (2011) ‘Citizenship Revocation as Punishment: On the Modern Duties of Citizens and Their Criminal Breach’, University of Toronto Law Journal, 61(4), pp. 783–810. Locke, J. (1690) Two Treatises of Government. London: Awnsham Churchill. Mac Amhlaigh, C. (2016) ‘Harmonising Global Constitutionalism’, Global Constitutionalism, 5(2), pp. 173–206. Mayhew, J. (1965) ‘On the Right of Revolution’, in Morgan, E.S. (ed.) Puritan Political Ideas. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, pp. 314–323. Melkote, M. (2022) Bystanders without an Excuse: On the Moral Duty to Revolt (Honors thesis, University of Richmond). Mokgoro, J.Y. (1998) ‘Ubuntu and the Law in South Africa’, Potchefstroom Electronic Law Journal, 1(1), pp. 1–11. Murray, P. and Longo, M. (2018) ‘Europe’s Wicked Legitimacy Crisis: The Case of Refugees’, Journal of European Integration, 40(4), pp. 411–425.

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Mutua, M. (1995) ‘The Banjul Charter and the African Cultural Fingerprint: An Evaluation of the Language of Duties’, Virginia Journal of International Law, 35, pp. 339–380. Nchalla, B.M. (2013) ‘Tanzania’s Experience with Constitutionalism, Constitution-Making and Constitutional Reforms’, in Mbondenyi, M.K. and Ojienda, T. (eds.) Constitutionalism and Democratic Governance in Africa: Contemporary Perspectives from Sub-saharan Africa. Pretoria: University of Pretoria Law Press, pp. 15–50. Omodia, S.M. (2018) ‘Political Parties and National Integration in Emerging Democracies: A Focus on the Nigerian State’, Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences, 9(6), pp. 69–74. Omodia, S.M. and Aliu, M. (2013) ‘Governance and Threats to National Security in Emerging Democracies: A Focus on the Nigerian Fourth Republic’, Research on Humanities and Social Sciences, 3(4), pp. 36–43. Padovani, C. and Santaniello, M. (2018) ‘Digital Constitutionalism: Fundamental Rights and Power Limitation in the Internet Eco-system’, International Communication Gazette, 80(4), pp. 295–301. Revkin, M.R. and Ahram, A.I. (2020) ‘Perspectives on the Rebel Social Contract: Exit, Voice, and Loyalty in the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria’, World Development, 132, pp. 1–9. Rousseau, J.-J. (1923)[1762] The Social Contract and Discourses (G.D.H. Cole, Trans.). London: J.M. Dent and Sons. Talisse, R.B. (2014) ‘The Ethics of Citizenship’, The Philosophers’ Magazine, 64, pp. 99–104. The Fund for Peace (2022) Fragile States Index. Washington, D.C.: The Fund for Peace. ´ Toulemonde, M. (2022, 31 January) ‘Coup d’Etat au Burkina: l’Afrique, un Continent de Putschistes’, Jeune Afrique. Available at https://www.jeuneafrique.com/1229331/ politique/coup-sur-coup-lafrique-un-continent-de-putschistes/ (Accessed: 6 October 2022). Transparency International (2022) Corruption Perception Index. Berlin: Transparency International. Valenzuela, F. (2009) ‘Liberalism’s Illeberal Obligation: The American Revolutionaries and the Duty to Revolt’. APSA 2009 Toronto Meeting Paper. Available at https:// papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1451974 (Accessed: 6 August 2023). van Ham, C., Thomassen, J., Aarts, K. and Andeweg, R. (2017) Myth and Reality of the Legitimacy Crisis: Explaining Trends and Cross-National Differences in Established Democracies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. World Health Organization (2023) ‘South Sudan Crisis’, World Health Organization. Available at https://www.who.int/emergencies/situations/south-sudan-crisis (Accessed: 16 February 2023).

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Chapter 4

Anti-colonialist Memory, Culture and Politics in Ireland Niamh Kirk and Seamus Farrell

Introduction The island of Ireland is divided into two states, the 26 county Republic and Northern Ireland’s, six counties retained by the United Kingdom in the Anglo-Irish Treaty 1921 that ended the War for Independence. Since the Good Friday Agreement 1998,1 political and media discourse focus has been on cooperation and allyship between the two states. However, the partition of the island as well as ongoing legal and political administrative legacies are rooted in a colonial-anticolonial struggle. Nonetheless, the dominant framework for thinking about politics in Ireland has been one which eschews discussion of colonialism all together (Lloyd 2011). With political attention focused on peace-building, an aversion to reviewing or discussing the colonial roots of the conflict by state, media and other elite institutions developed for fear of (1) appearing to be nationalistic/republican thus supporting the IRA, (2) provoking tensions between Unionists and Republican communities in the Northern Ireland2 and in turn (3) strain the relationship between the United Kingdom and Ireland (McVeigh and Rolston 2021). Underpinning this position was what is described as the revisionist perspective on Irish history that represented Irish rebels as the aggressors and which was adopted by elite institutions (McVeigh and Rolston 2021; Whelan 2004). In this context, a broad negative representation of republicanism and nationalism developed in the Republic of Ireland (Panos et al. 2020; Triga et al. 2021) while colonialism was largely omitted from the discourse. However, recent events indicate that latent anti-colonialism is emerging in public discourse. In 2020 Irish Government proposals to commemorate a British colonial police force, the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) as part of the Decade of Centenaries3 in the Republic of Ireland, sparked widespread public criticism, immediately on social media and later mainstream news media. The criticism itself became a story in its own right leading to government representatives defending the proposal by suggesting it was the ‘mature’ approach and accusing critics of being tied to old nationalistic ideologies (Halpin 2020). The deviation from the silence about Duty to Revolt, 49–64 Copyright © 2024 Niamh Kirk and Seamus Farrell Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited doi:10.1108/978-1-80382-315-720231004

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colonialism during the peace process was suddenly interrupted by a widespread anti-colonial movement against the commemoration. This chapter explores the anti-colonial discourse around the controversy on Twitter identifying four themes: firstly, the collective remembering of colonial violence through the sharing of family stories; secondly, through cultural republicanism via digital protest; thirdly through the anti-colonialism in political discourse and finally how anti-colonialist discourse incorporated contemporary social movements.

Ireland’s Colonial Narratives This section explores the approaches to colonialism in Ireland over the past 100 years leading up to the Decade of Centenaries, post-colonial nationalism and revisionism, focusing largely on the second revisionist phase (Kearns 2013; Perry 2016; Whelan 2004) that is in tension with emerging anti-colonialist ideology. In the immediate aftermath of the foundation of the Irish state and achieving independence for at least the three of the four provinces, there was a period of proud nationalism and romantic heroism over the Irish Revolutionaries (Garvin 2005; Kee 2000; Regan 2006). Despite being economically dependent on capitalist-colonial core Britain (McKearney 2011; Sheehan, Hamilton, and Munck 1998) representations of Ireland and Irishness attempted to craft an Irish identity and legitimise the new state through Irish nationalist symbolism (Scanlon and Kumar 2019). For a period of 50 years after independence, nationalism was pervasive but over time waned as several issues emerged contributing to the broad erasure of colonialism in Irish public life. These include the decline of colonialism or postcolonialism as a framework to understand contemporary events in academia, the ascension of the United Kingdom and Ireland to the European Union in the 1970s placing them as equal partners and shifting the primary political relationship between with Dublin from London to Brussels (McVeigh and Rolston 2021). The hard fought and precarious peace process required a positive relationship with Britain, coupled with the idea that the Good Friday Agreement had ended the Troubles and an upward lift in the economy facilitated an official discourse that there is no more colonial legacy to have to address (McCabe 2013). The themes within revisionism were a reaction to and rejection of the overt nationalism of the previous era.

Colonialism Revised The historical revisionism debate in Ireland began as early as the 1960s but escalated through the 1970s to become the academic orthodoxy by the 1980s. Revisionism was publicised through notable biographies and histories published by public historians such as Conor Cruise O’Brien and through the national news media. Irish revisionism coupled with British propaganda working in parallel, was a dominant ideology. ‘In this model, anything distinctively Irish – the language, traditional music, Gaelic sports . . . – were stigmatized as examples of a narrow

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parochialism’ (Whelan 2004, p. iii). It was associated with violence, the uneducated working classes and a stagnation in a country that was modernising and becoming more cosmopolitan (Bhloscaidh 2020; Dingley 2015; Whelan 2004). The Irish state ‘endorsed revisionism as a means of re-educating southern opinion, and as an antidote to the Provisional IRA’s utilisation of the traditional nationalist narratives’ (Whelan 2004, p. 13) and more broadly argues that revisionism itself was a part of the long retreat from the struggle for independence. The peace process and the strength of neoliberalism framed a series of histographic and public interventions which attempted to refute, reject colonialism as a historical reality and analytic tool as part of post-historical narrative. The violence of the Troubles on one hand and the newfound peace economy and economic prosperity was argued as a launchpad from which to re-examine ‘myths’ of Irishness’ and historical events at large and doing so revive the understanding of Ireland as oppressed by colonialism. Bartlett (1994) argued that political integration with Britain historically, which gave the Irish representation and Irish emigration and Kennedy and Dowling’s (1997) argument of economic distinction between the global south and Ireland, moved the line of debate towards an understanding of Ireland as a coloniser integrated with the empire. Bradshaw (1989), reviewing nationalism and historical scholarship in modem Ireland argues that this era blurred the line between intellectual discourse and popular sensationalism. They argue that ‘the modem tradition [of Irish nationalism] actually developed in self-conscious reaction against an earlier nationalist tradition. . ..and aspired to produce a “value-free” history informed by approaches in British scholarship’ (Bradshaw 1989, p. 329).

Anti-Revisionist, but Not Yet Anti-Colonial An anti-revisionism push-back emerged which attempted to re-centre an understanding of colonialism in Irish history and politics. Cleary (2002) and Lloyd (2001) argued for an understanding of mediation and complexities in Irish economic, social and cultural relations and experiences, both settler colonial and native, anti-colonial and colonial. Lloyd (2001), Miller (1998) and Whelan (2004) go further offering a defence of an understanding of colonialism as a useful and fruitful intellectual and academic lens from which to assess Irish history, economic, society, politics and culture while also deconstructing and refuting the intellectual and political dimensions of revisionism: reductionist logic, incoherent assumptions and the process of closing off entire expression of identity, culture and history in an elitist and colonial way; all Irish literature is British just one example of the cultural co-option and continuity of the colonial project. For anti-revisionists the rejection of revisionism is as much about understanding the origin and ideological framing of the perspective and opening up a wider research and intellectual field which can critically examine the Irish past, present and future. In Ireland, anti-revisionism was slow to move intellectually forward in response to the 2008 financial crisis and shifting global politics and thought; the era of austerity in Ireland, the Occupy movement, new social movement politics,

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shifts in racial composition on the Island and global re-emergence of de-colonisation, feminism and racial justice politics. That said, the period (2014–2021) has become an important one for the analysis of colonialism and its legacy. Kearns (2013) explored colonial haunting, O’Callaghan (2014) argued for the analysis of colonialism to be relocated in the partition Ireland, instead of centring the debates on the British Union in Westminster. Academics such as Rahman, Clarke, and Byrne (2017), Scanlon and Kumar (2019) and Bhloscaidh (2020) have reengaged the political and representation dynamics of colonialism in Ireland and its location within the broader analysis of colonialism. State and institutional approaches to assessing colonialism, both in the South and North in the twenty-first century, have been shaped largely by concepts of ‘narrative hospitality and ethical remembering’. To an extent, both frameworks attempt to move beyond descriptive explorations of place, space and memory and social dynamics of commemoration to provide a normative framework of shared remembering and shared commemoration, rather than a sharp understanding of colonial oppression and suffering. Kearney (2015) and Kearney and Fitzpatrick (2021) argue that narrative hospitality is a process of reaching beyond existing borders, experiences and understanding to open up a plurality of understandings of historic events, and a range of personal, social, economic and political motivation as framing and shaping contested historical memories. Conway (2010) outlines the concept of ‘ethical remembering’, in which traumas are recognised on multiple sides and personal impacts and experiences are uncovered as a form of shared re-constitution of collective memory. Each of these authors draw on an understanding of virtue ethics, which forms a vantage point of ‘standing above’ the politics of the past and their implication today and moving beyond a colonial structural framework as a path to a shared future. While many of these works have looked to the ambiguities of colonial experience in Ireland there have also been a recent increase in overt political and socio-economic theorising on colonialism in Ireland, reinforced by commemorative events and the threat of Brexit, as well as the growing weight of an Irish unity referendum, in the context of unionist decline in Northern Ireland. McVeigh and Rolston’s (2021) analysis of colonialism and articulation of anti-colonialism is one of the largest and most comprehensive of such works, but there are also a growing range of fruitful multidisciplinary research engaging the coloniality of Ireland (Flannery 2021; Molloy 2019). Historical revisionism as an intellectual debate remains alive and is entering new terrain: a generation of scholars born of a peace process, neoliberalism and socio-economic inequality who are reassessing and re-centring colonialism in Ireland, in an understanding of ‘Irishness’ and in their efforts to chart a progressive path forward on the Island. In this case we are concerned with the seemingly spontaneous emergence of explicit anti-colonialist discourse that involved public analysis of colonial ideologies in Irish politics that emerged online and in resistance to a seemingly benign suggestion to be more hospitable in approaching the past.

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Colonial Memory in Flux The ongoing commemoration of the Irish revolt against English rule (1916–1922) and subsequent Civil War (1921–1923) has provoked a review of the Irish response to colonialism. However, the public discourse of previous significant commemorations such as the 50th Anniversary of the 1916 Rising was led by ‘elite’ institutions such as historians, media and politicians (Whelan 2004). The Irish public’s perspective has been largely assumed to be in line with dominant narratives. The digital era has introduced the opportunity to analyse broad themes in Irish public discourse. Over the course of the Decade of Centenaries social media has injected the public perspective on the Irish Revolution into the public agenda and on occasion has reshaped public discourse by undermining the dominant ‘hospitable’ narrative and producing alternative narratives that foreground the memories of injustices, atrocities and unbridled violence. Analysis of a Twitter discourse about events in the Decade of Centenaries suggests that despite revisionism being pervasive among elite institutions, the Irish public think otherwise. When listings of the forthcoming events were published in national newspapers, it included an event to remember the RIC. The public reaction on social media was immediately hostile and over the course of two weeks intense criticism, both public and within politics, provoked the cancelation of the event. While it was a specific event that provoked and was the fulcrum of the discourse, the issue expanded into broader reflection on colonialism and the actions of the British military and government in Ireland at the time.

Irish Twitter’s Historical Memory This section explores anti-colonial discourse on Twitter around the Black and Tans commemoration controversy. Between 01/01/2020 and 21/02/2020 – roughly two months while the issue was salient in the news – tweets using the hashtag #BlackandTans were recorded using NVivo’s Ncapture.4 The dataset (n 5 24,029) is used in two studies, one quantitative and the other, this chapter, focuses on anticolonial discourses. Under the #Blackandtans hashtag, co-occurring hashtags that indicated an overt colonial discourse were separated for the discourse analysis.5 Further, SketchEngine was used to compile a list of the most frequent keywords, and again tweets containing keywords6 that indicated overt colonial discourse were recorded for review. The two key anti-colonial themes that emerged are detailed in the following sections: the first explores the anti-colonialism of the past, directed at the colonial forces in the form of recounting injustices suffered at the hands of the British military, and the second examines how the present is brought to bear on the debate in surprising and conflicting ways including cultural republicanism, public response to revisionism and how this incorporates criticism of government for their revisionism contributing to the failure to achieve the original promises of a ‘fairer’ Ireland under independence.

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Memories of Family Harassment While the commemoration event was for the RIC, the Black and Tan’s, a division in the RIC notorious for their brutality towards civilians, became the central actor in the discourse. Via Twitter people shared personal family stories of violence suffered at the hands of the Black and Tans. Despite the claims that Ireland had largely moved on and ‘matured’ from the British colonial invasion and suppression of Irish independence movements that drive revisionist interpretations, it seems that the Irish public have not forgotten and indeed have passed down an oral history of events in their families and localities. There were countless stories from across the island, from Donegal to Cork, of people who were told about homes being raided in the dead of night, with family members being shot and houses set alight. There were sometimes descriptions of torture and maiming. Most of the victims were named (Thomas, Michael, John, Patrick) and sometimes the relationship (Uncle, Grandfather) or job (soldier, mayor, farmer) stated. Some included depictions of the aftermath of fathers and uncles being killed, where women faced daily challenges in raising children in a war and at a time when employment for women was limited. The sharing of these experiences and stories should be recognised to some extent as exceptional; the inclination of the Irish to not speak about the colonial past, particularly since the Troubles, was suggested to be the norm by Beville and McQuaid (2012) and Lloyd (2011). And indeed, during the 1916 Centenary there were efforts to rectify this by museums collecting regional stories about the Rising to develop a people’s history that stood alongside the grand narrative of the Irish revolution (Kirk 2020).

Memories of Black and Tans The tone and sentiment towards the Black and Tans, and by extension those who ordered them to suppress the Irish rebels, also reveals that the Irish public do not recognise the Black and Tans as a legitimate military force or their actions as ‘part of war’. They were ‘murderous’, ‘rapists’, ‘thieves’, ‘barbaric’, engaged in ‘torturing’, ‘oppressing’, ‘burning’ and terrorising innocent civilians. Some even sought to contextualise their actions noting that most of the Black and Tans were former WWI soldiers who themselves were traumatised. The anti-colonial discourse was not contained to Ireland but expanded into the old empire, both temporally and spatially. Temporally, with the discourse drawing on the historical origin of Anglo-Irish conflicts and a wider review of British colonial efforts in Ireland. This included histories of Oliver Cromwell’s invasion (42 references), famed for his use of widespread bloodshed, Charles Trevelyan (2 references) and the wealth accumulated by the Royal family through colonial extraction and the suppression of the Civil Rights movement in Northern Ireland (50 references).

Memories of Empire It also extended geographically, situating Irish colonial history in the broader imperial agenda. Broadly the British Empire was compared with Imperial Japan

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and Germany. Furthermore, because Winston Churchill did not just deploy the Black and Tans in Ireland but in other British colonies, most notably the Punjab region of India, the anti-colonial discourse included the Black and Tans cruelties in African and Asian colonies. Additionally, people drew in contemporary colonial debates to underline the nature of colonial power dynamics and assert an inappropriateness of the weaker-colonised party, equating or honouring their losses with those of the more powerful colonising actor, such as asking if Palestinian’s should commemorate Israeli Defence Forces.

Memories of Ireland’s Role in Empire Part of the discourse incorporated negotiating the role of Irish people in the RIC and by extension their role in imperial Britain. Users highlighted family members who were recruited to the RIC, often joining because of the pay and benefits it offered. The Irish public display a rich and nuanced approach to the role of Irish people in colonialism via the participation in the British military, governance and labour in colonies. The small contingent of Irish recruits to the RIC was noted as were notable Irish governors in India and African’s colonies. While this was a minor theme in the broader discourse that focused on the horrors of colonial forces, it is important to note that it is not wholly a discourse of the colonised ‘us’ and the coloniser ‘them’.

Collective Remembering and Oral History Oral history has a strong tradition in Ireland and engages some of the more complex and contradictory dynamics of anti-colonial memory. Oral history projects and people’s commemoration contain critiques of violence, including those in the name of anti-colonialism, while simultaneously outlining the structural dynamics and lived experiences of colonialism and post-colonialism. The documenting of rural class structure (Cronin 2007) in Ireland demonstrates a complex web of exclusions and inclusions, formations of respectability as a class marker and haunting of poverty and dependency in social ritual, shaped by colonialism. Urban class dynamics have also been extensively documented through oral history, from tenement life (Kearns 2006), to Dublin dockers (O’Carroll and Bennett 2017) to folk history (Kearns 2001), providing important insight into the lived experience of an Island framed by colonial dynamics. Traveller history in Ireland finally has a strong oral tradition and has been documented by oral historians in an effort to explore the dynamics of discrimination and its relationship to colonialism, race and class in Ireland (Balaam and Lambert 2011; Harnett 2011; Helleiner 2012). Finally, the Magdalene laundry oral project is one of the largest and most significant example of documenting the memories of injustice in Ireland which emerged from the carcel structures across the Island of Ireland, a legacy structure of the colonial era (Hidalgo-Tenorio and ´ BenItez-Castro 2021; O’Rourke, O’Mahoney, and O’Donnell 2021).

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Anti-Colonial Culture and Politics Memories of injustice, in particular the understanding of colonial state violence and the continued way in which colonialism shapes institutional, economic and social forces today, is an important basis for cultural and political expressions of anti-colonialism. We argue here that a widespread re-engagement with Irish history and culture, particularly by Irish young people, has developed as a popular form of ‘cultural republicanism’ shaping anti-colonial sentiment in a new generation. In addition, social movements which have been engaging the most pressing economic and social issues in Ireland today, on both sides of the border, have in turn allowed a new range of politics and progressive people to reassess Ireland’s relationship to colonialism. Finally, Sinn Fein’s emergence as the largest and most popular political organisation on the Island, reflects the failures of the Irish states on the Island, it in itself a legacy of colonial structures, and a ‘borrowed majority’ formed from the wider popularity of cultural republicanism and the hard fought mass social movements of the era.

Cultural Republicanism Anti-colonialism, beyond memory, is a living cultural phenomena, particularly formed and shaped by Irish republican culture. Republicanism as an organised political force, often the main radical opposition to power, and a minority political force has nonetheless since the late 1700s had a mass culture form. The 1798 Rebellion in Ireland set out a commitment to a secular Irish republic that united Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter. The mode of cultural expression in this regard was the popularisation of the new thinking of the enlightenment and the inspiration of the French Revolution. The suppression of this rebellion, the Act of Union 1800 and the Penal Laws which discriminated against Catholics, and Irish language and culture meant that the political ideology of republicanism combined with a commitment to preserve elements of Irish culture, which were suppressed under British rule (McVeigh and Rolston 2021). By the late 1800s political republicanism represented by the Fenians, was small and clandestine, but its marking of republican ‘martyrs’ including with mass graveside orations was an important cultural force (De Nie 2001), while the larger movement for Irish cultural revival, including the restoration of the Irish language and Irish sport, saw a massive base for republican ideas, a ‘republican cultural undercurrent’ for a wider national revivalist movement (O’Daly 1998). Cultural republicanism shifted with the foundation of the southern Irish state and the partition of the Island. In the South cultural republicanism was integrated to an extent into the State, while in the north it was suppressed in a Unionist political and cultural statelet. Hanley (2018) argues that during the Troubles, despite minority support for republican violence, there were strong expressions of support for Catholics and republicans as they faced repression. This support, spilled over into demonstrations at particularly contentious moments (1969 and 1972), while also being reflected in a mass cultural current, such as the success of ‘Men Behind the Wire’ in the Irish charts and the vast array of local music,

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language, culture and dance, that operated as fundraising bases for the republican struggle, north and south. In the post Good Friday period, there has been a new wave of mass cultural republicanism, combining wit, satire, self-deprecation and sharp structural critiques. From the republican surrealism of the Rubberbandits, to the self-proclaimed ‘Fenian thugs’ Irish Language rapper group Kneecap, and to prevalence of anti-colonial memes on Irish Simpson Fan Page, as well as a revival of Irish language, folk music and cultural expression more broadly in a new generation. During the Black and Tans Commemoration controversy, the Irish public utilised online archives of Irish republican music and revolutionary songs on streaming services such as iTunes and Spotify to get the song ‘Come Out Ye Black and Tans’ by the Wolfetones trending and into the national charts. This is bolstered by the band offering to donate the profits to homeless charity the Peter McVerry Trust. At the same time comedian Steve Coogan performed a version of the song on prime-time British television, BBC One Show, a clip of which was shared widely. It is similar to the style of working-class protest seen in the United Kingdom when Margaret Thatcher died and people successfully campaigned for the tune from musical Wizard of Oz, ‘Ding Dong the Witch is Dead’ to reach the top 10 in the UK charts. However, here it draws on a long tradition of Irish rebel songs and anti-colonial sentiment that has mixed with a new era of class rage and social discontent, in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008 and the failures of an unequal peace in the North. While some perceive people drawing on entertainment content to make a point as trivialising this issue, it can also be interpreted as a mass radical counter-cultural emerging among anti-colonial resistance. The oral histories, now shared via social media in resistance to the light-handed approach of the state to the actions of the British colonial forces in Ireland, indicate that there has been an ongoing anti-colonial theme in Irish discourse through generations in contrast to the post Good Friday agreement neutralised narrative of forgive and forget in the name of peace. The public’s rejection of revisionist histories that often represent Irish anti-colonial revolutionaries as the source of violence and conflict, and position Ireland as a post-colonial state and society is evident. It seems that the Irish public neither prioritise nor equate the challenges faced by colonial forces with those of the people they suppressed. It was a way of asserting condemnation of British colonialism without directly attacking British people or identity today that was accessible and entertaining, contributing to its success in getting the song to No 1 in the UK national charts and pervasiveness in the corpus. While the Wolftones that linked #ComeoutYeBlackandTans to the Peter Mc Verry Trust, more broadly in the discourse Irish people were linking homelessness and other social and political issues to the anti-colonial ideology which is detailed in the following section.

Politics and Anti-colonialism Representation and commemoration of the past are about the political present. In the discourse around the controversy, as well as the focus on colonial actors and

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practices, the discussion linked contemporary socio-political concerns via the political actors that supported the commemoration. This section examines the political dimension of anti-colonialism that emerged from explicit discourse about ‘popular trains of thought’ about colonialism and which are displayed by various political figures. While relations between the United Kingdom and Ireland are transformed from enemy to ally, that people in Ireland perceive the history of British colonialism on the island as negative and by extension take a negative position on all colonial campaigns is not entirely unsurprising. The shift from the apologetic revisionist perspective to a more anti/de-colonial mindset regarding commemorating Irish history has expanded the actors and institutions subject to criticism for failing to decolonise the island and live-up to the promises of an equitable revolution. How political actors approach British colonialism and by extension to all colonialism was a key theme in the discourse. Irish people discussed the origin and history of Irish political parties and their various positions in relation to the UK over the years as well as their position on the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Broadly the Irish anti-colonialists went on to question the authenticity of various state actors’ commitments to achieving the ideals of the republic such as equal opportunities, civil liberties and upholding the values of a republic while as well as their values regarding colonialism. In discussion about political parties we identified the four common trains of thought discussed in the discourse that correspond to the different phases of colonial thought in Ireland as well as the emerging anti-colonial position. They are as follows: • Colonialist – working within the framework of the Empire examples of which

include the Irish people who participated in the British Military, East India Trading Company, owner plantations etc. This emerged largely in reference to the RIC. • Post-colonialist – romanticising revolution. This was a common position in Ireland between the foundation of the state and the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement in Northern Ireland and highlighted the Catholic Heroism of the revolutionaries as detailed by Whelan (2004). Within this discourse this is what the Irish political actors that were subject to criticism accused their critics of being, but there was little evidence of overt support for the revolutionaries or revolution from users. • Revisionist apolgogism – that developed during the Troubles that focused on the harms of conflict and delegitimise the ongoing struggle in the North and rejected it as a colonial conflict thus villanising the republican community in the North (Whelan 2004). Here it was used as a pejorative against those supporting the commemoration in explicit rejection of this ideology. • Anti-colonial – an emerging position, incorporating the nuances of previous two positions but recognising the need for continued de-colonisation here and resistance elsewhere. Here the discourse recognises the failings of the

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revolutionaries, criticise their Catholicism and misogyny while supporting the rejection of colonial rule. The focus is not on the heroism but on the resistance to colonialism. The tone of the discourse regarding the different trains of thought shows that despite the revisionist position being the elite and some may assume by default the popular position. In contrast, the term ‘revisionist’ was often used as a pejorative and against the government and other political actors who proposed and supported the commemorative event. In this regard anti-colonialism is represented as the more nuanced of the positions and by incorporating parallel anti-colonial movements such as Black Lives Matter and the efforts to decolonise public spaces in the United Kingdom, the most in line with global contemporary standards.

Anti-colonialism, Social Movements and Sinn Fein Broadly the discourse around the Black and Tan controversy linked the anti-colonial discourse to calls for further socio-economic reforms. A key theme in the discourse was highlighting a continuity in problems from colonial times to the modern day, in particular the issue of land ownership, housing and homelessness as well as public health and the Health Service Executive. The discourse however is somewhat confused in this regard. While some people accuse recent governments of destroying an imagined equitable state that was achieved post-independence, while others stressed the continuity in the failure of political leadership between Fianna Fail and Fine Gael since the foundation of the state to achieve an equitable society. The concept of a failed state North and South, underwritten by a contested continuity of colonial imposition and the debate over the nature of colonial history as a feature of the decade of commemorations, has run parallel to significant social movements across the Island of Ireland. Social movements saw a twin catalyst in this era: social progressivism – focused on overturning the social control of the church, with a power feminist movement emerging, and referendum victories that legalised marriage equality and overturned restrictive abortion legislation and socio-economic against water privatisation, and significant agitation around housing justice. Additionally, as Ireland has become more ethnically diverse anti-racism and migrant lead struggles, particularly against deportation and the system of carceral detention (direct provision) have been significant, tying social, economic demands with new conceptualisation of Irish identity. Anti-colonial is at times overt but more often an undercurrent of analysis and practice within social movements. Overtly, concepts of vulture funds which buy up distressed assets and evict families as foreign conquest and water privatisation as multinational encroachment and the expression of solidarity with refugees as based on Irish affinity with the experience of emigration, hunger and war mark social justice and anti-racism across the island of Ireland. Secularisation, as opposed to church domination, which marked recent referenda, the repeal of the

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eight amendment on abortion and on approving marriage equality, retain characteristics of classical secular republican thought, but also eschewed this in favour of a narrative of modernism and Europeanism. More complexly, is the role of ‘domestic oppressors’ such as landlords, economic elites, politicians, and media. Anti-colonialism positions these in relation to large international colonial interests, as administrators of empire, while there also limits to this current of thought, which downplay the domestic in favour of the international oppressor. Sinn Fein have been a major beneficiary of anti-colonial sentiment and social movement politics. In the February 2020 elections, shortly after this commemoration controversy, Sinn Fein emerged as the largest party in the Republic of Ireland (and largest party across the Island as a whole), winning the election, with the two conservative parties, Fine Gael and Fianna Fail failing to top the polls for the first time since the civil war split and emergence of Fianna Fail in 1926. Sinn Fein also became the largest party by membership on the Island. Sinn Fein’s position is contradictory. The adoption of social progressivism in the south, in particular in relation to repeal and engagement with housing and water justice, and increasingly since 2020 the cost-of-living crisis and class polarisation in the Republic of Ireland has been called a ‘borrowed’ majority for Sinn Fein, as they are perceived as main force of opposition and social democracy in a failed Irish state (Coulter and Reynolds 2020). In the North, they retain a level of power, through redistribution of the ‘spoils of war’ in a ‘sectarian’ institutional structure, where leading numerical representation of either the ‘nationalist’ or ‘unionist’ communities creates automatic access to regional state power, and the distributive functions that entail. The combination of these bases of power, North and South, as the largest party, would create a mandate for Irish unity. The significant of the end of partition as a form of structural anti-colonialism, over and above the social and economic needs of the people of the island as a whole, and to what extent these dynamics will either interact (a new united Ireland based on social and economic justice) or diverge (a united Ireland, under existing structures of political and business power, with disregard for the needs of the people), will in turn help to define Ireland’s future relationship with anti-colonialism globally – Ireland as a white nation in the core of European neoliberal policy or Ireland as a force of anti-neoliberalism and an ally of the global south against the global north.

Conclusion: Anti-colonialism at a Crossroads The public discourse around the question of whether or not it is appropriate to commemorate the British military force the RIC reveals a moment in the evolution in Ireland’s relationship with its past and with colonialism more broadly. The Irish diaspora news media have already been found to adopt a stronger anti-colonial position than the Irish national press (Kirk 2018) at the same time that Irish Americans have developed a positional identity above other ethnic minorities and racialised groups, as documented in Ignatiev’s (2009) piece ‘How the Irish Became White’.

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The pubic negotiations during the Decade of Centenaries about who, what and how to appropriately commemorate notable events in the revolution and the war for independence reveals that culturally, socially and politically Ireland is negotiating between an anti-colonialism position that locates it closer to a colonial history and the global south political and that fosters a demand for a continued process of decolonisation in Ireland and the post-colonial position of moving on and forgetting colonial pasts and in doing some integrate and orientate towards the powerful forces of the transatlantic global north, in particular, the United States, Britain and the European Union. While the state may favour the latter – there is a popular anti-colonial discourse that explicitly targets and rejects it, although this is often a contradictory and conflicted anti-colonial discourse in itself. Anti-colonialism then is an ideological position. In practice it goes beyond resisting and rejecting colonialism but involves active de-colonialism (Burke 2011). Outrage at a colonial era police resulting in a state commemorative event being cancelled is just one of many such rumbling of anti-colonialism emerging in its modern form in Ireland and interacting with public institutions and public opinion writ large. Controversy over the removal and reinstatement of statues at Clery’s, a flagship building on Dublin’ main street wrongly thought to depict slaves; Irish universities supporting academics in decolonising curricula (University of Virginia, online); large scale demonstrations in support of Black Lives Matter across Ireland (Spunout 2020) and Irish museums discussing decolonising public heritage (2021) all indication a public contestation of anti-colonial thought in Irish public life, that should continue.

Notes 1. A political settlement between Ireland and the United Kingdom which established a power-sharing administration in Northern Ireland as well as the institutions to support cross community peace building. 2. Unionist and Republican communities are fundamentally divided on the legitimacy of British colonialism. 3. This refers to 10 years of commemorative events marking the revolution, war for independence and civil war in Ireland (1913–1923). 4. Weekly datasets were scraped and compiled over the course of 3 months, however the dataset focused on only the period when the hashtag was active, recording more than five tweets per day. 5. These include #RIC #Cromwell #RoyalFamily #Civilrights. 6. These consist of cromwell, colonial, colonialism, colonialist, imperial, imperialist, imperialism, empire, royal, royalty and monarchy.

References Balaam, M.C. and Lambert, S. (2011) Oral History as Community History: The Welcome Stories Oral History Project. Lancashire: CentreWords.

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Bartlett, R. (1994) The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950-1350. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Beville, M. and McQuaid, S.D. (2012) ‘Speaking of Silence: Comments from an Irish Studies Perspective’, Nordic Irish Studies, 11(2), pp. 1–20. Available at http://www. jstor.org/stable/41702633 Bhloscaidh, F.M. (2020) ‘Objective Historians, Irrational Fenians and the Bewildered Herd: Revisionist Myth and the Irish Revolution’, Irish Studies Review, 28(2), pp. 204–234. Bradshaw, B. (1989) ‘Nationalism and Historical Scholarship in Modern Ireland’, Irish Historical Studies, 26(104), pp. 329–351. Available at http://www.jstor.org/ stable/30008692 Burke, R. (2011) Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Cleary, J. (2002) ‘Misplaced Ideas? Locating and Dislocating Ireland in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies’, in Bartolovich, C. and Lazarus, N. (eds.), Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies (Cultural Margins). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 101–124. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511483158.006 Conway, B. (2010) Commemoration and Bloody Sunday: Pathways of Memory. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Coulter, C. and Reynolds, J. (2020) ‘Good Times for a Change? Ireland since the General Election’, Soundings, 75(75), pp. 66–81. Cronin, M. (2007) ‘Class and Status in Twentieth-Century Ireland: The Evidence of Oral History’, Saothar, 32, pp. 33–43. De Nie, M. (2001) ‘“A Medley Mob of Irish-American Plotters and Irish Dupes”: The British Press and Transatlantic Fenianism’, Journal of British Studies, 40(2), pp. 213–240. Dingley, J. (2015) ‘Ireland, the Revisionist Debate’, in Durkheim and National Identity in Ireland. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 101–125. Flannery, E. (2021) Versions of Ireland. Empire, Modernity and Resistance in Irish Culture. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Garvin, T. (2005) Nationalist Revolutionaries in Ireland 1858–1928: Patriots, Priests and the Roots of the Irish Revolution. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan Ltd. Halpin, H. (2020) ‘Varadkar Says It’s “regrettable” that Some Politicians Will Boycott RIC Commemoration Service’, TheJournal.ie. Available at https://www. thejournal.ie/leo-varadkar-royal-irish-constabulary-boycott-4955277-Jan2020/ (Accessed: 06 January 2022). Hanley, B. (2018) Boiling Volcano? The Impact of the Troubles on the Republic of Ireland, 1968–79. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Harnett, J. (2011) Historical Representation and the Postcolonial Imaginary: Constructing Travellers and Aborigines. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. ´ hAodha, “Insubordinate Irish”: Travellers in the Text’, Irish Helleiner, J. (2012) ‘O Historical Studies, 38(149), pp. 178–179. ´ (2021) ‘The Language of Evaluation ´ Hidalgo-Tenorio, E. and BenItez-Castro, M.A. in the Narratives by the Magdalene Laundries Survivors: The Discourse of Female Victimhood’, Applied Linguistics, 42(2), pp. 315–341. Ignatiev, N. (2009) How the Irish Became White. New York, NY; London: Routledge. Kearney, R. (2015) ‘Hospitality: Possible or Impossible?’ Hospitality & Society, 5(2–3), pp. 173–184.

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Kearney, R. and Fitzpatrick, M. (2021) Radical Hospitality: From Thought to Action. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Kearns, G. (2013) ‘Historical Geographies of Ireland: Colonial Contexts and Postcolonial Legacies,’ Historical Geography, 41, pp. 22–34. Kearns, K.C. (2001) Dublin Voices: An Oral Folk History. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan Ltd. Kearns, K.C. (2006) Dublin Tenement Life: An Oral History of the Dublin Slums. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan Ltd. Kee, R. (2000) The Green Flag: A History of Irish Nationalism. London: Penguin. Kennedy, L. and Dowling, M.W. (1997) ‘Prices and Wages in Ireland, 1700–1850’, Irish Economic and Social History, 24, pp. 62–104. Kirk, N. (2018) ‘Conflict in the Discursive Construction of Irish Identity among Intra-Ethnic News Media and Homeland Journalism’, in Ethnic Media in the Digital Age. New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 134–146. Kirk, N. (2020) ‘Remembering Ireland: News Flows and 1916 in the Transnational Mediascape’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 23(5), pp. 801–816. Lloyd, D. (2001) ‘Regarding Ireland in a Post-colonial Frame’, Cultural Studies, 15(1), pp. 12–32. Lloyd, D. (2011) Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity 1800–2000: The Transformation of Oral Space. Newcastle: Cambridge University Press. McCabe, C. (2013) The Double Transition: The Economic and Political Transition of Peace. Irish Congress of Trade Unions and Labour after Conflict. Belfast: Irish Congress of Trade Unions. McKearney, T. (2011) ‘Internment, August 1971: Seven Days that Changed the North’, History Ireland, 19(6), pp. 32–35. McVeigh, R. and Rolston, B. (2021) Ireland, Colonialism and the Unfinished Revolution. Belfast: Beyond the Pale Publications. Miller, D. (1998) ‘Colonialism and Academic Representations of the Troubles’, in Miller, D. (ed.), Rethinking Northern Ireland: Culture, Ideology and Colonialism. pp. 3–39. Molloy, E. (2019) ‘Racial Capitalism, Hauntology and the Politics of Death in Ireland’, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 28(2), pp. 129–146. O’Callaghan, M. (2014) ‘Genealogies of Partition: History, History-Writing and “the Troubles” in Ireland’, in M. Zalewski and J. Barry (eds.) Intervening in Northern Ireland. London: Routledge, pp. 153–168. O’Carroll, A. and Bennett, D. (2017) The Dublin Docker: Woking Lives of Dublin’s Deep-sea Port. Dublin: Merrion Press. O’Day, A. (1998) Irish Home Rule, 1867–1921. Manchester: Manchester University Press. O’Rourke, M., O’Mahoney, J. and O’Donnell, K. (2021) ‘Institutional Abuse in Ireland: Lessons. Magdalene Survivors and Legal Professionals’, in Lynch, O., Windle, J. and Ahmed, Y. (eds.) Giving Voice to Diversity in Criminological Research: ‘Nothing about Us without Us’. Bristol: Bristol University Press. Panos, D., Theocharous, S., Siapera, E., Kirk, N. and Farrell, S. (2020) RePAST Output O2.3 Report on the Classification and Identification of Dominant Discursive Themes and on the Main Factors that Influence or Shape Conflict Discourses. Available at http://www.repast.eu/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Output_W2_2_ Oral_History_Report_18_10_2021.pdf Perry, R. (2016) Revisionist Scholarship and Modern Irish Politics. London: Routledge.

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Rahman, A., Clarke, M.A. and Byrne, S. (2017) ‘The Art of Breaking People Down: The British Colonial Model in Ireland and Canada’, Peace Research, 15–38. Regan, S. (2006) ‘WB Yeats: Irish Nationalism and Post-Colonial Theory,’ Nordic Irish Studies, pp. 87–99. Scanlon, L.A. and Kumar, M. (2019) ‘Ireland and Irishness: The Contextuality of Postcolonial Identity,’ Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 109(1), pp. 202–222. Sheehan, M., Hamilton, D. and Munck, R. (1998) ‘Political Conflict, Partition, and the Underdevelopment of the Irish Economy’, Review of Radical Political Economics, 30(1), pp. 1–31. Spunout (2020) ‘How to Support BLM from Ireland’. Available at https://spunout.ie/ news/news-2/black-lives-matter-ireland Triga, V., Mendez, F., Siapera, E., Kirk, N. and Farrell, S. (2021) ‘RePAST Deliverable D5.1 Typology of Political Discourses about the Troubled Past and Their Relationship to the EU’, Available at http://www.repast.eu/wp-content/uploads/ 2021/11/D5.1_Typology_of_political_discourses.pdf University of Virginia (online). ‘President’s Commission on Slavery and the University: UCC Joins USS’. Available at https://slavery.virginia.edu/university-collegecork-becomes-first-school-in-ireland-to-join-uss/ Whelan, K. (2004) ‘The Revisionist Debate in Ireland,’ Boundary 2, 31(1), pp. 179–205.

Chapter 5

Building the New Person: The Greek Revolution in the Mountain Readers Eleftheria Papastefanaki, Christos Papathanasiou and Nikos Vafeas

Introduction “Epidaurus 1821-Koryschades 1944”. In the midst of the plangent sound of cannons, amongst the ruins and dreadful sacrifices of the people, on 14 May 1944, the National Council convened in Koryschades. The National Council that represented the genuine expression and embodiment of popular will. The legacy of the revolutionary assemblies of Epidaurus, Astrous and Trizina revived’. With these words Roza Imvrioti (1945, p. 12) commenced her article ‘Popular Education’ in Elefthera Grammata to expound the educational work of the Mountain Government during the Axis Occupation of Greece and to establish a bridge between the recent experience of National Resistance and the Greek Revolution of 1821. The chapter focuses on the way the Greek Revolution appears in the two Mountain Readers (Little Eaglets and Free Greece) commissioned by PEEA, the Political Committee of National Liberation and written in the guerrilla-controlled territories of the country during the Occupation. This thematic unit, which occupies a prominent position in the Readers under investigation, treats the EAM-led Resistance as a revival of the Greek Revolution and constitutes part of an attempt to articulate a national socialisation narrative that would forge students’ ‘national’ and ‘fighting’ identity. Despite the employment of elements constitutive of Greek nationalism and folklore tradition, the Mountain Readers paint the figure of a new subject that embodies the social radicalism proposed by EAM and breaks away both from the prewar political and social norms and the consolidated Greek national identity. To this end, the perception of the Greek Revolution, a key pillar of the Greek national ideology, is transfigured to facilitate the emergence of the new person aspired by the Readers’ writers. The first part of the chapter sets the historical context of the Readers’ writing and briefly presents the official Party historiography developed in the 1930s and 1940s. Then, it explores the way the Greek Revolution appears in the Readers,

Duty to Revolt, 65–85 Copyright © 2024 Eleftheria Papastefanaki, Christos Papathanasiou and Nikos Vafeas Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited doi:10.1108/978-1-80382-315-720231005

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and in relation to the official Party historiography and the corresponding Left historiographical production of the time that sought to account for the development of the Greek social formation. On this basis, it identifies the attempt, manifested in the Readers, to construct a new person who, both heavily draws upon the legacy of the Greek Revolution – the crown of national narrative – and adopts radical and emancipating positions that overcome the boundaries of dominant national ideology.

Education and EAM in Occupied Greece To understand the nature of the Mountain Readers, reference needs to be made to the processes that culminated in their writing, the writers and their intellectual background as well as to the new political agency that sought, in the midst of Occupation, to put forward a proposal for the reform of Greek education. During the Occupation, EAM (National Liberation Front) and ELAS (Greek Popular Liberation Army) became the conduits through which KKE (Communist Party of Greece) and its allies managed to build one of the largest resistance movements in Europe.1 The attempts of the EAM bloc to politically express the Resistance forces culminated in the founding of PEEA, aka Mountain Government, in March 1944. By the end of the Occupation, PEEA’s work reflected the broader plans of the EAM movement regarding the postwar future of the country. To a large extent, PEEA’s work signified, at the highest administrative and political level, the intention to break away with the prewar political and socio-economic regime. In particular, to establish a democratic and, according to the parlance of the time, ‘people’s power’ regime that would combine the disengagement of the country from western tutelage with industrial development (Session 49, 1990, p. 176; Session 52, 1990, p. 187; Session 56, 1990, pp. 194–196). PEEA constituted an embryonic form of state power built under emergency, socially and politically, conditions which effectively organised a series of institutions to address not only the contemporary needs of the country but the post-liberation conditions as well. In this context, PEEA established institutions of local administration, education, justice, protection of public domain and the commons such as forests, and policing, as well as taxation to cover the needs of these institutions (Mazower 1993, pp. 269–277). The second session of the PEEA decided the establishment of a National Council – a legislative body that would ratify the executive decisions of PEEA. The National Council members were elected by universal suffrage of men and women over the age of 18 and comprised 180 or, according to other accounts, 184 counsellors.2 The body, on the one hand, reflected the will for national unity and, on the other, alluded to the National Assemblies of the Greek Revolution (Imvrioti 1945). During the historical session of the National Council of PEEA that took place in May 1944 in Koryschades, one the many issues debated (military, hygiene, popular justice, agriculture, labour, finance and food supply) was education reform. The deputy Secretary of Education and professor of medicine in the University of Athens Petros Kokallis invited to the stand Kostas Sotiriou, senior

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reform pedagogue and Glinos’ associate, who during the Occupation had joined the General Council of EPON, to present the key points of the education reform that the intellectual pedagogues of EAM had elaborated.3 Sotiriou provided the broad outlines of the reform and drawing upon the thoughts and reflections of the interwar communist intellectual and pedagogue Dimitris Glinos, highlighted the need to build an education system that would correspond to the needs of the people. According to Sotiriou (1962, p. 300), the education system had to be purged of its former characteristics: anti-popular spirit, individualism, the influence of the Great Idea and pseudo-classicism. Sotiriou emphasised the old imperative of prewar demoticists who sought to renew education through the resolution of the language question in favour of demotic4 and by aligning the country with the modern world. And yet, in the current conditions, this old demand was linked with the pedagogical proposals of the Left, which were initially formulated during the split of the Educational Society in 1927,5 and the Society of the linguistic-educational reform with class politics and the struggle for the political dominance of the ‘working class’ (Papastefanaki 2020, pp. 25–31).6 In the Koryschades national assembly, demotic was proclaimed the official language of ‘people as a whole’ (Imvrioti 1945). To address the lack of teachers, PEEA established pedagogical centres for their training (the most renown in Tyrna and Karpenisi) and published new school textbooks to replace those of the 4th of August dictatorship (Sakellariou 1984, pp. 142–150). In this context, two readers were complied, Free Greece for the fifth and sixth grades in Karpenisi and The Little Eagles7 for the third and fourth grades in Tyrna. For the rest of the grades, they reprinted the second grade Reader of 1932–1934 written by D. Delipetros, D. Doukas and R. Imvrioti (Katsantonis 1981, p. 131). The Mountain Readers are part of the broader plan to restructure the Greek education system along the lines of polytechnism – the dominant pedagogical theory in interwar USSR.8 The educational rationale of the EAM forces is manifested in the Plan for Popular Education (1944), a sophisticated and documented report that heavily draws upon the principles of polytechnic education9 (Papastefanaki 2020, pp. 89–90) and the interwar elaborations of Dimitris Glinos (1929) and the Educational Society conducted after its split.10 In tandem, several of the Readers’ texts are inspired by the reports of the local organisations to the General Council of EPON, the youth organization of EAM, and reflect the ‘immediate reality’ of children during the Occupation both in the urban centres and the guerrilla-controlled mountainous areas of the country. In actual fact, a considerable part of the Readers comprises texts from the Resistance press and literary works written by members and affiliates of EAM (Papamavros 1983, p. 119).

The Greek Revolution in the Official Party Historiography Given the centrality of the proletarian revolution in the communist movement discourse and its location either in the near or distant future, the analysis of past

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revolutions acquired special weight for they were conceptualised as nodes of an evolutionary process that would culminate in a deterministically predefined political end. In the case of Greece, the exploration of the Greek Revolution by Greek Marxists since the early twentieth century not only raised broader historiographical issues but sought to provide answers that would legitimate current politics (Stathis 2014). On the other hand, according to the dominant national ideology, the Greek Revolution constitutes the beginning of the free nation-state and the result of a prolonged process that started during the Ottoman rule. In this respect, the Greek nation conducted a revolution and managed to gain its freedom after centuries of enslavement during which several attempts for liberation took place.11 What is of interest here is that, particularly during the first half of the twentieth century, the Left historiography on the origins of the Greek nation is internally differentiated. Skliros (1919, 1922), one of the first scholars who sought to provide a Marxist analysis of Modern Greek society, reads the events of 1821 as a bourgeois revolution that resulted from the ‘awakening’ of the nascent middle classes and intellectuals. However, Skliros also accepts the historical continuity of the Greek nation, on the grounds that this is a transhistorical fact, and argues that the establishment of the modern nation-states resulted not from a process of ‘ethnogenesis’ but of ‘national awakening’ (Koubourlis 1997, pp. 8, 23). Still, other Marxist scholars of the time, such as Kordatos (1924) and Maximos (1945), explicitly located the ethnogenesis of the Greek nation in the eighteenth century, the former in his 1920s writings and the latter a bit later and while he was no longer a KKE member. In particular, Maximos argues that, despite the considerable presence of Greeks in commercial shipping as early as the sixteenth century, it was not until the eighteenth century that they made their presence felt in the economic life of the East and gave trade and transport a national flavour (Panagiotidis 2021, p. 310). Kordatos, on his part, stressed the economic growth of the Greek bourgeoisie and the conflict it triggered with ‘Greek feudalism’ and its representatives. The Greek bourgeoisie, mentioned as ‘shipowners’, ‘traders’ or ‘merchants’, acquired economic power and emerged as a distinct class next to the nobility and the clergy (Boubous 1996, p. 81). Despite their insightfulness, both accounts on the Greek Revolution were marginalised by the KKE leadership even when both scholars sought to re-affiliate with it, Maximos in mid-1930s (Katsoridas, Livieratos, and Paloukis 2003) and Kordatos during the Occupation (Spanakou 1991, p. 64). And this is due to the fact that their accounts clashed with the views of Nikos Zacharidis and Yiannis Zevgos, whose work became the official Party line in the 1930s and 1940s. Kordatos (1924) argued that the emergence of Greek bourgeoisie in the eighteenth century had led to the development of Greek national consciousness and the constitution of the Greek nation. In this context, the Greek Revolution assumed a national and anti-feudal character. For Kordatos the internal disputes during the Revolution culminated in a compromise between the bourgeoisie and the feudalists and to the establishment of a state where feudal residues remained strong.

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However, and according to the position supported since the 1930s by both Zachariadis and Zevgos, and the KKE, the origins of the modern Greek nation can be traced in the Byzantine era while its formation occurred during the Ottoman rule (Zachariadis 1945, 2013; Zevgos 1945). Moreover, and contra Kordatos, the bourgeoisie had been rendered reactionary already since 1821. Accordingly, the bourgeoisie, who had emerged as powerful merchants, established close contacts with Europe and were influenced by the Enlightenment during the late eighteenth century, were no longer considered as agents of progress and catalysts for revolutionary changes while the role and contribution of the ‘people’ to the Revolution was highlighted due to the struggle they appeared to have waged against the bourgeoisie and the rich landowners (Stathis 2014, p. 33). Consequently, the new interpretation prioritises the concept of the ‘people’ (Iliou 2014; Stathis 2014) that during the Revolution appear to be fighting not only against the Ottomans but also against a domestic minority and to be betrayed by its incompetent leadership. Thus, the universal participation espoused by EAM in the context of Occupation finds its historical analogue in the reading of the Greek Revolution as the work of poor peasantry and urban paupers. It is not coincidental that, at the same time, the positive role of the warlords (klephts and martoloses) in the Revolution was also retrospectively recognized (Stathis 2014, p. 36; Theotokas and Kotarides 2014, pp. 50–57). While before the Occupation, the warlords had been rendered reactionary, now and due to the development of guerrilla Resistance groups, the ELAS captains alluded to the chieftains of the Revolution. In short, by emphasising the analytic category of the ‘people’12 the KKE sought to vindicate the Party line in the present conjuncture and to articulate a historical narrative that aimed to rally people together by diffusing more a fighting spirit than an accurate and precise historical account (Margaritis 1986). These developments in the Greek Marxist historiography of the 1930s and 1940s also led to a positive appreciation by the Greek Left of certain aspects of mainstream Greek nationalism, Modern Greek tradition and folklore (Veloudis 1977), that had already gained popularity due to the demoticists’ struggle during the interwar era. Folklore tradition (i.e. folklore songs, including klephtika that in the Greek collective consciousness allude to the Greek Revolution) assumed a prominent role in the artistic production of EAM and was appropriated by the EAM pedagogues to address the organised youth and children of Free Greece. Thus, the Society of National Resistance with the Greek Revolution can also be traced in the appropriation of the folklore tradition that appeared to express the spirit of the Revolution fighters.13 The songs of the Occupation, be they products of anonymous popular artists or renowned composers, imitate or revive the traditional patterns of folklore songs to describe incidents and circumstances of the Resistance.14 The historiographical elaborations of the communists in the 1930s made space for folklore songs to be incorporated in the EAM discourse of the 1940s and to become a source of inspiration. In this context, the Mountain Readers include a series of folklore-like songs (Papamavros 1983, p. 62) that, borrowing folklore forms, narrate incidents and circumstances of the EAM-led Resistance. The spreading of EAM in the mountainous and backward areas of the

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country allowed for strong associations to be built between the peasant tradition of Greece during the Occupation with the homologous culture that dominated these very areas during the Revolution.

The Nation and the ‘Historical Analogue of the Greek Revolution’ in the Mountain Readers The Mountain Readers, by appropriating elements of the Modern Greek tradition, partly reproduce aspects of the Greek national ideology and partly take distance from the dominant discourse of the era. Systematic analysis reveals that certain recursive thematic units run through the Readers that fall under two rubrics: on the one hand, they provide an overall account of the historical trajectory of the Greek nation-state since 1821 and, on the other, analyse particular themes such as the heroic struggles of the Greek Revolution and its leaders, national celebrations and the strong presence of national symbols and the clergy in them, the reproduction of the basic assumptions of the tripartite scheme of Greek nationalism as well as the projection of national unity as the highest priority of the time. This section focuses on the elements that seek to forge in students the sense of historical continuity of the Greek nation and associate present struggles with the Greek Revolution through the painting of pictures that selectively appropriate elements of Modern Greek tradition. The Mountain Readers provide a normative account of the trajectory of the Greek nation-state that resulted from the Greek Revolution. Still, this trajectory is considered as unsuccessful and disappointing to the mass of lower strata, namely the populations that, according to the Readers, constitute ‘the Greek people’. For example, the text ‘The deliverance of the Greek people’, from Free Greece, paints the following picture regarding the disappointing outcome of the Greek Revolution: ‘a hundred and twenty years after the liberation of Greece from the Turks, the Greek people are free. And yet, nothing good has come out of this freedom. The Greek state not only did not provide for safety and justice, or schools and health but nor even for bread. . .Thus the people remained starving and illiterate. Education and civilization were reserved for the rich. The poor remain uneducated and die of diseases’ (Papamavros 1983, p. 82). As this extract makes it clear, and contrary to the dominant national ideology narrative that highlighted the Great Idea, the Mountain Readers and the EAM discourse as a whole don’t appear to be proposing the geographical expansion of the Greek state and the annexation of new territories. It needs to be remined that the Greek national ideology, historically formulated on the basis of Konstantinos Paparrigoroupos’ tripartite scheme,15 had articulated, already since mid-nineteenth century and emanating from the Greek Revolution, an ambitious narrative regarding the future of ‘Hellenism’, known as the Great Idea. Although the content of the term was never precisely defined (Politis 2008), in broad outlines the Great Idea aspired the expansion of the Greek state borders, the conquest of territories in the Balkans and Asia Minor and the restoration of the ‘imperial’ grandeur of the Greek nation. The refutation of the vision of the

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Great Idea that violently occurred in 1922 with the Asia Minor catastrophe opened a huge ideological void in Greek society. It is true that during the interwar era, Greek intellectuals sought to redefine Greekness and posed the problem of the country’s development within the existing borders. The large-scale irrigation works, constructed at the time, aimed not only to address the urgent needs of the primary sector and refugee rehabilitation but also the ideological void that emerged after the Asia Minor catastrophe. During the German Occupation, the Left put forth its own proposals on the issue of domestic development and managed to recruit important figures with technical expertise to formulate a distinct developmental project (Giouras 2014). The elaborations of the Greek Left on the meaning, nature and consequences of the Greek Revolution, released as they were from references to the Great Idea, emphasised the transformation of the domestic social, political and economic structures (Marketos 2003). To this end, the Readers make multiple references to the internal restructuring of the country, the building of new institutions that would serve ‘popular’ interests and the materialisation of infrastructural works to boost development and industrialisation (The Little Eagles 1944, pp. 55–56; Papamavros 1983, pp. 84–87).16 Still, the project of national recovery presupposed a sense of continuity between the critical conjuncture of the Occupation and the constitutive moment of the Greek state. In the Mountain Readers, the heroic fights of the Greek Revolution and their leaders, such as Kolokotronis, Karaiskakis and Androutsos, are presented to inspire the current struggles of Greeks against the conquerors. This approach is not unique to the Mountain Readers. Generally speaking, many Greek readers had contained, already since the nineteenth century, multiple references to the Greek Revolution while, even until today, similar references mark the knowledge students received of modern Greek history. Still and contrary both to Paparrigopoulos narrative, and the prewar Greek state readers and history textbooks, the Left associated the nation – its main analytical category – with the contribution of the ‘people’ to the revolutionary events. In the Mountain Reader, these differentiations become manifest not so much in the historical references to the Greek Revolution as to the presentation of the German Occupation. Accordingly, the ‘people’ appear to be combatting the old Greek elites, the traitors and the conquerors and, on the basis of the ‘patriotic/anti-patriotic distinction, is identified with the nation. Thus, the 25th of March, the day the Orthodox church celebrates the Annunciation of Virgin Mary, is considered as the day the Greek Revolution broke out and is both a national and religious celebration.17 Accordingly, the text ‘The 25th of March’ from The Little Eagles that commemorates the Greek Revolution reads: ‘Today we are enthusiastically celebrating our national celebration. . .The vice president of the United States of America said greeting us: . . .Upon the mountains of Greece the Greek Revolution lives on. . . The Russian Broadcast said: the Greek people will never be enslaved!!!. . . And the figures of the old fighters such as Botsaris, Karaiskakis and others lead their way. Brave Greeks! The day of liberation is not far away. The heroic Red Army will soon liberate Greece’ (The Little Eagles 1944, pp. 43–44).

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The adjustment of the broader narrative to the conjuncture of the WWII is more than obvious. And yet, it needs to be stressed that, for the Greek Left, the meaning of the national celebration did not remain unaltered but was (re) configured on the basis of the political stakes of the Occupation and the new Marxist historiographical approaches of the 1930s and 1940s (see above and Liberatos 2021, pp. 146–147). In this respect, Karpozilos (2021, p. 33), juxtaposing these accounts on the nation with the ones the Greek communist Left held previously, remarks: ‘This is a time of revision. The communist account had initially appeared as an emphatic negation of national ideology. . . Up until then, the national celebrations, such as the 25th of March, simply confirmed the attempt of the dominant classes to instill the poison of national ideology to those who constitutively “had no country”’. Still, the Mountain Readers emphatically emphasise the importance of national celebrations and primarily of the Greek Revolution in order to symbolically integrate the EAM particular institutions in the universe of the dominant national symbols including the clergy. In this context, the clergy undertook the task to eulogise the events of the EAM authorities the way they did in the prewar era. Indeed, during the Occupation, EAM declared the need for universal and indiscriminate participation in the Resistance. As a result, the EAM discourse contained no anti-clerical declarations. As The Little Eagles, citing a report supposedly sent to PEEA by the clergy, characteristically reads: ‘We pray to God that the work of the Political Committee of National Liberation will succeed. And we promise that the clergy throughout Greece will stand by our side to help people win the just struggle and acquire freedom. The venerable priest explained this to us and then slowly read the report and his eyes watered. We all listened to him carefully and men and women broke to tears for they long expected this [reaction] from the Greek Church. The clergy should be worthy of Papaflessas and Diakos!’ (The Little Eagles 1944, p. 42). The references to the clergy that participated in the Greek Revolution reproduces key elements of the dominant nationalist discourse. Contrary to the account of the early communist intellectuals and, of the important for the emergence of Left pedagogical thought in Greece during the interwar era, Dimitris Glinos (1927, p. 99) on the role of the Church in the Greek Revolution and in the Modern Greek state, the clergy returns to the political scene via either the heroic representatives of the Greek Revolution or the priests that resided in the guerrilla-controlled territories to eulogise the work of EAM and PEEA (Papamavros 1983, p. 114). These changes can be attributed to the massive participation of the lower clergy to EAM (Liberatos 2021, p. 144) and to the EAM’s intention to build a broader socio-political front. In short, EAM’s political rationale eliminated the most ‘extreme’ elements of the Left rhetoric and urged all Greeks to join the liberation struggle.18 After all, some of the national counsellors elected in Koryschades came from the anti-Venizelist wing of the interwar era. At this point it is pertinent to stress that even the Communist Party of the Soviet Union re-read and revised its official account of the past to include in its discourse heroic figures, such as Suborov and Kutuzov, and events from the tzarist era (Fitzpatrick 1994;

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Vihavainen 2000). As far as Greece is concerned, KKE attempted to win over the clergy who participated in the Resistance and had to prove themselves ‘levers of popular interests and worthy heirs of the Greek Revolution legacy’, as The Little Eagles (p. 58) characteristically reads. Another text, which reflected the key tenets of the tripartite scheme of Greek nationalism and formed the ideological background of National Resistance19, is the poem ‘Her message’ from Free Greece: ‘You touched upon the abandoned Thermopylae/you crossed Marathon/in the Bosporus castles you shivered and spread/on the flowerless mountains of the Greek Revolution./In your serene gaze/ sufferings, struggles and trophies and sacrifices revived/of present and future and past’ (Papamavros 1983, p. 47). Here, and having incorporated in the national ‘continuum’ symbolisms that allude both to classical antiquity (Thermopylae and Marathon) and byzantine ‘Middle Ages’ (Bosporus), the Greek Revolution is presented as a source of inspiration for the struggle of National Resistance against the Occupation forces and their Greek collaborators. In short, EAM adopted the tripartite scheme to support its own ideological narrative and to appear as the heir of the transhistorical struggles of the Greek nation/people and as the political force (KKE) that continues the long fighting tradition of the nation.20 Moreover, and in order to present the work of PEEA as a project that embraces the nation as a whole and seeks to establish national unity in the context of the liberation struggle, EAM is often likened to Philiki Etaireia to recall memories from the ‘historical analogue’ of the Greek Revolution (Liberatos 2021, p. 141). Typical, in this respect, is the text ‘EAM’ from Free Greece: ‘When, in a context of widespread disappointment, the first EAM groups emerged and took action the people got surprised. . .This was the new Philiki Etaireia that started the fight of the resurrection of the Nation’ (Papamavros 1983, p. 11). As known, the Philiki Etaireia was a clandestine organization that orchestrated the armed uprising during the Greek Revolution.21 In a similar vein, PEEA is equated with the Temporary Administration of the Greek revolutionaries. Thus, the text ‘Just like in 1821’, from The Little Eagles, reads: ‘Just like in 1821, now too there are people who care only for their own interest and not for the people’s interest. . .So they started to recommend patience and endurance, just like they do now. . .Thus they tried to divide the people so as they are not united, just like they do now. . .Back then, the Temporary Administration of Greece, say, the contemporary Political Committee of National Liberation, PEEA, sent the following message to admirals, captains and sailors. – Take care not to lose your enthusiasm over insignificant matters or your unity will dissolve’ (The Little Eagles, p. 45).22 To wind up, the selective integration of traditional and national ideology elements in the Readers’ discourse as well as the cluster of values and proposals adopted by EAM as a whole can be attributed to the ideological complexion of the EAM power bloc. The historical examination of EAM as a phenomenon and power coalition built during the Occupation indicates that EAM cannot be considered as purely communist organization given that it adopted more a national-liberation and ‘popular’ phraseology than a class/proletarian one (Tirovouzis 1987). After all, let’s not forget, that EAM was a coalition of forces

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which included parties and organizations of non-communist affiliation and, as the writings of the communists of the time reveal, care was given to keep them inside the EAM coalition (Chatzis 1982, pp. 265–278). On the other hand, the communist rationale of the time acknowledged the existence of a bourgeois fraction who were not affiliated with imperialist interests and foreign capital and could potentially be an ally even after the liberation. In this context, a discourse emerged that made reference to the Greek Revolution and drew more upon national rather than class ideology.

Building the New Person in the Mountain Readers The systematic, albeit selective, integration of traditional and national ideology elements in the EAM discourse is only one side of the coin. For, on the other hand, the study of the Mountains Readers reveals the writers’ intention to forge a new type of citizen with high political consciousness and fighting spirit. Although the Mountain Readers don’t exactly fall under the paradigm of the new person of the ideal socialist society (Cheng 2009; Kaganovsky 2008; Vujosevic 2017), they outline a new social subject on its way to social transformation. This is critical as the forces that supported Mountain Education and the writing of the Readers constituted a national-liberation front that, under extreme conditions, raised issues of social and political change both in the context of the Occupation and the post-war restructuring of the country in terms that negated the pre-war political status quo. The originality of the Readers lies, on the one hand, in the employment of the direct experience of the Occupation and, on the other, in the presentation of EAM’s institutions as points of rupture with the pre-war political, economic and social structuration of the Greek state. Thus, the Readers systematically project the unprecedented rural social institutions established in the ‘Mountains’. Popular self-administration and justice occupy a prominent place in the Readers (The Little Eagles 1944, pp. 55–56; Papamavros 1983, pp. 84–87). Typical in this respect is the following extract from The Little Eagles (1944, pp. 55–56): ‘[Popular] Administration along with Popular Justice turned our village into a city! . . .Now everything is in running order. There are no more thefts, forest depletion has stopped. Burdens are equally distributed’. These institutions, novel forms of social organization compared to the prewar apparatuses of the Greek nation-state, manifest the significance of EAM’s political and social work both for the Resistance and the orderly organization of society in a new political environment. These political institutions introduced new types of citizens’ representation and self-organization far more advanced than bourgeois democracy. Moreover, and while the Readers contain multiple references to national history and the significance of the Greek Revolution, they also break away with traditional norms. The text ‘The seven lazy people’ from The Little Eagles (1944, pp. 59–62) brilliantly contrasts tradition and modernity. The seven brothers are accused by their parents of being lazy simply because they wish to implement innovations in working patterns to make them more effective. Eventually, and as

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the new practices proved more effective, the traditional patterns are abandoned and a spirit of renewal and innovation is introduced in the otherwise backward village life. Similarly, in the text ‘How Dafnochori was saved’, PEEA sends an agriculturalist to help the peasants leave behind their prejudices and outdated modes of labouring (The Little Eagles 1944, pp. 76–78). After all, key to the concept of person in Marxism is the investment of the notion of labour with meanings that are not confined to the production process and its technical preconditions (cf. Kosik 1976; Meszaros 2005). In this context, production occupies centre stage and labour is acknowledged as the supreme human need. Although references to productive development are scarce in the Mountain Readers, given that warfare was not conducive for this issue to emerge, they contain references that praise labour, workers and the vision for a new, workers-based and developed post-liberation Greece. For example, the text ‘The green bench’ reads: ‘I am full of joy. The aspen was right. It is nice to be useful to society’ (The Little Eagles 1944, p. 64). The text contains multiple meanings indicative of EAM’s ideological orientation. The story is narrated by a bench that initially wished to be sit on only by kings. Gradually, however, it realized the importance of serving the community. The climax of the story is reached when a group of workers in their dirty work clothes sit on it. The Readers also highlight the new collective subjects, such as the children participating in the political and cultural organizations of EPON and Little Eagles, that dynamically enter the public sphere. As Free Greece characteristically reads: ‘The children of EPON will crush fascism. All children, boys and girls, join EPON (Papamavros 1983, p. 57). The youth organizations of EAM are involved in school life: they organise children’s free time, politicise them, facilitate their education and convey the aims of broader political, trade union and local organizations. It needs to be stressed that all versions of the New Education Movement, already since the interwar era, had placed school community centre-stage (Papamavros 1927). The Readers’ writers, renowned interwar pedagogues and adherents of the labour school, sought to implement the New Education principles in the Mountain Readers while taking into consideration the emergency conditions of the Occupation. In this context the school community is not confined to individual school’s internal life but intermingles with other groups, such as the children and youth organizations of KKE and EAM, reaching out the narrow borders of schools. In this sense it gets closer to the socialist version of labour school than the western variations of New Education. The Readers depict school communities as active, engaging with other organizations of Free Greece such as ELAS, organising cultural events and seeking to fulfil its entertaining, cultural and political mission. The Readers sought to highlight the fighting spirit and vigilance of students, their almost complete commitment to the cause of and struggle for liberation as determined by political leadership. In Free Greece Nikos, a little eagle, appears to be assisting, in a particularly fighting manner, the guerrillas: ‘Nikos, taking a further step and holding his breath, picked up a stone and threw it with all his strength on the German soldier’s head. . .The captain lifted him up. He kissed

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him. Well done little eagle! he cheered. You are a model Greek boy’ (Papamavros 1944, pp. 41–42). In short, what distinguishes the Mountain Readers from the previous ones is the recognition of emergency conditions and the positive evaluation of the military experience of Resistance.23 Indeed, the gap that separates the pacifist pedagogy that inspired the Greek interwar educators (Imvrioti 1926; Kawerau 1934) from the glorification of Resistance’s wartime deeds is large. Finally, the new person painted in the Readers is not genderless. And yet, it needs to be acknowledged that the references to gender roles revolve around Resistance and the national liberation struggle and, as a result, only particular aspects of the traditional gendered division of labour are challenged. In other words, the Readers contain both traditional and modern elements regarding the new person EAM envisioned to build. Generally speaking, the references to women can be subdivided to those regarding their private life and their role in the family, and their public and ‘fighting’ life and the new roles this engagement involves. Indeed, on the one hand, women appear to be performing the roles ascribed to them in a traditional society, a fact that reflects their experiences in the mountainous and underdeveloped areas of Greece where the action of EPON and the other youth and resistance organizations unfolded. For example, in The Little Eagles (p. 8), the girl from Souli offers her brother the fighter ‘Warm cake [. . .] that I kneaded with my own hands and mother baked in the fire on her own’. This incident indicates the particularly communist perspective on gender equality, which had prevailed both in the USSR and KKE since the early 1930s, that stressed the liberation of women through their ability to do what men do and without questioning the value system of women’s private life, particularly maternalism, namely the web of ‘ideas and policies foregrounding motherhood as crucial for the nation’s public health, global competitiveness, and moral order’ (Eley 2002, p. 186; see also Clements 1985, pp. 220–237; Fitzpatrick 2005, pp. 125–152). On the other hand, women are presented to participate along with their husbands in the Resistance struggle and the focus is on collective struggle rather than on the gender dimension of their problems. In other words, the Mountain Readers are devoid of gender distinctions as far as students and the child and student organizations are concerned. Boys and girls take up initiatives in the public sphere and appear to jointly participate in multiple activities. For example, the text ‘Greek girls in arms’ from Free Greece reads: ‘They thought we were inferior. They thought we had no guts, that all we could do was household duties and that we had nothing to offer to the present struggle. . . [However] we were eager to learn the art of war. . .In the fire of war and giving hard battles, we proved ourselves winners’ (Papamavros 1983, p. 72). The extract indicates that the attempt to leave the idea of women’s inferiority behind passes through struggle. And in this context, references to the Greek Revolution are employed and the women that participated and sacrificed themselves for the liberation, such as Bouboulina and Moscho Tzavella, appear as role models (Papamavros 1983, p. 72). Even more so the Souliotes women, who, a few years before the Revolution committed suicide lest of being captured by the Ali Pasha

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forces, appear as exemplars both in the Readers and other texts of EAM. The reference to these heroic female figures of the Revolution seek to mobilise the girls and young women in the liberation struggle through their participation in the Resistance organizations. Yet, despite the fighting and participating profile painted in the Readers, this female model and the demands it raises differ from the ones prioritised by both the feminist interwar movement and KKE during the 1920s. Roza Imvrioti, writer of the Little Eagles and committed feminist since the interwar, points out the transition from bourgeois to socialist feminist that occurred in the 1940s (Papastefanaki 2021b). According to socialist feminism, women’s issues take second place to the demand for social change and the struggle for the transition to socialism. In this context there is little space for women’s claims beyond and outside class struggle and societal divisions. On the other hand, the female role model projected by KKE after the 1930s changes, compared to the first generation of female Greeks that participated in the Party (Psarra 2010). In this respect, Elektra Apostolou, a communist of bourgeois descent who remained loyal to the Party line without either rejecting or prioritising the gender dimension, became the emblematic female figure of the communist movement when she died of torture without betraying her principles. In short, the gender dimension of the collective subject as presented in the Readers do not completely break away from the traditional gender norms of Greek society and particularly of the backward mountainous areas were EAM dominated. Still, women appear to participate for the first time in the public sphere through the new self-organised institutions established by EAM and to take up new political roles. Thus, in the context of the Occupation and Resistance, a new subject emerged that combined both traditional and modern elements.

Conclusion The Mountain Readers contain a considerable number of texts devoted to the Greek Revolution that associate the heroic figures, sacrifices and events of the struggle for independence with the present conjuncture: the Occupation and struggle for liberation. The armed fighters of the Greek Revolution -klephts and martoloses-find their heirs in the ELAS guerillas and the war deeds against the Occupation forces. National Resistance is presented as the new Greek Revolution that seeks to oust the conquerors and restructure Greece on the basis of a new balance of power and with an eye to progress, democracy and economic development. The EAM pedagogues, on the one hand, seek to socialise the generation of the Occupation, namely the children who participate in the national liberation struggle through the youth organization of Resistance, and, on the other, to educate and prepare them to bring about a deep change by ousting the conquerors and restructuring the country on a new socio-economic basis. The Readers aim to build the new collective subject of Resistance who is politically active and

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participates in the local administration of guerilla-controlled territories of the country. This new type of citizen is inspired by national history and primarily by the example of the Greek Revolution’s heroes to wholeheartedly engage in the struggle for the realization of EAM’s programme. In the context of the emergency conditions of the Occupation, the invocation of the Greek Revolution both in the Left discourse as a whole and particularly in the Mountain Readers acquires special weight and seeks to legitimate and confer meaning to the armed guerilla struggle. The content and form of the resistance movements’ struggle during the WWII may have changed but the mobilisation of national myths and national historical narrative becomes a powerful ideological weapon next to the ideas of social change and the plans for political transformation in the countries under Occupation.

Notes 1. EAM was founded on 27/28 September 1941 after an initiative of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) and with the participation of three minor parties of the Left – the Socialist Party of Greece, the Agricultural Party of Greece and of the Union of People’s Democracy (Close 1995, p. 70). 2. G. Skalidakis (2014, pp. 191–192) has detected a discrepancy in the numbers of the National Council members: according to the Minutes of the National Council there were 184 national counselors while according to the Texts of National Resistance vol. 2, 180. 3. Sotiriou (1987, p. 57), argues that the education reform he outlined in Koryschades envisioned a ‘progressive socialist education’. 4. The Greek language question was a dispute about whether the vernacular (demotic) or a scholarly cultivated imitation of ancient Greek (katharevousa) should be the official language of the nation. Although, by the end of the nineteenth century, demotic had made its presence felt in the literary sphere, as late as the first half of the twentieth century it remained excluded from public administration, academia, press and education. See, Frangoudaki (2001) and Stavridi-Patrikiou (1976). 5. The split of the Educational Society [ES] is indicative of the differences between the older members, who had invested in rising Venizelism, and the new forces who, since the early interwar era, had joined the ES. The failed reform initiatives of successive Venizelist governments shifted Glinos to the Left. Within the ES’s circle, the adherents of socialist and communist ideas offered a renewed perspective about both the causes of failure and the restructuring of the Greek education system. These developments culminated in the split of the ES in 1927 and the withdrawal of a group headed by Delmouzos who were reluctant to challenge the education system as a bourgeois state apparatus. See, inter alia, Charalambous (1987). 6. While the ‘Plan for the program of the Educational Society’, written by Glinos (1929), makes explicit reference to socialist education, envisioned to be implemented in a socialist society where the working class and its interests would play a prominent role, in the Plan for Popular Education (1944) the concept of the people and youth prevail and no reference is made to the working class. These

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two texts constitute the most elaborate expressions of Left reform thought during the first half of the twentieth century and heavily draw upon the principles of polytechnical education. It needs to be stressed that KKE called ‘Little Eagles’ the organizations comprising young children that participated in the Resistance under the aegis of EPON (Zorbalas 1993, pp. 113–130). The basic tenet of polytechnism is the Society of schooling with productive labor. Apart from the focus on experience and children’s interests, that all New Education currents share, the socialist version of labor school sought to prepare students for adult-working and civil-life. To this end, polytechnism was not equated with vocational training and negated early specialization in the name of holistic human development. Polytechnical education sought to transcend the individualistic mentality cultivated in schools by placing particular weight in joint activities within the classroom. On polytechnical education and its development during the early phases of the Soviet Union see (Fitzpatrick 1979, pp. 5–10; Papastefanaki 2021a; Small 1984). Polytechnical education, namely the socialist version of labor school distinguishes itself from its liberal counterpart on several grounds as codified in the case of Greece: (A) The liberal perspective does not challenge the broader framework of bourgeois state and its institutions. On the contrary, polytechnism is internally related to the realization of social transformation to the benefit of the working class. (B) The liberal perspective falls short of radically questioning national and religious acculturation. (C) In the liberal perspective, labor is strictly separated from schooling while in the socialist version of labor school it is an intrinsic part of society’s productive activity. (D) Polytechnism is intrinsically related to the change of the existing societal regime and the balance of power between social classes. It is centered around the education of the young generation, the working class that constitutes the historical subject of social change and aims to abolish exploitation. This problematique is absent from the liberal labor school perspective that puts forth an education system which, despite being formally open to all, is socially biased (Papastefanaki 2020, pp. 188–227). The Mountain Readers’ writers, Roza Imvrioti and Michalis Papamavros, as well as all the pedagogues who participated in Mountain Education, were old acquaintances of Dimitris Glinos and adherents of the linguistic-educational reform in Greece. During the Occupation both were members of the General Council of EPON and informed, by the reports submitted to the GC, of the activities of EAM’s youth organizations (Zorbalas 1993, pp. 113–130). For a critique of the idea that these revolts were nationally motivated see, inter alia, Rotzokos (2007). The category of the people, which it is hard to analytically define since its boundaries remain deliberately fluid, seeks to draw a distinction between the ‘lower’ and ‘higher’ social classes. As a result, it does not lend itself to an analysis of social stratification and is blind to distinctions internal to social strata and their dynamic development. Contrary to the concept of social class, as a Marxist analytical category, the concept of the people is more conducive to political delineation than to unbiased scientific analysis. As Boukalas (2021, p. 82) remarks, heroic deeds provide the opportunity for hymn writing and the poetic narration of events under extreme conditions.

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14. It needs to be stressed that the folklore tradition, the so-called klephtika songs and pastoral poetry, had been appropriated by the demoticism movement and utilized in the struggle in favour of the demotic language (Delmouzos 1925, pp. 15–16). The Readers’ writers, adherents of the demotic and members of the Educational Society in the 1910s and 1920s, were aware of the role the folklore tradition had played in the demoticists’ struggle against katharevousa. 15. On the content and historical development of the tripartite scheme see, Koubourlis (2012). 16. During the Occupation a group of intellectuals and technocrats, affiliated with EAM, established the Groups for the Study of Planned Restructuring (OMSA) to investigate the problem of post-war restructuring in Greece (Pappa 2000, p. iu9). After the war, the group gathered around the journal Antaios and the organization Science-Restructuring (EP-AN) to concretize their plans for the restructuring and industrialization of the country (Noutsos 1993). 17. Modern historiography has suggested that the Greek Revolution broke out long before the 25th of March while no connection has been found between the Revolution and the celebration of the Annunciation of Virgin Mary in Agia Lavra (Koulouri 2012, p. 200; Kremmydas 1996, pp. 18–20). According to the dominant national narrative, the Revolution started when the bishop Palaion Patron Germanos blessed the banners of the fighters in Agia Lavra on 25th of March. 18. Sotiriou (1987, p. 56), for example, taking about the establishment of PEEA in March 1944 in Viniani mentions a celebration that took place on the 25th of March: ‘Before long, the 25th of March arrived. A national celebration. The bishop of Kozani joined in and a modest, religious and patriotic, celebration was organized’. 19. After all even D. Glinos (1944, p. 58), in his seminal text What EAM is and what it wants, declared to the Greek people: ‘From the depths of a three millennia long history, you are being watched by the ancestors, the heroes and the martyrs. The fighters of Marathona and Salamina, the fighters of the Greek Revolution, the heroes of Albanian mountains. Don’t disgrace your history and don’t betray yourself. Be also a freedom fighter, along with all your brothers. Come on! All Greeks, all living people of this land, join the National Liberation Front’. 20. According to P. Stathis (2014, pp. 34–37), the populist Left historiography account of the Greek Revolution provided an effective and working ideological background for the struggles of the Left that allowed people to perceive their experiences through the prism of the struggle for liberation and the shaking off the foreign yoke. 21. During the post-war years and following the defeat in the civil war, Greek political refugees in the eastern bloc explored the relations between Philiki Etaireia and the Dekabrists (Zoidis and Gavriilidis 1955) who occupied a prominent position in soviet historiography. 22. Message signed by the Chairman of PEEA, dated 19/5/1944. 23. It is in this context that the incidents reflecting the Occupation’s brutality appear. Children are presented either as hunger victims or as members of the childhood or youth organizations of EAM (Little Eagles and EPON) that participate in Resistance. For example, the text ‘When hunger decimated Athens’ from Free Greece (Papamavros 1983, p. 15) that narrates the story of a mother with her 7-year-old daughter collapsing from hunger reads: ‘. . .I saw a black-dressed woman standing

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and crying. Next to her, her daughter stood, a 7-year-old girl. She was also crying. We are starving, we are starving! they shouted crying’.

Bibliography Boubous, G. (1996) H ellhnikή koinvnίa sthn prώimh marjistikή skέch: G. Sklhrό§-G. Kordάto§ (1907–1930) [The Greek Society in Early Marxist Thought: G. Skliros-Y. Kordatos (1907–1930)]. PhD dissertation, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences. Boukalas, P. (2021) “Apό ta klέftika sta antάrtika: Mia taxύtath peridiάbash” [From Klephtika Songs to Guerilla Songs: A Brief Excursus], Archeotaxio. Journal of Greek Contemporary Social History Archives, 23, pp. 75–86. Charalambous, D. (1987) O Ekpaideytikό§ Όmilo§: H ίdrysh, h drάsh toy gia thn ekpaideytikή metarrύumish kai h diάspasή toy [The Educational Society: Its Foundation and Activities in Educational Reform and Its Break-up]. Thessaloniki: Kyriakidis. Chatzis, T. (1982) H nikhfόra epanάstash poy xάuhke: O laό§ proxvreί. H hgesίa klonίzetai [The Victorious RevolutionThat Was Lost: The People Move Forward, Leadership Is Shaken], Vol. 3. Athens: Dorikos. Cheng, Y. (2009) Creating the New Man: From Enlightenment Ideals to Socialist Realities. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Clements, B.E. (1985) ‘The Birth of the New Soviet Woman’, in Gleason, A., Kenez, P. and Stites, R. (eds.) Bolshevik Culture: Experiment and Order in the Russian Revolution. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 220–237. Close, D. (1995) The Origins of the Greek Civil War. London: Longman. Delmouzos, A. (1925) Marάsleio kai zvή: Apάnthsh se mia kathgorίa [Marasleio and Life: Reply to an Accusation]. Athens: Athina. Eley, G. (2002) Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fitzpatrick, S. (1979) Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union 1921–1934. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fitzpatrick, S. (1994) Stalin’s Peasants. Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization. New York: Oxford University Press. Fitzpatrick, S. (2005) Tear off the Masks!: Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Frangoudaki, A. (2001) H glώssa kai to έuno§, 1880–1980: Ekatό xrόnia agώne§ gia thn ayuentikή ellhnikή glώssa [The Language and the Nation, 1880–1980: A Hundred Years of Struggles for the Authentic Greek Language]. Athens: Alexandreia. Giouras, T. (2014) ‘The Journal Antaios, Publicity as Struggle and Struggle as Publicity’, Utopia. Bi-montly Publication of Theory and Culture, 108, pp. 27–45. Glinos, D. (1927) ‘To Understand Our Times. Press, Education, Clergy’ [Gia na katanooύme thn epoxή ma§. Tύpo§, Paideίa, Klήro§], Anagennisi, 2(3), pp. 97–99. Glinos, D. (1929) “Sxέdio gia to prόgramma toy Ekpaideftikoύ Omίloy” [Plan for the Programme of the Educational Society], O Neos Kosmos, 9, pp. 1–15.

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Glinos, D. (1944) Ti eίnai kai ti uέlei to Eunikό Apeleyuervtikό Mέtvpo [What EAM Is and What It Wants]. Athens: O Rigas. Iliou, F. (2014) “H ideologikή xrήsh th§ istorίa§. Sxόlio sth syzήthsh Kordάtoy-Zeύgoy” [The Ideological Use of History. Comment on the Kordatos-Zevgos Debate], in Dimitropoulos, D. and Karamanokalis, V. (eds.) The Readings of 1821 and the Left. Athens: ASKI-I Avgi, pp. 15–28. Imvrioti, R. (1926) “H didaskalίa th§ istorίa§” [The Teaching of History], Anagennisi, 3, pp. 130–135. Imvrioti, R. (1945) “Laϊkή paideίa” [Popular Education], Elefthera Grammata, 22(12), p. 14. Kaganovsky, L. (2008) How the Soviet Man Was Unmade: Cultural Fantasy and Male Subjectivity under Stalin. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Karpozilos, K. (2021) “To έuno§ tvn kommoynistώn” [The Nation of the Communists], Archeotaxio. Journal of Greek Contemporary Social History Archives, 23, pp. 33–38. Katsantonis, G. (1981) Oi dάskaloi stoy§ agώne§ gia cvmί-paideίa-eleyuerίa. Symbolή sthn istorίa§ th§ Didaskalikή§ Omospondίa§ Ellάda§ [Teachers in the Struggles for Bread-Education-Freedom. Contribution to the History of Greek Primary Teachers Federation]. Athens: Sychroni Epochi. Katsoridas, D., Livieratos, D. and Paloukis, K. (2003) O ellhnikό§ trotskismό§: Έna xronikό, 1923–1946 [Greek Trotskyism. A Chronicle, 1923–1946]. Athens: Philistor. Kawerau, S. (1934) Sociological Pedagogy (M. Papamavros, Trans.). Athens: Ekdosi “Anexartitou”. Kordatos, Y. (1924) H koinvnikή shmasίa th§ Ellhnikή§ Epanastάsev§ toy 1821 [The Social Meaning of the Greek War of Independence of 1821]. Athens: Vasileiou. Kosik, K. (1976) Dialectics of the Concrete: A Study on Problems of Man and World (K. Kovanda and J. Schmidt, Trans.). Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Co. Koubourlis, G. (1997) ‘H tajikή pάlh sthn yphresίa th§ eunikή§ oloklήrvsh§’ [Class Struggle in the Service of National Integration], Dokimes, 5, pp. 187–215. Koubourlis, G. (2012) Oi istoriografikέ§ ofeilέ§ toy Sp. Zampelίoy kai K. Paparrhgόpoyloy: H symbolή Ellήnvn kai jέnvn logίvn sth diamόrfvsh toy trίshmoy sxήmato§ toy ellhnikoύ istorismoύ (1782–1846) [Historiographical Influences upon Sp. Zambelios and K. Paparrigopoulos. Greek and Foreigner Scholars’ Contribution Towards Forming the Tripartite Scheme of Greek Historicism (1782–1846)]. Athens: IHR/NHRF. Koulouri, C. (2012) “Giortάzonta§ to έuno§: eunikέ§ epέteioi sthn Ellάda ton 19o aiώna” [Celebrating the Nation: National Anniversaries in 19th Century Greece], in Invisible Facets of History. Festschrift in Honour of Giannis Gianoulopoulos. Athens: Asini, pp. 181–210. Kremmydas, V. (1996) “Mhxanismoί paragvgή§ istorikώn mύuvn. Sxetikά me mia omilίa toy Palaiώn Patrώn Germanoύ” [Mechanisms for the Production of Historical Myths. On a Speech of Palaion Patron Germanos], Mnimon, 18, pp. 9–21. Liberatos, M. (2021) H epanάstash toy 1821 kai to EAM. H έmpneysh, oi epidrάsei§, oi analogίe§ [The Revolution of 1821 and EAM. Inspiration, Impacts, Analogies]. Athens: Society of Modern History.

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Margaritis, G. (1986) “Apό th metagrafή th§ istorίa§ sthn anadhmioyrgίa th§: To pareluόn kai h didaskalίa toy sthn epoxή th§ EPON” [From the Transcription of History to Its Recreation: The Past and Its Teaching in the Times of EPON], in Proceedings of the International Symposium “Historicity of Childhood and Youth, Vol. B΄. Athens: IAEN/GSYG, pp. 641–647. Marketos, S. (2003) “H Ellhnikή Aristerά” [The Greek Left], in Chatziiosif, C. (ed.) History of 20th Century Greece. Interwar, 1922–1940, Vol. B΄, Part 2. Athens: Vivliorama, pp. 125–153. Maximos, S. (1945) H aygή toy ellhnikoύ kapitalismoύ (Toyrkokratίa 1685–1789) [The Dawn of Greek Capitalism (Turkocracy 1685–1789)]. Athens: A. Karavias. Mazower, M. (1993) Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941–44. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Merritt Miner, S. (2003) Stalin’s Holy War: Religion, Nationalism, and Alliance Politics, 1941–1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. M´esz´aros, I. (2005) Marx’s Theory of Alienation. London: The Merlin Press Ltd. Noutsos, P. (1993) ‘“Anoikodόmhsh” kai “Laokratίa”: To egxeίrhma toy Antaίoy kai th§ ΈP-AN sta prόuyra toy Emfylίoy Polέmoy’ [“Restructuring” and “People’s Power”: The Project of Antaios and EP-AN at the Brink of the Civil War], in Greek Society During the First Post-war Period (1945–1967): 4th Scientific Conference, vol. A. Athens: Panteion University/Sakis Karagiorgas Foundation, pp. 414–422. Panagiotidis, S. (2021) To “eunikό zήthma” sthn ellhnikή marjistikή istoriografίa (1907–1959) [The “National Question” in Greek Marxist Historiography (1907–1959)]. PhD dissertation, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences. Papamavros, M. (1927) H Sxolikή Koinόthta [The School Community]. Athens: Ekdotikos Oikos D. and P. Dimitrakou. Papamavros, M. ((1983)[1944]) Eleύuerh Ellάda. Anagnvstikό E΄ kai St΄ tάjh§ [Free Greece. Reader Fifth and Sixth Grade]. Athens: Synchroni Epochi. Papastefanaki, E. (2020) Aristerή paidagvgikή skέch sthn Ellάda (1910–1951). Apό to astikό sxoleίo ergasίa§ ston polytexnismό [Left Pedagogical Thought in Greece (1910–1951). From the Liberal Progressive Education to the Polytechnism]. Athens: National Center of Social Research (EKKE). Papastefanaki, E. (2021a) “To nέo sobietikό sxoleίo (1917–1941). H paidagvgikή sύllhch th§ ergasίa§ sthn ESSD” [The New Soviet School (1917–1941). The Pedagogical Conception of Labor in USSR], Outopia: A Bimonthly Publication of Theory and Culture, 135, pp. 135–153. Papastefanaki, E. (2021b) “Apό ton astikό sto sosialistikό feminismό. H perίptvsh th§ Pόza§ Imbriώth” [From Liberal to Socialist Feminism. The Case of Rosa Imvrioti], in Proceedings of the 3rd Panhellenic Scientific Conference of the Regional Directorate of Primary & Secondary Education of Crete in collaboration with the Region of Crete, Vol. B΄, 2–4 October 2020, pp. 145–153. Pappa, E. (2000) “Eisagvgή” [Introduction (ELIA, Ed.)], Antaios, 1, pp. ia΄–ki΄. Sxέdio mia§ laϊkή§ paideίa§: Eisήghsh toy E.A.M. kai th§ E.P.O.N. sth Grammateίa Paideίa§ th§ P.E.E.A [Plan for Popular Education: Report of EAM and EPON to the Education Secretariat of PEEA]. (1944) Athens: PEEA.

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Politis, A. (2008) Pomantikά xrόnia. Ideologίe§ kai nootropίe§ sthn Ellάda toy 1830–1880 [The Romantic Years: Ideologies and Mentalities in Greece 1830–1880]. Athens: Society for the Study of New Hellenism/Mnimon. Psarra, A. (2010) “Ta “prώta korίtsia” toy KKE kai oi tύxe§ toy§: Έmfyle§ ptyxέ§ mia§ bolikή§ aposiώphsh§” [The “First Girls” of KKE and Their Fortunes: Gender Aspects of a Convenient Concealment], in Karamanolakis, V., Olympitou, E. and Papathanasiou, I. (eds.) Greek Youth in the 20th Century. Political Trajectories, Social Practices and Cultural Expressions. Athens: Themelio/ Archives of Contemporary Social History/Nikos Poulantzas Institute, pp. 433–445. Rotzokos, N. (2007) Eunafύpnish kai eunogέnesh: Orlvfikά kai ellhnikή istoriografίa [Nation-awaking and Ethogenesis: The Orlov Events and Greek Historiography]. Athens: Vivliorama. Sakellariou, H. (1984) H paideίa sthn antίstash [Education during the Resistance]. Athens: Filippotis. “Synedrίash 49 sti§ 8 Aygoύstoy 1944, Trίth, ώra 9 p.m [Session 49, 8 August 1944, Tuesday, 9.00 a.m.]”, (1990) in Paraskeva, F. (ed.) Archive of the Political Committee of National Liberation (PEEA). Athens: Sychroni Epochi, pp. 173–177. “Synedrίash 52 sti§ 15 Aygoύstoy 1944, mέra Trίth, ώra 4 ½ m.m [Session 52, 15 August 1944, Tuesday, 4.30 p.m.]”, (1990) in Paraskeva, F. (ed.) Archive of the Political Committee of National Liberation (PEEA). Athens: Sychroni Epochi, pp. 180–187. “Synedrίash 56h sti§ 24 Aygoύstoy 1944, hmέra Pέmpth, ώra 4 m.m [Session 56, 24 August 1944, Thursday, 4.00 p.m.]”, (1990) in Paraskeva, F. (ed.) Archive of the Political Committee of National Liberation (PEEA). Athens: Sychroni Epochi, pp. 194–200. Skalidakis, G. (2014) H Eleύuerh Ellάda. H ejoysίa toy EAM sta xrόnia th§ Katoxή§ (1943–1944) [Free Greece. The Power of EAM in the Occupation Years (1943–1944)]. Athens: Asini. Skliros, G. (1919) Ta sύgxrona problήmata toy ellhnismoύ [The Contemporary Problems of Hellenism]. Alexandreia: Grammata. Skliros, G. ((1922)[1907]) To koinvnikό ma§ zήthma [Our Social Question]. Athens: Ekdoseis Sosialistikou Kentrou. Small, R. (1984) ‘The Concept of Polytechnical Education’, British Journal of Educational Studies, 32 (1), pp. 27–44. Sotiriou, K. (1962) ‘To Eunikό Symboύlio kai h Paideίa’ [The National Council and Education], Epitheorisi Technis, 87–88, pp. 300–304. Sotiriou, K. (1987) O Kώsta§ Svthrίoy afhgeίtai [Kostas Sotiriou Narrates]. Athens: Epikairotita. Spanakou, Z. (1991) H έnnoia th§ istorikή§ nomotέleia§ sto mesopolemikό έrgo toy Giάnh Kordάtoy [The Concept of Historical Determinism in the Interwar of Yianis Kordatos]. PhD dissertation, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences. Stathis, P. (2014) “To Eikosiέna sthn aristerή istoriografίa toy 20oύ aiώna” [The Greek Revolution in the Left Historiography of the 20th Century], in Dimitropoulos, D. and Karamanokalis, V. (eds.) The Readings of 1821 and the Left. Athens: ASKI-I Avgi, pp. 29–44. Stavridi-Patrikiou, R. (ed.) (1976) Dhmotikismό§ kai koinvnikό prόblhma [Demoticism and the Social Problem]. Athens: Ermis.

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Part 2 Commemorative Focus

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Chapter 6

The Revolutionary Subject and Its Affective Modalities: Love-Duty, Sacrifice and the Heroic Panos Kompatsiaris

Introduction This chapter explores the affective modalities of the revolutionary subject, namely the investments in revolutionary affects, involving love as duty to a higher vision, the sacrifice for this higher vision and the moment of the heroic as a constellation of intransigent actualities and mnemonic topoi. Revolutions, whether big or small, progressive or reactionary, customarily emerge in response to social, economic and political crises; crises are moments when ‘strong’ collective effects, such as disgust, anger or humiliation, are channelled into political narratives, potentially repositioning political belonging. From the point of view of revolutionary modalities, crises are then the ideal battlegrounds for crafting affective investments to this or that cause. Crises bring violence, destitution and fear; they demoralise, dehumanise and diminish bios to bare life. Every crisis, however, is also a temporal conjunction in which feelings and emotional states are sharpened to unimaginable degrees; as such, crises and their narratives cultivate bonds and mnemonic topoi that can be used to exercise future visions. Thinking through the affective dimensions of political belonging and revolting, this chapter takes on board Kollontai’s idea of love as a duty to the collective and as a higher revolutionary vision contrasting it to commodified notions of love as an individual path. Following, it looks at the modalities of sacrifice and the heroic as vehicles for combating oppressive structures from an internationalist perspective. Throughout the chapter, I will be discussing examples related to historical socialism and the revolutionary imagination arising as responses to social and economic crises as well as media mobilisations of the heroic for enabling state-sanctioned liberation narratives, such as in the post-2022 RussoUkrainian war, and grassroots constellations of the heroic, such as in the murder of the LGBT activist and drag queen Zak Kostopoulos/Zackie Oh in Athens. The chapter argues that an internationalist socialist viewpoint should assess the

Duty to Revolt, 89–98 Copyright © 2024 Panos Kompatsiaris Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited doi:10.1108/978-1-80382-315-720231006

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affective substratum of the revolutionary subject that cultivates bonds, affinities and visions of political mobilisation.1

Love – Duty Writing in 1923, almost 100 years before present times, the Russian Marxist-feminist revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai theorised the affective bonds, erotic or otherwise, in the then nascent Soviet Union emerging out of a bloody civil war. At a time when the Soviet public sphere welcomed radical gender ideas, Kollontai grappled with the necessity to abolish patriarchal institutions via understandings of gender that would correspond to the newborn communist society. In her text Make Way for Winged Eros, Kollontai contrasts two different conceptions of love. On the one hand, within bourgeois society, we learn to associate love with an all-embracing feeling towards one person that culminates in marriage. According to bourgeois love, then, for Kollontai, ‘(l)ove is permissible only when it is within marriage. Love outside legal marriage is considered immoral’ (2010, p. 356). The ideal of the stable family unit prepares adjacent moral identities as, for example, being a good family person was, ‘in the eyes of the bourgeoisie, an important and valuable quality’ (2010, p. 357). Love outside marriage was considered – especially for women – scandalous. On the other hand, to replace this ‘all-embracing and exclusive marital love of bourgeois culture’, Kollontai offers the concept of ‘comradeship love’ which, for her, involves ‘the recognition of the rights and integrity of the other’s personality, a mutual support, sensitive sympathy and responsiveness to the other’s needs’ (p. 359). Correspondingly, communist society has to be built on the basis of solidarity and mutual trust, and therefore these psychic dispositions need to be cultivated. Solidarity for Kollontai, thus, does not only depend on the rational awareness of the common interests of the working class but also on the cultivation of intellectual and emotional ties linking the members of the collective under a common project. ‘Warm emotions’, for her, like ‘sensitivity, compassion, sympathy and responsiveness’ are aspects of love that communist desire should embrace (p. 357). Thus, while Kollontai hoped that negative love – that is, the ‘sense of property’ and ‘egoistical desire to bind the partner to one “forever”’ – in Soviet society will vanish, this society would need to develop the positive, ‘valuable aspects and elements’ of love (p. 364). While communist love rejects the idea of love as property culminating in the family unit, it should welcome love as a ‘warm emotion’ permeating proletarian affects, solidarities, bonds and sexual practices. Kollontai argues that to abolish bourgeois patriarchy, then, comradeship love needs to involve three interrelated qualities (speaking primarily about heterosexual relations): first, the idea of ‘equality’ that would put an end ‘to masculine egoism and the slavish suppression of the female personality’; second, the idea of ‘mutual recognition of the rights of the other’ and ‘of the fact that one does not own the heart and soul of the other’, which for her was a result of ‘the sense of property, encouraged by bourgeois culture’; and third, ‘comradely sensitivity’, which is ‘the ability to listen and understand the inner workings of the loved

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person’, an ability which ‘bourgeois culture demanded only from the woman’ (p. 361). These qualities set the ground upon which radical gender imaginaries would respond to the expectations and urgencies that the Russian revolution set out to accomplish. For instance, an exploration of Kollontai’s debates around multi-partner comradely love can be found in the 1927 Soviet film Bed and Sofa (Trft:> Nf7aosla>) directed by Abram Room; by depicting a m´enage-`a-trois, the film shows both the tensions and joys of possible new institutional arrangements, including the idea of multi-parenting, emerging out of the tentative rejection of love’s oneness – at least among intellectual and artistic communist circles. The imaginary in this film as well as in Kollontai has to do with the present of the early post-revolutionary years, in which the revolution and its crises had already taken place, yet gender roles remained bound to traditional bourgeois morality. What made Kollontai’s utopian project relevant for our present times is not so much its insistence on a radical reorganisation of social relationships and institutions related to love but the framing of this reorganisation within a common future vision, a future project that would purportedly liberate social relations. Love, more than everything, needs to be subordinated to what she calls ‘the more powerful emotion of love-duty to the collective’ (2010, p. 361). While harbouring a certain optimism that could lead to teleological thinking, Kollontai’s faith in the production of a new person within a project common for the oppressed harbours a communist imaginary brokered by the mandate to commit to a cause. While one today can notice similarities between Kollontai’s ideas and discourses on free love or polyamory, the difference is that these latter imaginaries are often not accompanied – at least in their mainstream articulations – by a desire to change the social relations of production, the distribution of wealth, the abolition of exploitative relations and the economic system that sustains inequality for the benefit of antagonistic military complexes. Eva Illouz discusses this individualisation of sex and love in the framework of what she calls ‘emotional capitalism’, where the production of economic capital sets into motion human emotions and affects for the purpose of market exploitation (2013). The overwhelming proliferation of advice literature and love empowerment are part of an ideological apparatus of ‘psychologisation’, that is the social mandate in free market economy to reduce social, economic and moral problems to the question of individual psychology (Nehring et al. 2020, p. 4). The ideal of self-actualisation, for instance, central to the happiness industry and life coaching cultures, implies that to eventually achieve it, one needs to dig deep inside oneself and find what one really wants, as sex and love, similar to career, friendships and geographical mobility, need to be curated in the context of supposedly free-to-choose subjects (Cabanas and Illouz 2019; Illouz 2019; Illouz 2013; Kompatsiaris 2024). The liberation from disciplinary sexual constraints refers, in this context, to a general quest of individual life-making, a process subjected to the histories of capitalist modernity. The historical-discursive figure of the single man, developed in the capitalist modernity of the nineteenth century, was meant to represent this imaginary and ideal freedom of choice, unfettered by the shackles and responsibilities towards the other and simply committed to the

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life adventures of one’s own self (Illouz 2019, pp. 28–29). In emotional capitalism, the discourse on sexual freedom resembles a sort of ‘neoliberal philosophy of the private sphere’, that is a discourse and practice that ‘melts away the normativity of relations, naturalises the consumer ethic and technology as a new form of emotional self-organization’ (2019, p. 14). What is obviously missing from these lifestyle practices is a larger intersectional vision of the oppressed coming together under a common project. If Kollontai’s ‘love-duty’ then needs to be framed within a vision that would gather around it the oppressed, it is certain that working class, Marxist or communist politics, have, especially after the fall of Soviet Union, lost this common vision. This melancholic rehearsal of loss often occurs in fatalist terms, as Enzo Traverso poignantly demonstrates in his volume on left-wing melancholia (2016), and in ways that involve both lament and ironic distance towards a contemporary ‘communist horizon’ to refer to Jodi Dean’s concept (2012). The abandonment of an internationalist imaginary based on the grand narrative of communism and universal justice is partly a matter of ideological disagreements among various left-wing tendencies; yet I would argue that one of the reasons that revolutionary visions become untenable relates precisely to the subjective and anthropological dispositions of a growing and socially validated anti-revolutionary conformism linked to the intensification and universalisation of consumer ethos. As an exercise on anti-conformist discourse, Kollontai’s love-duty invites us to rethink, from an internationalist perspective, notions, including the idea of self-sacrifice and commitment to a cause as well as firmness in socialist ways of living.

Sacrifice and the Heroic The idea of love as duty to a higher vision (here the proletarian revolution) would entail a (revolutionary) subjectivity that appropriates heroic modalities for combating capitalism and its military complex. Heroic modalities are mobilised one way or another in all narratives of crises, including the widespread mediatization of the post-2022 Russo-Ukrainian war. Volodymyr Zelensky, the comedian turned to be the country’s president in 2019, became the archetype of heroic Ukrainian resistance during the Russian invasion mainly in Western media. During the invasion, his daily inspirational reports in his Telegram page, delivered in Russian and Ukrainian (often with English translation), presented a leader ready to be sacrificed for his people and for defending his country, dressed in military gear and bulletproof vests while not abandoning Kyiv despite fears of the Russians approaching. Zelensky’s media-savvy and sacrificial persona could be partly staged by PR consultants yet its apparent success in mobilising support for the Ukrainian cause shows the power of heroic modalities in unifying people towards a vision and against a common enemy: the ‘Russian invaders’ or even, at times, the ‘Russian people’, are contrasted to the heroism of the Ukrainian people for enduring, resisting and combating the invading power. On the other hand, the Russian state narrative conceptualised the whole Russian army as heroic in an

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apparent effort to mobilise the Russian population for the alleged ‘de-nazification’ of Ukraine. In the Russian state narrative, the enemy against whom the Russians are fighting, is not the Ukrainians (the latter, according to this narrative, are still considered to be ‘brotherly’ nation), but the ‘Nazis’, who somehow had conquered the minds and souls of Ukrainians and acted on their behalf. In turn, for the artist Dmitry Vilensky who is member of the left-wing art collective Chto Delat, the ‘heroes’ are those Russians engaging in oppositional ‘militancy or visible resistance’ in the current repressive rule (2022, p. 10). In the context of war, the heroic narrative implies a sacrifice of one’s comfort for a larger vision, and it is this vision that purports to unite people under a common cause. Historically, the post-war custodians of revolutionary socialist visions had to commit to a total sacrificial act that would validate their truthfulness (we can think of leaders such as Mao in the People’s Republic of China, Tito in Yugoslavia and Georgy Dimitrov in Bulgaria). In parallel to that, when members of the capitalist class wished to practice revolutionary visions, they had to go through a similar demonstration of a ‘true’ commitment to a revolutionary cause so as to be accepted as legitimate carriers of these politics. Archetypical figures of Marxism and anarchism, like Friedrich Engels or Pierre Kropotkin, were born to affluent and often exceptionally wealthy backgrounds. In order for privileged self-declared revolutionaries to be considered as working class heroes they had to either sacrifice these backgrounds or offer their fortunes to the cause of revolution. From the nineteenth century onward, in a tradition spanning from Russian and American anarchism, the Paris Commune and Latin American guerilla fighters, and figures such as Louis Blanqui, Henry David Thoreau and Che Guevara, revolutionary life came strongly to be connected with a devoted lifestyle and generally to what Foucault calls the ‘style of existence’ (2012, p. 185); that is to say the ‘manifestation of truth’ in the militancy of one’s life itself (2012, p. 185). This manifestation of truth renounces luxurious possessions in favour of the commitment to the prospect of a classless society, implying that there is a performative contradiction in advancing a society without exploitation while at the same time enjoying the luxuries of the privileged class. Indicatively, the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin denounced luxurious lives, noting that ‘[f]or the privileged classes a life of luxurious idleness gradually leads to moral and intellectual degeneration’, and that a high-born aspiring revolutionary should be ‘ashamed of his aristocratic lineage and renounce privileges of birth’ (1980, p. 91). Ron Taber describes the ethos of Bolsheviks as being consisted of ‘personal dedication and single-mindedness’, involving ‘a kind of asceticism, a pride in being able to do without luxuries and things most people take for granted’ (1988, p. 38–39). Rosa Luxemburg notes how ‘sacrifices are part of a socialist’s work in life, that they are simply a matter of course’ (2011, p. 923) and Simone de Beauvoir famously predicts that ‘every revolution, demands the sacrifice of a generation, of a collectivity, by those who undertake it’ (1996, p. 99). Similarly, although she anecdotally protested against a danceless revolution, Emma Goldman’s devotion to the revolutionary cause was firmly established, and for her and her comrades in New York the revolution in the turn of the twentieth century ‘was who they were and what they did’ (Gornick 2011, p. 24). For these

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iconic revolutionary figures, the truthfulness and convincing power of the revolutionary statement becomes an issue intimately connected to lifestyle choices, reflecting (or not) some real commitment through present time sacrifices. Thus, in the life of the revolutionary as a devotee to a higher egalitarian cause, there is a strong emphasis on sacrifice; the sacrifice of one’s conformism towards a greater purpose, the revolution. Apart from inter-left ideological conflicts that undermined grand revolutionary visions, a gradual breakdown of this so called purist position in radical politics came from and with the rise of the New Left and its academic branches as well as from the gradual loss in credibility of the project of Soviet Union (where self-declared revolutionaries lived the lives of bureaucrats) in the post war world. Also, from a theoretical and epistemological standpoint, the idea of the revolutionary as a hero who lives up to what they preach came also to be seriously challenged. While there is no space to review all of these positions here, we can indicatively mention a few: the withdrawal of class as a legitimate marker of resistant politics; the questioning of the unified subject by post-structuralist theory; the emergence of cultural studies and the focus on the ‘uses’ of the commodity rather than its form within a system of production; the popularity of Foucault’s idea that power is everywhere and thus resistance can be found anywhere; the rise of a Gramscian post-Marxism and the validation of the idea that engaging with, or marching through, institutions of power is an effective path towards left-wing hegemony; the concept of ‘social labour’ that transforms everyone to a worker (and thus a potential revolutionary agent) as their intellectual and affective abilities (or labour power) are exploited by capital; the idea that the task of liberating desire is an effective modality of resistance, associated with the thought of Gilles Deleuze, are some of these developments. In the broadly-conceived left-wing thought these ideas put pressure on a conception of the revolutionary as a figure whose statements need to embody and reflect a life of heroic fidelity to a Cause. For instance, since the subject is split and one’s subjectivity can never be consistent and unified, the sacrificial demand becomes obsolete and the sacrificial act can be seen as a mere ‘performance’ of sacrifice. Or, since social change can be more effectively performed from within platforms of visibility, the commodity critique can be seen as paralysing, secondary and even backward practice in relation to how the commodity is ‘performed’ within complex matrixes of power. After all, Marx’s Capital is sold as a commodity. Moreover, heroism and sacrifice in contemporary critical thinking most usually refer to macho subjectivities, more-than-human representations and generally to banal, oppressive if not outright totalitarian figures. In Baudrillardian accounts, for instance, the hero has been dismissed as an impossibility in a media saturated world (e.g. Berardi 2015) or, in critical art historical terms, it is often seen as the ideal figure promoted by fascist and Nazi art (e.g. Groys 2008). The celebrated disjuncture between theory and practice in theories around performativity reduces the heroic in narratives of fixity, purity and immovable intransigence while the hero expresses mostly white, male, heteronormative or cemented ways of being. To make matters worse, the heroic contributes to monumentalising and spectacularising specific moments of history, selectively, in order to serve

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ideological agendas. And since monumentalisation is usually bound to state policies and the production of national myths, the heroic is guilty of reinforcing dominant ideologies. Often, the great hero-leaders of the nation, whose monuments are erected in public squares and whose bravery is exalted by the state, enable regressive, ethically-bound dichotomies between ‘us’ and ‘them’ through myths of national unity. Speaking of the current Russian-Ukrainian war conflict, the monumental creation of heroes in both nations is pertinent here. Putin’s regime flooded the Russian public space with monumental representations of the nation’s supposed founding fathers, including a gigantic statue of Prince Vladimir, credited with Christianising Eastern Slavic people, next to the Kremlin, as well as more recently, with posters of named soldiers and military personnel that took part in the invasion appearing in public. After the Maidan revolution of 2014, Ukraine has claimed its own national heroes, who antagonise the Soviet past and are opposed to Russia’s own mnemonic topoi (that partly rests in the WWII victory against the Nazis), while at the same time it has physically removed Lenin statues and other Soviet public monuments in different Ukrainian cities. There is no doubt that critiques of the heroic are partly justified. Yet, the appropriation of the concept by reactionary forces should not entail its abandonment. Especially in the current conjuncture in which war, xenophobia, misogynism and racism have wide popular appeal in Europe and the world, heroic politics and its satellite concepts, including self-sacrifice, dedication, intransigence and risk, are in need of re-conceptualisation from a revolutionary Marxist perspective. Inasmuch as capitalism, spectacle and racism are themselves enormously powerful institutions, one can not beforehand exclude modes of resistance that would involve these qualities. In Kollontai’s radical gender theories, heroines and heroes, rather than being discarded as totalitarian or macho, are positive figures. To return to Kollontai then, the socialist revolution came out of the ‘bravery, self-sacrifice and heroism, and of tremendous faith in the victory of the revolution and the justice of the struggle’ from the side of the oppressed (Kollontai 1980, p. 234); in other words, it resulted from a complete dedication to the idea of socialism and communism through which the bonds, identifications and love duties towards the cause would emanate.

Socialising Love, Sacrifice and the Heroic Rather than simply a personal affair that manifests in certain individuals, we could ‘socialise’ the ideas of love-duty, sacrifice and the heroic, as a constellation that comes together in particular times and spaces that in turn enable socially-meaningful symbols. These symbols typically represent ideas of both transgression and justice (however these are interpreted) rooted in some commitment or dedication to the cause that the person or collectivity pursues. Transgression from assigned social roles, justice against injustice and firmness to the cause are qualities that the heroic expresses and through which bonds with their politics occur. In our context, such constellations would ideally allow an internationalist politics to emerge alongside the possibility of articulating a

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project common to the oppressed. It is not just a hero that inspires people to do things but the hero in context; a person or a collective committing in determined action and becoming a symbol for the larger idea they pursue. Of course, the idea that the hero strives for needs to be socially produced in order to become meaningful; it may be the subject of endless argumentation and debate between political adversaries, it may be distorted, repurposed, shifted, reshaped to fit one’s politics. It is then the work of internationalist politics to imbue transgressive memories and political arrangements with resistant meaning and construct heroes whose commemorative rituals would allow the circulation of respective imaginaries in public space. The clearer the heroic vision is, the less it can be distorted as soon as heroic constellations become part of public spheres. Qualities such as dedication, parrhesia and commitment enhance the hero’s vision and make identifications easier. The qualities of the hero’s visions can be read vis-`a-vis Joel Olson’s discussion on the idea of fanaticism (2014). In his prematurely finished yet influential work on the concept, Olson moves away from its dominant, pejorative use in liberal discourse by discussing the so called Garrisonian wing of the American abolitionist movement of the nineteenth century—a group ‘of self-defined fanatics’ (2014, p 4). These fanatics had a clear and consistent vision of equality for all, whose interpretation could hardly shift and slide: they were fighting for the abolition of slavery and in doing so they used transgressive methods that involved the breaking of church services and the persistent pro-abolition preaching in any given opportunity. The fanatic, then, as the figure who would totally commit to an idea, can provide less troubling and polysemantic identifications through their politics. Like fanaticism, heroism is ‘neither inherently democratic or undemocratic’, it refers to a mode of political articulation that turns the enunciator into a devotee to a cause (2014, p. 3). To take an example of the effectiveness of the heroic as socialised reality from the Greek public space, Zak Kostopoulos, a drag queen, HIV positive and LGBT activist was murdered in the centre of Athens by an angry mob of macho men and the police in 2018. The incident was initially presented by the state and the media as an accident, or even a form of rightful vigilantism, following a supposed attempted robbery of a jewellery. According to this narrative, Zak tried to rob the shop in daylight, got caught and as a result was ‘punished’ by the owner, the mob and the police who literally beat him to death. As part of his public vilification and media-spectacle trial after his death, Zak has been named a ‘junkie’ and a ‘robber’. This process of stigmatisation further included references to his sexual preferences, creating a chain of signifiers, in which homosexuality, HIV positive people, cross-dressing, drug-use and activism would be expressive of deviant or illegal behaviour. Zak was produced as a figure standing for a ‘transgressive other’ that threatens society’s bourgeois morality, whose ideal is still based on what Kollontai called the ‘good, family man’. However, soon the whole narrative of the threat proved to be false, initiated by the ones who killed Zak in the first place and subsequently uncritically recounted by the media. What was proven following witness reports and medical post-mortem examinations was that Zak neither attempted to rob nor used drugs but was simply lynched to death by the

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mob; he entered the shop, probably to cover himself from a nearby incident of bullying against him. The initial fake news was only reversed after the committed effort of his friends and fellow activists to bring justice and give publicity to the case. In the case of Zak Kostopoulos, we have different varieties and intensities of the heroic at play coming together in a single event in what we can call a ‘constellation of the heroic’. Once the concealment efforts by the media and the police were revealed, gradually, his transgressive otherness came to be associated in public debate with different aspects of justice. Under this reversed narrative, his murder was now seen through the lens of martyrdom and self-sacrifice for a cause; leading a different life from what is considered to be ‘normal’, transgressing the boundaries of the acceptable and, even more, being a prominent voice for LGBT and HIV-positive people were all aspects of a just actuality whose very risk-taking led to an unjust death. Zak’s life and death revealed a consistency between words and actions, in which truth was manifested in the way of life itself and where this very truth-telling bore consequences for the enunciator’s physical being (Foucault 2010). His death then was heroic in the expanded sense of the word; it revealed a ‘truth’ turning life itself to a site of justice. In turn, for this very constellation to be activated, the courageous, determined and, similarly, heroic efforts of his friends, lawyers and queer community activists were required. This constellation of heroic values opened debates in the Greek public sphere ranging from the treatment of HIV positive people to the rights of sexual minorities.

Conclusion Heroic constellations mobilise visions of social liberation as a pivoting point around which radical progressive politics can be set in motion. The danger of heroic politics is precisely that heroism is turned into an accomplished fact, a fossilised representation, and a cult of exceptional individuals, usually created at the safe distance that time affords, in which the initial militant spirit is lost and forgotten. There is, then, a tension at the heart of the heroic between the everydayness of the unwavering actuality and its possible spectacularisation, even by institutions that the ‘hero’ would normally oppose. The format of the ritual and commemoration – even if fossilised – can potentially preserve memories that would then can be mobilised to other futures; yet the heroic deed is always part of an intransigent actuality, an everydayness that would culminate in moments of danger. Moving beyond contingency and potentiality as concepts to resist the shifting totality of current techno-entrepreneurial narratives, crises and wars, the affective modalities of the revolutionary subject would suggest seeing the actualities, possibilities and modalities of politics of partisanship and self-sacrifice as means to mobilise actualities of resistance. Kollontai’s love as a private yet expanding affair towards a collectivity constructs the heroic as a socialised establishment, a symbol for an elevated, utopian idea that can inspire, consolidate bonds and turn Kollontai’s love-duty into a tentacular, ‘warm emotion’ among the oppressed.

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Note 1. This chapter uses parts of my previous writing: Kompatsiaris, P. (2019) Comradeship, Love and Heroic Constellations, NERO publications/Kompatsiaris, P. (2019) Celebrity Activism and Revolution: The Problem of Truth and the Limits of Performativity. in The Political Economy of Celebrity Activism. New York: Routledge, pp. 151–165, and Kompatsiaris, P., (2019) On the Heroisms of Today: Experience, Memory and Risk as Anti-fascist Politics in Contemporary Art. Third Text, 33(3), 415–430.

Bibliography Bakunin, M. (1980) Bakunin on Anarchism. Quebec: Black Rose Books Limited. Berardi, F. (2015) Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide. London and New York: Verso. Cabanas, E. and Illouz, E. (2019) Manufacturing Happy Citizens: How the Science and Industry of Happiness Control Our Lives. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons. Dean, J. (2012) The Communist Horizon. London and New York: Verso Books. De Beauvoir, S. (1996) The Ethics of Ambiguity. New York: Citadel Press. Foucault, M. (2010) The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Coll`ege de France, 1978–79. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, M. (2012) The Courage of Truth: The Government of Self and Others II. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Gornick, V. (2011) Emma Goldman: Revolution as a Way of Life. Yale: Yale University. Groys, B. (2008) Art Power. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Illouz, E. (2013) Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity. Illouz, E. (2019) The End of Love: A Sociology of Negative Relations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kollontai, A. (2010)[1923] ‘Make Way for Winged Eros’, in Barker, A. and Grant, B. (eds.) The Russia Reader. Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 351–361. Kollontai, A. (1980) Selected Writings. Norton: Manhattan. Kompatsiaris, P. (2024) (forthcoming) Curate and be Curated: The Cultural Imperatives of Platform Capitalism. London and New York: Routledge. Luxemburg, R. (2011). The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg. London and New York: Verso Books. Nehring, D., Madsen, O.J., Cabanas, E., Mills, C. and Kerrigan, D. (eds.) (2020) The Routledge International Handbook of Global Therapeutic Cultures. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Olson, J. (2014) ‘Rethinking the Unreasonable Act’, Theory & Event, 17(2). Taber, R. (1988) A Look at Leninism. New York: Aspect Foundation. Traverso, E. (2016) Left-wing Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press. Vilensky, D. (2022) ‘A Dive into the Depths’, e-flux Magazine. Available at https:// www.e-flux.com/notes/465781/a-dive-into-the-depths?fbclid5IwAR3CyWUIDmp 6QhqEvkWYTNft3ejrTWzJIm8HB7IR1MYMVKDBiDsiYC1vOhA

Chapter 7

Herstories: Activism, Detention and Torture Bev Orton and Alexander D. Ornella

Introduction This chapter focuses on the herstory of Black women activism in South Africa. We use the term Black to encompass the diverse ethnicities existing in South Africa. Theatre texts are used as a means to make women’s contribution against political oppression and racism visible. We discuss how their fight against racism emphasises the importance of their experiences of the divine within a religious context and the pivotal role women played as activists against apartheid. The herstory of Black women in South Africa is one of sexualised forms of political, physical and psychological violence – a herstory of violence, oppression, exploitation, victimisation, imprisonment and police brutality. The apartheid government used violence to control women, their bodies, their religious and spiritual experiences. The feeling of disregard for African women is echoed in an interview with Mhlophe when she talks about the Battle of Blood River and how there is no mention of women. ‘Did those men have no sisters, no mothers who helped them? Our history is very unbalanced’ (August 1990, p. 332). These sentiments highlight the reality of male domination and South African herstory which kept women on the periphery, neglected, and their suffering unrecognised. Thousands of women were arrested, subjected to naked body searches, physical torture, verbal abuse and sexual harassment. Women experienced both physical and psychological humiliation by white male interrogators. The role of men in the struggle against apartheid is one that is told repeatedly, however that of women in the liberation struggle, remains almost invisible. Their narratives and struggles tend to be side-lined and minimised (Orton 2018), despite their vital contribution to the fight against apartheid (Naidoo 2020). The marginalisation and discrimination of women was a result of various forces, power structures and power interests of actors across a range of social arenas, such as patriarchy, discriminatory and oppressive narratives around ethnicity and gender, religious language, iconography and imaginations. Female political prisoners included professional and educated women, nurses, social workers, teachers and medical doctors.

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Joining nationalist struggles enabled women to question gender roles whilst hoping to gain personal as well their country’s liberation. Multi-disciplinary women-led activist communities and organisations provided a space of protest and refuge. Their activism in the struggle was vital as they took on roles vacated by men who were imprisoned or killed by the police. The women were seen as not fulfilling their expected societal maternal roles of being mothers. They were punished for taking part in political activities by being issued with banning orders or placed under house arrest. Women who were placed under banning orders were treated differently from men (Orton 2018). Being taken forcefully and violently from homes by police, their young children left behind in the early hours of morning to fend for themselves – it was this separation from their children, the denial of visits or news of their children that was devastating.

Theatre and Herstory Theatre and various other forms of art are a key forum to realise, reflect on, make visible and raise awareness for women’s contribution to the struggle against apartheid creating ‘a space to speak’. Theatre and other forms of art enable communicating the herstory of apartheid activism. In this context, acting is not only a form to document the reality of women’s experiences, point to their subjugation by oppressive political and societal conditions and the impact of such oppression on society as a whole, as well as a means to imagine different realities and to demonstrate women’s ingenuity and agency in surviving detention and torture. Other forms of art, such as painting and writing, serve a similar purpose: to document and visualise, i.e. make heard and make visible, women’s embodied experiences. In their fight against injustices, racism and oppression in South Africa, women also drew on their very own experiences of the divine (Oduyoye 1997/1998, p. 494). Oduyoye (1997/1998, p. 498) argues that the experience of racism – and the fight against it – are intertwined with their religious context and that paying attention to this context is important: ‘The South African experience of racism included a Christian God who was boss (the South African secret police) and partial to the dominant group. Black theology had to debunk the underlying theory that God is partial and favored the white race and subjected the black race to servitude under them’. The dynamic herstory of South Africa is both indicator and product of social, cultural and religious contexts (Chitando and van Klinken 2021; Oduyoye 1997/ 1998; Pui-lan 2004). The herstory of theatre, art and religion in South Africa is closely aligned to the political history of the country itself. A herstory of violence, oppression, exploitation, victimisation, imprisonment and police brutality against women. The truth about how women experienced their herstory of apartheid is different from that of how men experienced their history of apartheid. Meer (1998) feels strongly that Black women’s experience of oppression, both within society and the home, has meant that their voices have not always been heard. Their experiences have been silenced because of their inferior status, domination

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by apartheid, victimisation within family structures and by being part of an oppressed and exploited community. Women in South Africa, theatre, art and religious feminist and womanist thinkers have played a pivotal role in resistance to both colonial rule and the anti-apartheid struggle. At the turn of the century, between 1910 and 1920, women participated in early anti-pass campaigns aimed at restricting the movement of women to the cities to look for work and to find their husbands. Since 1913. African women had been protesting against apartheid and pass laws, yet nationalist leaders did not acknowledge women’s oppression under colonialism nor patriarchy (Geisler 2004, p. 64). In 1913, Charlotte Maxeke, a schoolteacher from Kimberley, was the first South African Black women to receive a Bachelor’s Degree. She became involved in organising campaigns against pass laws and supporting trade union movements. She led a march against pass laws for African women. The protest against laws that required women to carry passes spread throughout the Free State and women, led by Charlotte Maxeke, began organising petitions. Five thousand signatures were collected and women prepared to go to Cape Town to present their concerns to the authorities there. This proposed action made the white authorities anxious and the Minister of Native Affairs requested John Dube, president of South African National Congress (SANNC), to stop the deputation as it would make whites nervous and hinder any representations made by other political organisations. However, the women would not be dissuaded and persisted in presenting their petition to officials in Cape Town. These acts of defiance underpinned the formation of the Bantu Women’s League. By 1922, their resistance had achieved success. The South African government agreed that women should not be obliged to carry passes. Charlotte Maxeke became known as ‘the mother of African freedom in South Africa’ (Orton 2018).

You Strike the Woman, You Strike the Rock (Klotz 1994) The play You Strike the Woman, You Strike the Rock (Klotz 1994) takes its title from a protest slogan for the Women’s Protest March of 1956 when women marched against the pass laws. Amongst the 20,000 women activists who marched on the Union Buildings in Pretoria South Africa were delegates included Lilian Ngoyi, Helen Joseph, Radima Moosa and Sophie Williams. The title of the play is the slogan which is associated with the women’s protest march in 1956,1 the largest mass gathering of women in South African herstory. A combination of humour and tragedy is used to expose the harshness of the lives of three women, Mambhele and Mompompo and Sdudla, as they spent their days selling goods by the side of the roads in townships despite their constant fear of being arrested for pass laws. Sdudla2 represents the political woman, fearing for the safety of the children in the township and who is ultimately responsible for politicising and empowering both Mambhele and Mompompo. Sdudla refuses to carry a pass in defiance of the apartheid government:

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You Strike the Woman, You Strike the Rock is dedicated to Lilian Ngoyi, Dora Tamana and Annie Slinga, founder members of the Federation of South African Women. The women gathered to demonstrate peacefully against the imposition of pass laws3 on black South African women (Kani 1994, pp. 164–165). The pass laws were extended to African women despite their vehement protests. They refused to accept these laws as they had seen what effect they had on their fathers, husbands and sons. Their protests continued despite vicious and violent intimidation. They raised money to hire transport to get to the Union Buildings in Pretoria where they left thousands of signatures on petitions (Bernstein 1978, p. 47). Despite their protests the issuing of passes continued. Old women were unable to collect their pensions if they did not have a pass. Mothers were unable to register the birth of their children if they did not have a pass. Teachers and nurses were sacked from their jobs if they refused to get a pass. In this way women were forced to apply for passes (Bernstein 1978, p. 47). The pass laws severely affected and restricted the movements of African women and had serious repercussions for women from rural areas who would be prevented from visiting their husbands working in the urban areas or on the mines. You Strike the Woman, You Strike the Rock also highlights the women’s concern for, and their sacrifices for their children’s welfare. Working in white South African suburbs during the day meant leaving their own children unsupervised and not cared for in the township. Mambhele: Our homes are painted red, painted by the blood of our children. (Klotz 1994, pp. 182–183)

Censorship and Segregation In 1948, the Nationalist Party won the South African election. The strongly patriarchal and protective aspect of African family life was shattered when it collided with the laws of apartheid. The South African apartheid regime was characterised by violence, political upheaval, brutal oppression and violations of human rights. The control exerted by the Broederbond4 severely and violently impacted on and affected the lives of Black population groups, both men and women. One of the aims of the organisation was total segregation of ethnic groups in South Africa. The workings of the Broederbond perpetuated the issues of racialised power and racialised privilege (Mandani 2000). South Africans were classified into groups such as white, coloured, Indian and black. Living under apartheid rule meant that various ethnic groups were separated from each other

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forcefully and by laws. Forming inter-racial relationships was severely restricted.5 Breaking these laws resulted in convictions, imprisonment and solitary imprisonment. The apartheid government regulated all public entertainment in South Africa. This included the publication and distribution of books and films. For more than 40 years, the government imposed censorship which was used as a political weapon to silence the opposition – to silence any voices of opposition to apartheid policies (Davis 1995, p. 185 in Fuchs 1999). Segregation was formalised by laws such as the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act, Act No 49 of 1953, which enforced the segregation of races with the aim of preventing contact between white and other race groups. Signs were posted stipulating different entrances for Black and White people. The Group Areas Act, Act No 41 of 1950 created separate areas for living for different groups, which led to forced removals of people living in areas not designated for their particular race. There was a strong element of conscientisation within the African community that challenged not only the government but also the liberal whites. The 1960s and 1970s were a time of political upheaval and consciousness: Sharpville6 in 1960 and the Soweto riots in 1976. It was against this background of political unrest that women were regarded as being the ‘silent strength’ (Britton 2005, p. 6) during the anti-apartheid struggle, whilst trying to maintain their identity as mothers and wives. They were at the forefront of mass action, voluntarily setting aside their fight for gender equality in their fight for racial equality (Britton 2005, p. 6).

The Pass (Dhlomo [1943] 1985) This is poignantly illustrated in the play The Pass (Dhlomo [1943] 1985) when the power of the African male is rendered void and useless whilst the constables rape the African women who are in prison for pass offences. In scene three, Dhlomo uses the characters Edward and Jim to describe their fears about the women in the cells. Jim tells Edward about how the constables assault the women because they know that the women are scared and will not talk about being assaulted. Edward questions why the women need to be searched and supervised in their cells by male policemen. The location for scene four is in the women’s cell at the charge office. A white officer calls Betty to come with him. Scene four captures the fear and vulnerability of the women whilst in prison. It also highlights the impotence of the African men to protect the women and the degrading aspect of the apartheid system. Constable: Where is Betty Ngcobo? The Nurse: (after some hesitation) I am here. Constable: Will you come along with me? (Betty follows him out.) Second Woman: A woman is not safe nowhere in this male-made world.

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Fourth Woman: It is late friends. Let us pray and sleep. It won’t hurt to pray even in here. Now, softly, very soft! After this scene the voice of Betty is not heard again. (Dhlomo [1943]1985, p. 201)

Police Power On 9 August 1956, Lillian Ngoyi led a march along with Helen Joseph, Albertina Sisulu and Sophia Williams de Bruyn of 20,000 women to the Union Buildings of Pretoria in protest against the apartheid government requiring women to carry passbooks as part of the pass laws. Many of the women having literally risked life and limb to get to Pretoria to attend the march. Albertina Sisulu was arrested after her husband skipped bail to go underground, becoming the first woman to be arrested under the then General Laws Amendment Act of 1963. The Act gave the police the power to hold suspects in detention for 90 days without charging them. Albertina Sisulu was placed in solitary confinement for almost 2 months. Lilian Ngoyi, known as a strong orator and a fiery inspiration to many of her colleagues in the ANC, was arrested in 1956, spent 71 days in solitary confinement, and was for a period of 11 years placed under severe bans and restrictions that often confined to her home in Orlando Soweto. Winnie Mandela’s description of her time in solitary confinement – she spent 491 days in solitary confinement – reflects the horror of being in that situation. Winnie Mandela goes on to explain how the system is designed to destroy the person by forbidding any contact with another person. As a mother she found the hardest part was the suffering and pain of her daughter Zindzi. The most notorious section 29, allowed for potentially indefinite detention for the purpose of interrogation. A court of law had no jurisdiction to intervene in any action taken under section 29.

Born in the R.S.A. (Simon 1985) During the apartheid era many women spent time in solitary confinement – Barbara Hogan, Albertina Sisulu and Lilian Ngoyi to name a few women – and had banning orders7 or were placed under house arrest.8 During their imprisonment the women experienced relentless inhumane behaviour and torture at the hands of the apartheid government who attempted to silence their fight and to defeat their activism (Naidoo 2020). Thousands of women were arrested, subjected to naked body searches, physical torture, verbal abuse and sexual harassment. Women experienced both physical and psychological humiliation. Thenjiwe, the political activist in Born in the RSA, is taken to the police station and after twenty eight days in solitary confinement

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the security police came for her and led her into an office and where they forced her to write about herself: Cop (Glen): Now my girlie, you know what you’re going to do? You are going to write about yourself. . . no games hey? Not like Biko, or Timol, or Aggett, hey? You know what happened to them. Thenjiwe wrote as much as she could and after her fifth attempt they threatened her and told her that she would have to stand until she told them the truth: Thenjiwe: I stood 18 hours a day for the first five days . . . when I went back to my cell I couldn’t sit or bend. It took me ages, first to sit, then to lie, but by the time sleep came – it was time to stand again. . .. They began to hit me. On the seventh day my shift was changed to 24 hours. (Kani 1994, p. 28) According to the police a man who did not break under torture was respected by the police. “There was a sense of respect, where torturers would even say – ‘He is a man”. But a woman’s refusal to bow down would unleash the wrath of the torturers. Because in their own discourse a woman, a black meid, a kaffirmeid at that, had no right to have the strength to withstand them (Krog 1999, p. 272). Women’s prison experiences were highly gendered. Among the main difficulties that women faced were torture, sexual abuse, separation from and denial of access to their children and husbands, poor reproductive medical care and naked body searches. According to McClintock (1991, p. 116) women prisoners are tormented for being ‘failed mothers’. They were accused of being whores and sluts and were made to stand naked, do star jumps whilst the police made sexualised comments about their bodies, their sex lives, made to stand the whole day, fallopian tubes were flooded with water – tools of humiliation. There was a constant awareness of your body, its vulnerability and how it can be abused and ridiculed. Sanitation facilities were poor with women forced to live with broken or bucket toilets, lack of adequate ablution facilities, soap, shampoo and towels. Women were subject to further humiliation when during menstruation no sanitary pads. During her interview with Naidoo Joyce Sikhakane-Rankin talks about how menstruation stops and how bodily functions of women are different from men’s. The denial of sanitary pads meant that women bled through their clothes, on their sisal mats and bedding and the humiliation of having to ask white Afrikaner male interrogators for sanitary pads (Naidoo 2020). Prison, a site of torture and humiliation, was also another site for political resistance. They protested about their treatment such as not having adequate protection when menstruating or lack of underwear (Krog 1999, p. 282). Women endured torture and sexual assault and remained true to their commitment to the struggle. Their survival is a reflection of their inner strength and steadfast commitment to the anti-apartheid struggle. They were considered to be the

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property of men and the prison could be translated as being a male space – a private space in which torture could be carried out with impunity and without any recrimination from the state or the justice system. The police were extended the ‘privilege of torture’ (Gudorf 2011, p. 618). Fear of torture by the security forces did not deter the women activists from joining the struggle despite reports of women political prisoners being raped, having to undergo vaginal examinations, made to strip and be subjected to body searches (Krog 1999, p. 272). In Born in the RSA Thenjiwe an activist is captured: He moved towards me [ ] ‘No, I can’t believe it – he wants to grab me, to take me’. I wanted to tell him ‘Listen, man, it’s no use- it’ll take you an hour to get me to lie down, and I’m no good at doing it standing. His gun was on the table. If I could just fall that way, I would land on it. The thought of using a gun for the first time got me very excited. I saw it happen – Kazoom! Kazoom! Again and again! Kazoom! Kazoom! Like a crazy cowboy movie! Kazoom Kazoom! The black cop arrived with the Coke. I think we were equally disappointed. (Kani 1994, p. 35) Zakrah Nakardien said that what bothered her the most were the rats which were the size of cats. One night they ate through her blockade of clothing and reached her neck which was when she screamed. She was found eating her t-shirt in a corner of the cell (Krog 1999, p. 276). Women political prisoners formed close bonds in prison. Motshoba, describing her experience in detention mentions the strength of Winnie Madikizel-Mandela, Fatima Meer and Joyce Seroke. She said that the wardress called Winnie by her name, that Winnie taught them how to stand up for their rights. However, when Motshoba was rearrested in Vrede, in the Orange Free State, they too made her write her history and kept her standing. Then they began to beat her. When she recovered after collapsing on the floor they threw a pack of sanitary towels at her. Her cell was swarming with lice and stank of urine (Krog 1999, p. 282–283). There was much concern about the paucity of women’s testimony before the Truth Commission by women activists. At the special hearings which were organised by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) women were provided with an opportunity to talk about their experiences as women living under apartheid instead of talking about what had happened to someone in their family. These special hearings provided women with a public space in which to speak as ‘survivors of the violation of human rights [ ] as themselves, those who directly suffered’ (Mtintso in TRC women’s hearings, 28 July 1997 in Oboe 2007, p. 61). The transcripts offered important insights into the experiences of women and contributed to building a public memory of women as gendered subjects whose experiences were marginalised and ‘whose bodies have been used as a terrain of struggle by men’ (Mtintso in TRC women’s hearings, 28 July 1997 in Oboe 2007, p. 65). Women’s voices against sexism in political liberation movements were dismissed by male colleagues who insisted that the first issue was the

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liberation struggle and then the women would get their turn. This attitude towards women contributed to the silencing of their voices (Cleary 2000, p. 219). According to Naidoo (2020, p. 138), ‘one of the most significant acts that the TRC did not document was gender-based violence against women’. Gender-based violence was ignored – silenced, thereby denying women their important role as activists against a dysfunctional and destructive political system which brutalised and traumatised women activists and their families.

Religious Practice and Theology The fight against oppression, racism, and for equality also meant a need to re-imagine ideas and visualisations of the divine. ‘The South African reimagining of God revolved around ridding themselves of the patriarchal model that supports the hierarchy, domination, and sexism of their experience under apartheid’ (Oduyoye 1997/1998, p. 499). Oduyoye takes the patriarchal hierarchy found in, for example, Christianity, one step further and juxtaposes Christian patriarchal hierarchies with women’s experiences of God: ‘For many women, however, this [men speaking on behalf of God demanding women’s obedience] is a clear substitution of the will of God for the will of the male of the human species. Many women experience God differently and cannot allow themselves to be subjected to cultural codes that mask the image of God in women. They experience God as empowering them with a spirituality of resistance to dehumanization’ (Oduyoye 1997/1998, p. 500). For the practice of reimagining God, of reimagining social and patriarchal structures, art, such as theatre, painting and literature, provided a site of resistance and revolt. As Brent Plate (2006, pp. 45, 90) argues, art in and of itself is not blasphemous but is labelled as such from within a distinct political and religious context for specific political and power purposes. Establishing social, cultural, political, and religious control, Plate argues, includes exerting control and power over images, censoring them, destroying them or crafting what fits into the accepted narrative. One such example is the painting Black Christ, 1962, by South African artist Ronald Harrison. In his painting, Harrison portrayed Jesus as Chief Albert Luthuli, president of the ANC, first African recipient of a Nobel Peace Prize in 1961. Harrison portrayed the Roman centurions torturing him portrayed as Hendrik Verwoerd, Prime Minister of South Africa and one of the main architects of apartheid, and B.J. Vorster, Verwoerd’s Minister of Justice and Police. There is nothing blasphemous about the painting itself but him depicting Jesus as black and Verwoerd and Vorster as torturers was deemed so unthinkable, so unimaginable, that Harrison was arrested and tortured by South African security police. Yet, Harrison’s painting also situates (religious and spiritual) forms of resistance deeply in the question of history and herstory. As such, any act of resistance, and fight against oppression, any act of challenging those in power and the status quo always also includes the practice of imagining that which is classed as unimaginable, that which is deemed unthinkable. Razal (2016) argues that to date

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(and speaking about a US context), many Black women still find them subjected to and judged based on white and Eurocentric gender norms. Black women, she argues, continue to be seen as hypersexualised or sexual deviants. In this context, she directs our attention to what she (Razal 2016, p. 129) calls the ‘African Sacred Feminine’, a term I use to characterise diverse African elaborations of female divinity, and embodied female social and cultural power. Chicago based Afro-Cuban artist Harmonia Rosales9 is one among many examples of what a reimagining of patriarchal hierarchies to challenge and visualise male oppression can look like. In one painting, called ‘I Exist’,10 she replaces Jesis with a female figure. The title ‘I Exist’, we would argue, pays homage to all the forgotten suffering black women had to endure. The painting is not about questioning the historical figure of Jesus or Jesus’ gender, but visualising the radical idea that Jesus gave his life for all of humanity, not just the male half. In other words, Rosales visualises that herstory is a story of forgotten and ignored sacrifice, suffering, and strength. In another paining, ‘Creation of G. . .’,11 Rosales takes the well-known Michelangelo painting from the Sistine Chapel and replaces the white old male figure representing God and white Adam with female figures. Rosales sees her artwork as an attempt ‘to expand the limited cultural imagination around the agency of Black people and the nature of Black female identity’ (Okoro 2020). While herstory of religious practice and spirituality might often go unnoticed similarly to herstory of suffering and resistance, Razak (2016, p. 143) argues that reimagining and rediscovering a herstory of spirituality and religion is a key ingredient to any processes of healing: ‘I believe the recovery of African images of the Sacred Feminine are a vital part of our efforts to generate diverse, healing images that serve a variety of Black women’s needs, especially in regards to our bodies and our sexualities’. The Apartheid Museum in Guateng is well-known, highly visible, whilst the public memorial to the memory of women’s role in the struggle, the Monument to the Women of South Africa, Imbokodo, is located at the Union Buildings in Pretoria and is invisible to the public because of the inaccessibility of the Union Buildings. ‘The Monument’s invisibility not only trivialises the political significance of the Women’s March, but is also a distressing act of post-apartheid erasure of women’s political agency’ (Miller 2011, p. 1). There is an urgent need to reassess the cultural and artistic politics of commemoration in relation to women’s activism and their sources for liberatory thinking during apartheid, in the post-apartheid era, and their conflicting identities as women, mothers and political activists. This need is imperative in the light of post-apartheid femicide and violence against women and girls. The South African government needs to understand the importance of achieving gender equality in a country that has experienced years of oppression, discrimination and racism. In post-apartheid South Africa, women are being actively denied their rights as members of a democratic country where men are using rape, genocide and femicide as weapons of war. The silence of rape and torture of women persists.

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Notes 1. In 1956, 20,200 women marched on the Union Buildings in Pretoria South Africa. Delegates included Lilian Ngoyi, Helen Joseph, Radima Moosa and Sophie Williams. 2. Sdudla’s character is based on Annie Silinga, a political activist who refused to carry a pass regardless of threats from the police. 3. Pass laws controlled and regulated the movements of African and people of mixed race in South Africa. They were a form of racial segregation and discrimination against African people, immigrants and people of mixed race. 4. The Afrikaner Broederbond was formed in 1916 to further the aims of the Afrikaner nationalism in South Africa. It was a secret organisation and very influential politically and socially in South Africa. 5. The Immorality Act meant that sex between white and other ethnic groups was a criminal offence. 6. On 21 March 1960 the police fired on black protesters who were protesting about pass laws and the extension of carrying pass books to black women. Since 1920 black men had to carry a pass book. In 1960 the carrying of pass books was extended to women. 7. A banning order restricted an individual to a particular magisterial district. They had to report to the police. They could not associate with more than one person at any time – this included family members – could not visit public places and educational institutions. Banned people could not be quoted in the press or used for publication. They were not allowed to appeal against their banning order (http://africanhistory.about.com/od/glossaryb/g/def_banned.htm, Accessed: 20 May 11). 8. Opponents of the apartheid system were subjected to severe restrictions that could practically amount to house arrest (http://www.enotes.com/genocideencyclopedia/apartheid, Accessed: 20 May 11). 9. Her artwork can be found on her website https://www.harmoniarosales.com or on her Instagram account https://www.instagram.com/honeiee. 10. https://www.harmoniarosales.com/collections?lightbox5dataItem-l2je5q194 11. https://www.harmoniarosales.com/collections?lightbox5dataItem-l2je5q193

References August, T. (1990) ‘Interview with Gcina Mlophe’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 16(2), pp. 328–335. https://doi.org/10.1080/03057079008708237 Bernstein, H. (1978) No 46- Steve Biko. Michigan: International Defence and Aid Fund. Britton, H.E. (2005) Women in the South African Parliament: From Resistance to Governance. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Chitando, E. and van Klinken, A. (2021) Reimagining Christianity and Sexual Diversity in Africa. London: Hurst Publishers. Cleary, B. (2000) ‘The Spaces I Traveled: Notes on Theater and the Legacies of Apartheid in South Africa’, Macalester International, After Apartheid: South Africa in the New Century, 9, Article 15, pp. 216–223.

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Cook, B.A. (2006) Women and War. A Historical Encyclopedia from Aantiquities to the Present, Vol. 1. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, Inc. Davis, G.V. (1995) ‘Theatre for a Post-Apartheid Society’, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 30(1), pp. 5–21.https://doi.org/10.1177/002198949503000102 Dhlomo, H.I.E. (1985)[1943] ‘The Pass’, in Visser, N. and Couzens, T. (eds.) H.I.E. Dhlomo Collected Works. Johannesburg: Ravan Press. Fuchs, A. (ed.) (1999) New Theatre in Francophone and Anglophone Africa: A Selection of Papers held at a Conference in Mandelien 23–26 June 1995. Matatu: Rodopi. Geisler, G. (2004) Women and the Remaking of Politics in Southern Africa: Negotiating Autonomy, Incorporation and Representation. Uppsala: Nordic Africa Institute. Gudorf, C.E. (2011) ‘Feminist Approaches to Religion and Torture’, Journal of Religious Ethics, 39(4), pp. 613–621. Kani, J. (1994) More Market Plays. Parklands: Ad Donker. Klotz, P. (1994) ‘You Strike the Woman, You Strike the Rock’, in Kani, J. (ed.) More Market Plays. Parklands: Ad Donker. Krog, A. (1999) Country of My Skull. London: Vintage. Mandani, M. (2000) ‘The Truth According to the TRC’, in Amadiume, I. and AnNa’im, A. (eds.) The Politics of Memory: Truth, Healing and Social Justice. New York: Zed Books. Meer, S. (ed.) (1998) Women Speak. Roggebaai, Cape Town: Oxfam GB and Kwela Books. Miller, K. (2011) ‘Selective Silence and the Shaping of Memory in Post-Apartheid Visual Culture: The Case of the Monument to the Women of South Africa’, South African Historical Journal, 63(2), pp. 295–317. Naidoo, S. (2020) Women in Solitary. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Oboe, A. (2007) ‘The TRC Women’s Hearings as Performance and Protest in the New South Africa’, Research in African Literatures, 38(3), The Preservation and Survival of African Oral Literature (Fall, 2007), pp. 60–76. Oduyoye, M.A. (1997/1998) ‘The African Experience of God through the Eyes of an Akan Woman’, Cross Currents, 47(4), pp. 493–504. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24460601 Okoro, E. (2020, 10 September) ‘How Three Artists Are Exploring Mythology and Race’, The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/10/arts/design/ black-female-art-mythology.html Orton, B. (2018) Women, Activism and Apartheid South Africa. Bingley: Emerald Publishing Limited. Plate, B.S. (2006) Blasphemy: Art that Offends. London: Black Dog. Pui-lan, K. (2004) ‘Mercy Amba Oduyoye and African Women’s Theology’, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 20(1), pp. 7–22. https://www.jstor.org/stable/ 25002487 Razak, A. (2016) ‘Sacred Women of Africa and the African Diaspora: A Womanist Vision of Black Women’s Bodies and the African Sacred Feminine’, International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, 35(1), pp. 129–147. https://doi.org/10.24972/ijts. 2016.35.1.129 Simon, B. (1985) Born in the R.S.A. Market Theatre Company; available as: Simon, B. (1997) Born in the R.S.A.: Four Workshopped Plays. Johannisburg: Witwatersrand University Press.

Chapter 8

Commemorating the Revolution as a Duty to Obey: From the Rehabilitation of Gregory the V to ‘Greece 2021’ and the ‘Do-It-Yourself’ Bi-centenary Tassos Kostopoulos

Introduction Revolution – unlike Revolt – is a word full of positive connotations in a modern society. No wonder therefore that, besides its extensive metaphoric use in trivial political discourse and commercial advertisement, it has also been advanced to denote even the other way round. In modern Greek history not a few violent endeavours carried out in defence of the established order have been thus loudly proclaimed a ‘revolution’ ‒ the 1967 military Coup d’´etat of the Colonels’ Junta being the most famous case of such a semiotic recuperation.1 In a less prominent but equally revealing incident of the late 1990s, Political Science Professor Stathis Kalyvas, the well-known ideologist of Greece’s New Right (and a councillor of actual Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, appointed by him to the Committee responsible for the Jubilee commemorations), was very glad to discover during his field research in Argolida that some of his informants, former Nazi Collaborators, used to describe their enlistment in the auxiliary units of Wehrmacht (the infamous Security Battalions) as a ‘revolution’ against the so-called ‘red terror’ of the Communist-led Resistance of EAM-ELAS (the National Liberation Front and its Army) – a self-definition that Kalyvas also enthusiastically espoused in his own writings (Kalyvas 2000, p. 154). The most emblematic anniversaries of the 1821 Greek Revolution, its quinquagenaries and centenaries, more or less followed the same pattern, reflecting a number of crucial mutations underwent in the meantime by Greek nationalism, its social content and message. As time lapsed, ‘1821’ was less and less celebrated as a revolutionary event (that is, a victorious mobilisation of the subaltern in order to change their fate by recourse to the most radical means available), more and more as an opportunity for symbolic confirmation of the established order and social hierarchies. In this chapter we shall follow this development, examining Duty to Revolt, 111–127 Copyright © 2024 Tassos Kostopoulos Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited doi:10.1108/978-1-80382-315-720231008

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the four emblematic commemorations marking the 50th, 100th, 150th and 200th anniversaries of the constituent event of the Greek nation-state.

1871: Rehabilitating Clerical Counterrevolution In 1871, the commemoration of the Revolution’s Jubilee was dominated by the official rehabilitation of the most emblematic counterrevolutionary figure of the early nineteenth century, a person who had tried in vain to prevent the victorious uprising: Gregory the Fifth, the Constantinople Orthodox Patriarch at the time of the revolt and a collateral victim of the repressive measures taken by the Ottomans. A very conservative figure and a fervent supporter of the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire as a precondition for the Patriarchate’s own jurisdiction over its flock (Tertsetis 1853, pp. 17–18), Gregory had bluntly excommunicated the revolutionaries, condemning them on March 11/23, 1821 as ‘ungrateful and criminal apostates against the godsent authority’ of the Sultan,2 as he had also done with all the earlier manifestations of radical Greek nationalism or actual resistance to the Ottoman authorities, from the revolutionary preachings of Rigas Velestinlis in 1798 (Aggelopoulos and Pappadopoulos 1866, pp. 498–9; Iliou 1997) to the Kolokotronis family in 1806 (Kolokotronis 1846, p. 16, for a vivid description of the consequences of the excommunication on the survival efforts of its victims). Nevertheless, he was finally publicly hanged on 10 April of that same year, as a failed official who had lost control over the folk entrusted to him by the Sublime Porte (Trikoupis 1860, pp. 80–86; Finlay 1861, pp. 229–32; Filimon 1860, pp. 215–24).3 His corpse was later thrown into the sea, but recuperated by a passing-by ship and solemnly buried by the Russian authorities in Odessa on June 19 (Trikoupis 1860, pp. 87–88; Filimon 1860, pp. 226–30; Aggelopoulos and Pappadopoulos 1865, pp. 386–98). Hearing the news of his execution, the prominent Paris-based intellectual Adamantios Kora¨ıs caustically remarked: ‘What a stupid, this sultan! He is slaughtering his own friends. . .’ (Damalas 1885, p. 164, Korais letter to Jacob Rotas, 26 December 1821). Fifty years later, the relics of Gregory were pompously translated from Odessa to Athens, providing the commemoration of the revolution with a new meaning. It was a celebration that marked the end of an era, when Greek irredentism had been conceived and broadly understood as a process of social emancipation, and the dawn of another, whereby Hellenism would be identified more and more with the reactionary tenets of ‘Greek-Ottomanism’, i.e. the ‘temporary’ defence of the Empire (and the interests of its upper classes, Moslem and Christian alike) against the imminent threat posed to them by the prospect of a national and social emancipation of the Balkan Slav peasantry. On the way of the 1871 rehabilitation, two landmarks had already defined this course: the defeat of the recent Cretan Uprising (1866–1869), which put an end to active irredentism by the part of the Greek kingdom, on one hand, and the emergence of a rival Balkan nationalism laying claim for the hearts and minds of the Slav-speaking Christian Orthodox flock, officially recognised in 1870 as a millet-i Bulgar in the framework of the Ottoman system, on the other. In the vicious competition between Greek

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and Bulgarian nationalists for this constituency, a struggle that was to unfold till the early 1910s, the Constantinople Patriarchate constituted the main institutional pillar of the Greek camp; no wonder, therefore, that the retroactive rehabilitation of its former dead as the standard-bearer of national revival left so marked an imprint on the 50th anniversary of the revolution he had in fact unequivocally condemned. Although March 25 had been established since 1838 as the official National Day commemorating the 1821 revolution (Koulouri 2012, p. 81),4 in 1871 the celebration of the 50th anniversary was extraordinarily transferred to the end of April, in order to coincide with both the arrival of the relics of Gregory from Russia and King George’s name day (Karaspyros 1871). After having obtained a written consent by Tsar Alexander for their translation, a special mission (composed of two bishops, the secretary of the Holy Synod, a preacher and a nephew of Gregory who served as a cavalry captain in the Greek army) was sent in late March to Odessa on a military ship to bring the relics. The removal of the latter on 7 April was followed by their exposure for 3 days to public veneration in the Odessa cathedral, and successive religious services in the presence of the regional authorities, in an atmosphere heavily charged by the bloody anti-Semitic pogrom carried out the previous week in the same neighbourhood by local Greeks and other Orthodox Christians (Anonymous 1871, pp. 77–87; Exertzoglou 2001, pp. 162–4).5 Even more festive was the second part of the translation, after the arrival of the ship at Pireus on 14 April.6 Although the relics had to remain on the royal steamship for 10 days, until the name day of the King passes (Anonymous 1871, pp. 88–89), the final act of 25 April definitely overshadowed any earlier commemoration of the National Day. At the head of the procession carrying the relics from the railway station to the cathedral of Athens stood the royal couple with all their attendants, followed by the council of ministers, the members of Parliament and the Holy Synod, all the priests of the Greek capital as well as the usual army detachments. The crowd that took part in the celebrations was estimated at around 50,000 persons (including a number of visitors from the provinces or the Diaspora) in a city of no more than 60,000 inhabitants (Anonymous 1871, p. 90; Exertzoglou 2001, p. 179). In the following years a marble reliquary would be ordered to accommodate Gregory’s relics in a prominent space of the Athens’ cathedral; its front depicts the ship that carried them from Odessa to Athens, implying that their translation had been a national event of almost equal importance with the Patriarch’s life or martyrdom (Kautantzoglou 1875, p. 9). Official ceremonies were coupled with a new narrative of Gregory’s role in the 1821 revolution, a narrative that transformed the former excommunicator into a secret protagonist of the struggle for Greek independence. Since the mid-1860s, Gregory’s nephew Georgios Aggelopoulos had already tried to portray the Patriarch as a conscious fellow-traveller of the revolutionaries, mostly on the basis of anonymous hear-saying (Aggelopoulos and Pappadopoulos 1865, pp. 368–72); he even persuaded beleaguered King Otto, during the last months of his reign, to

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form by decree a short-lived fund-raising committee for the erection of a memorial to Gregory (Aggelopoulos 1863, pp. ka9-kd΄; Kautantzoglou 1875, p. 7). Such a reappraisal was not however so easily swallowed by the citizenry and until 1871 the Patriarch’s name was completely discarded in the public ceremonies of 25 March (Exertzoglou 2001, pp. 166–7). After the quinquagenary celebration, an even more radical revision of Gregory’s attitude towards the revolution was projected as an established truth, with a flood of commemorative literature presenting the former head of the Orthodox clergy as the secret architect of national deliverance. ‘As the highest spiritual leader of all the Greeks’, national poet (and former MP) Aristotelis Valaoritis declared during the official unveiling of Gregory’s statue in front of the University building on 25 March 1872, Gregory ‘held all the mysterious strings of the great Greek conspiracy in his hands’; an allegation that needed no proof at all, taking into consideration that a Patriarch was by axiom ‘considered as the father and leader of the entire [Greek] race’ (Valaoritis 1872, p. 6). Equating power-holding in the Ottoman regime with leading a revolution against it may seem completely absurd; nevertheless, it was an argument fully in line with the Balkan strategy of Greek nationalism at the time, whereby the prospect of a distant liberation of ‘unredeemed brothers’ had to be ‘temporarily’ accommodated with the fight for the protection of the Empire against the Slav menace. National Unity was further consolidated with the erection of a statue of Rigas Velestinlis, the enlightened radical revolutionary whose pamphlets had been mercilessly persecuted by Gregory, next to the place where the latter’s statue was to be put some months later; both of them, gifts from the same Diaspora tycoon (Georgios Averoff), in a gesture of patronising soft power politics (Mykoniatis 1984). A third statue of the secular but moderate Paris-based intellectual Adamantios Kora¨ıs was added in 1875 by some affluent Greeks from Western Europe, who also transferred Kora¨ıs’ relics from France to Athens (Koulouri 2012, p. 203; IAYE, f.1872/79.3-4, various documents). Rehabilitation had some obvious limits, however. A proposal to canonise Gregory as a Saint of Greek Orthodoxy was defeated that same 1871 in the Greek Holy Synod, by no other than the man who had initially proposed the translation of his relics from Odessa. An old acquaintance of Gregory himself, and a former a deacon to a fellow bishop, surrendered by Gregory as a hostage to the Porte in March 1821 and hanged 2 months after him (Trikoupis 1860, pp. 77, 91–92), Archbishop Theophilos persuaded his colleagues during a special session of the Synod, closed to the public, that the life and deeds of the hanged Patriarch had in fact been too far from sanctity (Gedeon 1936–1938, pp. 446–447). His canonisation should therefore wait for another 50 years. It was finally enforced in April 1921, at the apex of the Asia Minor campaign, by a Holy Synod truncated by political strife; as a professor of Theology at the University of Athens publicly admitted, in fact Gregory ‘was never recognized as a saint neither by the clergy nor by the people’ (Amilkas Alivizatos [1948], quoted by Panayiotopoulos 1954, p. 356).

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1921: Not Revolution, but Lebensraum The centenary of the Greek revolution coincided with the apex of Greek irredentism: the Asia Minor campaign (1919–1922), a deadly adventure that had already taken an overtly racial (and irrational) overtone. The spirit prevailing during the 1921 disastrous onslaught of the Greek Army towards Ankara is best reflected in the personal correspondence of no other than the Marshall King Constantine himself with his absent mistress, Italian actress Wanda Paola Lottero: his campaign, he explained on 9 August, was nothing but a Christian Crusade aiming at the enforced ‘disappearance’ of all Moslem Turks ‘into the interior of Asia whence they came’ (King Constantine 1925, p. 191). In fact, not only the Asia Minor hinterland that was to be transformed into Constantine’s main battlefield was inhabited by a wide majority of Moslem Turks, but even in the coastline attributed by the 1920 Sevres Treaty ‘temporarily’ to Greece, Greek Orthodox populations were in the minority, albeit numerous enough to support an irredentist vision.7 Moreover, Greek occupation had led to the radicalisation of local Moslems, giving birth to a national liberation movement against the occupant forces. As Constantine’s old comrade-in-arms (and would be dictator in the late 1930s), General Metaxas, pointed out to the King’s ministers in March 1921, the bloody nation-building process of the Greek Revolution was now repeated by the Kemalist movement, as the Turks were experiencing ‘their own 1821’ (Metaxas, n.d., III:83–84). The centenary of the Greek Revolution was thus celebrated with the filming of a semi-documentary/semi-fictional silent movie, named ‘The Greek Miracle’ (To Ellhnikόn Qaύma), funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; the script of the film, heavily edited by the ministry’s bureaucrats, is still kept in a special file of the latter’s Historical Archive, together with the rest of the official correspondence relative to this pioneering endeavour of inward nationalist propaganda.8 Reflecting the colonial essence of the Asia Minor campaign, not only the latter but also the revolution of 1821 were projected there not as a fight for human liberty, but as the constituent parts of an eternal fight of Greek Christendom to reclaim the territory and the resources necessary for its elevation to the status of a European power. In order to persuade his audience that the ongoing war was the unavoidable precondition for a bright future, the film’s script provided even for ‘statistical representations’ proving that only the conquest of a vast Lebensraum could transform Greece into a prosperous country, liberating its middle classes from heavy taxation and the labouring ones from endemic poverty (Ellinikon Thauma 1921, p. 5). The social strata primarily targeted by such propaganda were also exposed by an eloquent detail: the main hero of ‘The Greek Miracle’ (played by a Russian e´ migr´e actor) was for example a middle-class reserve officer, with a private mansion and a permanent female servant at the disposal of his family. Some scenes from the commemorated 1821 revolution were of course incorporated in the movie, as a reminder of the citizens’ duty to conquer the territories coveted. The script’s sole allusion to ‘revolt’ referred, however, not to the Greek

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Revolution of the 1820s but to the Turkish guerrillas facing the Greek Army in Asia Minor: ‘once more, the infidels rose up against us’. A conservative militarist approach was also discernible in the 1930 centenary of Greek Independence, when a ‘Book of Sacrifices’ was published with the names of all the officers and soldiers of the standard Army – not revolutionaries of any kind – who had been killed on duty since the creation of the Greek nation state (Ypourgeion Stratiotikon 1930). Exactly the same applied to the monument of the Unknown Soldier erected in 1932 in downtown Athens, in front of the Old Palace turned into Parliament: the battles waged during the Revolution are completely absent from its dedicatory inscription. Not incidentally, this monument was widely scorned during the following Inter-War years, not only by the anti-nationalist Left but also by the mainstream public; revered only by the militant extreme Right and its open supporters within the conservative establishment (O Ios 2009).

1971: On the Delicate Meaning of Revolution In 1971, the commemoration of 1821 was amalgamated with the celebration of the 1967 military coup, which had averted a long-awaited victory of the centre-left by calling off the elections scheduled for 28th May and imposed a reactionary right-wing dictatorship professing to create a ‘Greece of the Christian Greeks’. The perpetrators of the coup, widely known as the Colonels’ Junta, declared that their action was nothing but a ‘revolution that saved the nation’ by putting an end not only to parliamentary ‘anarchy and chaos’ but also to the ideological division of Greeks into ‘Leftists, Centrists, Centre-Leftists and Rightists’, a division promoted by ‘a few traitors, demagogues, unscrupulous opportunists and professional anarchists’ (To Vima, 23 April 1967, p. 1; partly reproduced in Young, 1969, pp. 341–344). Salvation was forcefully imposed to a ‘sick’ Greek society by fastening it on a ‘surgery table’ in order to perform the necessary ‘surgical operation’ for an unspecified space of time, until the national body was finally cleaned from ‘cancerous elements’ and recovered from ‘the anarchist ideas that had been imposed to almost every member of the society’; at least so affirmed junta leader George Papadopoulos, in his first conference to the Press (Papadopoulos 1968, pp. 10–15). Professional regime ideologists rushed to provide a somehow more articulate version of this scheme, explaining that the officer corps had acted as the vanguard and self-appointed representative of the lower and middle classes, as well as ‘the most sensitive carrier of national consciousness’, in order to save the Greek people from ‘incessant strikes, demonstrations and riots’ but also from rule by a non-authorised, ‘fellow-traveller’ majority; the revolution’s goal was to keep the capitalist system intact while radically transforming its political superstructure, establishing ‘a kind of nationalist-state democracy’ based on the suppression of class struggle, where traditional values would be fully safeguarded and every citizen should be actively mobilised against communism, with no room left for neutral bystanders (Georgalas n.d.; Papakonstantinou 1970, pp. 220–226). In an effort to recuperate the positive

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connotations of an already idolised revolutionary distant past, the Junta adopted as its symbol the coat of arms of the new-born Greek Republic of 1828–1831, the Phoenix, with the (minor but significant) addition of a modern soldier in full gear at its forefront.9 No wonder, therefore, that the 150th anniversary of the 1821 revolution was perceived as an opportunity to further identify the two ‘revolutions’ in the public mind. 21st April, the anniversary of the 1967 coup, had already been proclaimed as a national day, alongside 25 March and 28 October, the latter being the anniversary of Greece’s entry into the Second World War (Royal Decree 157/ 1969; for the reasoning advanced to support this measure, see Papakonstantinou 1973, pp. 295–298). In the spring of 1971, the number ‘21’ was thus projected as a double entendre, denoting both the national liberation war of 1821, universally revered as such by the Greek public, and the Colonel’s seizure of power, whose popular support was estimated at the time between 10% and 20% of the electorate, with a diminishing trend due to the unending repression and the obviously growing corruption within the upper echelons of the military regime.10 During the five decades that separated this anniversary from the 1921 centenary, three cataclysmic developments had however deeply affected the perception of the revolutionary upheaval of the 1820s by various components of the Greek public. • The catastrophic outcome of the Asia Minor campaign in 1922, and subse-

quent enforced transfer of the remaining Greek Orthodox populations of the former Ottoman Empire to Greece, in the framework of a compulsory exchange of minorities between the two countries, put a decisive end to Greek irredentism as the dominant ideology of Greek society. Although Cyprus (inhabited by an ethnic Greek majority) and Southern Albania (the home of a sizable Greek minority) were still widely perceived as exceptions to this rule, territorial enlargement was more or less substituted by economic development as the main priority of both the Greek state and its citizens. • The Axis Occupation of 1941–1944 led to the emergence of an alternative form of commemorating 25 March ‘from below’, in the form of mass demonstrations organised by the Resistance, quite always leading to street clashes with the Nazi security forces and troops or their local subordinates. Armed resistance against the Axis also generated a new hybrid culture, which merged traditional rituals of Greek nationalism (whereby the movement was self-described as a rehearsal of ‘1821’ for the liberation of Greece from foreign yoke) with Communist-led agitation for the satisfaction of the lower classes’ material needs. In 1944, the Quisling Regime tried to recuperate 25 March with its own official celebrations, reinterpreting the revolutionary anniversary as a day of ‘patriotic’ mobilisation against ‘anarchy’ and ‘partisan terror’; quite understandably, its call was however widely scorned by the Athenian public (Kostopoulos 2017b). As a result of those developments, the previous state monopoly of celebration was definitely broken during the post-war decades, as the national day of 25 March was now invested by different socio-political

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actors with antagonistic and often mutually exclusive meanings. This binary approach lasted until the early 1980s, at least, when the first PASOK governments finally blended the two rival commemorative ‘traditions’ (from above, by the official state institutions, and from below, by the former Resistance fighters whose collective memory had been suppressed by the official narrative) into a new one. • Last but not least, the simultaneous integration of Greece and Turkey into NATO in 1952 led the right-wing post-war Greek governments to ‘water down’ the nationalist, anti-Turkish rhetoric traditionally released during the 25 March commemorations. Special instructions to the school principals stressed for example that Turkey was now an allied country against ‘Russia’, as the Soviet Union was still commonly referred to, ordering them to stamp out ‘any mention that could offend, directly or indirectly, the sensitivity of the Turkish nation. [. . .] It is absolutely forbidden to foster sentiments of hate against the Turkish people, who is today defending the same cultural ideals which the Greek people is also fighting for’ (Kanistras 1954). In May 1971, dictator Papadopoulos came out publicly even in favour of a future Federation between the two states, taking for granted its creation ‘after 20 or 50 years’ (Nea Politeia, 1 June 1971, pp. 1 and 5). The commemoration of the 1971 anniversary, entrusted to the care of a special committee under the vice-president of government, Brigadier Stylianos Pattakos (Nea Politeia, 24 September 1970, p. 2), had therefore to follow a carefully defined path. Following the Junta’s motto about a ‘Greece of Greek Christians’, the main task of the official anniversary was to dissociate the 1821 revolution from Western European enlightenment and its radical ramifications, while allowing enough space for a propagandist interplay between the two ‘national’ events: ‘Revolution makes History’, was the ambivalent front-page headline carried by the semi-official organ of the regime, Eleftheros Kosmos, featuring the New Year messages of Regent Zo¨ıtakis, Prime Minister-cum-dictator Papadopoulos and the Archbishop of Athens, Ieorymos (also a Junta appointee), all of whom focused on the incoming anniversary, associating the celebrated revolution with the incumbent ‘revolutionary’ regime (Eleftheros Kosmos, 1 January 1971, p. 1). The struggle to attribute the correct meaning to the anniversary took however a rather unusual turn, exposing a facet of the Junta’s internal contradictions. When the Regent reminded in his message that the Greek war of independence ‘brought the onset of the breaking up of the Holy Alliance and salvaged the principles of the French Revolution’ (Zoitakis 1971), he was publicly castigated by Eleftheros Kosmos for his ‘historically groundless claim’. In a two page editorial, editor Savvas Konstantopoulos (also a Junta ideologist, a long-time figure of the Greek deep state and an old comrade-in-arms of Papadopoulos in 1958–1913, when the latter was serving as a coordinator of the right-wing parallel state apparatus set up by Prime Minister Constantine Karamanlis in order to suppress the legal Greek Left) then exposed an alternative reading of the revolutionary upheaval of the 1820s, according to which the national revolution had

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been in fact wrecked by a fake Constitutionalism imposed to its leaders by malicious aristocrat politicians linked to the Western Powers (Konstantopoulos 1971a). The fact that the editor’s reaction was published 10 whole days after the initial event, and his claim that ‘the government was to blame’ for passing on this ‘wrong’ message to the Greek public, were quite eloquent about the actual political ramifications of an ostensibly historical dispute. Further public discourse on the meaning of the anniversary put thus an emphasis to the alleged particularity of the Greek nation rather that to its ecumenical dimensions. ‘The Revolution of 1821 came out directly from our national heritage’, stressed for example the prominent Academic Spyros Melas, a former collaborator par excellence of Nazi propaganda during the Axis Occupation, by the way (Christidis 1971, p. 23; Kostopoulos 2019a; Theotokas 1987, pp. 521–523), in an op-ed published by Eleftheros Kosmos on March 25. ‘No foreign elements at all. All those who see this huge movement as a replay of the French Revolution are misunderstanding and doing injustice to it. [. . .] The French Revolution was anti-clerical, while in 1821 a metropolitan was the revolution’s standard bearer. [. . .] The revolution of 1821 had nothing to do with class struggle. It was a purely national movement. A superior race, proud and brave, continues its heroic traditions’ (Melas 1971). In his personal message for the anniversary, addressed to the Greek youth, Papadopoulos chose on the other hand to focus on his own ‘revolution’, exhorting the new generation ‘not to destroy its youth by resorting to a fruitless rejection’ and reminding them that ‘discord has always been the worst enemy of the Greek race’ (Papadopoulos 1971). His choice to focus on the new generation was not at all fortuitous: a few months earlier, the eventful screening of three American films (Easy Rider, Woodstock and The Strawberry Statement) had provided the first signs of widespread youth discontent with the regime, foreboding the student revolt that was to follow in 1973 (O Ios 2014). As for the anniversary editorial of Eleftheros Kosmos, it stressed once more that the Greek nation had fared better not under a democratic regime but when ‘power was concentrated in the hands of only one man’, while at the same time reminding its readers that ‘the secret for survival lies in adjusting’ (Konstantopoulos 1971b). Association of the two ‘revolutions’ was also promoted in the field of so-called ‘banal nationalism’, affecting the trivial routine practices that definitely inscribe nationhood upon popular consciousness in peacetime. Matchboxes, for example, produced by the State Monopoly set up after the 1893 default in order to repay Greece’s old sovereign debt, had after 1967 carried the Junta emblem in their forefront. In early 1972 they were replaced by new ones, portraying a variety of 10 heroes of the 1821 revolution in front, while keeping the emblem of the regime in their back side (Dimopoulos 1972; Makedonia, 23 February 1972). A few motion pictures dealing with some of those heroes were also filmed during 1971, the two most popular of them putting an emphasis to the injustice suffered by the military faction of the struggle at the hands of its internal political opponents (Dermentzopoulos 2006, pp. 244–251). They received state support, in the form of many soldiers acting as free surplus personnel for its battle scenes, and one of them (Papaflessas, directed by Errikos Andreou) was solemnly watched by the

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Junta leadership as a special event (Eleftheros Kosmos, 26 October 1971). Although a number historical inaccuracies in their script were timidly pointed out by critics at the time,11 these movies finally proved to be a far more decisive tool of political education for the Greek public, as they are still constantly projected on TV on almost every 25 March anniversary. Another semiotic warfare was waged by the institutional instances of censorship. The office of the Ministry of Government responsible for the preventive censorship of songs took for example great care to suppress any ambivalent verse that might be interpreted as instigation to revolt or resistance to the established authority (and thus recuperated by the ‘internal enemy’ as a soft-power weapon against the regime). A 1971 song entitled ‘The Vezir’s dragoman’ was thus banned because it warned the (presumably Ottoman) power holders that their reign was to be short, as the opposite camp was preparing for a fight: ‘from dawn to dusk we shall be making bullets for liberty and honor’ (Papadopoulos 1982, p. 91). When such a problematic hidden meaning escaped the censor’s notice at first, there were always vigilant regime supporters to inform the authorities and demand its suppression. An extremely popular song, full of nostalgia for the revolution’s old days, entitled ‘I wish I lived in 1821’ (Na ‘tanε to Eikosiέna), created in the fall of 1969 in order to catch in time the anniversary celebrations, initially not only evaded the censorship but was even repeatedly broadcasted by the Armed Forces’ TV Channel. In early 1970, a letter by right-wing nationalist Law School student Petros Makris-Straikos warned however the authorities that the song’s verses were not at all compatible with a healthy attitude towards the nation’s history, as they presented an imaginative hero of 1821 not only having sex on the eve of his battle feats, but also choosing ‘a young Turkish girl’ (mia Toyrkopoύla) as his sexual partner. On the basis of this letter, the song’s authors were informally ordered to record a second version of it, substituting the Turkish girl with a nationally undefined ‘beautiful’ one (omorfoύla), and to withdraw the earlier one from circulation (Kostopoulos 2022b). An attempt to export the Junta’s anniversary message to an enlarged audience abroad backfired, nominally at least. An astute businessman engaged for many years in political advertisement in favour of various conservative Greek governments (and a Nazi propagandist during the Occupation [Kostopoulos 2017a]), Gerasimos Apostolatos, submitted to Brigadier Pattakos the idea of sending 800,000 ‘luxurious’ anniversary post-cards to ‘a number of selected [West] European farmer families’, bearing a combination of the Parthenon and the Junta’s emblem under the logo ‘Struggles for Freedom’, calling the receivers to pay their vacations in ‘the cradle of the Western Civilization’; he earned the contract and was luxuriously rewarded through the (state-controlled) Farmers’ Federation. Although many of his post-cards came back baring insulting inscriptions against the junta, Apostolatos was not much annoyed. He neither met any serious problems after the Junta’s downfall, when this pro-junta business endeavour of him was debated in the Press (O Reporter 1975). In 1977, he was appointed by Constantine Karamanlis as a vice-minister for Social Security, a post he kept until the electoral defeat of New Democracy in 1981. As an old hand of Cold War propaganda, he then set up a Society for the Study of Greek History

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(E.M.E.IS.), in order to combat the left-wing historiography on the 1940s dominant at the time.

2021: The Do-It-Yourself Commemoration Two years before the 2021 bicentenary, just-elected Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis created a special organ (Committee ‘Greece 2021’) entitled not only with the preparation of the incoming anniversary, but also with the ‘development of a national narrative leading to a unified image of the country’ and a comprehensible ‘re-branding of the Greek state’ (Law 4622/2019, article 114). Its creation came as the culmination of a protracted intellectual fermentation that had begun after the 2010 debt crisis and the collapse of the illusion cultivated during the previous two decades, about a ‘powerful Greece’ permanently anchored among the First World leading Powers, looking for a suitable reinterpretation of the nation’s place in the world, its past and its future prospects. The bicentenary was thus designed for the final battleground among rival mainstream versions of national history and identity; a conflict that dated back from 2007, when a short-lived revisionist primary school textbook on modern history had triggered a Greek version of Historikerstreit on the country’s Ottoman past and the 1821revolution (Athanasiadis 2015, pp. 45–99).12 The members of ‘Greece 2021’, all of them personally appointed by the Prime Minister, were a mixture of ND or PASOK academics plus a few foreign luminaries. On top of them, Mitsotakis put Yanna Aggelopoulou, the former organiser of the 2004 Olympics, whose extravagant expenditure had been in a great extend responsible for the subsequent default of the Greek Public Debt a few years later (Kostopoulos 2019b). Whatever the initial plans, the whole endeavour suffered a severe blow from the covid-19 epidemic and subsequent lack of public funds. The anniversary of 25 March 2021, took place under a strict quarantine that deprived even the traditional army parade of its live audience. The commemoration project finally espoused provided thus for a ‘do-it-yourself’ commemoration, where most of the work to be done was entrusted to local mayors and/or associations looking first of all to upgrade the place of their hometown in the national Pantheon or to private enterprises looking for a cheap advertisement opportunity. No wonder, therefore, that the 2022 bicentennial evolved into little more than a low-quality conformist re-enactment of the Greek Revolution as a mythical non-political event, defined by a ‘racial’ temperament that has more to do with Zorba the Greek than with any kind of social, political or intellectual upheaval (Kostopoulos 2020, 2021a). Although the anniversary also provided the opportunity for the publication and/ or dissemination of a considerable scientific literature on the revolutionary 1820s, this development had nothing to do with the official commemoration. Instead of been produced by the official Committee, as had been initially scheduled, the ‘development of a national narrative leading to a unified image of the country’ and a comprehensible ‘re-branding of the Greek state’ was finally carried out through a private agency, as a televised documentary series prepared

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by professor Stathis Kalyvas and featured in early 2022 by Sky TV. Based on Kalyvas’ earlier book Modern Greece. What Everybody Needs to Know (2015a), translated in Greece as Disasters and Triumphs, this documentary explained the history of the Greek nation state as a sequence of ‘boom-bust-bailout cycles’: a succession of overambitious projects conceived by the nation’s enlightened, self-confident elites but led to disaster by objective factors or internal strife, only to be finally salvaged (in part, at least) by the international Allies ‘correctly’ chosen in advance by those same elites.13 As a dissident scholar aptly observed, social movements constituted an ‘absolute taboo’ that had to be completely erased from this new narrative (Athanasiadis 2022).

Notes 1. For the self-designation of the 1967 military Coup as a ‘revolution’, see for example the political education primer of the junta and its shortened version taught in the secondary schools under the dictatorship: Papakonstantinou (1970, pp. 220–226 and 1973, pp. 117–20). Also: Georgalas (n.d.), Diati egine (n.d.), Dyo chronia (1969), and Young (1969, pp. 329–352). 2. For the full text of the excommunication, see Trikoύph§ (1860, pp. 321–334). For its impact on the course of the revolution: Filimon (1859, pp. 112–113), Finlay (1861, p. 155), and Trikoupis (1860, p. 76). 3. Although suspicion of harbouring or even fomenting the revolution was also advanced as a secondary justification for his execution, the Sublime Porte didn’t provide any proof on this (Gordon 1832, p. 187). 4. This choice was dictated by the necessity to associate the public memory of the independence war to the universally celebrated religious feast of Annunciation. In fact, the revolution was proclaimed on 24 February in what is today Romania; even in Peloponnese, the town of Kalamata had already been liberated by 23 March. 5. On the 1871 pogrom, see mostly Zipperstein (1985, pp. 114–128). The toll of 4 days of riot, unleashed after a trivial Easter brawl between Greek and Jew kids at the premises of the Greek Church, was 6 dead, 21 wounded and 863 houses and 552 businesses damaged or destroyed by the anti-Semitic crowd. Odessa Greeks, as well as Greek sailors from visiting ships, had already played a crucial role in the previous pogroms of 1821 and 1859; the first of them was carried out on the day of Gregory’s funeral, as a response to the alleged involvement of Istanbul Jews in his execution (Aggelopoulos 1863, p. 269; Aggelopoulos and Pappadopoulos 1865, p. 386; Zipperstein 1985, pp. 119–120). 6. Accounts of the translation ceremony in Anonymous (1871, pp. 89–100) and Exertzoglou (2001). For the official program: Greek Foreign Ministry Historical Archive (therefore IAYE), file 1871/76.1.1A, pp. 41–43. 7. According to the data submitted by the Greek government to the Allied Council in 1921, the Occupation Zone provided by the Sevres Treaty was inhabited by 468,909 Greeks (46.3%), 473,984 Turks and 69,204 ‘others’. A posterior estimation based on the secret census organised by the Greek administration at around the same time recorded 435,487 Greeks, at least 555,848 Turks and 72,683 ‘others’ (Kostopoulos 2007, pp. 92, 173).

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8. IAYE, f.1923/49.5 (hereafter: Ellinikon Thauma 1921). For an extensive presentation of the script, see Lamprinos (2005, pp. 217–238), and Kostopoulos (2021b). 9. On the Phoenix meaning as a symbol of the Junta, see Papakonstantinou (1970), p. 462 and 1973, p. 292. Under Capodistrias rule, immediately after the 1820s revolution, the same mythical bird had been used not only as a state symbol but also as a name for the first monetary unit of independent Greece, before its substitution by drachma in 1832. 10. For various estimations of the Junta’s popular appeal, see Kostopoulos (2017c). 11. Mauraganis (1971); Apogevmatini, 23 September 1971, p. 23. There were also some sarcastic comments: Kaisis 971; Ta Nea, 23 September 1971, p. 2. The movie was of course lauded by Eleftheros Kosmos (Iliadis 1971). 12. With unquestionable insight, the Greek Church had for example set in motion its own intellectual preparation for the bicentenary since 2010, organising a thematic conference each year between 2011 and 2020. 13. Kalyvas (2015a, 2015b, 2022). For critical appraisals of this documentary, see Athanasiadis (2022), Voglis (2022), and Kostopoulos (2022b).

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Diati egine (n.d.) Diatί έginε h Epanάstasi§ th§ 21 Aprilίoy 1967 [Why the Revolution of April 21, 1967, Took Place]. Athens: Panellinioos Synomospondia Efedron Axiomatikon. Dimopoulos, A. (1972) ‘Decision of the Vice-Minister of Finance, Aristeidis Dimopoulos, “Defining the Price of Matches” (February 12)’, Efhmεrί§ th§ Kybεrnήsεv§, 1972/B/148, p. 1174. Dyo chronia (1969) Dύo xrόnia mεtά thn Eunikήn Epanάstasin. Mεrikά apό ta basikά εpitεύgmata [Two Years After the National Revolution. Some of Its Achievements]. Athens: n.p. Eleftheros Kosmos [Free World] (1966–1982) Athenian Daily of the Far Right, Semi-official Organ of the Military Junta. Ellininon Thauma (1921) To εllhnikόn uaύma [The Greek Miracle], Typewritten script, Greek Foreign Ministry Archive (IAYE), f.1923/49.5. Exertzoglou, C. (2001) ‘Politikέ§ tεlεtoyrgίε§ sth nεόtεrh Ellάda. H mεtakomidή tvn ostώn toy Grhgorίoy E΄ kai h pεnthkontaεthrίda th§ εllhnikή§ εpanάstash§ [Political Rituals in Modern Greece. The Translation of the Relics of Gregory the 5th and the Quinquagenary of the Greek Revolution]’, Mnήmvn, 23, pp. 153–182. Filimon, I. (1859) Dokίmion pεrί th§ εllhnikή§ εpanastάsεv§ [An Essay on the Greek Revolution], Vol. II. Athens: Typois G. Karyofilli. Filimon, I. (1860) Dokίmion pεrί th§ εllhnikή§ εpanastάsεv§ [An Essay on the Greek Revolution], Vol. III. Athens: Typois D. Soutsa – A. Ktena. Finlay, G. (1861) History of the Greek Revolution, Vol. I. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons. Gedeon, M. (1936–1938) Patriarxikaί εfhmεrίdε§. Eidήsεi§ εk th§ hmεtέra§ εkklhsiastikή§ istorίa§ 1500–1912 [Journals of the Patriarchate. Pieces from Our Ecclesiastical History, 1500–1912]. Athens: Typografeion Stergiadou. Georgalas, G. (n.d.) H idεologίa th§ Epanastάsεv§ [The Ideology of the Revolution]. Athens: n.p. Gordon, T. (1832) History of the Greek Revolution, Vol. I. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and T. Gadell. Iliadis, F. (1971, 23 September) ‘O pyrεtό§ anέbhkε mε ton Papaflέssa [Fever Mounted with Papaflessas]’, Elεύuεro§ Kόsmo§, p. 2. Iliou, F. (1997) ‘H patriarxikή katadίkh toy Pήga [Rigas’ Condemnation by the Patriarch]’, Ta Istorikά, 27, pp. 297–302. Kaisis, D. (1971, 23 September) ‘Synεxίzontai oi mέtriε§ tainίε§ sto Fεstibάl [The Festival: Still, Mediocre Movies]’, To Bήma, p. 5. Kalyvas, S. (2000) ‘Red Terror: Leftist Violence during the Occupation’, in Mazower, M. (ed.) After the War Was Over. Reconstructing the Family, Nation and State in Greece, 1943–1960. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, pp. 142–183. Kalyvas, S. (2015a) Modern Greece. What Everybody Needs to Know. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kalyvas, S. (2015b) Katastrofέ§ kai urίamboi. Oi 7 kύkloi th§ εllhnikή§ istorίa§ [Disasters and Triumphs. The Seven Cycles of Greek History]. Athens: Papadopoulos.

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Kalyvas, S. (2022) Katastrofέ§ kai urίamboi [Disasters and Triumphs]. TV Documentary in Seven Episodes, with Stathsi Kalyvas as Screen Player and Narrator. Athens: Sky TV. Kanistras, F. (1954) Circular to the Middle School Principals of the 8th Region. Kozani, March 13, No. 20 Confidential. General State Archives/Pella Prefecture/ 1st Lyceum of Edessa, f.18, p. 15. Karaspyros, D.S. (1871, 9 April) Untitled Article (Or Letter) in Eunofύlaj, pp. 2–3. Kautantzoglou, L. (1875) Ta pεrί ton tάfon toy Patriάrxoy Grhgorίoy toy E΄ [About the Tomb of the Patriarch Gregory the 5th]. Athens: Typografeion Ermou. King, C. (1925) A King’s Private Letters. London: Eveleigh Nash & Grayson Ltd. Kolokotronis, T. (1846). Diήghsi§ symbάntvn th§ εllhnikή§ fylή§ apό ta 1770 έv§ ta 1836 [A Narrative of Events Related to the Greek Race from 1770 to 1836]. Athens: Typois H. Nikolaidou Filadelfeos. Konstantopoulos, S. (1971a, 10 January) ‘Diafvnoύmεn mε ton Antibasilέan kai katalogίzomεn εyuύnhn εi§ thn Kybέrnhsin [We Disagree with the Regent and Hold the Government Responsible]’, Elεύuεro§ Kόsmo§, pp. 1 and 10. Konstantopoulos, S. (1971b, 25 March) ‘1821–1971. Ti prέpεi na gnvrίzomεn kai na mh lhsmonώmεn [1821–1971. What We Must Know and Not Forget]’, Elεύuεro§ Kόsmo§, pp. 1 and 14. Kostopoulos, T. (2007) Pόlεmo§ kai εunokάuarsh. H jεxasmέnh plεyrά mia§ εunikή§ εjόrmhsh§ (1912–1922) [War and Ethnic Cleansing. The Forgotten Aspect of a Ten-Year National Campaign, 1912–1922]. Athens: Vivliorama. Kostopoulos, T. (2017a, 6 January) ‘Diadromέ§ th§ «εunikή§ afύpnish§» [Routes of National Awakening]’, Efhmεrίda tvn Syntaktώn, pp. 31–32 and 57–58. Kostopoulos, T. (2017b, March 24) ‘Ekdoxέ§ toy “nέoy 1821”. H 25h Martίoy sta xrόnia th§ Katoxή§ kai th§ Antίstash§ [Versions of the “new 1821”. The 25th of March during the Axis Occupation and Resistence]’, Efhmεrίda tvn Syntaktώn, pp. 31–32 and 57–58. Kostopoulos, T. (2017c, 24 June) ‘H “platiά apodoxή” toy 10–15% [The “broad appeal” of 10–15%]’, Efhmεrίda tvn Syntaktώn, pp. 32 and 89. Kostopoulos, T. (2019a, 6 April) ‘Apό ti§ Qεrmopύlε§ sto Stάlingkrant. H katoxikή propagάnda ston εllhnikό Tύpo [From Thermopylae to Stalingrad. Pro-Axis Propaganda in the Greek Press during the Occupation]’, Efhmεrίda tvn Syntaktώn, pp. 31–32 and 89–90. Kostopoulos, T. (2019b, 8 November) ‘Apό thn εunεgεrsίa stoy§ tagmatasfalίtε§ [From National Revival to the Security Battalions]’, Efhmεrίda tvn Syntaktώn, p. 6. Kostopoulos, T. (2020, 4 June) ‘Άnoijε aylaίa mε foύnta, tsaroύxi kai (fόbo gia) fέsi [Opening Ceremony with Traditional Garments and a Fear of OverBurdening]’, Efhmεrίda tvn Syntaktώn, pp. 4–5. Kostopoulos, T. (2021a, 2 January) ‘To Eikosiέna mε ta mάtia toy 2021. Poio “εunikό afήghma” diamόrfvsε h εpitropή th§ Giάnna§ [1821 through the Eyes of 2021. What a Kind of “national narrative” has been Elaborated by Yanna’s Committee]’, Efhmεrίda tvn Syntaktώn, pp. 31–32 and 65–66. Kostopoulos, T. (2021b, 10 April) ‘To “εllhnikό uaύma” toy 1921. Kinhmatografikή propagάnda gia thn katάkthsh “zvtikoύ xώroy” [The “Greek miracle” of 1921. Motion Picture Propaganda for the Conquest of “vital space”]’, Efhmεrίda tvn Syntaktώn, pp. 31–32 and 65–66.

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Kostopoulos, T. (2022a, 12 February) ‘Ojfόrdh mε galάzioy§ kόkkoy§. To nέo εunikό afήghma toy Stάuh Kalύba kai toy Skάi [From Oxford, Painted Blue. The New National Narrative of Stathis Kalyvas and Sky TV]’, Efhmεrίda tvn Syntaktώn, pp. 51–54. Kostopoulos, T. (2022b, 26 March) ‘Poio§ logόkrinε thn Toyrkopoύla; [Who Censored the Turkish Girl?]’ Efhmεrίda tvn Syntaktώn/Nhsίdε§, pp. 27–28. Koulouri, C. (2012) ‘Giortάzonta§ to έuno§: εunikέ§ εpέtεioi sthn Ellάda ton 19o aiώna [Celebrating the Nation: National Anniversaries in 19th Century Greece]’, in Auέatε§ όcεi§ th§ Istorίa§. Kείmεna afiεrvmέna sto Giάnh Giannoylόpoylo [Invisible Aspects of History. Texts Dedicated to Yanis Yannoulopoulos], pp. 181–210. Athens: Asini. Lamprinos, F. (2005) Isxύ§ moy h agάph toy fakoύ. Ta kinhmatografikά εpίkaira v§ tεkmήria th§ Istorίa§ (1895–1940) [My Power, the Might of Lens. Documentaries as Historical Documents, 1895–1940]. Athens: Kastaniotis. Law 4622/2019. Epitεlikό Krάto§ [Strategic State]. Efhmεrίda th§ Kybεrnήsεv§, 2019/A/133, pp. 3223–3294. Makedonia (1911) Mainstream Daily of Thessaloniki. Mauraganis, X. (1971, 23 September) ‘H trίth mέra toy Fεstibάl. Ayjάnεtai to εndiafέron [The Festival’s Day Three. All the More Interesting]’, Makεdonίa, p. 3. Melas, S. (1971, 25 March) ‘H έnnoia th§ Epanastάsεv§ [The Meaning of the Revolution]’, Elεύuεro§ Kόsmo§, p. 9. Metaxas I. (n.d.) to prosvpikό toy hm«rolόgiό [His personal diary]. Athens: Govostis. Mykoniatis, E. (1984) ‘Oi andriάntε§ toy Pήga kai toy Grhgorίoy E΄ sta Propύlaia toy panεpisthmίoy th§ Auήna§ kai to prώto koinό toy§ [The Statues of Rigas and Gregory the 5th in Front of the University and Their First Public]’, Ellhnikά, 35, pp. 355–370. Nea Politeia [New Polity] (1968–1972) Athenian Daily, Semi-Official Organ of the Military Junta. O Ios (2009, 22 March) ‘O gnvstό§-Άgnvsto§ Stratiώth§. H jεxasmέnh istorίa εnό§ mnhmείoy [Known-Unknown Soldier. The Forgotten History of a Monument]’, Kyriakάtikh Elεyuεrotypίa, pp. 41–43. O Ios (2014, 22 November) ‘O άllo§ Noέmbrh§ [The Other November]’, Efhmεrίda tvn Syntaktώn, pp. 15–17. O Reporter (1975, 18 October) ‘Epixείrhsh “Mhnύmata apό thn Ellάda” [Operation “Messages from Greece”]’, Antί, 30, pp. 14–16. Panayotopoulos, V. (1954) ‘Prospάuεia agiopoiήsεv§ Grhgorίoy E΄ katά to 1823 [An Attempt to Sanctify Gregory the 5th in 1823]’, Ellhnikή Dhmioyrgίa, 147, pp. 356–360. Papadopoulos, G. (1968) To Pistεύv ma§ [Our Credo], Vol. I. Athens: Geniki Dieythynsis Typou. Papadopoulos, G. (1971, 25 March) ‘Mήnyma toy prvuypoyrgoύ pro§ toy§ nέoy§. Diatί έginε h Epanάstasi§ th§ 21h§ Aprilίoy [Prime Minister’s Message to the Youth. Why the Revolution of April 21 Took Place]’, Elεύuεro§ Kόsmo§, p. 1. Papadopoulos, L. (1982) ta tragoύdia moy [My songs]. Athens: Kaktos. Papakonstantinou, T. (1970) Politikή Agvgή. Athens: Kabanas.

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Papakonstantinou, T. (1973) Politikή Agvgή, dia ta§ G΄ kai St΄ tάjεi§ toy Gymnasίoy (5th ed.). Athens: Organismos Ekdoseos Didaktikon Viblion. Royal Decree 157/1969. Pεrί kauorismoύ εortώn [Fixing of Public Holidays]. Efhmεrίda th§ Kybεrnήsεv§, 1969/A/46, pp. 459–463. Ta Nea [The News] (1945-) Athenian Mainstream Daily. Tertsetis, G. (1853) Omilίa pεrί toy aoidίmoy Grhgorίoy, patriάrxoy Kvnstantinoypόlεv§ [Speech on the Defunct Gregory, Patriarch of Constantinople]. Athens: Typois H. Nikolaidou Filadelfeos. Theotokas, G. (1987) Sεlίdε§ Hmεrologίoy (1939–1952) [Pages of a Diary, 1939–1952]. Athens: Estia. To Vima [The Tribune] (1945-) Athenian Mainstream Daily, now weekly. Trikoupis, S. (1860) Istorίa th§ εllhnikή§ εpanastάsεv§ [History of the Greek Revolution], Vol. I. London: Red Lion, Taylor & Francis. Valaoritis, A. (1872) O andriά§ toy Aoidίmoy Grhgorίoy toy E΄. Athens: Typografeion Ekatogheiros. Voglis, P. (2022, 4 February) ‘O mύuo§ toy “kaloύ” jέnoy [The Myth of the “good” Foreigner]’, Efhmεrίda tvn Syntaktώn, p. 8. Young, K. (1969) The Greek Passion. London: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd. Ypourgeion Stratiotikon (1930) Agώnε§ kai nεkroί, 1830–1930 [Struggles and Dead, 1830–1930]. Athens: Ypourgeion Stratiotikon – Eidiki Epitropi Ekatontaetiridos. Zipperstein, S. (1985) The Jews of Odessa. A Cultural History, 1794–1881. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Zoitakis, G. (1971, 1 January) ‘To 1821 synεtέlεsε εi§ thn diamόrfvsin toy Xάrtoy th§ Eyrώph§’, Elεύuεro§ Kόsmo§, p. 1.

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Chapter 9

1821 Tweets: Networks and Ideological Discourse Around the Greek Revolution Bicentenary Panos Tsimpoukis and Nikos Smyrnaios

Introduction The year 2021 marked the 200th anniversary of the 1821 Revolution against the Ottomans, which eventually led to the formation of the modern Greek state. In order to celebrate the momentous occasion, a special committee called Greece 2021 was formed to organise the national festivities of the bicentenary commemoration in March 2021. Greek businesswoman Gianna AngelopoulosDaskalaki, best known as the president of the bidding and organising committees for the 2004 Athens Olympic Games, served as the head of Greece 2021. Many prominent business people, mainstream academics, cultural figures and historians participated in the committee. For the right-wing government of Kyriakos Mitsotakis that organised the celebration, as well as for the economic elite connected to it, this was a great opportunity to stage a series of events that would boost its popularity and occupy the news agenda. But things didn’t go as expected because of the COVID-19 pandemic and the social, economic and political tensions that it triggered. The majority of the planned events were cancelled, leaving plenty of room for the dissemination of controversies around the 1821 bicentenary in social media that largely countered the official agenda. In this chapter, we propose an original method combining large scale network and lexicometric analysis in order to link identifiable communities of Twitter users with the main discursive themes they mobilised around the 1821 revolution bicentenary. This method enabled us to the political and cultural issues and cleavages within Greek society that were made visible on Twitter on the occasion of this event.

Methodology In the context of this study, we collected 19.117 tweets that were published during the period between 11 February 2020 and 21 March 2021 and contained the terms Duty to Revolt, 129–143 Copyright © 2024 Panos Tsimpoukis and Nikos Smyrnaios Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited doi:10.1108/978-1-80382-315-720231009

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‘1821’, ‘1821gr’ or ‘Εllhnikή Εpanάstash’ (Greek Revolution). These tweets were published from 8,252 unique users. The collection of the tweets was performed using the DMI-TCAT tool, which is based on the Twitter Search API (Borra and Rieder 2014). The keywords allowed for the collection of tweets on a variety of topics related to the celebration of the bicentenary of the Greek Revolution. The starting point of the studied period was 1 year before the official celebration day, a choice that allowed us to trace the preparations and the discussions concerning the forthcoming celebration. We stopped the collection a few days before the official date of the bicentenary (25 March 2021) in order to avoid biasing our sample with a mass of official messages that were posted on that day. For the purpose of our analysis, we implemented a robust research protocol previously applied in numerous studies (Ratinaud and Smyrnaios 2016; Smyrnaios and Ratinaud 2014). This protocol enables to discover homogeneous Twitter user communities by tracing their interactions. Indeed, research has shown that clusters identified in Twitter retweet and mention networks correspond to opinion or affinity groups (Mousavi and Gu 2015). In the context of political controversies these groups are characterised by political homophily (Barbera 2015). Furthermore, our method enables us to draw the main discussion frames and themes mobilised by these communities. This implies a two-step procedure. Firstly, a directed graph is generated using the open-source software Gephi (Bastian, Heymann, and Jacomy 2009). This graph is calculated on the basis of the retweets and mentions of the users that have published a tweet during the studied period comprising the selected keywords. Each one of the Twitter accounts is represented by a graph node. When an account retweets or mentions a different account, an edge (in other words, a link) is created between the nodes, representing an interaction. The interactions between the accounts are visualised using Atlas Force2 algorithm (Jacomy et al. 2014). This algorithm takes into consideration the degree of interactions between network nodes, in order to arrange them in the graph. In this case, this degree is calculated on the basis of the amount of retweets and mentions that each account receives. The more an account is retweeted or mentioned by a different account, the more the two accounts are close to each other in the graph. The resulting graph consists of distinct communities each of which includes users that tend to interact in a higher degree, compared to the rest of users. The composition of each cluster and its political orientation is determined by manual annotation of the most mentioned and retweeted accounts. The effectiveness and relevance of this manual characterisation method has been statistically demonstrated (Fraisier et al. 2018). In the second step, a lexicometric analysis is performed on the sample of the tweets that were collected during the period in question. This corpus is analysed with the Reinert method (1990), which is implemented in the open-source software IRaMuTeQ (Ratinaud 2004). This method relies on hierarchical clustering which groups segments of text in different groups of words, the latter described by the software developers as classes. The classes obtained consist of text segments that appear together in the text in a statistically significant level (p , 0.001). These classes, otherwise ‘lexical worlds’ (Reinert 1990), represent different discursive

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themes, i.e. topics discussed in the tweets. Furthermore, the IRaMuTeQ software also identifies characteristic segments for each class, in this case tweets, which include the word structures most present in each class. This allows us to identify the most representative tweets for each class that we will use as quotes it the content analysis.

Debating a Complex Historical Event on Social Media Since their creation, social media platforms have been the scene of numerous experiments in popularising history, whether they be projects led by academic actors, heritage institutions or the media. However, these traditional protagonists of ‘public history’ are now largely overtaken by initiatives and accounts created to share and comment on historical material without bothering with contextualisation, veracity and referencing of sources (Grandjean 2018). At the same time, the debate around historical events that takes place on social media is almost systematically determined by social and political issues of the present time. François Hartog (2003) qualifies this regime of historicity which, according to him, has characterised our era since the fall of the Berlin Wall as ‘presentism’. For Hartog (1989) marked the end of a regime of historicity that began with the advent of progressive liberalism, where the future took precedence over the present and the past, and where the latter was considered from a distance. Presentism, on the other hand, is marked by the replacement of history by memory, while the traces of the past are omnipresent and considered without hindsight, i.e. interpreted and understood according to present issues. Presentism can be exacerbated by the particular socio-technical characteristics of social media platforms such as Twitter where users have a real-time view of the information circulation, thus favouring the high-frequency temporality so characteristic of online controversies. Indeed, social media constitute a vast public arena in which the hierarchizing and framing of political facts are played out, and in which is formed our representation of the world and the issues that run through it (Rochira et al. 2020). Public expression and the circulation of ideas is thus mediated by complex technical devices, most often controlled by global private digital platforms with powerful economic interests (Smyrnaios 2018). This digital public space is fragmented because, unlike traditional media, digital social media are both plentiful and very diverse, constantly mixing the private and the public, the intimate and the political (Habermas 2021). Far from the ideal of a ‘market of ideas’ where a democratic consensus would be formed through the confrontation of rational arguments, the digital sphere is a symbolic battleground where multiple actors try to impose their interpretation of the world by all means. A battle for cultural and political hegemony is thus being fought online between contradictory, and often incompatible, points of view, which mobilise all the symbolic, technical and economic resources available. These ‘ideological battles’ are even more severe when it comes to the interpretation of complex historical events such as the French Revolution (Gildea 1994), whose bicentennial celebration took place in 1989 and gave rise to

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numerous public controversies (Garcia 2000). Symmetrically, the Greek revolution of 1821 represents a field of conflict between opposing historiographical but also ideological and political currents (Stathis 2021). Its reading serves as the compass for interpreting the whole process of the foundation of the nation state of Greece and the forging of the modern Greek identity. Opposing political actors make selective use of the history of 1821 revolution by forming historical genealogies through which they could claim authentic continuity with leading social groups and figures of the revolution. Accordingly, each of its readings function as the starting point in shaping the political practices and ideological cleavages in the present. Theses cleavages were reactivated in 2021 in the context of post-crisis Greece riddled with acute socioeconomic problems and extreme political polarization (Spourdalakis 2014) as well as distrust of the mainstream politics and media (Katsourides 2016). This was particularly true on social media. The interest of Twitter, compared to other more popular platforms such as Facebook or Instagram, lies not only in its open architecture, which makes it a predominantly political communication tool, but also in the sociological characteristics of its users among which there is an overrepresentation of highly educated and highly politicised strata.

The Ideological Sub Poles Resulting From Network Analysis As we can see in Fig. 1, during the period in question we observe some peaks in Twitter users’ activity comprising the selected keywords. These peaks correspond to different controversies or discussions that took place during that period. Two of them concern the reposting by the Greece 2021 committee of part of two articles by Professor Aristidis Hatzis from the Greece 2021 committee. Another peak concerns the publication of a video in which Hollywood star couple Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, who obtained Greek nationality in July 2020, urge citizens to participate in the celebrations of the bicentenary. Finally, users show a lot of interest in two events, a cover-parody of BHMAgazino and a meme posted by the LBGTQ community, which occur in the days before the bicentennial anniversary. We’ll detail the content of the tweets referring to these events further. In a first step, we analysed the clusters formed by the interactions of users in our sample. The network analysis clearly shows a political polarization between the Left (left part of the graph) and the Right (right part of the graph), but also a cleavage within the Right between an international-official, a neoliberal and a nationalist-conservative sub pole (Fig. 2).

The Nationalist-Conservative Sub Pole The nationalist-conservative sub pole is composed of the second largest cluster of users including 16.85% of the accounts of our sample ‘National conservative sub pole’. The most mentioned or retweeted accounts of this cluster belong to nationalist conservatives (pro- but also anti-government). Among these we find accounts that during the period in question posted tweets that belittle ethnic or gender minorities such as Albanians and homosexuals. We also find in a central

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Fig. 1. The Number of Tweets per Day Comprising ‘1821’, ‘1821gr’ or ‘Εllhnikή Εpanάstash’ During Our Sampling Period and the Main Events Discussed. Source: Authors, DMI-TCAT.

Fig. 2.

The Graph of the Mentions Network Comprising the Tweets of Our Sample. Source: Authors, Gephi.

position the account of Savvas Kalenteridis, a former secret services officer, and an account dedicated to renowned composer Mikis Theodorakis that posts essentially patriotic content. Some members of this cluster interact with the members of a smaller group (3.28% of the sample) on the lower part of the conservative sub pole. The most

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cited accounts of this community post outward nationalist and racist content. Among the most cited accounts we find the –suspended – account of Christos Pappas, leading member of the neo-Nazi political party Golden Dawn who was condemned to imprisonment for criminal activities in October 2020. We also find the account of Stochos, a neo-fascist Greek weekly newspaper, as well as an account that posts satirical memes and frequently retweets posts from Ilias Kasidiaris, also an imprisoned former leading member of Golden Dawn. Overall, these two clusters constitute a nationalist community with strong links to the xenophobic far-right.

The Neoliberal Sub Pole This neoliberal sub pole is situated in the heart of the right part of the graph and is composed by two clusters, at the center of the conservative sub pole (5.07% of the sample) and on the right of the conservative sub pole (9.03% of the sample). This sub pole consists of users that cite frequently members and partisans of the neoliberal wing of the conservative government of Kyriakos Mitsotakis, as well as accounts related to liberal think tanks and public figures. The most cited accounts of this community are the Center for Liberal Studies – Markos Dragoumis (a nonprofit think tank based in Athens), the official account of the Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and the personal accounts of Niki Kerameus (Minister of Education and Religion Affairs) and Adonis Georgiadis (vice-president of ruling party Nea Dimokratia and Minister for Development and Investment). Among the accounts that are highly cited in this group we find Alexis Patelis, chief economic adviser to Greece’s Prime Minister, Babis Papapanagiotou, a former journalist and spokesman for the government, and Thodoris Georgakopoulos, the Director of diaNEOsis, another liberal think tank based in Greece. The central position of this neoliberal sub pole results from the fact that its members interact both with the nationalist-conservative sub pole at the lower part of the graph but also with another, the international-official sub pole on the upper right part of the graph.

The International-Official Sub Pole The main component of the international-official sub pole is a cluster on the top right of the graph, which represents 9.46% of the sample. The most cited accounts are those of the official committee Greece 2021, the Hollywood stars Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, US-based news portal Greek City Times, German based portal Griechenland Aktuell as well as the account of Ioannis Chrysoulakis, Secretary General of Foreign Affairs. This cluster emerged following the publication of a video on March 6, 2020 on the Greek City Times YouTube channel. In this video, Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson urged citizens to celebrate the bicentenary of the

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Greek Revolution.1 It brings together essentially Greeks from abroad, their media and representatives. This cluster intertwines with two other, smaller, groups which are situated towards the centre and the right part of the graph and make up respectively 3.31% and 5.07% of the sample. The most cited accounts of these clusters are the official account of the President of the Hellenic Republic, the account of the US Embassy in Athens and the personal account of Geoffrey Pyatt, former US Ambassador in Greece. Other highly cited accounts comprise Greek ministers and pro-government mainstream media such as Antenna TV, SKAI TV, news portals iEfimerida, Enikos and Amna, the Greek State news agency. In these clusters, we also find embassies in Greece (Cyprus, Germany, France, Israel, Ireland). Overall, this international-official sub pole is firmly related to the government and its supportive media as well as to foreign officials.

The Leftist Pole On the opposite left side of the graph, there is a clearly separated pole which consists of two clusters, a main one that consists 24.32% of the sample and a secondary which lies on the left part of the leftish pole (1.87% of the sample). This pole is composed of left-leaning users and members of the opposition. In contrast with the other pole, the members of this community do not cite officials or state organisations, with the exception of the account of Alexis Tsipras leader of the main opposition party SYRIZA. The accounts of this leftist pole cite frequently humour and parody contents such as the posts of Ellinofreneia (satirical leftleaning radio and TV show), of Katiousa (website close to the Communist Party of Greece) and of Tasos Anastasiou, cartoonist for ‘Avgi’, a left-wing daily newspaper connected to the opposition. The rest 19.09% of the sample is highly fragmented in clumps of very few users. In order to examine the topics and discursive themes that were privileged by the different groups of users, we conducted a lexicometric analysis of the tweets of our sample. Overall, the network analysis highlights a double polarization among Greek Twitter users who posted about 1821. On the one hand, we find a large pole on the Right of the political spectrum that represents more than half of our sample. This pole comprises three main sub poles: an international-official sub pole, a neoliberal sub pole and a nationalist-conservative sub pole with close connections to the xenophobic far-right. On the other hand, we find a much smaller leftist pole. In the next section we will proceed to a content analysis in order to link these ideological sub poles with the main discursive themes they mobilised.

The Discursive Themes Resulting From the Lexicometric Analysis Our lexicometric analysis of the tweets of our sample revealed three main groups of discursive themes comprising a total of 16 classes that resulted from the lexicometric analysis (see Fig. 3).

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Fig. 3. Automated Lexicometric Classification of the Sample Tweets Into Categories With Similar Content. Source: Authors, IRaMuTeQ.

Discursive Themes About Commemoration Events and Cultural Productions The first group consists of classes 16, 10, 6, 5 and 2 (28.53% of the tweets sample). Within these classes we find publications that concern various events organised in the context of the Greek revolution bicentenary in Athens but also in smaller towns and even in other countries with a strong Greek community such as Germany and Australia. Example: We continued work on organising events to mark the 200th anniversary of the Greek Revolution in parliaments and municipalities here in Australia where there are elected members of Greek origin.2 These kinds of tweets are particularly numerous within class 10. In Class 5 we find references to other related events and cultural productions dedicated to the bicentenary like the fabrication of Playmobil toys with Greek Revolution characters or special television programs and documentaries. We read, for example: SKAI TV commemorates the 200th anniversary of the Greek Revolution with a series of documentaries, or elsewhere: Cosmote History, new episodes of popular documentary series and a tribute to the Greek revolution. Class 6 contains tweets concerning exhibitions and publications. These themes correspond to the international-official sub pole of the network.

Discursive Themes About Historiographical and Ideological Controversies The second branch consists of classes 1, 9, 11, 12, 13 and 14, that gather 43.46% of the corpus and presents a particular interest for our analysis because it reveals several historiographical and ideological controversies that took place on Twitter at the occasion of the commemoration of the bicentenary. In response to the publication of a video by the Greece 2021 committee concerning the anniversary of the assassination of Grigoris Lambrakis we read in class 9: Hey @Greece2021, your purpose is to commemorate the 200 years of the nation’s rebirth and recovery, instead you are trying to divide the Greeks. What did Lambrakis have to do with ‘21’?. Another user comments: While the committee is

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commemorating the assassination of Grigoris Lambrakis, we ask the removal of its members from organising the celebrations of the Greeks. Grigoris Lambrakis was an emblematic figure of the Greek Resistance during the World War II, assassinated by right-wing thugs in 1963 after a speech in an anti-war meeting. In this class we find fragments of a controversy sparked by Konstantinos Bogdanos (a renegade deputy of the ruling party known for his nationalist opinions) in which he wonders why the committee focused on the anniversary of the assassination of Lambrakis, a figure of the Left, on that particular day.3 In classes 11 and 12, we find traces of controversy regarding two articles of Aristidis Hatzis that were reposted by the Greece 2021 committee. Professor of Philosophy of Law in the University of Athens, Hatzis is also the director of the Centre for Liberal Studies - Markos Dragoumis as well as a member of the committee Greece 2021. In the first article, originally published in 2016, Hatzis mentioned that Ioannis Kapodistrias had established a ‘modernist dictatorship’.4 Ioannis Kapodistrias is considered as the founder of the modern Greek state. Although in modern historiography there is ambivalence about Kapodistrias’ policy (Andriakaina 2016) there seems to be a consensus that since his arrival in 1828, he established an authoritarian regime, which provoked vast reactions (Spyropoulos and Fortsakis 2017). However, several historians have criticised the use of the term ‘dictatorship’ in that particular historical context. Τhe phrase in question was cited in a tweet of the Greece 2021 committee and led to numerous reactions. For example, a user said sarcastically: Perhaps we should thank Mr. Hatzis and @greece2021 because their attacks on Kapodistrias have provoked a great interest in the study of this great personality. Another criticises the fact that those who expressed negative opinions on the article were classified as far right: @glakopoulos I appreciate you, I read your article on @greece2021 a. the term dictator for this particular era is unhistorical b. the role of the committee is not to highlight sexual preferences and c. Mr Hatzis is not a historian and is inadequate. Conclusion, we are not all right-wing extremists and conspiracy theory believers. The reference on ‘sexual preferences’ in the previous tweet is relative to another article published by Hatzis on the website of the Greece 2021 committee entitled ‘The Love of Karaiskakis’.5 It dealt with the private life of Georgios Karaiskakis, a central military figure of the Greek Revolution, and in particular his description of his mother as a prostitute and his love affair with a young Turkish girl that he dressed in man’s clothes and brought along in every important military and diplomatic meeting. Once more, the committee’s account on Twitter posted parts of this article, provoking negative reactions: @greece2021 did very well to withdraw the specific passage about Karaiskakis, the lines it contains are highly sexist and I wouldn’t want them to be normalised. No, I am not speaking ironically at all. Another user calls the Twitter community to sign a petition demanding the committee members to resign. The deconstructionists also took on Karaiskakis, another incident which shows that the @greece2021 committee has deviated from its purpose and has become a laughing stock. Another user criticises the committee: The @greece2021 committee should project a unifying and honest national narrative with key meanings, symbolism, values and inspirations. I’m sorry but the

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preoccupation with the sex life of Karaiskakis’ mother is a sickness, a perversion. According to another user the article highlights deeper political differences in the representation of the Greek Revolution: This is not a communication problem, it is a political one, since they present their ideologically biased articles as scientific evidence. In class 14 we trace another controversy that concerns the influence of the American and French Revolutions upon the Greek Revolution. This discussion was triggered initially by several articles published in national newspapers (authored by academics such as Nikos Alivizatos, Richard Clogg, Napoleon Maravegias as well as Aristidis Hatzis) and flared-up by two tweets published by the President of the Republic and the Prime Minister respectively. We read a comment: For so many years they tried to make us think that the Greek Revolution was a child of the French Revolution. After Pompeo’s visit (Ed. Note: United States secretary of state from 2018 to 2021), we are told that the Revolution is a child of the American Revolution. Another user points out the importance of the context of the Balkans region in triggering the Revolution: The Greek revolution was much more connected to the developments in the Balkans since the fall of the Ottoman Empire than to the American and French Revolutions. Another one notices that the influence of the American Revolution is even mentioned in the Greek national anthem: I’m told that our fellow citizens are surprized to hear that the Greek Revolution was inspired by the American Revolution. Who will inform them that George Washington’s name is mentioned in our National Anthem? This controversy is relative to a long-standing debate about whether Greece is part of the Western world, a position defended by liberals, or it’s closer to the Orient (Eastern Mediterranean and the Balkans in particular). It is worth mentioning here some results of a survey conducted by the aforementioned Center for Liberal Studies – Markos Dragoumis regarding the representations of Greek citizens towards the Greek Revolutions. During this survey, the participants were asked to choose which country had the greatest influence on the Greek Revolution: only 1.1% of them mentioned the United States while 42.5% indicated Russia, 18.3% France, 17.1% Great Britain and 6.2% Austria (ΚΕFίΜ 2019). In the same class, another historiographical controversy takes place, that of the disputed historical continuity of the Greek nation and the nature of the Greek revolution. What sparked comments on this controversy was a tweet by the Greece 1821 committee referring to the work of major nineteenth-century historian Konstantinos Paparigopoulos, one of the first to defend the idea of the continuity of the Greek nation from the Antiquity to modern times through the Byzantine Empire.6 In defence of this idea, one user writes: According to the @greece2021 committee, Greeks have only been around for 200 years, while another opposes the multiethnic nature of the 1821 uprising: why are we talking about the Greek Revolution since it was not only the Greeks who rebelled, the region was also inhabited to a large extent by Turkish people, Arvanites, Vlachs, etc., who also actively participated in the revolution?. In the same vein, a user stresses: the Greek revolution of 1821 was a class, proletarian, anti-feudal, anti-monarchical and at the same time national-liberating popular revolution. In the end, its social content never prevailed, because of its protagonists, while another one notes that the French

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revolution was a class struggle against the feudal lords while the Greek revolution was a national liberation struggle. The French revolution was a civil war while the Greek was a national Christian revolution. The Greece 1821 committee remains in the centre of the dispute and gets criticised from different angles: @greece2021 You have managed to put a large part of the people against the celebration of the most important anniversary. So celebrate for yourselves and share the congratulations among yourselves. These comments reflect a cleavage that can schematically be described as that between the supporters of the ‘liberal revolution’ (mainly present in the neoliberal sub pole of our sample), the supporters of the ‘national revolution’ (nationalistconservative sub pole) and the supporters of the ‘social revolution’ (leftist pole). As Panagiotis Stathis (2021) remarks, the main historiographical controversy through most of the twentieth century was that between the opponents of the national history and the Marxist or left historians concerning the character of the revolution. This controversy is summarized in the dilemma whether 1821 was a national or a social revolution. More recently another historiographical current gained momentum, linking the Greek Revolution to the European Enlightenment and insisting that it was only secondarily a social subversion and primarily a political and ideological liberal revolution (Pizanias 2021). These historiographical traditions correspond to different currents of public opinion. In the aforementioned survey regarding the representations of the Greek Revolution, 90.4% of the participants said that the term ‘national revolution’ fits well the Greek Revolution, 54.6% of them declared that the term ‘social revolution’ is appropriate, while 52.9% of participants believe that the Greek Revolution can be qualified as a ‘liberal revolution’ (ΚΕFίΜ 2019). Globally, in this class we find traces of the main narratives concerning the Greek Revolution, which take the form of either-or dilemmas: either the Greek Revolution may be characterised as a national or a social revolution; as a modern revolution or a traditional rebellion; as a European event or an accomplishment that drew from Balkan and Eastern contexts (Andriakaina 2016).

Discursive Themes About Contemporary Greek Politics Our lexicometric analysis also revealed controversies that are related to contemporary Greek politics and long-standing conflict between ideological and political currents of the Left and the Right, expressed around current affairs. One of these was, as expected, the COVID-19 pandemic (class 4). A user comments, for example: 100 years since the Greek Revolution of 1821 and we celebrate the struggle for freedom by being confined to our homes. Another user says: This is no time for celebrations after the tragedy of the coronavirus. The @greece2021 committee should be disbanded and the proceeds donated to Health sector or Let’s leave the fiestas for the Greek revolution of 1821 and give this money to education, publishing, theatres, culture, with full transparency. There are also hints about possible corruption and public money misuse that point out the precedent of the 2004 Athens Olympic Games where Gianna Angelopoulos-

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Daskalaki was also the head of the organising committee: Has the @greece2021 committee really filed a budget or we will be confronted once more with the countless corruption scandals of the Olympic Games? Finally, within the corpus we find comments concerning two memes that attracted users’ attention. The first one concerns an illustration in the cover page of BHMAgazino magazine that portrayed contemporary politicians such as the Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Emmanuel Macron, Boris Johnson and Ursula von der Leyen as heroes of the Greek Revolution era. This cover was perceived as pro-government propaganda and was sarcastically commented and parodied particularly by the leftist pole: As the bicentenary approaches, the kitsch with the @greece2021 story will grow thicker and thicker. The other event was a meme posted by LGBT community accounts based on a classical painting of nineteenth-century artist Theodoros Vryzakis, entitled ‘Oath of the fighters’. In the meme the heroes of 1821 hold a rainbow flag, instead of the Greek flag which appears in the original painting. Following this publication, we find critics as well as supportive comments. The Sydney Opera House will be illuminated with the Greek flag to mark the bicentenary of the 1821 Revolution. In our country, unfortunately, we see weird ideas from certain groups, mentions a user. Another user, in response to a tweet by a ruling party deputy known for his nationalist and sexist opinions comments: Thanos Plevris opens up the issue of homosexuality in the Greek Revolution. So let’s start with Byron (Lord Byron an English poet who participated in the Greek Revolution) who dressed boys in women’s clothes in Mesolongi.

Conclusion Our research points out the political divisions and cleavages of the Greek society that were reflected on the discussions around the Greek Revolution bicentenary commemoration. Overall, the network analysis highlights a double polarization among Greek Twitter users who posted about 1821. On the one hand, we find a large pole on the Right of the political spectrum that represents more than half of our sample. This pole is far from being homogenous. It consists of three main sub poles: an international-official sub pole that groups the Greek diaspora and its media, Embassies and foreign leaders as well as officials related to the ruling party of New Democracy (Nea Dimokratia) and its supportive media; a neoliberal sub pole with a central position that consists of think tanks, media pundits and government officials of the neoliberal Right; finally, a nationalist-conservative sub pole with close connections to the xenophobic far-right. These groups of Twitter users correspond to the different blocks that compose the supporters of the ruling party and the government of Kyriakos Mitsotakis (the most radical part of the nationalist-conservative sub pole being oppositional). On the other hand, we find two clusters that constitute the leftist pole which makes up a quarter of our sample and is composed of users that essentially post satirical content about the government but also the Greece 1821 committee. We can conclude that the discussion around the bicentenary of the Greek Revolution, as an officially

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organised event of national interest, was much more invested by users who are globally right-wing and pro-government. The leftist opposition was much less active and limited itself to ironical comments and criticism about the official agenda. Our content analysis on the other hand clearly demonstrated that the discussion about the bicentenary that took place on Twitter was characterised both by presentism, that is determined by social and political issues of the present time, as well as ‘ideological battles’ around historiography that express political divisions that run through Greek society. In this respect, along with the traditional opposition between leftists, liberals and nationalists, the framing of the Twitter discussion points also to the interpretative scheme that focuses on the so called Greek peculiarity, the traumatic encounter of tradition and modernity× or otherwise, a narrative about the never-ending and always postponed modernity due to the burden of the country’s Oriental, Ottoman and Byzantine past that makes convergence with Europe an aspiration unfulfilled (Andriakaina 2016). This online controversy points out that, on the occasion of the bicentenary celebrations, different groups tried to impose their interpretation of the Greek Revolution. By doing so, they left traces both in interactions and in discourse, which sketched long-standing cleavages that are also observed in other public arenas. Further research would give more insights on the way that ‘ideological battles’ of historical nature are taking place in the Greek digital public sphere.

Notes 1. Greek City Times (2020) Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson Excited to Celebrate the Bicentennial of the Greek War of Independence. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v5lTHRAKV0sss (Accessed: 2 March 2022). 2. Translation of the cited tweets from Greek to English was made by the authors. 3. Huffington Post (2020) Κύkloi th§ Εpitropή§ «Εllάda 2021» apantoύn sto Κ. Μpogdάno gia th dolowonίa Lamprάkh. Available at https://www.huffingtonpost.gr/entry/kekloi-tes-epitropes-ellada-2021-apantoen-sto-k-mpoydano-yia-tedolofonia-lamprake_gr_5ec959ddc5b69a413bb4fa22 (Accessed: 23 February 2022). 4. Χatzή§, Α. (2016) Κύriε Prvuypoyrgέ, to 1821 ήtan mia Dhmokratikή kai Filεlεύuεrh εpanάstash! Available at https://www.andro.gr/apopsi/hatzis-liberal-greek-revolution/ (Accessed: 23 February 2022). 5. Χatzή§, Α. (2020) Ο έrvta§ toy Κaraϊskάkh. Available at: https://infognomonpolitics.gr/2020/02/o-erotas-tou-karaiskaki/ (Accessed: 23 February 2022). 6. Εllάda 2021 (2021) Η «Ιstorίa toy εllhnikoύ έunoy§» toy Paparrhgόpoyloy. Accessible at https://greece2021.gr/timeline/25-timeline/645-i-istoria-tou-ellinikoyethnous-tou-paparrigopoulou.html (Accessed: 23 February 2022).

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Identity and the Changing Scope of Culture in the Digital Age. Hershey, PA: IGI Global, pp. 56–78. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-5225-0212-8 Barbera, P. (2015). ‘Birds of the Same Feather Tweet Together: Bayesian Ideal Point Estimation Using Twitter Data’, Political analysis, 23(1), pp. 76–91. Bastian, M., Heymann, S. and Jacomy, M. (2009) ‘Gephi: An Open Source Software for Exploring and Manipulating Networks’, in Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, pp. 361–362. Available at https://ojs. aaai.org/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/13937 Borra, E. and Rieder, B. (2014) ‘Programmed Method: Developing a Toolset for Capturing and Analyzing Tweets’, Aslib Journal of Information Management. D. Axel Bruns and Dr Katrin Weller, Ed., 66(3), pp. 262–278. https://doi.org/10.1108/ AJIM-09-2013-0094 Fraisier, O., Cabanac, G., Pitarch, Y., Besançon, R. and Boughanem, M. (2018) ´ ee2017fr: The 2017 French Presidential Campaign on Twitter’, Proceedings ‘#Elys´ of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 12(1). Available at https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/14984 Garcia, P. (2000) Le Bicentenaire de la R´evolution française. Pratiques sociales d’une comm´emoration. Paris: CNRS e´ dition. Gildea, R. (1994) The Past in French History. New Haven: Yale University Press. Grandjean, M. (2018) ‘Mise en sc`ene de l’histoire sur les r´eseaux sociaux, pratiques et limites’, Le Temps des m´edias, 2(31), pp. 156–172. https://doi.org/10.3917/tdm.031. 0156#xd_co_f5YmVhMTA5ODEtNDlkNy00MTAzLWIzZDEtNjRlMDg1OW Y5ZjMy; ¨ Habermas, J. (2021) ‘Uberlegungen und Hypothesen zu einem erneuten Struktur¨ wandel der politischen Offentlichkeit’, in Seeliger, M. and Sevignani, S. (eds.) Ein ¨ neuer Strukturwandel der Offentlichkeit? Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG, pp. 470–500. https://doi.org/10.5771/9783748912187-470 Hartog, F. (2003) R´egimes d’historicit´e. Pr´esentisme et exp´eriences du temps. Paris: Seuil. Jacomy, M. et al. (2014) ‘ForceAtlas2, a Continuous Graph Layout Algorithm for Handy Network Visualization Designed for the Gephi Software’, PLoS One, 9(6), p. e98679. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0098679 Katsourides, Y. (2016) Radical Left Parties in Government. The Cases of SYRIZA and AKEL. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Mousavi, R. and Gu, B. (2015, September) ‘The Effects of Homophily in Twitter Communication Network of U.S. House Representatives: A Dynamic Network Study’. Available at http://ssrn.com/abstract52666052 Pizanias, P. (2021) Η Εllhnikή Εpanάstash. 1821–1830. Athens: Estia. Ratinaud, P. (2004) ‘IRaMuTeQ: Interface de R pour les Analyses Multi- dimensionnelles de Textes et de Questionnaires (Version 0.7 alpha 2) [Windows, GNU/ Linux, Mac OS X]’. Available at http://www.iramuteq.org Ratinaud, P. and Smyrnaios, N. (2016) ‘La Web sph`ere de #CharlieHebdo: une analyse des r`eseaux et des discours sur Twitter autour d’une controverse politique’, Essachess: Journal for Communication Studies, 9(2 (18)), pp. 213–230. Reinert, M. (1990) ‘ALCESTE. Une m´ethodologie d’analyse des donn´ees tex- tuelles et une application: Aur´elia de G´erard de Nerval’, Bulletin de M´ethodologie Sociologique, 26(1), pp. 24–54. https://doi.org/10.1177/075910639002600103

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Rochira, A. et al. (2020) ‘Theory and Method for the Analysis of Social Representations’, in Mannarini, T., Veltri, G. and Salvatore, S. (eds.) Media and Social Representations of Otherness. Cham: Springer, pp. 17–38. https://doi.org/10.1007/ 978-3-030-36099-3_2 Smyrnaios, N. (2018) Internet Oligopoly: The Corporate Takeover of Our Digital World. Bingley: Emerald Publishing Limited. Smyrnaios, N. and Ratinaud, P. (2014) ‘Comment articuler analyse des r´eseaux et des discours sur Twitter’, tic&soci´et´e [En ligne]. https://doi.org/10.4000/ticetsociete. 1578 Spourdalakis, M. (2014) ‘The Miraculous Rise of the “Phenomenon SYRIZA”’, International Critical Thought, 4(3), pp. 354–366. https://doi.org/10.1080/21598282. 2014.931022 Spyropoulos, P. and Fortsakis, T. (2017) Constitutional Law in Greece. 3rd ed. Kluwer Law International. Stathis, P. (2021) ‘The Historiography of the Greek Revolution of 1821: From Memoirs to National Scholarly History, 1821–1922’, Historein, 19(2). Available at https://ejournals.epublishing.ekt.gr/index.php/historein/article/view/25634/21838 ΚΕFίΜ (2019) Pώ§ blέpoyn oi Έllhnε§ thn Εpanάstash toy 1821. Αuήna.

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Chapter 10

Digital Storytelling From Below: Revolutionary Athens Through a Kaleidoscope Andromache Gazi, Theodoros Giannakis, Ilias Marmaras, Yiannis Skoulidas, Yannis Stoyannidis, Foteini Venieri and Stewart Ziff

Introduction Creating a digital application for a historical event is not necessarily intertwined with historical documentation and re-negotiation of historiographically shaped reality. Typically, app and game developers borrow the widely accepted versions of the past and invest in digital presentation of battles and landscapes. In the case of the REVAthens programme ‘Reviving life in revolutionary Athens’, the project team chose to look for evidence concerning the daily life of the population in Athens before and during the 1821 War of Independence. Although this was not a historiographical project, the members of the project team agreed that an understanding of the pre-revolutionary social environment was an important precondition for the implementation scenario. Historians have long debated about the actual social group that sought to overthrow the Ottoman imperial power and organised the popular uprising (Kremmydas 2016; Papanikolaou 1991). Official narratives and standard school history refer to persecuted Greeks who chose to free themselves from the oppression of their Ottoman compatriots. International historiography has already discussed and identified how multicultural everyday life on the borders of empires included tolerance and consensus (Brewer 2018; Clogg 2013; Faroqhi 2000; Finkel 2007; Gallant 2017; Sugar 1994). So, in order for the REV_ATHENS scenario to correspond to a documented version of reality, information was sought on the ways in which populations with distinct cultural, linguistic and religious characteristics managed to coexist before nation building.

Duty to Revolt, 145–157 Copyright © 2024 Andromache Gazi, Theodoros Giannakis, Ilias Marmaras, Yiannis Skoulidas, Yannis Stoyannidis, Foteini Venieri and Stewart Ziff Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited doi:10.1108/978-1-80382-315-720231010

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‘A Duty to Revolt’? Everyday Life in Pre-Revolutionary Athens A widespread assumption is that the Greek-speaking subjects of the Ottoman Empire sought to overthrow the sultanate and recalled the freedom they enjoyed during the years of the Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire. Historian David Brewer studied the period 1204–1453 and concluded that the Western troops (Franks, Venetians, Catalans), who were looting the mainland Greek-speaking area at the time, had made the native populations suffer so much that the Ottoman conquest of the fifteenth century seemed like redemption to their eyes. The Ottoman invasion was presented as an alternative to the feudal model imposed by Western rulers. In fact, the Greek-speaking populations were familiar with the multicultural life of the empires as soldiers, cavalry, and archers from Germany, Hungary, Serbia, Bulgaria and the Black Sea circulated in the area since the Byzantine era (Brewer 2018). After the Fall of Constantinople in 1453 and until the sixteenth century the Greek-speaking populations exercised their religious duties freely, while their daily lives were not substantially disrupted. Princes and dukes ceased to alternate, and along with administrative stability, changes in tax systems were reduced. The decision of the Ottoman administration to ban the sale or division of real estate prevented the accumulation of farms in the hands of a few rich people and the impoverishment of the poor. Property stability created the necessary conditions for the mitigation of class antagonisms (Brewer 2018). Moreover, the Ottoman Empire invested in the coexistence of diverse religious communities. Muslims and Sephardic Jews settled in the old Byzantine cities, while Catholic Christian populations continued to live in coastal cities (Methoni, Koroni, Nafplio). The multicultural structure of the Ottoman society is testified also by Tournefort (2003). Ottoman Athens was inhabited at least until the seventeenth century mainly by Greek-speaking residents along with Turkish-speaking families and Albanian-speaking Muslims. In contrast to Thessaloniki, which became a commercial hub thanks to the wool trade, Athens became famous due to the Acropolis and the material remains of classical antiquity. From the end of the sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century European diplomats, intellectuals and travellers visited the small settlement of modern times that surrounded the rock. The main reasons for these trips were scientific with an emphasis on botany and the acquaintance with classical antiquity. According to these travellers, the locals – especially the villagers – were illiterate and religious (Brewer 2018). Christians and Muslims lived a common daily life, the boundaries of which were not always distinct. Intercultural relations were not always the same, however, and tensions developed between different ethnicities over time (Chandler 1776). For the needs of the digital project, we took into account testimonies such as this of Chateaubriand who visited the Peloponnese and Central Greece 15 years before the outbreak of the War of Independence. Chateaubriand describes a lazy daily life, in which Christians and Muslims coexisted without much tension. However, he observed violent practices in the imposition of order and control by the Ottoman authorities. He also commented on the increased presence of Franks and Italians and doctors arriving to work from Venice and the Ionian Islands (Chateaubriand 2019).

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Europeans in groups or lonesome searched for monuments and other material remains of ancient Athens. Muslims and Christians had become acquainted with the quest for ancient heritage and they gladly led the visitors to these relics. Interestingly, the Europeans had the impression that the inhabitants coexisted with the ancient remains as if they were part of city life. Ignorance of the historical past and mainly of a coherent historical consciousness allowed them to integrate these remains smoothly into their daily lives. Life in the city until the first decade of the nineteenth century seemed idyllic and corresponded to a period of peaceful coexistence. The American Samuel Howe informs us that at the beginning of the Revolution and during the first siege of the Acropolis, there were no clashes and violent actions by one ethnicity towards the other (Howe 1997). Uprisings did not necessarily lead to major revolutions. We form a similar picture from Finkel’s descriptions of the Orloff period. This is a generalised climate of local uprisings in areas of the Balkan Peninsula (Montenegro, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Albania, Greece). It expressed the dissatisfaction of the inhabitants of multiple areas. According to Finkel, the Ottomans of Athens believed that they had greater interests in defending the hegemony of Moldavia. The local uprising was deemed insignificant (Finkel 2007). We should try to understand the greater developments through different prisms (transnational relations, local movements, ideological framework, religious relations). Local uprisings need to be integrated into the wider context, as the Russian fleet was circulating the eastern Mediterranean and Russian foreign policy allowed local commanders to hope for a reorganisation of the Balkans based on religious orientation (Gallant 2017). Ottoman foreign policy was aware of the military weaknesses of the empire, its economic difficulties and therefore followed a peaceful stance, even after the annexation of Crimea in 1783 by the Russians. These war conflicts between the Ottomans and the Russians fuelled subsequent conflicts between the religious communities of the Balkans. In terms of participation, it is now known that the 1821 uprising attracted fighters and warriors of Greek or Albanian origin. Some were professional mercenaries who had been trained and paid by Ali Pasha. The first conflicts in the Peloponnese were followed by a resurgence in the wider geographical area. As a result, the attitude of the Ottomans towards the Christians changed during the second year of the revolution. Howe (1997) notes that when Omer Pasha settled in Athens to help his fellow believers, he resorted to violence. This refers to the hunt for Christians, a ‘game’ they established then. The Ottoman soldiers captured some villagers, then let them escape, until the cavalry overtook them and killed them with their rifles. Howe criticises the torture of elderly Christians by Ottoman soldiers. The narratives of those who observed the conflict as external viewers are of particular interest, as they confirm that the ‘duty to revolt’ was not the result of a process of nostalgia and ideological quest for a pure Greek state or empire. On the contrary, the descriptions show that violence was purely linked to the war process itself and operated in a vengeful manner. The war and the claim of Independence were the actual factors that reshaped relations and sparked violent incidents across the Empire. The human body was at the centre of these conflicts, as the ‘duty to revolt’ was understood as an

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obligation to ‘dishonour’ the enemy’s body regardless of gender, age and whether it belonged to a warrior or a villager.

The Project’s Rationale and Methodology Our project focused on the life of individuals, mainly Christians, during the 1826–1827 siege of the Acropolis by the Ottoman General Cioutachis. The characters of the app were developed according to the methodology of museum theatre, an interpretive technique that can contextualise information in a stimulating and engaging way and convey multiple layers of human experience in a direct manner (Jackson and Kidd 2011; Kidd 2018; Nikonanou and Venieri 2014; Venieri 2023). Theatre as a method to communicate the past in museums appeared in the nineteenth century. As it draws from the long theatre tradition it involves a wide spectrum of tools and methods that can significantly enrich the ways we interpret and communicate the past today. It is especially useful in incorporating the notion of ‘process’ in the interpretation of the past as the visitors meet the characters in particular circumstances, being themselves in a process that involves past memories, beliefs, assumptions, hopes and fears. Museum theatre also allows for a direct approach of cultural practices, as a field of convergence of competing discourses which influence the production and spread of ideology. Thus, the characters’ performance becomes a place of flow of cultural signs that generate cultural messages. These dynamics were incorporated in a non-traditionally theatrical setting, which formed a space of experimentation for the research team. In line with our basic rationale, we decided to focus on ordinary people and on human practices with a timeless character (like love, death, child rearing, friendship) as expressed in times of war and extreme hardship. In this way we aimed at a bottom up approach of historical narratives and a connection to today’s visitors. Research results have proved that bringing to life ordinary people from the past who speak about universal characteristics, in their own historical context, encourages visitors to relate to their experience (Venieri 2023). The political and military events are filtered through the characters’ daily experience as we wanted to shed light on how these events were experienced by different subjects, in terms of gender, position and ethnic origin. Selecting a few single deep stories or many shallow stories was another matter of concern. Neither is better than the other; but mixing multiple approaches can significantly increase the complexity of the experience. We thus opted for more shallow stories that can bridge general issues to concrete experience, in other words, ‘translate’ theoretical issues into their everyday impact. Characters were first selected based on criteria of heterogeneity. The first question was whether we would use historic or imaginary characters. We opted for the latter, and only used one historic character. Imaginary characters did not exist, but could have existed, and are shaped by the method of ‘substantiated hypotheses’ (also called ‘educated assumptions’) based on historical sources. A key criterion is the ability of these characters to illuminate different aspects of historical processes in a way that will be comprehensible to different contemporary audiences.

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Following this rationale, our virtual characters/avatars represent different gender, social and ethnic groups, like a Greek fighter, an Athenian woman of Albanian origin, a Muslim resident of Athens that fought on the Ottoman side, an Albanian messenger, an educated Greek woman, etc. However, a complete representation of the heterogeneity of the population of the time exceeded the scope, time frame and funding of the project that initially aimed to produce a model that can be further enriched. The design of the avatars is as close as possible to the depiction of the faces, bodies and clothes of the time that we have traced in our sources Image 1.

Image 1.

Various Avatars Developed for REVAthens © REVAthens.

The dialogues and monologues of the avatars express the feelings and anxieties of the besieged, evoke memories from their life in the city before the uprising, inform about significant events occurring during the siege. So historical events ‘hang’ on the characters’ life tree. In this way, the issue of subjectivity in the interpretation of the past comes to the fore, and visitors encounter multiple approaches to the characters’ current reality, that involve their past, present and future and shape complex constructs similar to the ones that we create in our everyday life. Following the bakhtinian notion of heteroglossia, we aimed to combine distinct points of view without a hierarchical structure. Through heteroglossia visitors are encouraged to adopt a critical stance, as there is not a clear narrative that controls the meaning-making process. The language spoken by the avatars is understandable today, but retains a sense of the historical period made evident either by the vocabulary and the syntax in Greek or by the inclusion of some Turkish and Albanian words. In brief, the information given in the dialogues serve to elicit questions about established and widespread representations of the national history. All dialogues were scripted based on meticulous research and with the assistance of a professional actor (Image 2).

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Image 2.

Manolios’ Monologue © REVAthens.

Digital Tools and Narration The basic idea for the creation of the app was to combine the physical presence of the user within specific places around the rock of the Acropolis (The well-spring of Klepsydra, The Herodion/Serpentzes), where, through geo-location, s/he can watch and interact with a digital narrative that they have previously downloaded and saved on their mobile or tablet. The physical presence of the users within the arena of the third siege was deemed necessary, in order for them to be able to compare the current form of the Acropolis with that of the ‘castle’, which at the time of the Revolution, constituted the morphology of the rock, as determined by the natural conditions of the time and the effects of the Revolution in and around the area of Athens. The structure of the digital narrative can be considered at a first glance as a form of gamification of public history. While the term ‘gamification’ finds narrow use in contemporary discourse to describe participatory approaches in consumer marketing practices (for example, collecting frequent flier reward points, liking and unliking in social media), we adopt a more general understanding of gamification, informed by the work of the French sociologist Roger Caillois (2001) who proposed play (in the context of games) as activity that is: free, separate (within defined limits of space and time), uncertain, unproductive (creating neither goods or wealth), governed by rules and make-believe (invoking the imagination). Caillois’ work draws from the earlier ideas of Johan Huizinga (1949) who used diverse examples such as lawsuits, dancing, and the military battlefield to show how civilisation arises and unfolds in and as play (Gazi et al. 2021). At this point, it is worth noting that the various forms of mobile gaming that are most popular nowadays, should not be seen solely as a consequent contemporary ‘invention’ of the digital revolution. Parikka and Suominen approach

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mobile gaming and, in general, digital narrations with gameplay elements such as the REVATHENS application, as a natural extension of cultural practices and products dating as far back as the nineteenth century. . . . the pattern of mobile entertainment usage as the creation of a private sphere was already part of the railway culture of the nineteenth century - even if people consumed such media contents as newspapers and books instead of digital entertainment. In addition, such artefact-like mobile gaming systems as card decks and portable chess sets were part of the mediascape of nineteenth century modernisation and the new patterns of increasing movement of the Victorian upper class. Also the small mobile flipbooks, originating from the 1860s by the name of kineographs, which animate picture series can be added to the history of mobile entertainment. One could also view such objects as mobile cameras, wristwatches, women’s fans and hand-screens from the perspective of archaeology mobile media. . . (Huhtamo 2005; Parikka and Suominen 2006) From this point of view, the idea of creating a digital narrative app that is constructed as a game-space which frames as an experience both the simulation of a part of the Acropolis rock as it appeared during 1826–1827 and a requirement that the user is physically present within the area in order to experience a (an expanded) narration of public history, is not a surprising phenomenon, but rather the continuation of a tradition born after the second industrial revolution and the beginning of distanced travel, mostly via trains but not exclusively. Nowadays, we may observe the appearance of new forms of networks, which are hybrid analogue/digital networks. These networks are composed on the one hand by traveller’s bodies moving in frenzy speed towards cultural destinations, facilitated through the logistics of air transports and hosting platforms such as Airbnb. On the other hand, the individual management of these moves and visits, made possible through the use of mobile devices, which at the same time dislocate the users from the physical environment in order to provide them guidance on how, where and what to perceive in the environment. Following this thought, an observation that Parikka and Suominen make in their aforementioned paper, adds one more insight to the use of public historical narrations. Following Foucault’s ideas, the German media historian Friedrich Kittler . . . has in his own work concentrated on mapping the discourse networks which act as the historical a priori of media experiences and subjective positions. Media act as discourse networks in the sense that they are the processes which produce reality and concepts of that which can be sensed, thought, memorized, etc. (Parrika and Suominen 2006)

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In other words, as the traveller’s guides, which are embedded in mobile phones as apps, suggest visitors where and what to eat, drink and sleep, so in the same way, but in a different non-trivialised, uncommodified way, a digitally encoded historical narration can be part of the visitor’s media network experience. So, what can be ‘sensed, thought and memorized’ may provide hints to the visitor/ user on the reality of the present and the past of the space that s/he walks by or stands in.

Present-Day Athens and the Digital Simulation of the Acropolis Siege Contemporary Athens and its suburban environs is a dense, sprawling, concrete metropolis of commercial buildings, apartment blocks, industrial warehouses, workshops, stores and houses extending in all directions, south towards the sea and north, east and west to the rises of four mountains that surround the city on all sides. With a population of around eleven and a half million it is home to some of the most densely inhabited city neighbourhoods in the world and for or a traveller visiting central Athens, the experience is one of narrow streets, heavy traffic, bustling commercial districts, shops, restaurants and bars, while never far from sight is the Acropolis, a flat limestone rocky outcrop with an area of around 3 hectares that rises some 80 metres or so from the surrounding city streets. Capped with the restored archaeological remains of an ancient citadel dominated by the iconic classical temple of the Parthenon, it is a popular tourist attraction for travellers passing through Athens to visit the site on their journey to their holiday destination of Greek islands, mountains, resorts and beaches. Two hundred years ago at the time of the Revolution the scene was entirely different. The town of Athens was a small enclave with a mixed population of around 9,000, comprising Christians and Muslims of different ethnicities, Greeks, Turks, Arvanites, Egyptians and a small number of Ethiopians all living together in relatively peaceful harmony. The town comprised around 1,600 buildings: small houses, stores, bazaars, markets, gardens, churches, mosques, hammams, a madrassa, etc. Everywhere could be found ruins of the ancient past, scattered marbles, broken elements of classical structures, some of them incorporated into the contemporary buildings of the time in a kind of assemblage that didn’t overtly distinguish the artefacts of the past with the constructions of the present. The town itself occupied the area close to the North and East of the Acropolis and was surrounded with a rough and hastily constructed walled rampart built in 1778 from marbles and stones pilfered from the walls and remains of classical structures under the direction of Hadij Ali Haseki, the Ottoman governor of Athens. The vista extending in all directions away from the town towards the surrounding mountains was a bucolic landscape of open space, rocky hills, knolls and outcrops, the waters and tributaries of two major rivers, the Illisos and Kifissos, along with the smaller river Eridanos. Dotted here and there the vista was punctuated with isolated houses, walls, stony paths, clumps of trees, the occasional olive grove and at the sea, the small settlement ports of Piraeus and Faliro.

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The fortified area on top of the Acropolis rock formed a tightly knit space of houses and ammunition stores, rainwater tanks and cisterns to support the soldiers tasked with defending the citadel and built into the open interior of the Parthenon, bombed and partially destroyed in 1687 by Venetians targeting gunpowder munitions stored there, was a small active mosque. REVAthens is divided into two primary scenes, each situated with sub scenes at two main locations around the Acropolis rock. A primary scene defines the real-time experience by the user of the game scenario and is located either at the North part of the Acropolis or the South part. The historical content of the narrative embedded in a primary scene will have taken place within these specific locations during the period of the third siege of the Acropolis in 1826–1827. The first of these primary scenes, ‘Klepsydra’, is centred around a fortified spring well located at the north east part of the Acropolis, near to the Propylaea. The second scene, ‘Serpetzes’, takes place in and around the ruins of the Roman Herodes Atticus Odeon to the southeast of the rock. Today, a visitor to the ‘Herodion’ encounters an active cultural venue and performance space for classical and modern, theatre, music and dance, within a structure fully excavated in the latter part of the nineteenth century and extensively restored in the 1950s with marbles quarried from Mount Penteli (Images 3, 4 and 5).

Image 3. The Odeon of Herodes Atticus (‘Herodion’) in 1843 as Published in Th´eodore du Moncel, Odoiporikό toy 1843 apό thn Auήna sto Naύplio, Athens: Olkos-Ariadni, 1984.

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Images 4 & 5.

‘Herodion’/Serpetzes Simulated Environment © REVAthens.

Two hundred years ago, however, the scene of the ‘Herodion’ was very different (Fig. 4). Most of the lower part of the walls and seating of the theatre was buried under a thick accumulation of rocky sediment and dirt with only the upper parts of the Herodion wall extending above this piled up ground. Our intention with REVAthens has been to render the environment of our scenes with as much detail as we can that corresponds as accurately as the historical record can inform us. While the aim is to represent the space with an informed concern for visual historical accuracy consistent with the historical and cultural reality of that time, the intention is not to simulate with hyperreal verisimilitude, but instead to consider the virtual space as akin to a theatre stage and to digitally paint the environment with the aesthetic of a theatrical look and feel. Multiple

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references have been used as source material for simulating the physical environment with an attention to the visual accuracy of the representation. Many of these sources were the work of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Northern European travelers, drawn to Athens with a curiosity borne from a romantic interest in the Greece of classical antiquity, whose drawings, watercolours and etchings were rendered with a keen eye for observed accuracy and detail. In particular, we relied heavily on a set of architectural schematics of the ‘Herodion’ carefully drawn with accurate measurements by James Stuart and Nicholas Revett, two British architects who visited Athens between 1751 and 1754, and who later published a large volume of copper plate etchings of plans, sections and details of classical Athenian monuments and structures. Their work was noted for its departure from the generic and often imaginary representations of ancient monuments that preceded them (Images 6 and 7).

Images 6 & 7. The ‘Herodion’ in the Late Eighteenth Century as Sketched by James Stuart and Nicholas Revett, and Published in The Antiquities of Athens measured and delineated by James Stuart F.R.S. and F.S.A. and Nicholas Revett painters and architects, vol. IV (Ed. Josiah Wood and Joseph Taylor), London: Thomas Bentham, 1816.

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A key opportunity for a user of the application is to see for themselves how different the space of historical events appears today from how the space appeared during the revolutionary period. Geolocation data and GPS compass tracking of the handheld device will permit a coordinated registration of the user’s line of sight so that the virtual camera of the simulation frames the same point of view the user has of the real-world space they are situated within. In this way we aim to convey a sense of space and place that simultaneously engages the user in the landscape of the present layered through the portal of the virtual screen with the landscape of the historical past.

Conclusion The REVAthens project aims to fill a significant gap in the research and dissemination of evidence related to the Revolution of 1821. Its originality lies in the creation of a digital interpreting tool for mobile phones and tablets, which is accessible to different groups of audiences, and utilises the methodology of museum theatre to create subjective narratives of fictional characters in a playful, enjoyable and understandable way. According to our bottom-up approach to historical narratives, the app seeks to indicate points of interest for the revolutionary era that the official historiography has passed over, intentionally, or unintentionally. Thus, the app focusses on the experience of ordinary people of different gender, position and ethnic origin, and filters historical and military events through the characters’ daily experience. These imaginary characters were selected according to their ability to illuminate different aspects of the siege and convey timeless feelings of empathy. This encourages visitors to relate to the characters’ experience in a much more effective way. At a different level, the scattered information given in the characters’ dialogs and the scenes of the application compose the mosaic of the Ottoman society of the revolutionary times and serve to elicit questions about the established and widespread representations of the national historiography. Through this process, the understanding of different aspects of the past and the visitors’ critical involvement with historical narratives are encouraged. The ultimate goal is the diffusion of alternative readings of history to wider audiences. From this perspective, REVAthens is an innovative interpretive application in the field of public history as a history that utilises new forms of representation and storytelling outside of academic contexts, is offered through a variety of interpretive media (e.g. films, literature, comics, exhibitions, etc.) and aims at spreading history to the general public.

Bibliography Brewer, D. (2018) Ellάda, 1453–1821: oi άgnvstoi aiώne§ [Greece, 1453–1821: The Hidden centuries]. Athens: Ekdoseis Patakē. Caillois, R. (2001) Man, Play, and Games. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

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Chandler, R. (1776) Travels in Greece: Or an Account of a Tour Made at the Expense of the Society of Dilettanti. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Chateaubriand, F. (2019) Odoiporikό toy 1806: Pelopόnnhso§ - Attikή - Smύrnh – Kvnstantinoύpolh [Tour in 1806: Peloponnisos-Attiki-Smyrna-Constantinopolis]. Athens: Metaichmio. Clogg, R. (2013) Synoptikή istorίa th§ Ellάda§, 1770–2013. Athens: Katoptro. du Moncel, T. (1983) Odoiporikό toy 1843 apό thn Auήna sto Naύplio. Athens: Olkos-Ariadni. Faroqhi, S. (2000) Koyltoύra kai kauhmerinή zvή sthn Ouvmanikή aytokratorίa [Culture and everyday life in the Ottoman Empire]. Athens: Exantas. Finkel, C. (2007) Ouvmanikή Aytokratorίa [The Ottoman Empire]. Athens: Dioptra. Gallant, T.W. (2017) Neόterh Ellάda [Modern Greece]. Athens: Pedio Books. Gazi, A., et al. (2021) ‘REVAthens: Bringing Athens of the Revolution to Life Through Museum Theatre Methodology and Digital Gamification Techniques’, in Shehade, M. and Stylianou-Lambert, T (eds.) Emerging Technologies and the Digital Transformation of Museum and Heritage Sites. s.l.: Springer, pp. 166–183. Howe, S.G. (1997) Istorikή skiagrafίa th§ ellhnikή§ epanάstash§ [History of the Greek Revolution]. Athens: Ekdoseis Ekatē. Huhtamo, E. (2005) Pockets of Plenty. An Archaeology of Mobile Media. s.l.: Brill. Huizinga, J. (1949) Homo Ludens: A Study of Play-Element in Culture. London: Routledge & Keagan Paul. Jackson, A. and Kidd, J. (2011) Performing Heritage: Research, Practice and Innovation in Museum Theatre and Live Interpretation. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Kidd, J. (2018) ‘‘Immersive’ Heritage Encounters’, The Museum Review, 3(1). [Online] Available at https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/110788/1/TMR_vol3no1_Kidd.pdf Kremmydas, V. (2016) Ellhnikή epanάstash toy 1821: tekmήria, anachlafήsei§, ermhneίe§ [The Greek Revolution of 1821]. Athens: Gutenberg. Nikonanou, N. and Venieri, F. (2014) ‘Museums as Gameworlds: The Use of Live Action Role Playing Games in Greek Museums’, The International Journal of The Inclusive Museums, 6(3), 67–76. Papanikolaou, L.P. (1991) Koinvnikή istorίa th§ ellhnikή§ epanάstash§ toy 19oy aiώna: Symbolή sthn istorίa th§ diamόrfvsh§ toy ellhnikoύ eunikoύ krάtoy§ [A Social History of the Greek Revolution in the 19th c. A Contribution in the History of the Greek Nation Building]. Athens: Synchroni Epohi. Parikka, J. and Suominen, J. (2006) ‘Victorian Snakes? Towards a Cultural History of Mobile Games and the Experience of Movement,’ [Online] Available at http:// gamestudies.org/0601/articles/parikka_suominen Revett, N. and Stuart, J. (1816) The Antiquities of Athens Measured and Delineated by James Stuart F.R.S. and F.S.A. and Nicholas Revett Painters and Architects. Vol. IV ed, London: Thomas Bentham. Sugar, P.F. (1994) H notioanatolikή Eyrώph kάtv apό Ouvmanikή kyriarxίa (1354–1804) [Southeastern Europe under Ottoman rule (1354–1804)]. Athens: Smēlē. Tournefort, J.d.P. (2003) Tajίdi sthn Krήth kai ti§ nήsoy§ toy Arxipelάgoy§: 1700–1702. Iraklio: Panepistēmiakes Ekdoseis Krētēs. Venieri, F. (2023) Moyseiakό uέatro: istorίa, uevrίa, efarmogέ§. Thessaloniki: Disigma.

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Part 3 Contemporary Focus

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Chapter 11

Firefund.net: An ‘Online Translocal Connection’ of Anarchist(ic) Social Movements Stamatis Poulakidakos

Introduction The twenty-first century witnessed the development of a massive wave of protests around the world (Veneti and Poulakidakos 2021). As a result of the social unrest caused by a wide variety of factors (e.g. financial crises, austerity policies, political crises, totalitarian regimes), many countries saw the emergence of new social and solidarity initiatives that offer a rich terrain for examination to anyone interested in exploring new forms of protest and resistance (Biekart and Fowler 2013; Douzinas 2013). Anarchist or anarchist-inspired/quasi anarchist (anarchistic) (Day 2004) movements have been growing everywhere, and traditional anarchist principles – autonomy, voluntary association, self-organisation, mutual aid, direct democracy – seem to permeate a wide range of social movements (Lederman 2015, p. 244). To a certain extent these new forms of social protest wouldn’t have been realised if it wasn’t for the Internet and its applications (Williams 2018), especially in the form of social media. As stated on the Facebook group of firefund.net ‘with the internet, we have become part of each other’s struggles. Now we need to take advantage of this infrastructure and explore its revolutionary potential’ (Firefund Facebook Community 2021). Focusing on the interconnection between the Internet and newly emerged social movements, the current chapter seeks to examine the relationship between anarchist social movements and the crowdfunding platform firefund.net. According to the info posted on their website ‘FIREFUND is a platform that seeks to encourage cooperation within this diverse field of revolutionary movements. We want to encourage, inspire, empower, support, include, exchange and work together within the movements, fighting for a world beyond oppression and unequally distributed rights, wealth and power. We want to facilitate and escalate the work of the social movements by connecting struggles through crowdfunding and crowdsourcing’ (FIREFUND 2016). Duty to Revolt, 161–179 Copyright © 2024 Stamatis Poulakidakos Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited doi:10.1108/978-1-80382-315-720231011

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Given this anarchist(ic) ideological imprint, the current research aims, through the implementation of quantitative content analysis of the projects seeking to be crowdfunded in firefund.net, at addressing several research questions: In which ways can the projects/campaigns promoted by firefund.net be characterised as ‘revolutionary’ and/or anarchist? How diverse are these crowdfunding efforts in terms of their aims and their geographical region? How successful are the efforts in achieving their funding aims? Thus, we set out from a theoretical background that focuses on the influence of the anarchist thought on the formation of social movements seeking to prefigure an anarchisti(ic) society, permeated by horizontalism, solidarity and the abolishment of any form of hierarchical authority. Then we move on to assess the role of the Internet and its applications in anarchist(ic) organisation, focusing on the rationale of crowdfunding that emerged within the digital public sphere. Then we move on to the research part. Bearing in mind that the Internet and its applications – predominantly the social media – have enabled the organisation and function of multiple horizontal social movements (Williams 2018), the current research focuses on the crowdfunding projects (past and present/active ones) presented on the website of Firefund, seeking to examine the global dispersion and the anarchist characteristics of the projects that seek crowdfunding. Thus, our research questions are as follows: (1) Is there a wide variety of countries/areas worldwide, where these social movements seeking funding come from? (2) What percentage of the projects managed to gather the funding needed? (3) Which anarchist characteristics can be traced in the self-presentation of the social movements that seek funding through the platform firefund.net? In addition, according to our theoretical background we have formulated the following research hypotheses, focusing on the issues of the use of violence from anarchist(ic) movements, which constitutes a topic of heated debate among different approaches on anarchism: (1) According to our theory on the minority support for violence within the anarchist tradition (Gibson 2013) we expect that a rather low percentage of movements promote violent actions as a means of achieving their scopes. (2) In the occasions when violence is accepted as a means of action, it is ‘justified’ as a means of political reaction to the implementation of repressive policies on behalf of government, police or any other hierarchical structure, defined by anarchists as oppressive mechanisms (Heywood 2017). The method used for the current research is quantitative content analysis, briefly defined as the systematic, based on scientific criteria, analysis of the characteristics of various messages (Kyriazi 2001; Neuendorf 2002). It is a systematic, reproducible technique for transforming the content of various forms of messages (text, still and moving image, sound, etc.) into fewer categories of

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meaning, based on specific codification rules (Miller and Brewer 2003), ultimately, allowing the researchers to examine large amounts of data through a systematic methodology. The primary target of content analysis is the systematic research of the content of the unit of analysis (text, image, news item, advertisement, etc.) (Berelson 1971). In this research, the unit of analysis is the social movement asking for crowdfunding through the platform firefund.net. We, thus, examine each social movement according to a coding frame that includes variables seeking to answer our research questions and examine our hypotheses. Hence, our variables focus on whether a campaign has succeeded in gathering the requested amount and the continent and the country of origin of the campaign. On top of that, given that each campaign presents itself through a written text, visual and audiovisual material, we are coding for the existence of anarchist characteristics such as anti-authority, pro-violence, pro-direct democracy, anti-globalisation, anti-capitalism, anti-poverty, anti-police, anti-government, anti-religion, anti-official justice, anti-landlordism, anti-racism, anti-consumption, anti-imperialism, anti-privatisation, anti-neoliberalism, anti-deregulation of economy, anti-unemployment, anti-fascism, anti-nationalism, pro-refugees, anti-sexism, pro-feminism and pro-LGBQTI1. In addition, we examine whether the social movements seeking funding through firefund.net seek to fund prefigurative and rather permanent structures, whether they focus on environmental issues, whether they constitute transnational movements and/or they call for international collaborations. The abovementioned parameters could be used as a framework for examining social movements in terms of their anarchist(ic) profile. The total number of the campaigns analysed is 133. The research was conducted between 7 and 10 March 2022 and the elaboration of the gathered data in order to produce the necessary results is conducted with the use of the SPSS 26 software. The statistical test used for the scopes of this analysis is the Fisher’s exact test (Field 2017). Out of the total of 133 campaigns presented by firefund.net, 123 are completed/closed and 10 are ‘currently’ (at the time the research was conducted) open/running, thus still gathering funding. Our main finding is that FIREFUND, though it has only recently (mainly during the ‘pandemic’ years) acquired significant dynamic as a crowdfunding platform, constitutes an additional online communication node and financial support initiative, connecting a wide variety of geographically dispersed anarchist(ic) movements to a wider, transnational audience, a prerequisite for their viability and the further development of the anarchist movement.

The Influence of Anarchist Thought In the public sphere, anarchism is associated usually with violence and chaos. Distorted conclusions about anarchism – an association with violence, chaos and naivet´e – result from notions propagated mainly by state actors and the media (Williams 2018, p. 2). Despite anarchism being an intellectual tradition, media commonly uses ‘anarchy’ to signify chaos and disaster. The term ‘anarchist’ is framed by media in a negative way, implying directly that anarchism is an

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inherently violent philosophy (Rosie and Gorringe 2009). Relevant research has shown that corporate mainstream media’s typical depiction of anarchists is extremely imbalanced, presenting little contextual information, only reporting police statements, ignoring activists’ words, and depicting anarchists as instigators of trouble, regardless of facts (Koca-Helvaci 2016; Williams 2018). On their behalf, anarchists reject such aphorisms and describe anarchism as a rational and constructive response to any form of (repressive) hierarchy and domination (Williams 2018, p. 2). At times, anarchists have advocated violence in the form of ‘propaganda of the deed’ (Heywood 2017) or bloody revolution as means for achieving liberation. Nevertheless, support for violence for its own sake represents a minority position in the anarchist tradition (Gibson 2013, p. 339). When violence is being used it is considered a form of revenge or retribution, since violence comes from the oppression and exploitation that politicians, industrialists, judges, the police and others inflict on the working masses. In addition, violence is seen by several anarchists a way of raising political consciousness and stimulating the masses to revolt (Heywood 2017). On the other hand, violence has not always been considered the ideal method for anarchist activism. The principle of non-violence has appealed to several anarchists as well, since it considers human beings as moral and autonomous creatures, who are entitled to be treated with compassion and respect, and on top of that the rationale of ‘fighting’ for your beliefs in a non-violent way demonstrates the strength and moral purity of one’s convictions and may thus be more compelling in terms of disseminating the anarchist idea(l)s (Heywood 2017). Defining anarchism has always been difficult (Swann 2015), with no clear consensus even among self-proclaimed anarchists (Clough and Blumberg 2012, p. 337). Thus, it is maybe better to speak of ‘anarchisms’ with diverging theoretical and methodological influences (Clough and Blumberg 2012, p. 337; Swann 2015, p. 6; Vincent 2010, p. 116). Anarchism can be rather broadly approached as a ‘social, economic, and political philosophy and social movement dating to the mid-1800s that opposes the existence of hierarchical power and authority, while at the same time promotes horizontal, cooperative, and egalitarian social relations’ (Williams 2019, p. 754). Influenced by the most radical currents of the Enlightenment, anarchism emerged as a revolt against the solidifying nation-state, early capitalism, and the influence of religious authority. Anarchists not only critiqued the centralising and bureaucratic qualities of these institutions, but advocated the creation of horizontal, egalitarian and cooperative institutions in their place (Williams and Lee 2012, p. 559). The anarchist case against authority is simple and clear: authority is an offence against the principles of freedom and equality (Heywood 2017). Authority based on political inequality and the alleged right of one person to influence the behaviour of others enslaves, oppresses, and limits human life. It harms and corrupts both those who are subject to authority and those who exercise authority. Since a (wo)man is a free and autonomous being, submission to authority means that (s)he is diminished, that her/his essential nature is suppressed. In addition, to be an authority is to be eager for prestige, control, and

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domination. Authority, therefore, leads to a ‘psychology of power’ based on a pattern of ‘dominance and submission’, a society in which, as Paul Goodman (1977) said, ‘many are ruthless and most live in fear’ (quoted in Heywood 2017, p. 141). The state can deprive individuals of their property, their liberty and ultimately, through capital punishment, their lives (Heywood 2017). Proudhon (1989 quoted in Vincent 2010, p. 112) defined anarchy as the ‘absence of a master, a sovereign’, or, as Price (2007) argued (quoted in van der Walt 2016, p. 361), ‘anarchism is democracy without a state’, since states involve violence, hierarchy, and domination, resulting in the denial of human equality (Vincent 2010, p. 124). For these reasons, anarchism rejects capitalism, landlordism and states – all of which are seen as centralising wealth and power in the hands of small ruling classes –, as well as the authoritarian family and multiple forms of inequality, including gender oppression, colonialism, nation, and race. It aims instead at the revolutionary transformation of social relations, including interpersonal and family relations, and the creation of a universal human community based on voluntary cooperation (van der Walt 2016, p. 351). In this sense, Goldman emphasises that ‘anarchism urges people to think, to research, to analyse every proposal’ (Clough and Blumberg 2012, p. 338) in order to make each individual critically engage with social reality, its institutions and structures. Anarchist struggles are guided by different theoretical perspectives that are not unified, rigid, or unchanging, but share a common commitment to non-authoritarian organisation based on mutual aid, affinity-based organisation, and prefigurative politics (Clough and Blumberg 2012, p. 340). Anarchist-inspired struggles have challenged the boundaries between private and public, work and home, society, state and economy, based on principles such as mutual aid, solidarity, self-determination and individual freedom that is socially supported (Clough and Blumberg 2012, p. 340). At the centre of anarchism is the individual, who is seen as morally valuable and forms the existential core of anarchism the ‘teleological pursuit of individual freedom’ (Gibson 2013, p. 339). Although the desire to free the individual from the shackles of authority and hierarchy is central to anarchist theory and practice, anarchism does not seem to be unanimously ‘optimistic’ about human nature. The majority of anarchists believe that man is a product of his environment, even if he is capable of changing it (Heywood 2017). Contrary to popular belief, anarchism does not mean complete disorder. One of the important threads connecting the many different currents of anarchism is the importance of organisation (Heywood 2017). Bakunin (1872) (quoted in Juris 2004, p. 353) wrote that a central value of anarchism is organisation based on grassroots participation from below rather than centralised command from above. In anarchist movements, the goal is to form democratic and anti-authoritarian organisational structures that respond to the needs for autonomy, such as affinity groups (Day 2004; Williams 2018, p. 5). To achieve horizontalist goals in direct, anti-authoritarian ways, anarchists advocate the decentralisation of power, decision-making and organisation. Thus, the focal point of anarcho-syndicalism is the creation of a decentralised network of connections without a central, controlling node. These connections are linked

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by a logic of ‘affinity’ (Day 2004). Counter-hegemonic and anti-authoritarian projects that embody this decentralised network or federal ideal include Peoples’ Global Action, No Border Camps in Europe, the Indymedia network, the Zapatistas (Williams 2018, p. 4). Features that are presented as new, such as a preoccupation with interpersonal power relations, racism, imperialism, and consumption, were in fact part of earlier anarchist and syndicalist generations. Also not new is the use of cultural struggle, the appropriation of public spaces, bottom-up organising, the building of transnational and cross-continental networks and broad alliances; or the concern to oppose not only economic exploitation but all forms of oppression and to seek the emancipation not only of the industrial proletariat but of all the exploited people (Hirsch and van der Walt 2014; van der Walt 2016, p. 353). Like other socio-political ideologies and movements, anarchism has a unique combination of values and goals that overlap with numerous (contemporary) anti-authoritarian movements. These values include horizontalism, direct action, anti-authoritarianism, decentralisation, anti-capitalism and mutual aid. Horizontalist organisations aim to be popular, independent of power centres, collectivist and directly democratic (Sitrin 2006), sharing or stepping on some basic parameters of anarchism, even though not all of their members consider themselves as anarchists. This anarchist(ic) (Day 2004) rationale promotes organisational structures, communication and deliberative approaches to maximise these values. Relatively small organisations, impermanent or limited leadership, inclusive communication styles, and consensus-based decision-making procedures are expressions of direct-democratic anarchist values in organisations (Williams 2018, p. 3). Contemporary anarchist(ic) social movements are characterised by an opposition to the agenda of globalising capital and the associated neoliberal ideology that brings privatisation, deregulation, and unemployment to the Global North and structural adjustment programs and increasing impoverishment to the Global South. This opposition may come from all classes, identity groups, and causes, from all parts of the world (Day 2004).

The Internet and Its Role in Anarchist Organisation Social movements are ‘dynamic communication systems’ (Fuchs 2006, p. 101) in which communication practices produce alternative understandings and oppositional framings that persuade ‘large-scale, collective changes in the areas of public policy, corporate practice, social structure, cultural norms, and daily life experience’ (Ganesh, Zoller, and Cheney 2005, quoted in Mann 2015, p. 159). In any social movement, its activities (e.g., strategising, mobilising, protesting, evaluating) involve communication (Cammaerts, Mattoni, and McCurdy 2013, p. 154). A plethora of studies have examined the relationship between social movements and the media in recent decades due to the emergence of digital media and communication technologies (Karatzogianni and Matthews 2020; Poulakidakos, Veneti, and Rovisco 2021). Due to the cyber age’s reliance upon technology (e.g., the

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Internet, social media, and cellular phones), a new and ever-changing terrain for both horizontal organising – as well as surveillance and suppression – exists (Williams 2018, p. 11), a ‘both and’ rationale that describes the dualities of contemporary digital communication contexts (Demertzis and Tsekeris 2018, p. 4). Each new and emerging media and communication technology that has become available, whether print, sound recording, telecommunications, broadcasting or the Internet, has been appropriated by activists to achieve various goals and purposes related to their struggles (Cammaerts, Mattoni, and McCurdy 2013, p. 4; Poulakidakos, Veneti, and Rovisco 2021, p. 228). While many view anarchism in a negative way or as an unworkable ideal (Heywood 2017; Vincent 2010) – among other reasons due to the negative representations of anarchist(ic) activism in mainstream media –, there is fairly concrete evidence/case studies showing that anarchism, while certainly not unproblematic, does exist in the lived practices of alternative forms of organising and reproducing social life (Day 2004; Swann and Stoborod 2014, p. 604). Moreover, the Internet and its applications are becoming a widespread cultural ideal in certain fields, implying new forms of decentralised, directly democratic politics that reflect both the traditional values of anarchism and the logic of computer networking (Juris 2004, p. 347). With regard to social networks, Wellman has argued that ‘computer-supported social networks’ (CSSNs) are profoundly transforming the nature of communities, sociality and interpersonal relations (Wellman 2001 quoted in Juris 2004, p. 347). The networking logic within contemporary globally networked social movements includes the concept of horizontal coordination between autonomous elements (Juris 2004, p. 354). In many ways, anarchism resembles the decentred networking logic of information capitalism. As Ward (1973, p. 58 quoted in Juris 2004, p. 347) further explains, ‘the anarchist conclusion is that every kind of human activity should start from what is local and immediate, that it should connect in a network without a center and without a directing authority, splitting off new cells as the original ones grow’. From this point of view, it is not surprising that anarchism, or more generally left-libertarianism, becomes the dominant ethos of opposition in an age characterised by decentralised network forms. This ‘autopoietic’ (self-produced) network (Luhmann 1990 quoted in Juris 2004, p. 354) becomes a powerful model reflecting an open-source developmental logic based on a multiplicity of autonomous components coordinating and interacting without central command. In 2000, the first Spanish-language anti-globalisation listserv was established to coordinate local solidarity actions throughout Latin America, involving mainly anarchists and radicals from Mexico, Brazil and Argentina. Around the same time, activists in Barcelona set up the first mailing list in the Spanish state to organise for Prague. Since then, global justice distributors have sprung up in almost every country in the world, especially where local actions and campaigns have been organised. The use of the Internet has not replaced face-to-face coordination and interaction but has complemented and facilitated it. Activists use listservs to keep abreast of activities and complete concrete logistical tasks, while

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more complex planning, policy discussions and relationship building take place in physical settings supported by virtual networks (Juris 2004, p. 348). It is in this digital decentralised network that crowdfunding/crowdsourcing sites emerged. Crowdfunding, which can be loosely defined as raising capital through small contributions from a large number of geographically diverse contributors, typically via the Internet, is an increasingly popular practice among entrepreneurs and social movements (Karatzogianni and Matthews 2020; Robertson and Wooster 2015), especially newly emerged, decentralised, horizontal efforts that seek grassroots funding and/or sourcing in order to financially support their activities. FIREFUND constitutes a crowdfunding/crowdsourcing platform identifying itself as ‘a community for international solidarity, a network of activists, organized to crowdfund the movements’ (firefund.net 2021). This network seeks to bring together grassroots social movements that seek funding in order to support their activities. Apart from its website (firefund.net), which includes a full catalogue of past and present crowdfunding projects, Firefund, at the time this research was conducted, had a Facebook group (https://www.facebook.com/ firefund.net – liked by 895 people and followed by 913 people) and an Instagram account (firefundnet) with 421 followers and 33 posts.

Geographies of Funding Among the main tenets of crowdfunding portals like firefund.net is that they seek to bring together projects (in this case movements) from different countries. Thus, our first research question focuses on where these social movements seeking funding come from.

Fig. 1.

Origin of the Social Movements in firefund.net per Continent.

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As shown in Fig. 1, the majority of the campaigns are organised in European countries (almost 70%), followed by Asia (11.3%) and Central/South America (10.5%). Fig. 1 shows that there is a rather ‘unequal’ internationalisation of the projects promoted through firefund.net, since most of them come from the European continent, whereas other areas of the world with serious social, political and financial issues (e.g., Africa) are – at least up to now – ‘under-represented’. The findings demonstrated in Fig. 1, are complemented by Fig. 2, which re-affirms the conquest of the European countries and among them Greece (28.6%), Denmark (13.5%) and Sweden (6.8%). The country with the most

Fig. 2.

Origin of the Social Movements in firefund.net per Country.

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campaigns outside Europe is Brazil (6%). Even though there are specific countries that stand out compared to others (Greece, Denmark, Brazil), the platform promotes social movements from 36 different countries worldwide, a rather significant number for a ‘developing’ online community, while several projects appear to be organised by activists based in multiple countries. This (up to now) ‘unequal’ internationalisation of the projects/campaigns seeking crowdfunding through firefund.net, might be partially explained by the fact that Firefund appears to be a ‘developing community’. Even though it exists since 2015, most campaigns (66.9%) have been running as shown in Fig. 3 in the last 2 years (2020–early 2022), and that’s something that is connected to the COVID-19 pandemic. First, the consequent lockdowns have limited drastically the face-to-face interpersonal communication, which is the main characteristic of horizontally organised communities, whereas the expenses for their administration and maintenance of their facilities must be covered and become even more imperative. Second, the emergence of the pandemic and the (harsh) restrictive measures imposed by various governments, along with the implementation of limited measures to enhance the capabilities of public health systems (e.g., the Greek government), have caused

Fig. 3.

Social Movements Asking for Funding Through firefund.net per Year.

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social unrest, public demonstrations and collision with police or even armed repression forces. Thus, the pandemic crisis has both brought about the need for social resistance against repressive policies and for new ways of funding the activities of anarchist(ic) communities.

Successful Vs. Unsuccessful Projects Another important aspect contributing to the ‘success’ of any crowdfunding portal is the percentage of the campaigns that manage to achieve their aims in terms of funding. According to Fig. 4, more than 75% of the campaigns seeking financial support through firefund.net manage to gather the requested amount of money and only approximately one out of five campaigns (18%) fail to do so. Quite interesting is the fact that the continent of origin of the movement/ campaign seems to play a significant role in the success of the campaign. Almost 84% of the campaigns coming from European countries achieve their (crowd) funding aims, whereas ‘only’ 60% of the campaigns from non-European countries reach their financial threshold (Fig. 5). Thus, one could argue that the percentage of the campaigns actually reaching their financial targets is rather high and contributes to the further development of firefund.net as a ‘reference’ portal for crowdfunding and bringing together anarchist(ic) activists.

Fig. 4.

Percentage of Campaigns (Not) Achieving Their Aims Through firefund.net.

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Fig. 5. Percentage of Campaigns (Not) Achieving Their Aims Through firefund.net per Continent (Europe/Non-Europe) (Fisher’s Exact Test p-Value 5 0.006).

Anarchist Elements in Self-Presentation The current research aims to create a ‘profile’ of the movements/campaigns that seek to be funded through firefund.net, according to their self-presentation, coding for a rather wide range of characteristics that fall into the rationale of anarchist(ic) movements (Lederman 2015). As Fig. 6 shows, most anarchist movements promote their anti-establishment rationale, mostly through their anti-authoritative/anti-hierarchical stance (found in 58.8% of the campaigns), which is usually further specified as anti-government (52.7%), anti-police (35.9%) and anti-fascist (33.6%) rationale. This anticipated prevalence of the anti-hierarchical/anti-government rationale is placed at the epicentre of anarchism and anarchist movements (van der Walt 2016; Vincent 2010), since anarchism’s major concern is the dissolve of the hierarchical structures permeating social structures and regulating the human agency in restrictive – according to anarchism – way. In addition, a significant part of the campaigns seeking funding through firefund.net identify themselves as prefigurative (35.9%), in the sense that they organise and run (semi-)permanent structures/groups/communities, which seek to implement the anarchist ideals in everyday life and demonstrate that an anarchist organisation/social structure is not an ‘utopia’ as several criticisms on anarchism claim (Heywood 2017; Vincent 2010). Another interesting finding is that no anarchist movement identifies itself as against religion/church, at least not explicitly in the descriptions uploaded for

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Characteristics Mentioned in the Self-Presentation of the Social Movements on firefund.net.

each petition of firefund.net, even though traditional anarchist theories include religion in the oppressive authoritarian institutions that perpetuate the hierarchical structure of society (Williams and Lee 2012). This specific point, though, is contestable within the different approaches of anarchism, since (libertarian) anarchists place at the epicentre of their interest the protection of individual freedom/rights, given that the free individual constitutes the fundament of a free – from the oppression of hierarchy – society (Gibson 2013). Thus, several anarchist approaches acknowledge the right of each individual to religious freedom. Though anarchism has been identified with violence in the public sphere (Rosie and Gorringe 2009), Fig. 6 shows that in our sample from firefund.net only 21.4% of the movements seeking funding refer to the implementation of violence in a context of reaction to the oppression on behalf of a government and the police, hence as an ideological ‘countermeasure’ (Heywood 2017). Thus, we accept our first hypothesis, that a minority percentage of movements would include violence in their activistic repertoire.

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Seeking to further elaborate on the picture drawn by Fig. 6, we scrutinised our data for differences and similarities in the different anarchist characteristics between the movements coming from different continents, hence from different socio-political contexts. Given the prevalence of European movements, we recoded the initial variable into a new one with two values: ‘Europe’ and ‘other continents’. The relevant results are shown in two Figs. 7a and 7b, which seek to demonstrate the proportion of each anarchist characteristic in the total number or social movements/ campaigns in each region (Europe – 93 campaigns vs Non-Europe – 40 campaigns). As seen in Fig. 7a, there is a rather balanced focus of the movements both inside and outside Europe on anti-authoritative/anti-hierarchical and anti-government rationale. European based movements present their activities as anti-police and anti-judiciary on a more frequent basis compared to the non-European movements. On the other hand, non-European movements appear

Fig. 7a. Characteristics Mentioned in the Self-Presentation of the Social Movements on firefund.net per Continent (a).

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Fig. 7b. Characteristics Mentioned in the Self-Presentation of the Social Movements on firefund.net per Continent (b).

to focus more on pre-figurative activities and environmental issues, compared to the European ones, echoing to a certain extent the different imminent issues facing northern and southern societies (Day 2004).

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In addition, as shown in Fig. 7b, European movements underline more frequently their anti-fascist rationale compared to non-European ones, whereas non-European movements seem to be more focused on an anti-imperialist and pro-feminist rationale, echoing some of the major issues that beset non-European societies. Seeking to examine our second research hypothesis, on the support of violent action as a political countermeasure to oppressive institutions/mechanisms and their policies, our analysis shows that in 25 out of the 28 occasions that a violent action – actually direct confrontation with the repression mechanisms of governments – is mentioned, is goes hand in hand with an anti-government rationale (Fig. 8). That leads us to accept our second hypothesis, describing violence as a political response of anarchist(ic) movements against the oppressive character of specific social mechanisms, especially the state/government.

Fig. 8. Number of Campaigns Mentioning Violent Methods as a Means of Action per Reference to Anti-government Rationale (Fisher’s Exact Test p-Value 5 0.000).

Conclusion The current research examined the crowdfunding platform firefund.net and made an initial assessment on the role it plays in bringing together anarchist(ic) social movements from around the globe in a single online crowdfunding portal. In addition, we tried to analyse the major characteristics of the movements asking

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for funding through firefund.net, through their self-presentation on the platform, I order to map the major parameters permeating these campaigns. To begin with, firefund.net appears to be a still developing portal, which has been proving its important role in gathering money for social movements mainly after the outburst of the COVID-19 pandemic (from 2020 onwards), and the restrictive measures imposed in multiple countries around the world, which impeded face-toface social contact, the communicational backbone of anarchist(ic) social movements. Within the context of social distantiation that caused social unrest, online portals – like firefund.net – have a major role to play in bringing together social movements and disseminating the rationale of bottom-up activism. In this sense, firefund.net serves as an ‘online translocal connection’ of anarchist(ic) social movements, echoing David Featherstone’s notion of ‘translocal connections’ that integrates activities in places with the contestations of national space or public space (2008, p. 4, quoted in Goyens 2009, p. 446). Yet, this global ‘translocality’ hasn’t been completely fulfilled yet, since almost 70% of petitions come from Europe-based movements and the remaining 30% form other continents. In addition, we sought to create and activistic profile of the social movements asking for financial support through firefund.net. Our content analysis included a rather wide range of characteristics of social movements falling under the umbrella of anarchism and can be considered to constitute anarchist values. Our findings show that discursive instances against hierarchical repressive institutions of contemporary societies (Vincent 2010) (e.g., state/government, police, judiciary system) play a protagonist role in the self-presentations of the movements found in firefund.net. In addition, of major importance in the self-presentation of the movements in firefund.net appear to be anti-fascism and the rationale of prefiguration. Prefigurative structures are prioritised by a significant number of social movements on firefund.net. This strategy gives an answer to the critics of anarchism who argue that the establishment of a horizontal social structure is nothing less than an abstract ideal that cannot be achieved (Heywood 2017). To that end, horizontal structures (e.g., communities) that last in time can be considered – according to anarchist ideals – to be forms prefiguring a possible ‘horizontal’ future of human societies. In a nutshell, firefund.net, though it doesn’t appear to be that widespread/ popular – at least not yet, constitutes an additional online communication node, connecting a wide variety of geographically dispersed anarchist movements, contributing to the financial viability of grassroots revolutionary movements, a prerequisite – given the capitalist socio-economic structure of contemporary societies – for the further development of horizontal, grassroots social movements that defy hierarchical social structures (Day 2004).

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Mann, A. (2015) ‘Communication, Organisation, and Action: Theory Building for Social Movements’, Communication Research and Practice, 1(2), 159–173. Miller, L.R. and Brewer, J.D. (Eds.) (2003). The A-Z of Social Research. London: Sage. Neuendorf, K.A. (2002) The Content Analysis Guidebook. London: SAGE Publications. Price, W. (2007) The Abolition of the State: Anarchist and Marxist Perspectives. Bloomington: Author House. Proudhon, P.-J. (1989) General Idea of Revolution in the Nineteenth Century. London: Pluto Press. Poulakidakos, S., Veneti, A. and Rovisco, M. (2021) ‘The Online Communication Strategies of a Small-Scale Social Movement: The Case of the Greek ‘Do Not Pay’ Social Movement’, in Karatzogianni, A., Schandorf, M. and Ferra, A. (eds.) Protest Technologies and Media Revolutions: The Longue Duree. Bingley: Emerald Publishing Limited, pp. 227–239. Robertson, E. and Wooster, R.B. (2015) Crowdfunding as a Social Movement: The Determinants of Success in Kickstarter Campaigns. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn. 2631320 Rosie, M. and Gorringe, H. (2009) ‘“The Anarchists’ World Cup”: Respectable Protest and Media Panics’, Social Movement Studies, 8(1), pp. 35–53. Sitrin, M. (2006) Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina. Oakland: AK Press. Swann, T. (2015) Anarchist Cybernetics Control and Communication in Radical Left Social Movements. Thesis Submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Leicester, School of Management University of Leicester. Swann, T. and Stoborod, K. (2014) ‘Did You Hear the One about the Anarchist Manager?’ Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization, 14(4), pp. 591–609. van der Walt, L. (2016) ‘Back to the Future: Revival, Relevance and Route of an Anarchist/Syndicalist Approach for Twenty-First-Century Left, Labour and National Liberation Movements’, Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 34(3), pp. 348–367. Veneti, A. and Poulakidakos, S. (2021) ‘Video-activism and Small-Scale Resistance: The Visual Rhetoric of YouTube Videos by the Greek Anarchist Group Rouvikonas’, in Crick, N. (ed.) The Rhetoric of Social Movements: Networks, Power and New Media. Oxon and New York: Routledge, pp. 65–83. Vincent, A. (2010) Modern Political Ideologies, 3rd ed. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell. Ward, C. (1973) Anarchy in Action. London: Freedom Press. Wellman, B. (2001) ‘Physical Place and Cyberplace: The Rise of Personalized Networking’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 25(2), pp. 227–252. Williams, D.M. (2018) ‘Contemporary Anarchist and Anarchistic Movements’, Sociology Compass, 12(6), pp. 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12582 Williams, D.M. (2019) ‘Revolutionary Anti-authoritarian Movements and Anarchist Studies’, Social Movement Studies, 18(6), pp. 754–758. Williams, D.M. and Lee, M.T. (2012) ‘Aiming to Overthrow the State (Without Using the State): Political Opportunities for Anarchist Movements’, Comparative Sociology, 11, pp. 558–593.

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Chapter 12

From Anti-Gentrification to Fab Lab Community: Spatialisation of Conflicts, Contentious Politics and the Limits of Techno-Politics in Urban Areas Leandros Savvides

Introduction My involvement with Fabulous St. Pauli started during my PhD years. I was searching for communities which cared about social justice, but were not following a pattern of looking back at simpler ways of living to express their political ideas (see e.g. Chitewere and Taylor 2010). I wanted to cover different versions of those communities which sprung up here and there in many parts of the world, especially in cities of the so-called Western world. Most of the ideas which had broadly speaking approached history in progressive thought, taking technology seriously, and looking at the ills of modern technological infrastructure came of course in the cities of large industrial countries (MacKenzie and Wajcman 1999). Taking into account that such ideas are most recently carried by urban social movements rather than a traditional working class movement, these often resorted to entrepreneurial and creative ideas to raise awareness or create conditions for social struggles (see Harvey 1989; Jessop 2003). Some of such communities started as an outgrow of garage hobbyists, to get bigger spaces in order to perform their experiments and do their crafts, others saw them as a good way to mix with people of different technical expertise in order to complete their projects; others just did this for fun. I had already followed a few other spaces (Derby Silk Mill,1 Leicester Hackerspace and NottinHack most notably) which all of them were communities that to some degree encompassed the above description. Following discussions about my study subject with makers and colleagues, I was referred to Fab Lab in St. Pauli, an area in Hamburg, Germany. The reason for the referral was the perceived political stance of the community there, which contrary to other communities I have studied, it seemed as if it routinely tapped into earlier anti-gentrification struggles in the city as a source of meaning to its Duty to Revolt, 181–202 Copyright © 2024 Leandros Savvides Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited doi:10.1108/978-1-80382-315-720231012

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existence. The Fab Lab was founded during such anti-gentrification struggles, and was part of the social movements of the city which called for ‘spatialisation of conflicts’ (I will come back to this later in the chapter) via a political and theoretical lens similar to social movements calling for ‘the Right to the City’ (Harvey 2008). However, it was not solely about how it relates to politics. Interestingly, Fabulous St. Pauli presented an emerging point of reference in European Fab Labs because of its activities as they relate to the city’s urban gentrification transformations. This Fab Lab provided examples and answers, key pieces in the puzzle that other places did not. While, as mentioned, I was shuttling between the Hackerspaces and Makerspaces on a more or less daily basis between February 2014 and June 2016, practical reasons dictated that I visited St. Pauli on two occasions, each time for a two-week period, in October 2015 and again in March 2016. Following the visits, I became even more interested in this case, as it presents a perplexed and multidimensional reality which social movements, especially of the technology cohort, have faced over the last few decades. Why has such a movement drawn praise from both proponents of neoliberal institutions such as the EU and on the polar opposite, anti-gentrification, anti-fascist and pro-immigrant activists in urban cities? Drawing on those findings of my research in the city of St Pauli, and looking closer at the theory upon which it draws its historical continuity, I argue that the politics of Hackerspaces/Makerspaces and Fab Labs constitute sites that disclose contradictions as sites of capital realisation within cities. They are becoming spaces of contesting the dominant paradigm, but also reflecting the societies within which they operate. Users become developers themselves who simultaneously reinvent forms of consumption, processes of learning and re-conceptualising the relationship between science and craft, productivism and play, authority and informal horizontal learning. The ‘City is our Factory’ emerges as a key theoretical pillar of the idea of spatialisation of conflicts, engaging in contentious politics of hacking with a look at the failures of capitalism. This chapter is an attempt to explore and trace the historical context of social movements similar to the one which revolted in St. Pauli (Park Fiction anti-gentrification struggles), as well as try to link the theoretical foundations upon which the movement in the city was mentioning with the subjective experience, both collective and individual which the everyday reality presented itself. The revolt against the gentrification of one of the most working class symbols of the St Pauli area in Hamburg, opened a political opportunity that spiralled into an opening of political possibilities. It was not the first time, other waves of protests tried to protect the areas of the poorer in the city in the past, and ¨ managed to keep a collective memory of struggles since the early 1980s (Ruhse 2014). The anti-gentrification protests of 2011 around ‘park fiction’, which later also linked with the Gezi revolt in Istanbul, Turkey, inherited to the protesters extra room to manage as they succeeded in squatting a number of buildings which local developers wanting to convert to luxury apartments, in one of the poorer neighbourhoods of Germany. One of the buildings was to house a Fab Lab, a unique community idea (see the work of Gershenfeld 2005) which a team of

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activists have been inspired to suggest, following their own interests and links with a Fab Lab network in other countries. With such a rebellious birth certificate, the task of maintaining and building communities that will sustain the struggle against capital and local authority plans for gentrification, would prove to be a hard task indeed. The Fab Lab has been moved to another area since then, but the political events which brought it into existence have been ongoing and the community has managed to survive and develop over the years. The case of Fabulous St. Pauli is a unique story in European social movement politics, not only because it is part of the ‘repertoire of contention’ of social movement modular politics (Tarrow 2011; Tilly 1983). Perhaps most importantly, it is one of the very few places that could combine this political identity with a thoughtful engagement to techno-politics, both as DIY and grassroots practises but also as political futures. Political ideas and concepts such as the ‘Right to the City’, ‘spatialisation of conflicts’ and the ‘City is our factory’ are the ones who resonate most, which given that most Fab Labs are created as an outright rejection of politics, it is a unique social experiment blend of politics and technology to be studied.

Gentrification and the Rise of Social Movement (Techno)politics Gentrification as a live and experienced process, started shortly after the WWII, when upcoming petty bourgeois attempted to invest by buying property, in neighbourhoods which were left disinvested, because they were cheaper. The move into these areas was so evident that the process started to attract the interest of firms, which saw a market in trying to buy property in those areas, create condominiums, apartments and townhouses and then sell it (Ley 1996). Consequently, this process left unchecked or even promoted by the local authorities and the state, displaced the working class that inhabited those regions in the cities, as they could not afford to stay there any longer (Helbrecht 2018). On many occasions, this process grew the discomfort of the working class of those areas, so much that resistance was organised, and sometimes violence was also used, but evidently, with the absence of robust policy for affordable housing and measures in favour of the working class, the resistance movements had little success in the long run. Gentrification was evident in major cities across the globe, especially in mega cities of the West, such as New York and London. After the earlier years, during the 1980s and later, corporate plans sometimes did not even follow the movement of small owners into those areas, and attempted to locate areas to invest first hand, which could also turn friendly areas for further corporate investments (Ley 1996). This process grew the property and financial markets and integrated each other to the point that they became primary sources for profits (Aalbers 2019). Given that by the 1980s the manufacturing sectors in the core capitalist countries was stagnant, deregulation in finance and expansion in credit gave the opportunity and relative ease for capital investors to see the real estate as a viable path to profits (Fernandez and Aalbers 2016). By the time an area was gentrified, even the small home-owners and petty bourgeois

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residents could not access those areas, as the property market grew the prices, requiring bog down payments and mortgages that they could not afford. Thus, gentrification was partly an opportunity and consumption tastes and partly structural changes in capitalist production which took the form of an organised industry to preserve accumulation (Campbell, Ghosh, and Sirmans 1998). As gentrification became a theme in many cities, the residents had already seen the future a few times already. It was then quite common to try and resist the upcoming gentrification of places, especially those which the residents were very poor and had no other options but to experience mass displacement. Seeing the economic side of this story, the political story of anti-gentrification resistance movements has its roots in the mesh or replacement of traditional working class politics of the twentieth century with social movements. In Europe, the 1960s France was a laboratory where the new social and political developments became very visible, which started a new way of organising and mobilising, as a spearhead of demands articulated by the working class, the middle and lower middle strata. Boltanski and Chiapello’s (2005) seminal work ‘The new spirit of capitalism’ explained how such new political developments co-existed or presented as another way of mobilising by the middle strata on the side of the working class movement mobilisations. They noted that much of the discussion on the demands of the largely youthful movement that included students who did not wish their parents luck and path in life was the partly contradictory demands of autonomy and security. Autonomy in the sense that the type of capitalism that prevailed in the previous generation did not allow room for individuality, authenticity and room to carve one’s own life path. Security of livelihood via stable jobs (that however were not as boring and bureaucratic as before) was expected in order for the working class and the other popular strata to be able to make a living. The preceding mode of capitalist development was characterized by extensive long-term strategizing, prominent bureaucratic organizations, standardization, and the pursuit of economies of scale. Such mode predominantly relied and reproduced entrenched cultural and social structures, particularly the family unit, which played a significant role in sustaining mass social rituals that were considered obligatory for all individuals to embrace. This collective way of looking at the individual meant security in terms of what to expect; many employees had a stable job, prospective careers and increasing leisure time that was subsidised. The profound crisis which French capitalism had succumbed to meant that this was not a viable option to move forward. Meanwhile, the youthful movement that was breeding with universities at their core (since, the university then was not guaranteeing a secure future) embarked in a social and artistic critique of the old form extending towards a critique of the capitalist system. Thus, the transformations of the ruling class aimed at recuperating some of the themes that this crisis was subjected to, in order to create a new dynamism for the capitalist system itself. The French crisis of May had the dual character of a student revolt and a working-class revolt. The revolt by students and young intellectuals was in fact extended to cadres or engineers who had

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recently left the university system, and served as a trigger for a very widespread working-class revolt. The workers, mobilised against the threats posed to them – especially wage earners in traditional sectors (mines, shipyards, the iron and steel industry) – by the restructuring and modernisation of the productive apparatus undertaken in the 1960s, would speak the language of capitalist exploitation, ‘struggle against the government of the monopolies’, and the egoism of an ‘oligarchy’ that ‘confiscates the fruits of progress’, in the tradition of social critique. [. . .] Students (and young wage-earners recently graduated from universities or the grandes ecoles), who had seen their numbers increase significantly during the previous decade marked by the university explosion (the number of students enrolled in faculties virtually quintupled between 1946 and 1971, from 123,313 to 596,141), but had simultaneously seen their conditions deteriorate and their expectations of obtaining autonomous, creative jobs diminish, instead developed a critique of alienation. It adopted the main themes of the artistic critique (already pervasive in the United States in the hippie movement): on the one hand, the disenchantment, the inauthenticity, the ‘poverty of everyday life’, the dehumanization of the world under the sway of technicization and technocratization; on the other hand, the loss of autonomy, the absence of creativity, and the different forms of oppression in the modern world. Boltanski and Chiapello (2005, pp. 169–170) The difference between the two was evident on what the demands were and who was carrying those demands, as well as what was the expected outcome. For working class politics, it was simply the manifestation of modernist politics: build a collective power aim against the oppressor and then have the power to change things. But for the artistic critique articulated by the students and other mostly petty bourgeois strata, there was a need for change that was similar to a spiritual one. These strata understood power to be distributed within society than concentrated, and therefore getting power was inconceivable. Instead, they opted for a critique of everyday life, perceived forms of oppressive regimes of the modernist era (nuclear family rituals) that also touched upon the inner workings of the enterprises (critique of hierarchy forms, division of labour and operations). Thus, instead of understanding both critiques as opposites, it is better to suggest that they evolved co-jointly. However, it was evident that the artistic critique was the one that could and was co-opted in a new version of capitalist types. The decades that followed, the defeat of working class politics either through shock neoliberal governments or recuperation through social democratic governments, the artistic critique grew bigger. Whereas the organised working class movement was diminishing, at Universities, a number of new micro and mid-range sociological and anthropological theories on class and power emerged (Alexiou 2002a).

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The new theories understood class in terms of its cultural taste, collective memory or everyday habits at work and life. There was even attempt by Marxist theorists to fuse those new theories with a Marxist critique, as Marxist thought, at least in academic circles embraced the new social movements politics rather than traditional working class politics (Alexiou 2002b). The new social movements were steadily replacing working-class politics since the 1960s in mature capitalist societies. In the process, new debates were set to theorise what a ‘post-industrial’ society based on the prevalence of ICT technologies means and the apparent pervasiveness of capital outside the physical limits of the production system (Gandini 2012). Thus, politics and political struggle were conceived mostly outside the wage relation and closer to the aesthetic social critique of inequality. Class was at some point even being called into question causing ontological, academic and activist debates on what it means in the twenty-first century. For most such new theories and arguments, instead of class playing an active role in creating inequality, class was seen as something that happens because of inequality. Inequality then was to be questioned in every face of work and life; at work, neighbourhoods, gender, race, media etc. According to such perspective, power is everywhere and does not have a centre of gravity, nor does it hold the wage relation as a special category for anti-oppressive politics. Instead, power is perceived in terms of practices, as resistance ‘is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power’ (Foucault, 1979, p. 95). Thus, everyday rituals, identities, practices and the organisation of knowledge subjects within community organised spaces became the centre of resisting to power and offer alternatives. It is seen as the emergence of a culture of the new world within the shells of the old. Working class politics were replaced by social movements which had identities and practices at the centre of their political struggle (Alexiou 2016; Psimitis 1996). Despite the rejection of traditional class politics and the unfashionable work of Marx, the study of Henri Lefebvre about the Right to the City became highly influential,2 as it acknowledged the politics of the production of space within cities, according to class interests.3 Thus it managed to capture the interest of movements which wanted to see how the everyday life integrated into political life and influenced structures. Particularly noteworthy is the period following the aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. A significant shift occurred, characterized by the emergence of potent narratives asserting the definitive triumph of liberal democracy, marking the perceived end of history (Fukuyama 1995). With the hegemony of the end of history narrative, many authorities tried to solve problems within cities through capitalist inducing investments. Commodification of space meant rising rents, housing crisis and displacement of population of working class background from the space they occupied in the past. As employment declined, became more precarious and fragmented (later developed and termed as the gig economy), the population was both willing to pose some resistance, but at the same time it was slowly eroded out of existence in the areas designated for investments (Klein 2002). Adding to these categories, the increasing importance of software in the 1990s and hardware in the last few decades has created the need for social movements

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that espouse increased individual freedom and autonomy. Debates within the free and open software movement ranged from libertarian understandings of freedom which are potentially compatible with the corporate world (see e.g. Carson 2010; Levy 1984; Postill 2014) to Marxist leaning perspectives (Soderberg 2008). However, even the most radical ideas touching upon structural understandings of a rising technological inequality saw the re-emergence of class cleavage in mature Western liberal capitalist countries as just another category of oppression. Technology was always part of such movements, but aside from tools of mobilisation, there is an emergence of techno-politics connecting with everyday problems of inequality. Rather than having a political programme for change, the politics of such movements rather espouse a generally progressive outlook aiming at secularism and inclusiveness and being open, as is the case of the politics of Wikipedia (see Tkacz 2014). If for Wikipedia the important tenet denoting its political inclination is openness and access to information, in this case such spaces are temples of access to practice and experimentation.

Makers: An Ambivalent Social Movement Within this historical context and theoretical framework, the case of Fabulous St. Pauli is an interesting story that encapsulates the emergence of revolt-like interventions against plans of gentrification, in relation to the emergence of the maker culture, where technology and making are explored outside the professional lab, predominantly in Hackerspaces, Makerspaces and Fab Labs. Such spaces have emerged during the times of global capitalist crisis; they constitute important sites in the development of open-source hardware and software, and provide conducive conditions for the spread of locally created technology to and often beyond technologically informed publics. They can be both used as de-politicised DIY urban practices (which is mostly the case) that give space for individuals to create their own projects (and possibly enter the market) or/and as powerful tactics in the service of social movements. The movement which acted as a vehicle of this new spirit was the called the ‘Makers’ movement’. So named because of ‘Make magazine’, an American bimonthly publication founded by Dale Dougherty, it started as a leading proponent of open software. The Makers movement had a very simple message: ‘Make. Just make. This is the key. Making, is actually fundamental to what it means to be human’ (Hatch 2013, pp. 11–12). Creative hobbyists and communities started to use such type of machinery for their own purposes, experimenting and in many ways adding to and advancing the technology itself. The movement had borrowed to some extent cultural characteristics from the ‘Californian ideology’ which was dominant amongst tech publics in the United States (see the work of Turner 2010; Turner and Schneiter 2008). The iconic garage where the Apple seed was first planted and similar stories of mega concerns first seeing the light of day in small uncomfortable places where their creators had to hack their initial products and ideas until they took off became the stuff of legends that provided a motivational boost for those who otherwise might have packed it in

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after experiencing the inevitable setbacks associated with developing a new technology. Emphasising the need for accessibility of new technologies (especially digital fabrication) by the wider public and the engagement of the wider public with technical and collaborative skills (Blikstein and Krannich 2013), this movement that started to emerge and expand over the past 10 years within an environment which contained three historical developments: firstly, the collective experience and cultural legacy of the urban working class of previous generations, whose radical science movements for democratic decision-making challenged the direction of scientific explorations taken by government administration (Rose and Rose 1979); secondly, industrial production upgrades like digitising manufacturing (Wu et al., 2015); and last but not least, shifts in educational trends which expanded traditional learning practices to include informal playful practices while retaining basic educational values (Tanenbaum et al., 2013). In addition to these informal practices, new methods of learning place greater importance on the methodology of searching for answers than on the answer itself. There is also the growing, necessity-based collaboration between industrial workers whose skills are outmoded (due to redundancy and/or industry changes or the availability of cheaper production and bigger profits elsewhere) and skilled university graduates who find it increasingly difficult to find secure jobs. It is for these developments that proponents of capitalism have been seeing this movement in a positive light, seeing in its dynamics a rejuvenation of capitalism (Davies 2018). But apart from outright opponents, some voices have been mixing the above needs with the Marxist idea that the workers could now own the means of production, thus changing the production paradigm altogether by looking backwards to guild forms of socialism and getting inspiration from the arts and crafts movement that were popular ideas from mid-nineteenth to earlier twentieth century (Krugh 2014; Luckman 2014). Today we are seeing a return to a new sort of cottage industry. Once again, new technology is giving individuals the power over the means of production, allowing for bottom-up entrepreneurship and distributed innovation. Just as the Web’s democratisation of the means of production in everything from software to music made it possible to create an empire in a dorm room or a hit album in a bedroom, so the new democratised tools of digital manufacturing will be tomorrow’s spinning jennies. And the guilds they may break may be the very factory model that grew up in Manchester and dominated the past three centuries. Anderson (2012, pp. 50–51) The movement is an umbrella term that transcends class and other categories of oppression that social movements are most usually concerned about. Instead, the field covers a wide range of often overlapping practices, technologies, lifestyle and ways of thinking, including art and small start-up enterprises, all of which find it increasingly beneficial to collaborate in some way or another. Adjacent to this, a new movement of the commons emerged to argue that the networked type of society we are in and the technological advancements could also constitute a

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radical new opportunity for doing away from monopoly and heavy industrialised capitalism (see Bauwens and Kostakis 2014; Kostakis and Bauwens 2014). In other words, the Makers’ movement has been a social movement that looked like anti-establishment, but had been embraced by the establishment as a new force that could recuperated to rejuvenate the old structures of capitalism, just like the aesthetic critique was back in France in the 1960s. The politics of Hackerspaces/Makerspaces and Fab Labs constitute sites that disclose contradictions as sites of capital realisation within cities, becoming spaces of contesting the dominant paradigm, but also reflecting the societies within which they operate. Users become developers themselves who simultaneously reinvent forms of consumption, processes of learning and re-conceptualising the relationship between science and craft, productivism and play, authority and informal horizontal learning. Narratives such as small scale production, production as part of leisure and not in wage relation, the city as a productive organism, and neotechnic networked machines and infrastructure that can replicate itself, give an everyday science fiction and visions of future technologically induced social justice. However, despite the apparent social and collective nature of these practices and proclamations of that users can nowadays ‘own the means of production’, technology will be democratised or the demand for self-control and autonomy, on many occasions leads to a parallel individualistic twist at the heart of the maker culture. Thus, recuperation and entrepreneurship emerge as a constant negotiation to the direction of the movement (Soderberg and Delfanti 2015), but one which allows social movements to engage in contentious politics of hacking (Tilly and Tarrow 2015).

The Meaning of Park Fiction Revolt Fabulous St. Pauli is located near the port in Hamburg, Germany, and is a nightlife attraction. The area is considered to be historically a working class area, which has recently been designated for development plans along the gentrification frame, mainly with construction projects that would form the basis for further development of the area. The area featured all the recognisable common problems in neglected and poor areas, a mix of unemployment, drug use and crime. However, this is contrasted with luxurious buildings that have been erected over the last decades and are coming closer to this area. The area’s economy depends mainly on tourism, as there is a famous red light district near a street called Reeperbahn. The area leaves an intense flavour to outsiders, seeing a mix of cultures and remnants of the ongoing struggle against gentrification. Since the 1980s, the population residing near the area, had been fighting against the plans for gentrification of their neighbourhoods. One of the iconic free spaces that the poorer residents had been able to enjoy was named Park Fiction. A symbol of utopian taste, the park is small but allows the residents of the area to embark on different activities, often of creative nature. The park features palms made of steel, as it looks to the port; it is a strange juxtaposition of a paradise looking at an industrial setting. My interlocutors have been very proud of the legacy of the park and its centrality in the struggle for the city. The area has been famous for hosting squatters who in the 1980s have been able to occupy some of the unused buildings and then in the 1990s, another wave of protests against the

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plans of the authorities to create areas for erecting high buildings to see the port. Within this second wave, between 1994 and 2005, the park was created, with the help of the activists themselves, who designed and executed the plans for its creation.4 The name was a direct influence from Quentin Tarantino’s film Pulp Fiction, revealing the subcultural inclinations of the group of activists which were inspired. The experience of earlier waves of struggle was passed to the next generation of activists who continued this legacy, albeit within the context of the time. I was told by some of the activists that remember those earlier times, that the park has been a symbol of free space, in an ever-decreasing production of such type. . . .the children in my neighbourhood used to go to the gasoline station. It was a meeting point, some of the kids’ brothers were working there as well, simple jobs like cleaning cars. That was the only remaining perspective for young children here. The new buildings had receptions and the rest was closed to the kids. An example is that even car rental station was underground and nobody could see anything in there. So buildings were systematically closed. So when companies went out of St. Pauli, either because rents went higher or because companies grew and wanted to move, we started the Fab Lab against some investors who bought many houses over the area. (Andreas, Fabulous St. Pauli founding member) The creation of the park was not only supported by radicals, but on the contrary, many different groups of people from different backgrounds saw this development as a general good for the city and the area. As it usually happens in social movements, actions and practices might be inspired by democratic participation and collective decision making, but the justification or the reason for those actions was interpreted according to the interests of the individual or the group who participated. There were many different theoretical references inspiring the different groups and individuals participating, which have some resemblance to the May 68 influences; the Marxist ideas of Henri Lefebvre, the surrealist ideas of Situationist International, the postmodernist ideas of Deleuze and Guattari. The composition of the activists varied, but the ideas that survive it suggest that the most dominant groups, which are able to tell the story of the area, are intellectual in kind: architects, academics, designers and scientists. Some great initiatives started from the park, which also enjoyed the support of the local protestant church with social programs for the poor, such as guerrilla gardens, music and cultural events, art projects and critical pedagogy initiatives. All within a non-institutional framework, despite sometimes political parties (such as the Social Democrats) supporting some of these initiatives which was accepted up to the point that covered the interests of the park and the area residents. In 2010, groups of citizens managed through mobilisations to halt the gentrification of the section of historic neighbourhoods near the port. As the park symbolised the free use of space, it also suggested the rights of those who did not

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have the power to speak for themselves; the workers, the refugees who were hosted in a number of squatted buildings. On the other hand, it was very clear that developers who had the capital to alter the area into private space symbolised the destruction of the area and restriction of the right to live the city for ordinary residents: In the cities, however, one side enters the match with lots of capital, demolition excavators, a tooled-up police force, and the law as a weapon. The other side has nothing but their determination, their wit, and their bodies when they take to the streets. The other side are the city dwellers that try to hold squares, save houses, defend tenants, squat infamous vacancies, protect refugees. For that they are beaten up, shot with tear gas grenades, forbidden to gather in assemblies or demonstrations. All in the name of the constitutional state, of course, in the name of the market-compliant democracy [. . .] The Right to the City manifests itself as a superior mode of rights: the right to freedom, to individualization in socialization, to housing and living. The right to works [oeuvre] (to participatory activity) and the right to appropriation (well distinguished from the right to property) are included in the Right to the City. (Neils Boeing, Fabulous St. Pauli, written note) The mobilisations managed to leave many of the poorer sections of the population of the area in their homes, as well as leaving the place protected from violent gentrification. They were part of a growing movement named ‘the Right to the City’ and which called for ‘spatialisation of conflicts’ within the city.5 This meant that activists from within the city would be able to focus on a variety of issues, across spatial lines, that would cross paths between each other and achieve common goals (see also Murdoch and Marsden 1995). The Fab Lab was one of the outcomes of this urban struggle, which was created as a way to create permanent presence and a community around the space. The activists pondered on the idea of finding money to buy the buildings but such thoughts quickly faded. There was an initiative against these, so the investors wanted to buy the places from them because they were not interested. For some time, it looked like the initiative could buy the space there. It was rental buildings and economic buildings. So the rental buildings, housing, was ok, but what could we do with 2,000 square feet of economic space, to get income from it? So we met and agreed to invite people for breakfast [and] part of that became the Fab Lab. As such, it was seen as a political gesture in the form of contentious politics that would further grow the resistance to plans for gentrification and displacement of residents.6 With the help of the Fab Lab truck (a van featuring garage style and

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community workshop machinery), they created the Fab Lab, using an event to kick start the idea. As a non-profit club, according to German law, the Fab Lab was supported mainly by member fees and donations.

The City Is Our Factory: Heterotopias of Productive Resistance and Prefigurative Living After opening in 2011, the Fab Lab relocated in the summer of 2015 to a new space, as the initial space was to be utilised for housing purposes. The community that grew out of those practices was already established and determined to survive the initial cause. The new space was a few blocks up the road, an old factory which the owner rented cheaply because of his intention to demolish it sometime in the future. The members of the Fab Lab thought this could be a temporary solution with a bigger space, one that housed experimental artists, woodworkers, small entrepreneur artists and digital artists under one roof. The arrangement was reminiscent of a mixture of past lifestyles that were domesticated and largely replaced with the development of capitalism and industrialisation of creative industries. The idea behind the further development of the Fab Lab from a situational event into a growing community was that of connecting people from different backgrounds and gathering support – either practical or ideological – from a diverse crowd; connections could create so many rhizomes entangled together. The skills of a designer could help a woodworker with making their own furniture. Another case might include using the skills of a software developer for identifying and fixing bugs in open source software. Such skill sharing activities could save money for individuals who are usually dependent on the company which the software is licenced from. Either solidarity and/or personal help could be good reasons to be attracted to the place. For people like Andreas, the history of the place is important, but what attracted him to the Fab Lab was access to tools and networking. He said access is an important feature of the region for years, since craftsmen and artisans were common in the area. In such circles, participating in political activism was not just about single issue campaigns but a whole new world. People fought for their craft, their identity and ultimately building networks within which they could find employment. Keeping up with the older generation’s identity whilst developing the new one is one of the key aspects that came up when discussing how it all started, We are a diverse people so the intentions were diverse, but there was an interest in the technology or in doing things. For others, it’s the topics around it, like potentials for education or for others this is a political issue. For me it was very important to find access to the tools and I found many aspects of the ideals of the community interesting. Here in Hamburg are of course our values are different than others. (Andreas, Fabulous St. Pauli, interview)

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Hackerspaces consist of people that are constantly creating, building, modulating, tinkering, mixing existing technologies and structures but at the same time forced to adopt institutional logic as a way to integrate and spread. They are spaces where hacking, the creative engagement of the non-professional public with science and technology, is encouraged (Oudshourn and Pinch 2005). Despite work is clearly being done at the spaces, however, they are not designated as professional or industrial spaces. They can be sorted as ‘other’ spaces, as they constitute a departure from what could be associated as a space of division of labour and production spaces where professionals are engaging within their special training fields. Inspired by political theory of social movements, economic ideas such as ‘Small is beautiful’ (Schumacher 1973), political economic approaches like ‘The City is our Factory’ (Sch¨afer 2010), artist philosophers such as Joseph Beuys (Gandy 1997), the practices and ideas that float around the space seem to suggest a re-enchantment in world that was disenchanted long ago with the rise of industrial modernist societies (Firat and Venkatesh 1995). It is indeed a different mentality than what the stereotypical national attitudes to work suggest, which emphasise division of labour, specialisation, prevalence of productive work, and strict application of science and technology as a neutral force in production. Rather, it seemed as if there was a historical longing for smaller businesses, based on non-industrial or alternative industrial machinery, and work relations based on free association of craftsmen and artists, reminiscent of pre-capitalist or infant capitalist societies. Spatializing conflicts within the urban landscape entails actively participating in contentious politics within the city, while simultaneously demonstrating forms of resistance and alternative ways of living that embody micro-potentialities for an alternative world. Space, after all, is the basic ontological schema characterizing the epoch that such social movements engage, replacing time, and thus, historicity (Jameson 2003): The spatialisation of conflicts: occupy areas or buildings, stop development plans, block evictions, create places where people can be active on their own terms, can gather. All this might appear like odds and sods in the face of a system that is so powerful it makes you feel helpless. Yet these activities are not fruitless. Seemingly tiny conflicts about urban spaces show, first, the context and mechanisms of neoliberal policies in the immediate vicinity. By that they mobilise, secondly, not only people who are directly affected but also other sceptical minds who had not yet found a point [at which] to join causes. Third, even tiny conflicts provide a first experience of self-empowerment that can change the thinking of the inhabitants and even give them a new dignity. Ideally they create, fourthly, spaces in which a logic beyond neoliberalism can be tried. Anne Querrien calls these spaces local micro-potentialities. (Neils Boeing, Fabulous St. Pauli, written note)

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With all its contradictions, Fabulous St. Pauli functions and grows as a community, and has managed to introduce some of the science and technology issues which appear as if they are neutral according to the hegemonic ideology to be politically contested. The workshops organised by the members introduce the space, its history and framework of analysis as induction in most of the activities that attract guests and members alike. Thus, the Fab Lab has become a community centre for re-politicising and engaging in the contentious politics of the social movements of the city, the issue of industrial revolution and what high and low tech means for the needs of the common residents of the city. Whose industrial revolution? Who has the right to develop technologies or create technologies specifically addressed to the needs of the population? How is work to be divided and spatially directed? These are questions that concern the members and which are positioned at the heart of the identity development of the community around the space.

High Tech for All! Entrepreneurship and Social Justice A central feature of the everyday politics at Fabulous St. Pauli is the issue of access to tools. The city of Hamburg is home to highly educated workers and there are a number of technical higher education institutions which produce workers with unique and attractive skills for the industry. However, not all individuals are absorbed in the industry and some of them who are, try to use their free time to create objects of their own taste and liking. It is therefore not uncommon, that the relationships forged under the roof of Fabulous St. Pauli are ones that have a variety of potential developments. In this respect, the space is understood as a meeting space or platform space for many different purposes. People might learn from each other in critical educational projects, be friends, go to demonstrations together, work on projects, or even find a job opportunity: People can come and build their own projects and next to this you have someone who knows about this stuff, a professional who started as a cabinet maker so he could explain a lot of things. If you were from the other side of the town, it was a meeting point, a point for people to search for learning, how to learn, what can they learn. Maybe something develops from this space, and a job opportunity arises as well. (Andreas, Fabulous St. Pauli founding member) Technological availability, everyday problem-solving, socialising and doing the rest of daily practices are sometimes seen not as means but as ends creating those alternative words, albeit in potentiality. Consequently, lifestyle choices that re-affirm individual and collective identities can then turn into contentious politics (Tarrow 2013). The goal of the Fab Lab is to provide access to tools and access for all to a digital production that has been confined to factories. At the same time, to establish a space in which people can learn together and teach each other

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the basics of digital production in a casual way in order to overcome dichotomies that are brought with the present system of production. For the members of the community, this means overcoming the ‘fabrication divide’ (Gershenfeld 2005; Suire 2019) that has shaped industrial societies for a long time, similar to the relatively new ‘digital divide’ of the information age that got more attention: the gap between those who have access and those who have not. They are ways of critiquing new forms of inequality by trying to open doors to the public. In doing so, acting democratically7 and organising as a seemingly autonomous space is an important political ingredient that gives context and shapes the meaning of the community. ¨ However, Bohm, Dinerstein, and Spicer (2010, p. 18) argued that such and similar endeavours that emphasise autonomy are impossible to be realised in a total system such as capitalism. In fact, there is a real danger of doing the opposite; amplify the message of the ruling classes on flexibility of work through na¨ıve interpretations of resilience and autonomy. In the impossibility of autonomy, they argue . . .the practice of autonomy is bound up with the ‘new spirit of capitalism’, emphasising autonomous and flexible forms of economic organization, including the increasing incorporation of social movement activities into the neoliberal service provisions of the state. In this way, autonomous movements must be seen as part of the hegemonic system of capital and the state. Yet any hegemony can only ever be partial and incomplete. That is, within the impossibility of autonomy there are possibilities of autonomous practices that challenge the very hegemony they are part of. Hence, our argument is that autonomy constitutes both a possible and impossible aspiration, as autonomous spaces embody and disclose the contradictory dynamics between the swinging movement between integration and transcendence. These contradictions perhaps explain the eagerness of capitalist institutions such as the EU and monopoly capital to try and recuperate such spaces and their movement, turning them into entrepreneurial, volunteer and NGO like fosters of skills needed by the industries (Rayna and Striukova 2021). In the process of trying to provide tools, the Fabulous St. Pauli was open to collaborate and take up project funding from such institutions, as long as the apparent autonomous character of the community remained unaltered. In fact, as my interlocutors have mentioned, they would rather agree to an EU funding than collaborate with local capitalists and authorities. This is because the Fab Lab, as is usually the case with such spaces, are vehicles for the articulation of local interests more than anything else. The recursive public that evolved (Kelty 2008) managed to ensure the existence of the community through the daily operation of the space, by turning a situational event into a potentiality of alternative organisation. Still, this is achieved without really being able to avoid all the contradictions that come with

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participating in a capitalist city. The people were welcome to take private initiatives, and either act as political consumers or create products in the form of small businesses and individual entrepreneurs. Access to technology and what type is needed for the city are rationalised through a theoretical lens of ‘democratisation of production’ (Shea and Gu 2018) which despite acting to resist inequality and displacement, rather obscures than clarifies the ways and how to politically fight how capital consumes the city and produces more private spaces.

Conclusion: The Limits of Hackerspace Politics The potentiality of another world of production and consumption, does not let the activists to be na¨ıve about replacing the existing paradigm with low-tech technology. Rather, they acknowledge that what they are doing is at best to be able to eliminate the neutral appearance of science and technology from the public discourse, and leading by example to create enough momentum from a wider rejection of the present high tech, capital intensive, industrial paradigm. Instead of calling for the capture of factories, the pertinent social movement called for creating practices and the production of space on the image they would like to affirm. I don’t mean that a community fabrication community could ever replace an industrial production. If we think about the heavy industrial production, thinking about liberation, of course [this] comes to the question of ownership of the factory. So in a future structure of manufacturing in the cities we have to think about how can we get hold of the heavy means of production. This is not just playing with a 3D printer. We know that chip factories are so capital intensive. We could never for example replace them. Our task is to get hold of medium technology that is not so capital intensive because we cannot get our hands on semi-conductor factory. (Niels, Fabulous St. Pauli, interview) Despite their best efforts, such communities have theoretical and practical limits that historical experience of social movements which is based on creating the new within the old, are facing. However innovative in practice and successful in postponing gentrification plans, they seem to reinforce the logic of an older version of capitalism or guild socialism, supposedly more inclusive with smaller shops and workshops. The fading memory of working class politics plays a role in the limitations of understanding class as an active force in shaping politics, which means that they are vulnerable to their own struggle for existence. As they struggle to provide access and participation to residents of the city, they use the same language ingredients (transparency, open source hardware and software, inclusion and sustainable development) as the monster they very much try to map and resist against. Of course, this is not limited to Fabulous St. Pauli, but it is a contradiction that concerns many other politically conscious Fab Labs, Makerspaces and Hackerspaces. Such spaces represent a set of practices and lived

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experiences that surpasses its actual function as it is configured this moment in history. They appear as what Henri Lefebvre described as ‘Representational Spaces’ (1991, p. 33), described as: Space as directly lived through its associated images and symbols, and hence the space of ‘inhabitants’ and ‘users,’ but also of some artists and perhaps of those, such as a few writers and philosophers, who describe and aspire to do no more than describe. This is the dominated – and hence passively experienced – space which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate. It overlays physical space, making symbolic use of its objects. Lefebvre (1991, p. 39) Taking the concept and furthering the discussion of ‘representational space’, Hetherington argues that a representational space is one that opens up possibilities for alternative ordering, for imagining a different path than the one already in place. Such spaces, therefore, are not sites as such but temporal situations, events, which occur in particular places that open up the possibilities of resistance within society to certain marginal groups or social classes. Hetherington (1997, p. 22) Nevertheless, Hetherington argues, these practices and social spaces are not completely autonomous, since they operate under the capitalist mode of social reproduction. Yet the contradictions and fragmentation of capitalist production presents possibilities, at least experimentally, of what could be a more successful form of organising and making within cities. The activists and members of the Fab Lab, face the everyday struggle to meet ends in order to keep the place open as funding via memberships is most of the times not enough. The lack of interconnected similar public and community driven social spaces is certainly another problem they face, as one community cannot produce everything it needs (see for example similar problems in the work of Karatzogianni and Matthews 2020). In this context, there is an open debate on the character of the Fab Lab itself: create its own business model and face the possibility to be eventually being recuperated by its own success or continue to struggle politicising further science and technology and gentrification linking the issues with development of public infrastructure. Indeed, Cenzati (2008) taking a similar stance to Lefebvre, argues that such ‘other spaces’, heterotopias are not worlds which can outgrow the social conditions which gave birth to them. Consequently, they can only function as possibilities, with clear limits, and as such, can better serve as resistance and political organising more than just seemingly pirate communities in a sea of capitalist accumulation and city gentrification. The juggling which the members of the hackerspace in St. Pauli face, can be summarised as between survival and political organising. The character and representation the space can potentially offer is conditioned and shaped by the

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extent to which the community’s initial organisational principles remain consciously part of the reason of its existence, as well as the commitment of the community to contentious politics. Taking alternative routes and developing the space as a work space, for example in the form of ‘platform cooperativism’ (see Scholz 2016), means that collective decision-making and managing with respect to building alternative structures to for profit management is key. Once such matters are removed as central to the meaning of developing such communities around such spaces, then it becomes a matter of management, and thus, inevitably, the political character of the project fades towards the need to ensure enough resources for the continuation of the space as a simple shared workshop. To this end, an option would indeed be the lucrative projects which can command significant funds via projects filly or partly funded by the EU, the local authorities, private enterprises, or a combination thereof. Thus, there is a very real possibility that such spaces can flourish as communities and then get re-appropriated or recuperated by corporations and market institutions. They can do so, even without changing the nominal intended purpose or structures, just by establishing parallel ways of extracting value or inserting new meanings and symbolisms to structures developed to combat the capitalist market in the first place.

Notes 1. The Derby Silk Mill for example was the first factory in the world. With such a powerful symbolism around it, it became an interesting case, because it encapsulated the spirit of the times. The factory was at a state of rejuvenation by the local authorities, which allowed private enterprises to restore and use it mostly as a museum and exhibition centre. All three cities, Derby, Leicester, Nottingham along with Coventry were former heavily industrialised regions, that have now gone in other ways. They all however have utilised their former industrial past to restore some traces, albeit as museum artefacts or as tourist attractions. Some of the members in those hacker communities have living memory of this past, others not so much. 2. Although in a brand that distinguished between academic and theoretically dense approach with a more activist and ‘concrete’ attitude to block what is perceived as neoliberal urban plans. This difference seems trivial, but it explains both the reality on the ground, which is that members of the activist groups are not using political theory in its strictest sense, and that some of the individuals which are part of this expansive deployment of political theory into struggle, are well aware that their actions might be subject to re-appropriation and commodification. But they do so in order to galvanise the support of as many people as possible, and focus on the issue at stake each time. 3. European Marxism of the time had intense, fruitful and creative debates since WWII, which can also explain the embrace of different brands of Marxism of social movements. For further details you can see Anderson (1995) and Barker et al. (2013). 4. The irony of the matter is that such initiatives by residents and other locals often do get the support of other authorities in the form of funds. Thus, Park Fiction was created with funds from the Hamburg Department of Culture, whilst the activists were opposing the plans of local authorities to allow developers to invest

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by destroying the working class character of the area. For more on this see the ¨ work of (Ruhse 2014). 5. This way of conducting contentious politics, derives in part from micro-sociological ways of understanding political strategy and how to change the world. Theoretically, it is an evolutionary path to micro-sociological and anthropological ways of understanding class and inequality. Politically, it is part of conducting political struggles not via mass movements and political parties looking to grab power, but rather as situational networks of actors who exploit opportunities to advance the interests of those oppressed categories (class, race, gender, legal status etc.) prevalent in each case. 6. Similar spatial-political movements against gentrification are elaborated in several studies recently: Holzl (2018), Antunes, March, and Conolly (2020), Tsavdaroglou (2020). 7. The issue of self-organising in structureless groups also hides some of the practical and political dangers of these communities. Informality without clear separation of roles, rules and responsibilities, practically helps individuals who are more charismatic or have better access to resources that could benefit the group. Whether this is more free time, better financial situation or access to private investors and political structures, they are significant barriers to a democratic decision making, which as the community develops perhaps tensions could also rise. In addition, participation within this context leads to individual responsibility to speak up rather than collective action and is up to the community to create rules and processes that would ensure that the voice of all members is heard.

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Chapter 13

Depictions of Emotions in News Media’s Visual Framing of Small-Scale Protests in Greece Anastasia Veneti

Introduction Following the global contagion of the financial crisis from 2007 onwards, an increasing number of protests and demonstrations erupted around the world, initially triggered by socio-economic inequalities and against the austerity measures imposed in many countries (not least in Southern Europe) dissent expanded to embrace various socio-political issues; from racialised discrimination and structural violence (the Black Lives Matter movement, for example) to gender-based violence and gender rights (such as the MeToo movement). News agencies’ media images of these protests and demonstrations have circulated widely offline and online, and constitute a main source of public information of these events. As Cottle (2008, p. 854) expounds, ‘the co-present public at demonstrations no longer count the most’ as compared to the ‘mass audience watching and reading the media coverage at home’. While Cottle’s account may have been impacted by user-generated content and the ways in which activists and populations in general appropriate new technologies to produce their own stories, mainstream media remain a central source of information. Photographic imagery accompanying and embedded within news media is important, as it assists viewers to originate differing angles to a news story (Messaris and Abraham 2001; Zillmann, Knobloch, and Yu 2001). Such images impress realities that cannot be narrated in their totality through text, and thus permit the viewer to consider and explore various different interpretations. Frosh (2001, p. 43) theorises that ‘photography is a “performance of representation”, in which both the act and the material product of the act, the photographic image, generate multiple and inter-related meanings’. In the case of protests and demonstrations, photographic images are of dual importance. On the one hand, they serve as vehicles for visibility; and on the other, they serve to communicate the feelings and the atmosphere that are crucial constituent elements of any such action. Essential to any liberal democratic societal ideal, news media photographs Duty to Revolt, 203–215 Copyright © 2024 Anastasia Veneti Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited doi:10.1108/978-1-80382-315-720231013

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can serve to illuminate the actions of those that, through protesting, wish their demands to be heard and taken up. Photographs function as visual references of the actions in which people engage during protests and, as Mitchell (2005) suggests of pictorial power, these visual references contribute to others’ understanding of the world and can therefore potentially lead to further, synthesised action. Nonetheless, as various studies attest, much news media coverage of protest tends to be negative, focused on violence, and to delegitimise protesters (McLeod and Detenber 1999; Perlmutter and Wagner 2004). While a considerable body of scholarly work discusses how contentious politics is replete with emotions (Jasper 2018; Klandermans, Van der Toorn, and Van Stekelenburg 2008), there are fewer studies, predominantly in the field of Media and Communication, examining how protesters’ expressive emotions are represented in mainstream media and how audiences then respond (Jeyapal 2015). That is, how the affective qualities of images can subsequently stimulate empathetic experiences and thereby mobilise publics but also elicit disengagement too. This chapter provides a socio-semiotic analysis of two different sets of photographs that visually represented a relatively small-scale protest, that of schoolteachers which took place in Athens, Greece, on 21 March 2014. Mainstream press images of this protest are compared and contrasted with those circulated online by a professional photographer on their social media account. The focus of the analysis draws on the emotional portrayal of the protest and deliberates on news media selection criteria of protest imagery and how journalists and editors value emotionality in protest coverage. The discussion unfolds through the juxtaposition of the relative paucity in the mainstream media visual framing of the protest event with the more humanised images produced and circulated online by the photographer. The significance of this specific case study arises with respect to the different media treatment between sizable protests, which tend to attract wider media attention, and smaller scale (both in size and duration) protest events, such that the latter make for an involved case study when examining the visual framing of protest. As this chapter focuses on a small number of photographs constituting a rather unique and idiographic single case study, it does not aspire to offer definite assumptions on the emotional portrayal of protests by the Greek news media, rather, the chapter aims to provide reflections on such matters as well as on the political valence of the visual, and on the asymmetries of influence between creators and recipients of political information.

Emotions and News Media’s Visual Framing of Protest [T]he visual becomes doubly significant. It intertwines two areas of reference: the impact of visual media, images, and practices on political processes, and the relations of power believed to characterize specifically visual forms of communication (what we

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might call the ‘politics of vision’) – relations between images and minds, viewers and viewed, hidden and displayed. (Frosh 2011, p. 95) Media has an important dual role, namely, in setting the news agenda by selecting the stories to be told, and in the framing of how they are to be told. Neither occurs randomly. As Gamson et al. (1992, p. 374) argue, ‘[t]he lens through which we receive these images is not neutral but evinces the power and point of view of the political and economic elites who operate and focus it. And the special genius of this system is to make the whole process seem so normal and natural that the very art of social construction is invisible’. Based on a variety of factors (including news values, organisational structures and occupational practices), editors eventually decide what kind of information is considered newsworthy and how it is going to be presented to the public. Several studies have discussed and debated the journalistic criteria of newsworthiness (Galtung and Ruge 1965; Harcup and O’Neill 2001), and as Hall (1973, p. 181) argues, news values ‘are one of the most opaque structures of meaning in modern society’. In an analysis of network television news that draws on a sociological approach to news-making, Epstein (1973) supports the claim that the pictures of society broadcast by national news media are, to a considerable extent, shaped by organisational considerations. Molotch and Lester (1974) suggest a typology of news according to whether stories are planned or unplanned. Their main argument revolves around the claim that the news media reflect the practices of those who have the power to determine the experiences of others, and not the world ‘out there’ (Molotch and Lester 1974, p. 54). This viewpoint, taking news-making as a reality-constructing activity governed by the imperatives of power elites, proved to be useful and influential in later studies (Bennett 1994; Schlesinger and Tumber 1994). Fahmy, Kelly, and Kim (2007) analysis of images of hurricane Katrina offers an illuminating study of the different visual framing practices among diverse media agencies. Comparing the photographic offerings of the Associated Press and Reuters against the pictures that ran on the front pages of US newspapers, they found significant differences in visual framing with regard to ‘timeframe, location, storm/flood victims, emotional portrayal, suffering of non-white citizens, presence of public officials, and aerial depictions of massive destruction’ (Fahmy et al., p. 551), among other variables. Framing, as a theoretical schema, suggests that the presentation of news events in the mass media can systematically affect how its recipients come to understand these depictions (Price, Tewksbury, and Powers 1995). Drawing on the work of Fahmy et al. (2007), it becomes apparent that news organisations use different framing devices, inclusive of words and images, to construct newsworthy issues – a process of selection, amplification and omission – and consequently influence people’s opinions and attitudes. Images are powerful framing tools because they are seemingly less intrusive than words, requiring less cognitive load in processing, and as such ‘audiences may be more likely to accept the visual frame without question [. . .]

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because they have the power to create stronger emotional and immediate cues’ (Rodriguez and Dimitrova 2011, p. 50). A relatively new wave of studies explores the role of emotions in journalism; how they are constructed and circulated through mediated texts (Wahl-Jorgensen 2019, 2020; Wahl-Jorgensen and Pantti 2021). To generate drama and compassion, and to bring the audience closer to the story, journalists tend to ask sources how they feel (Back 2017). As Wahl-Jorgensen (2019, p. 16) argues, ‘to understand the experiences of others and make large and often abstract political happenings come alive, it is necessary to tell people’s stories, although such storytelling can take many different forms’. This ‘affective turn’ has been attracting increasing attention in media and politics studies (see, e.g. Clough and Halley 2007; Gregg and Seigworth 2010). As Papacharissi (2015) argues, affect can act as a means of sense-making because it can inform a general understanding of the world around us. Contentious politics is full of emotions and, as Jasper (2018, p. 2) puts it, ‘the world of protest is proving a real world testing ground for all sorts of feelings’. Protests are imbued with emotions (Goodwin et al., 2001). As feeling-thinking communal interactions, these involve intense, entangled processes of empathic arousal and cognitive rationalisation converged on perceived injustices (van Troost, van Stekelenburg, and Klandermans 2013). Consequently, studies have shown protesters experience and display a mixture of emotions (Benski 2011), both pleasant and unpleasant in various situations of high and low arousal. Among the most prevalent surveyed being sadness and frustration (van Troost, van Stekelenburg, and Klandermans 2013); anger, shame and despair (Van Stekelenburg and Klandermans 2010; van Zomeren et al., 2004); and fear (Klandermans, Van der Toorn, and Van Stekelenburg 2008). Despite this wealth of sensation, routine news coverage of protests is usually characterised by a limited and idiosyncratic representation of protesters’ emotions. News media have often been criticised for framing protests and social movements in negative ways, particularly through an emphasis on violence (McLeod and Hertog 1992; Perlmutter and Wagner 2004), with various visual framing devices being used to either legitimise or delegitimise protesters (Juris 2005). According to several studies, protesters’ appearances – such as clothes, hair and age – have frequently been used as devices to marginalise protesters and belittle the cause of the dissent (Ashley and Olson 1998; Gitlin 1980; McFarlane and Hay 2003). Research on mainstream media coverage of contemporary protests in Greece has revealed that there is an over-reliance on images of property destruction and generalised violence between riot police and protesters, even if that occurs at the fringes of a protest (Veneti, Lilleker, and Reilly 2018). Despite the fact that new technologies have facilitated activists as well as ordinary citizens in producing and circulating their own stories and images of such events (Bosch and Mutsvairo 2017; Gerbaudo 2012), mainstream media still remain a powerful source of information for a wider audience.

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Case Study: Schoolteachers’ Protest, Greece This chapter uses as its case study a relatively small-scale protest of schoolteachers, members of the Greek Federation of Secondary Education State School Teachers (OLME, in Greek), that took place in Athens, Greece, on 21 March 2014 and who marched towards the Hellenic Parliament and the Ministry of Education, demonstrating against impending dismissals. These protests constitute a compelling case study with regard to the visual media framing of small-scale protests. Although the layoff of schoolteachers was an issue of great political and social importance, not least in the context of understaffed schools across the country, mainstream media offered a limited and, as discussed below, indifferent coverage of the protest. The objectives of this study are addressed by means of comparing and contrasting two sets of images of this protest. The first set of images comes from Greek mainstream media; in particular from the online editions of three Greek newspapers: Kathimerini (centre-right), Ta Nea (centre-left) and Proto Thema (centre-populist). The second set of photographs were taken by Marios Lolos, a Greek photojournalist working with national and international news agencies, who publicly posted the images on his social media page. The images were analysed following a socio-semiotic approach, which enables a deeper understanding of the ideological underpinnings and political implications of semiotic choices and of meaning-making (Aiello 2020). Here, the focus is dual; on both the sign and, as van Leeuwen (2005, p. xi) argues, on the ‘way people use semiotic ‘resources’ both to produce communicative artefacts and events and to interpret them [. . .] in the context of specific social situations and practices’. The selection of the images from the mainstream media was made based on a Google search using protest identifiers (e.g. cause and date). While this is not a systematic research method, the aim of this chapter is not to offer a conclusive account, but rather to reflect on the visual framing of smaller-scale protests and explore the significance of the depiction of emotions for news coverage of protest. It is important to note that due to copyright issues news images could not be reproduced here. Instead, these images can be found through the weblinks provided in the following section. Before proceeding to the analysis, it is also worth mentioning that the Greek media system is marked by interlocking interests among media organisations and political parties (Veneti and Karadimitriou 2013). According to Hallin and Mancini’s (2004) widely used typology, the Greek media system belongs to the Mediterranean or Polarised Pluralistic model, which is characterised by strong state intervention and weaker professionalisation.

Analysis of the News Media Coverage in Greece of the School Teachers’ Protest With regard to the mainstream news images, some common patterns can be identified; there was a low number of photographs accompanying the reportage

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(varying between a single and just a couple of images) whose focus was on banner slogans and scattered protesters marching or engaged in group discussions. In most cases the photographs were taken from a crowd-encompassing distance. Such images of gathered and marching crowds are important because they provide information on the size of the protest and cues as to who participated. Moreover, images of banners also constitute part of the basic inventory of media depictions of protest for the reason that they are used to succinctly communicate the causes of the protests (Veneti 2017). Such a selection of primarily descriptive images is common to news coverage of protest in accordance with the need to provide visual information about what is happening (Veneti 2017). A practice that is also closely linked to the entrenched principles of objectivity in journalistic practice as well as to the established criteria of determining newsworthiness (Galtung and Ruge 1965; Mazzoleni and Schulz 1999). In this case, a protest of a relatively small scale and primarily peaceful in character may not be deemed as newsworthy when compared to larger protests characterised by extended violent confrontations that more directly fulfil news value criteria of drama and conflict. As Entman (1993, p. 52) argues, ‘[t]o frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described’. The representational power of photography is reliant on capturing the right moment concerning the focus of the picture and its compositional elements. Obviously, news reporting and the accompanied visual framing of the story should be able to provide information on the where, who and why of the news item through such descriptive images as those discussed above. However, in the context of a protest there is always a more complex account concerning the people participating that also needs to be communicated. To do so, it is necessary for news photographs to transcend their traditional descriptive character and also be ‘explanatory’. The news images examined here constitute a rather incurious photo-coverage incapable of narrating the protest story. The sparse amount of images used primarily depict a dispersed, faceless crowd,1 and give the impression of being undirected, non-specific shots which in some cases lack focus, consisting of illegible half banners or principally blurred content.2 The overall effect is of an incomplete representation of the protest story. The pictures portray a protest against layoffs but fail to explain what these dismissals mean for these people. While the selection criteria of the examined news media regarding the photographic coverage of this protest were apparently limited to provide only very basic information, studies have suggested that photojournalists seek to capture images that humanise protests (Veneti 2017). In a qualitative study that drew on interviews with Greek photojournalists covering protests in Greece, Veneti (2017, p. 289) argues: Photojournalists [. . .] aim to transcend conventional forms of news photography in a quest for the exegesis rather than the mere representation of the event. Such photographers hope to produce an aesthetic and cognitive interpretation of the event, one that

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departs from the conventional and stereotypical norms of news photography and, as such, one that can generate new ways of seeing and understanding. Such images may involve an unusual sensitivity, unanticipated juxtapositions, pathos, irony and visual lyricism. The central themes of these photos are usually the protesters themselves. To produce such images, professional photographers focus on faces, usually through close-ups, and aim to depict the protesters’ emotions. As Veneti (2017) argues, the value of these photographs is in the affective qualities that such images possess. Lolo’s photographs of this protest event reflect such a practice. Comparatively, his studies are much more incisive and manage to capture and effectively communicate several aspects of the protesters’ psyches. By focusing on people rather than impersonal crowds, Lolos manages to communicate the impetus of the protest, together with the distress, passion and anger of the protestors involved in it. Lolo’s photographs are in more assiduous proximity to the photographic subject. Distance is of paramount importance in photography. According to Hall’s (1966, cited in Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996, p. 125) study on people’s use of space, there are different fields of vision, such that ‘[a]t intimate distance [. . .] we see the face or head only. At close personal distance we take in the head and the shoulders. At far personal distance we see the other person from the waist up. At close social distance we see the whole figure. At far social distance we see the whole figure “with space around it”’. Distance in photography has a direct impact on the creation or exclusion of intimacy. As can be seen in Figs. 1

Fig. 1.

© Marios Lolos. Reproduced With Permission.

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Fig. 2.

© Marios Lolos. Reproduced With Permission.

and 2, such images capture moments of struggle and resistance, telling a story by juxtaposing determination with agony and anxiety. Closely related to van Leeuwen’s (2001) notion of iconographical symbolism – that draws on Barthes’ (1977) visual semiotics and Panofksy’s (1970) work on iconographic analysis – the repeating motif of the raising of fists in both photographs underlines the emotional state of the protesters and their social fight. Lolos also portrays the human pain, sorrow, and perceived injustice with an accuracy and precision that permits communication of the protesters’ emotions. In the close up of the woman’s face in Fig. 3, her distress and despair are evident, while her hurt rather than being overemphasised becomes part of a larger story that involves elements of solidarity and mutual agony brought to the viewers’ attention through the presence of the man towards whom the woman leans. The depiction of emotions, in being able to provide more information on why something is happening, allows for a more substantial understanding of the protest events. While photographs are needed that portray a protest’s magnitude as well as the banners of the protesters’ demands, for a comprehensive coverage of such events it seems essential to also include photographs that depict protesters’ emotions (Goodwin et al., 2001; van Stekelenburg and Klandermans 2010). Images of protests constitute the building blocks for the generation of emotions by their viewers, and various studies (Barthes 1981; Frosh 2011; Sontag 2008) have supported the proposition that images influence their viewers and give rise to networks of mental associations. These networks mobilise viewers’ subsequent intentions regarding acceptance of, identification with or disapproval of the characters (in this case the protesters) and their actions (Hristova 2014).

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Fig. 3.

211

© Marios Lolos. Reproduced With Permission.

Photographs of demonstrations are important to protesters, as they can constitute both a means of providing the general public with information and an opportunity to convey demands to political leaders. As Sontag (2003, p. 104) comments, pictures are an ‘invitation to pay attention’. It can be argued that Lolos’ photographs constitute such an invitation. Comparing his photographs of the protest to those of the Greek newspapers, striking differences can be observed regarding the portrayal of the human presence and the overall messages that the respective photo-reportages communicated. The newspapers depicted this particular protest stripped of its political potential and in a visually indifferent manner. Such coverage discourages possible identification with the protesters and their demands, diminishing the possibility of the mobilisation of the people in support of such actions.

Concluding Remarks This chapter attempted to highlight the importance of the depiction of protesters’ emotions in the news coverage of demonstrations. While considering the need to avoid excessive sensationalism and dramatisation, which can possess the power to unduly manipulate audiences (Campell 2007), this study suggests that a news story of protest cannot be comprehensively told if deprived of such images.

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Although there is a general, widespread reluctance within the mainstream media to portray protesters’ feelings and actions (with a few exceptions in the case of unavoidable protests such as Occupy Wall Street in New York’s financial district and Spain’s Indignados anti-austerity movement), there are plenty of cases where media have been at the forefront of utilising emotionally charged photos (from terrorist attacks to economic ruination, such as the images of crying Lehman Brothers employees carrying their office belongings after the collapse of the financial services company at the peak of the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis). Emotions, in being to some extent socially constituted, are shaped by dynamic relations of power, making their mediated public articulation (such as protests) more than just a notification of individual feelings. This performativity reveals how emotions are socially narrated for larger, collective meaning-making purposes, and as such can facilitate audiences in making sense of complex world events (Wahl-Jorgensen 2019). While the newsworthiness of small-scale protests cannot be compared to that of large impactful events, empirical research is still needed as to the editorial selection criteria of news images of all scales of protest (Veneti 2017). Not least as many micro events may be local expressions connected to wide-felt macro phenomena. In view of studies having shown that personalised storytelling has ‘a powerful role to play in cultivating compassion and creating community’ (Wahl-Jorgensen 2019, p. 16), there is an identifiable civic need to better understand which forms of emotionality are valued by editors and (photo) journalists, and why. In this chapter’s case study, in the absence of any major conflict (street violence) and in the context of a small-scale protest, mainstream media news coverage was extremely limited and indifferent. By contrast, Lolos’ photographs captured the affective atmosphere of the protest, its dynamism and vigour, through portraying protesters’ trauma and determination, and by doing so he provided a clearer connection between the protesters and the proximate cause of the protest (the dismissals of teachers). Photographs that accompany a news item are important as they provide a conceptual agenda for the viewer. As Sontag (2008, p. 23) aptly argues, ‘[p]hotographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy’.

Notes 1. See image in Kathimerini at: http://www.kathimerini.gr/759170/article/epikairothta/politikh/olme-sth-voylh-oi-diamartyromenoi-ekpaideytikoi. 2. See images in Proto Thema at: https://www.protothema.gr/greece/article/363531/ nea-24ori-apergia-tis-olme-gia-tis-apoluseis/and Ta Nea at: http://www.tanea.gr/ news/greece/article/5099956/synexizontai-oi-kinhtopoihseis-ths-olme-en-opseiapolysewn-ekpaideytikwn/.

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Chapter 14

From Duty to Impulsion: Obstacles to Organising Future Revolutions Robert Latham The chapters in this volume remind us that there is as of today a rich, complex, inspiring and at times tragic history of revolt and revolution. Even if one eschews any whiff of ‘end of history’ sentiment, in our still early twenty-first-century moment, few might be faulted for sensing that revolution’s best times are behind it, especially in the global North. Gone mostly are widespread explicit, formal worldwide empires and expressly non-democratic regimes with categorical, oppressive hierarchies. What is left in their wake seems to be a global capitalist system and set of states mostly set up to follow a sort of textbook model of organisation (Meyer et al. 1997); the principles of which – informed by liberalism and basic notions of human and democratic rights – are too often not realised in living terms. If we assume these conditions prevail, then revolution at the national level will likely depend on how much in violation of basic modern state principles a given regime is – the Samosa Regime of Nicaragua comes to mind. But revolution is not a likely prospect if regimes manage to avoid extreme violation, cover it up well when it exists, foster divided and unorganised populations, maintain unified and effectively repressive security forces, or gain assistance from outside dominating powers like the United States. This implies that national revolution will depend, where such regimes emerge, on whether these factors do not prevail. A focus only on national regimes, however, is distinctly insufficient. Even in the nineteenth century the masses especially in Europe progressively understood that they were up against not just regimes but an intensifying and extending system of material exploitation and accumulation that was present in and operating across nation spaces. They increasingly shaped their revolts as a struggle-against-capitalism, even when specifically articulated at the national scale. While desirous, starting in the 1830s, of a real struggle at the international scale, the possibility of international revolution did not go beyond the hope for and pursuit of a series of compounding national revolutions, a pattern also prevalent in the anti-colonial struggle. This hope to a great degree died with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Duty to Revolt, 217–226 Copyright © 2024 Robert Latham Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited doi:10.1108/978-1-80382-315-720231014

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Is there something about today’s truly globalised capitalism that alters this equation? In negative terms, some might agree that the depth, extent and counter-struggle capacity of contemporary capitalism is such that it is resistant to international scale revolution – or even revolution in its powerful geographical core. In positive terms, some might suggest this globalised, deeply uneven and combined capitalism, dialectically, opens up corresponding possibilities and modes in the struggle-against-capitalism. I have elsewhere discussed what such a transnational struggle-againstcapitalism might look like, entailing diverse movements, organisations and mobilisations joined by a key attribute, their anti-capitalism (Latham 2018). My concern here is whether such a struggle can emerge in the form of a widespread, sustained arc of movements with serious presence in capitalism’s core, the global North. We know well that there are all sorts of relatively isolated protests, resistances and uprisings across the global North and South. But they tend to remain isolated or are subject to the counter-struggle forces mentioned above. Some thought that the economic disruptions associated with Covid-19 might create the conditions for a diffusion if not coalescence of struggles against capitalism across and within countries around the world. Certainly, there were processes such as the return of the left in Latin America, the organisation of Amazon workers in the United States and transportation worker struggles in Europe and the United States. But these seem to hardly match the expectations arising from 2020 onward. In response to these limited developments, it is natural to assume that a far more intense crisis is required. Perhaps, but this raises the question of whether workers and the oppressed, in the capitalist core, are in a position to respond to even more deep and disruptive crises in some sort of organised and sustainable array of struggles against capitalism. There is the possibility that we are in a sort of in-between moment, where the masses are aware in disparate ways about how they are subject to exploitation and suffering under capitalism but unable to translate this into pathways towards struggling against capitalism. They struggle and cope with capitalism as opposed to struggle against it. They contend with conditions that are substandard or insecure; face crushing debt and job loss or insecurity; endure unpleasant, unhealthy and exploitative work in factories and fields; experience violence and imprisonment, and environmental harms. In any given national setting, there are those who are at a minimum comfortable and secure (e.g. not contending with debt, job, food, housing and healthcare pressures) and those who are not. But the masses who are struggling with capitalism typically form a majority of the population of global North societies, and beyond them are marginally middle-class families whose security is tenuous and who might be, for example, on the verge of losing their home or unable to afford rent to house their family comfortably. We might look at the relation between the masses being stuck in a struggle with capitalism rather than a struggle against it as a sort of stalemate. Therefore, a key question becomes through what forces are the masses moved from the ‘struggle with’ to the ‘struggle against’ capitalism. It is not just that a century of persuasion, propaganda, inculcation, consent-production across the global North favouring

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capitalism has had a positive effect. It is also that a very deep and extensive world of institutions exists across the North that was not there in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Wanting to revolt against this world is possible, as the 1960s showed, but defeating it seems remote. This is reinforced by the possibility that by contemporary capitalism becoming ‘the world’ as such, everyone but the capitalists and ‘well-off’ are left to cope, to struggle with it and draw what pleasure one can where and when available (entertainment has certainly become more diverse and accessible). But what does it mean, in this context, to ‘struggle against’ it, against what in effect is taken to be existence itself? While many scorned Margaret Thatcher for her TINA comment, I think she was just expressing a ‘common sense’ that had an institutional bulwark behind it that exceeds in strength what Gramsci through his conception of hegemony confronted earlier in the century. Rather than vulnerability to revolt and resistance it might be taken as a sign of strength that capitalist modernity’s institutional edifice can withstand alienation, cynicism, and criticism across its populations struggling with it. The distance between a consciousness anchored in personal circumstances and one taking into view the broader context of capitalism is not to be underestimated. For those who are aware of this situation and are committed to the overthrow of capitalism the question raised just above, about how to break this stalemate, can be seen as vexing. All the good intentions and actions of committed activists, varieties of vanguards, leftist unions and inspired protesters – even in the hundreds of thousands – will be insufficient unless, ultimately, millions of masses in each country struggle as a force against capitalism. Just because capitalism’s exploitation and oppression are more visible and intense – and activists are able to broadcast this to groups and communities – it does not mean that a process of transformation in the consciousness of the masses will commence that makes a sustained, synergistic ‘struggle against’ possible. If we assume that the masses are aware of the pressures they face in work and social existence tied to capitalism, then two intersecting factors immediately arise. One is questioning what the overall nature of that awareness is. Another is identifying, more specifically, how an awareness is shaped by a self-identified political sense that the only option is going along, even cynically, with society as it is (perhaps via some right-wing orientation that only a limited number of things need to change such as leadership or policy towards immigration). Again, a materialist vision might suggest for many that the nature of awareness and political sense could be shifted by a significant crisis-driven shift in conditions that undermine or shatter existing consciousness and what it implies among the masses. But if we look back to the Great Depression we see such a shift can end up leading mostly to pockets of resistance (in movements and protests) and a willingness to vote for progressive political representatives. It could be ‘different this time’ but back then there was much more left organisational life and the echoes of the Russian Revolution. We also see that even as inequality and capitalism-related suffering have increased across the decades since the 1970s in the global North, no real sustained mass movement – we can count as serious class struggle – has really begun to grow. There are portions of the population in Europe, in countries like

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Greece and Portugal, who remain loyal to classic communist parties like the KKE, but these segments are relatively small. The recognition of the relative absence of ‘struggle against’ has been longstanding, not just a matter of decades but even now a century. In the 1920s, a variety of observers, from Lenin to the Frankfurt school, looked at the working classes in Europe, especially Germany, in that decade with disappointment as they failed to follow through on the energy created by the Russian Revolution and the serious economic and social challenges created by World War One. While a substantial portion of especially the working class and some of the peasant class supported socialism the response to a revolutionary call to the barricades associated with revolutionaries such as Rosa Luxemburg never materialised. How did this happen? Marx conjectured that the large factory floors would create and fuel the common identity of the proletariat, the members of which could come to see how they were being exploited in their labour and that the insecurity and impoverishment of life were a by-product of their position. Fighting against exploitation and conditions was already starting to happen in unions and worker associations of various forms. The next steps involved a growing radical willingness, manifest in a changing consciousness, to challenge a capitalism that would be seen as needing to ultimately be undone in the name of socialism. It was Lenin, and in his wake Georg Luk´acs, who recognised the hold of capitalism over the consciousness of workers (including the power of national and religious commitments). Complicating the scene is the further recognition by Lenin that some workers do well (the ‘aristocracy of labour’) and they can impede the anti-capitalist progress of the working class. Decades later thinkers like Herbert Marcuse emphasised that better living conditions were more prevalent for workers overall and it was problematic to expect revolution from those with a decently stocked larder. As suggested above, the security labour had since WWII began to melt away starting in the 1970s, leading to labour actions associated with trade unionism without a return to conscious class struggle. They way to overcome gaps in consciousness and mobilisation in Lenin’s view was for revolutionaries to constitute a vanguard deeply committed and present in parties capable of forging an anti-capitalist beacon to reach across the proletarian landscape. He seemed to see this need in universal terms applied to his own time. The vanguard we know would have extensive knowledge of class struggle and the living possibilities of socialism in any given era. This can be imparted to the proletariat who thereupon would come to develop class consciousness. Once this process got started an increasing number of more class-conscious workers could form an advanced cadre in the party and work with the rest of the workers to help get them towards the consciousness appropriate to their class. Today we have to consider whether the logic of the vanguard – which might be generalised in ways to include multiple forms of activist leadership – applies to a working class far more conquered and subdued. Vanguard or not, there is no getting beyond the central, duality of the masses versus political organisation. This, I will argue below, constitutes a sort of second

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stalemate: can we really have momentum for an organisation, vanguard or otherwise, without some portion of the masses ready and open to the aims of the organisation? Where is our contemporary version of the 1905 Russian Revolution (a base from which the forces leading to 1917 could expand)? Anything even remotely pointing in that direction would signal a certain readiness and momentum among the masses. Before addressing this second stalemate directly, I think it worth considering a bit further a couple of points mentioned above that offer some context for both stalemates. One is the recognition that the left in the global North is not alone in the effort to organise the masses in opposition to the liberal capitalist centre edifice, especially in the context of crises. What are the implications of the right also supplying viewpoints and interpretations, successfully taken up by workers, regarding more extreme crisis conditions? Blame can be assigned to the global elite, China, immigration, progressive social media corporations, ‘cultural Marxism’, and the deep state. Within such framing the masses can develop further awareness of aspects of capitalist oppression and exploitation, focussing on the elite 1%, the ‘greedy corporations’, or corrupt officials. However, the rightist framing never takes the masses very far. It does not call for thinking critically about the capitalist system but only what is seen as corrupted aspects, with special attention often given to what is seen as linked to progressive social changes. It is these facets that become the targets of any mass action such as protests. Examples include the trucker convoy in Canada, protests against Covid-19 control regimes, or the farmer protests in the Netherlands. There is a tendency in rightist mobilisation and upsurge to emphasise immediate issues whose scope is anchored in personal lives. Such contexts can be very good sites where hints of struggle might begin. The question is how to push things along so it does not end there. If the left is ever serious about trying to reach workers who are for now right-oriented it may need to devise tactics and strategies for extending these basic starting points so that they potentially might develop along a path towards struggles-against-capitalism – while remaining cognizant that such action will create resentment and backlash. A second factor worth expanding on somewhat is the power of contemporary capitalism in its world-making capacities. That the right keeps developing does not mean liberal capitalism does not. When I use a phrase like capitalism’s institutional edifice to concretise what I see as an important aspect of Gramsci’s hegemony, it is not meant to imply any stasis in its development. Capitalism has developed, as we know well, a great deal since not just the mid but also the latter twentieth century. Do the fundamental ways established nearly a century ago regarding how we might think about the class consciousness/anti-capitalism relationship still apply? Does the notion of ‘false’ consciousness still make sense today compared to how it was used a century ago? Luk´acs, in History and Class Consciousness, suggested the power of capitalism over consciousness might not as great as one typically thinks. That on the surface the masses remain mired in a wide range of values and norms bearing not only on the supposed naturalness of market but on the nation, family, religion, liberal ethics, and accepted logics of the workplace and cultural sphere. Even if this range

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has expanded today – adding, for example, neoliberal logics emphasising how we are individually to blame for the problems we face – we might still be able to think about its effects the same way Luk´acs did. Luk´acs saw this range as relatively shallow in terms of shaping one’s existence. Workers were, at a greater depth, shaped by their class existence and experience. In terms of consciousness that deeper level was a sort of space left empty, ready to be filled and formed via a flourishing proletariat consciousness that could become aware of its potential as the essential force in transforming the world. Of course, much of this process relying on a great deal of work from the vanguard. Putting aside issues associated with Luk´acs revised thinking decades later, I have to question whether the social frame that is seen as constituting false consciousness is vulnerable today to being slowly broken away to get to the deeper kernel of potential class consciousness via the dyad of masses and party. Something that is shallow but relatively wide-ranging can be hard, if not seemingly impossible, to traverse from one side to another (like swimming across a very large body of water that only the very highly trained can undertake). Even Gramsci’s thinking here about hegemony and counter-hegemony, achieved through a war of position, does not account for the much wider scope and effect of the capitalist hegemony faced today, especially as manifest in its institutional power (we have Foucault among others to thank for exposing the types of power it yields). This implies that transformation today likely entails far more than in the past. And building any position likely needs extensive left institutional development. The left has not even really begun to theorise what this might look today like and how it can be built. The thickened and extended contemporary capitalist edifice might be such that even just getting started on a meaningful ‘position’ will be extremely vulnerable to being undermined by waves of counter-struggle from both capitalism’s liberal centre (with all its institutional power) and its right (with all its ideological appeal). This assumes such an effort could even get off the ground without a body of masses increasingly geared to the struggle-against-capitalism. Moreover, left institutions (historically this has taken form in such things as alternative schools, welfare organisations, various activist aid societies) should be seen as necessary but not sufficient for transformation towards revolution. Perhaps the most developed example of this in the global North is the German Social Democracy Party from the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries – which was able to build parallel institutions to a degree that they got labelled as a ‘state within the state’. However, there was no real test of the transformative potential since the party gave up any revolutionary tendencies (as Luxemburg emphasised). Another example is the organisational array constructed via the Comintern in the 1930s, which also was not enough to transform the working class and its allied classes. The alternative is to bracket this task and hope an uprising will be able to capture the state and its institutions readymade for transformation as did happen especially in the first half of the twentieth century – but not in capitalism’s core. Whatever one’s views are on vanguards, traditional parties, horizontalism or the role of mass spontaneity it seems clear, as intimated above, there is no bypassing the mass/organisation duality. If anything, given the formidable

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challenges posed by contemporary capitalism, left organisation is more necessary than ever. At the very minimum there is need for organisation to help advance anti-capitalist mass consciousness, providing it with focal points for positions and programs of action. It is worth pointing out here that there is no notable approach in the Marxist tradition that eschews organisation. Even council communism – which placed emphasis on workers organising themselves into councils to govern all aspects of political-economic life – saw organisation dedicated to mobilising workers for this outcome as necessary. Rosa Luxemburg, who is often associated with an emphasis on the spontaneous action of workers, was clear that it is the interaction of that spontaneity and left organisation that is central to the advancement of anti-capitalism. Irrespective of one’s view on this history and the susceptibility of mass consciousness to transformation today, those committed to the struggle-againstcapitalism and socialism face, especially in the global North, an absence of large-scale, sustainable left organisation (parties, radical unions, movements, etc.). This would be organisations that can meaningfully engage workers regarding their frustrations with life under capitalism (the ‘struggle-with’) and channel that into not only disruptions but longer-term mass political, social, economic and cultural structure-building. The aim would be not just to join already conscious youth, advanced workers, and progressives to challenge existing governments and win electoral victories (e.g. Spain’s Podemos or the UK’s Labour) but to undertake the process of transformation of mass consciousness along the lines discussed above. The existing organisational landscape does not extend much beyond, on one side, the old-line communist parties in Europe mentioned above which in recent decades rarely get beyond well-worn ceilings of support (e.g. 10%). Their wider appeal is in part limited by an understanding that they for too long were willing to ‘go long’ with existing capitalist states. On the other side of this landscape are the various socialist organisations (some understanding themselves as a vanguard in waiting), that might be of Trotskyist, Maoist or democratic socialist orientation. These would typically be surprised to gain even 1% support at the national level. A way to look at this absence is as one side of a vicious circle that is central to the second stalemate: we do not have mobilised anti-capitalist consciousness of meaningful extent and thus we cannot build substantial organisations upon it. From the other side, we do not have substantial organisations of meaningful extent that can work to help foster anti-capitalist consciousness. The circle would be broken if we had, even just step by step, consciousness and organisation developing synergistically; a process that might be at times accelerated by deep crises. The kindling for this process is the susceptibility of the masses to moving from ‘struggle with’ to ‘struggle against’ discussed above. That is, the first stalemate needs to be overcome. How are both, interrelated, stalemates overcome? One can await the sort of wide and deep circle-breaking rupture that Lenin outlined was key to the success of the Russian Revolution. But by the time the Bolshevik Party formed in 1912, Russia was well on its way towards revolutionary conditions. There is nothing like those conditions today (nor is there a deeply problematic Czarist state) and no

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real clarity as to how to create momentum for a robust process of transformation of mass consciousness. There is only the expectation that an extensive, rupturing set of crises (economic, political, social and international) is around the corner to unsettle the confined consciousness of the masses who then, being more susceptible, can transition from a struggle with to a struggle against capitalism. Even if that rupture is directly ahead it does not mean such a transition is automatic. As implied above history suggests that capitalism going into deep crisis has the forces of the right allied with it and they are far more coterminous with capitalist modernity than the left (able to rely for example on established ideologies of nationalism, racism or individualism). The right’s alignment with capitalism means that the left must, to come back to the institutions question, compensate with extensive organisational presence throughout the life of the masses. Figures like Lenin, Gramsci, Luxemburg and Luk´acs understood this. And they looked about in their time and saw left organisational development and mobilising masses. We cannot. They laid out conditions and possibilities (e.g. workers becoming conscious of their labour as a commodity), strategic objects (e.g. types of parties, tactical alliances) and various methods (e.g. staying close to the lives of real workers). Unfortunately, none of these thinkers left a map and directions for how to navigate the sort of context and stalemates now faced. If they were to reappear today, their genius and realism would likely compel them to step back to think again as to how a century of capitalist development compels new approaches to the challenges posed by mass consciousness and the nature and role of organisation. I doubt that attempts seeking to break the vicious circle with sheer effort to spark momentum would be seen as feasible. This presupposes both sides of the circle: sufficient organisational presence plus susceptible consciousness among the masses. The task of rethinking this is a momentous project that should be undertaken not just in terms of the global North but globally. Can we step away from the circle in order to put it in a broader perspective? I do think we have at hand some ways of thinking about this that help point to some initial paths of departure. The best way to step away I know of is through a dialectical perspective. A dialectic represents the relations between an existent (whether it be material, social, or ideational) and its negation (whether it be the destruction or alteration of a materiality, the transformation or elimination of a social relation or form or the critique, or the alteration or refutation of concept, theory, or praxis). A dialectic can appear at different scales, spatial and temporal. It can involve a dynamic sequence entailing some length of historical unfolding or not, where there is just the relation between an existent (e.g. a practice, institution, body of thought or even large-scale social form) and its negation. With a dialectic a negation can remain latent but still be discernible to analysis and it can take several forms (as long as they negate), depending on who is the agent (e.g. theorists, workers, capitalists, the state) or what forces are in play (e.g. contradictions in power relations or accumulation patterns) in the negation. What we need then is to self-reflexively assume the circle and its profound limitations are part of the conditions of our world (i.e. the totality that capitalism

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constitutes) and a moment within a set of dialectical transformations from out of history and into the future. This means that proletarian consciousness, even in its limited form, is part of the wider context of capitalist totality even if workers are not aware of this. This totality is the aggregate of relations, formations, institutions, structures, actions and historical progression constituted by capitalism. As such, even if crises do not create anti-capitalist standpoints on a mass scale, the state of proletarian consciousness (even in its limited susceptibility) shapes and can at times transform the capitalist totality. For example, recognition of mass discontent (struggling with) can become widespread and alter ruling class policies and practices, either in the direction of attempted reforms (e.g. adaption of basic income) or greater oppression and repression to enforce capitalist order, which in turn can prompt further mass reactions and resistances. The key for activists, radical educators, and their organisations is not to take this as a reason to be passive (letting the dialectic unfold) but to think about worker education and activism in dialectical terms with this totality in mind (fostering anti-capitalist thinking and positions) as dialectical steps on the way to capitalism’s development (recognising that their actions can shape dialectical development not just constructively – when, for example, capitalist power reacts to counter strengthening anti-capitalist currents). Viewing the development of mass consciousness dialectically means analysing the totality to discern in very practical, realist terms what the next steps of change might be, discerning the kernels of dialectical movement in any given contemporary context (taking account not only of socio-political actions but also the emergent changes in social and material life, whether it be from accelerated socio-digitisation, the re-forming of cities or ecological disaster). Accordingly, two-dimensional interactions with the masses could be devised: one anchored in the current states of consciousness (emphasised by Lenin); the other in the possible next steps of consciousness development, given the current states, potential changes as well as interventions on all sides of the political spectrum (based on realistic assessments rather than wished-for outcomes). Such an approach might want to think not just of one potential dialectical step but many steps into the future guided by the play of current unfolding developments and their negation (in alterations or eliminations), devising methods, strategies, and theory (including new approaches to parties and organising therefore thinking of their own agency dialectically) that are appropriate to the possibilities in play in the dialectical path into the future. But this would be done with all the possibilities in mind that favour capitalism, such as reform, the development of the right, or extreme state authoritarian repression. Emphasis on the dialectical development of consciousness is not a formula for gradualism. Escalation and proliferation – or at least the possibility – of mass disruptiveness and anti-capitalism can emerge. But the dialectical viewpoint suggests it may well just be a ‘moment’ rather a fundamental transformation. It is unfortunate that organisers today, compared to the past, face such complex, challenging, and uncertain tasks. The socialist theorists of the early twentieth century (e.g., Lenin, Luxemburg, Luk´acs, and Gramsci) were also thinking about dialectical development. But they were thrust into revolutionary

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conditions and had recourse to burgeoning parties and thus the task of dialectical development was of a different form. Also, today the more developed capitalism that the masses face has learnt, dialectically, from past crises and evolved its political, economic, and cultural institutions. It even confronts crises differently. A lot more, therefore, is expected, compared to a century ago, not just of organisers but of the masses in terms of being conscious of the workings of contemporary capitalism and their own position within it. Organisers, seeking to discern and advance that understanding in dialectical terms – relying both on their own study of contemporary capitalism and mappings of pathways for organisational expansion – can look not to the early- and mid-twentieth century but the mid-nineteenth century when Marx, in his own time, was immersed in the same.

Bibliography Latham, R. (2018) Contemporary Capitalism, Uneven Development, and the Arc of Anti-capitalism, Global Discourse, 8(2), pp. 169–186. Meyer, J.W., Boli, J., Thomas, G.M. and Ramirez, F.O. (1997) World Society and the Nation-State. American Journal of Sociology, 103(1), pp. 144–181.

Chapter 15

Discussing With Roger Hallam, Environmental Revolutionary and Co-Founder of Extinction Rebellion1 Athina Karatzogianni and Jacob Matthews

Introduction We interviewed Roger Hallam twice on a videoconferencing app (in February when we were interrupted by police knocking at his door and March 2021), during fieldwork for the H2020 project DigiGen (www.digigen.eu). Our discussion focused on ideology, leadership, organisation, communication and mobilisation strategies in radical movements, class and youth politics, transition, community and resilience, as well as conflict within Extinction Rebellion, delving into Roger’s thinking on radical politics more broadly. The interview was first published online for Mέta (Centre for Postcapitalist Civilisation, https://metacpc.org/en/hallam/) and we are grateful for permission to reproduce it here. Subsequently, in November 2022, Roger, along with seven others, was arrested by the Metropolitan Police in pre-emptive attempts to thwart the latest wave of Just Stop Oil protests. He was charged with conspiracy to cause a public nuisance, newspapers dubbed him the ‘suspected mastermind ring leader’ of the ‘Just Stop Oil’ campaign, and was accused of organising to block M25 (one of the busiest motorways in the UK). In January of 2023, he was denied bail at Southwark Crown Court remaining in HMP Wandsworth Prison, without trial, until his eventual release four months later. During his stay in prison, Roger created a series of podcasts on Spotify titled: ‘Designing the Revolution: Roger Hallam Live from Wandsworth Prison, UK’ https://open.spotify.com/episode/3VyJTgmVDlj1EKA10vMAGn. One of us talked to Roger after his release from prison. He was concerned with this more recent crackdown repression logic against environmental protestors that was not there in the first 3 years of Extinction Rebellion (XR) (for other XR actors commenting on XR policing see Karatzogianni et al. 2021; Karatzogianni and Matthews 2023). We also discussed his experience in prison, which apart of the expected critique of dire conditions and inhuman treatment he witnessed, Duty to Revolt, 227–251 Copyright © 2024 mέta via metacpc.org. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved doi:10.1108/978-1-80382-315-720231015

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pointed to Roger’s belief that eventually when you start putting in prison respectable middle-class professionals, key people in the system will start ‘rebelling’ against incarcerating people for exercising their right to protest the environmental disaster, with tactics such as civil disobedience spreading to lawyers and other legal professionals. In April 2023, during ‘The Big One’, a four-day peaceful XR protest at Westminster Parliament in London involving thousands which attracted very little media attention (Macdonald 3 May 2023), Roger was stranded in hospital, due to a bike accident, but wrote that his design for revolution means that first, ‘it has to be organised – have a core of trusted and competent people that can run a big operation with integrity and a profound sense of service to the historical moment we face’, second, ‘it has to take control of the state’, and Third and in a way this is the most exciting thing – it has four interlocking elements which move forward in mutually supporting iterations. . .The four elements are resistance (civil disobedience), assemblies (citizens, local, peoples), culture (production, financial support and amplification) and elections (local and national) . . . the latter with a demand that removes the political class from power and replaces it with a checks and balances system of assemblies of ordinary people randomly selected – i.e. ‘sortition’. And yes, just in case you thought otherwise capitalism is going to have to go. (Roger Hallam, April 2021, Facebook public post, 9.20 p.m.) The interview below shows vividly how this thinking about designing the revolution came about, as well as core ideas of his conceptualisation of the environmental crisis, the urgency with which people need to exercise their ‘Duty to Revolt’, and strategies for mobilising and organising the revolution. Athina Karatzogianni: Roger Hallam:

Athina Karatzogianni: Roger Hallam:

How did you get involved in radical politics? I’ve been involved in radical politics since I was 14 or 15. In the 1980s when I was a teenager, I was involved in the peace movement in Europe. I got arrested and went to prison during that period. So, I was well aware of civil disobedience as a method of bringing about political change. And then when I was at the London School of Economics, I studied Gandhi and non-violence for a year. This was in your early twenties then? Yes, and then I became involved in workers collectives and organic farming and other things in my thirties and my forties. But when I went to London, the main thing I

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was working towards was how to mobilise people to engage in mass participation, civil disobedience. I was particularly influenced by research in the United States. It seemed enormously clear to me that the most effective way to bring about rapid political change was mass, non-violent civil disobedience. I studied various different forms of direct action as part of my field research: light strikes, occupations, rent strikes and suchlike. Then I was asked to advise climate change activists on how to be effective. So, I talked to them about creating a more civil resistance sort of model based upon the global south, which is to occupy major cities. Given that part of the problem is obviously systemic, as it were. When were you advising climate change activists? Around 2007 I think, and through those discussions, Rising Up was formed, which was a sort of network of activists and academics researching how to engage in mass participation, civil disobedience. Then I did a paper called Pivoting to the Real Issue in January 2013, which proposes that we create a rebellion against the British government on civil resistance principles and that led to the foundation of Extinction Rebellion. And since that’s been formed, I’ve been one of the main strategic voices in XR on how to do that effectively. Your first very publicised action was at King’s College when you were a PhD student there. You were arrested for that and then you were vindicated. In relation to that specific period of your life, how did that particular action inspire you? Given that arrests are a tactic that is used by XR, what was your own experience of that arrest and how did it influence what you were doing in XR? As I was basing my action designs on the principles developed by Martin Luther King and Gandhi, and the classical theory of non-violence is that you engage in disruption in order to get attention and force an opponent to come to the table and negotiate. That’s the other side of classical non-violence: once the opponents come to the table, you’re very respectful towards the opponent and focus upon a change in behaviour or policy, rather than denigrating the opponent in a in a sort of traditional political way. So

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Athina Karatzogianni and Jacob Matthews those are the two elements. The hypothesis, as you might say, of the King’s College campaign was that direct action would produce a result a lot quicker and more efficiently than traditional forms of campaigning. Usually, a divestment campaign to force a university to divest from fossil fuels can take anything from 1 to 5 years.

The campaign I engaged with changed their whole corporate policy in five weeks. The outcome of that case today, as it were, was that vigorous non-violence is massively more effective than traditional campaigning, and the mechanism was to create criminal damage with lawful excuse – as it turned out, causing £7000 worth of damage to the building and then carrying on a 14-day hunger strike. That produced a change of policy in those two weeks. They had an emergency investment meeting. I was suspended from King’s College, banned from King’s College for 10 days, and then they reinstated me, because it was too embarrassing for them. And then when we came to an agreement, everyone shook hands and were friends as it were, so it was a classic Gandhian sort of progression of giving an ultimatum, engaging in direct action, negotiation and reconciliation. What I took from that was to replicate that on a mass scale towards the government or towards larger institutions. The main hypothesis being that in any power relationship, there is a certain point of non-cooperation or pressure, at which an opponent will be forced to negotiate and no one has absolute power, and it is all a question of numbers and a non-violent force, those that are two criteria. Athina Karatzogianni: Roger Hallam:

Athina Karatzogianni:

Were you influenced at all by Gene Sharp? Yes, I mean he was one of the main scholars in classical civil disobedience, very much so. And you know, as I just said, his main proposition is that power is relational. It’s not absolute. In other words, a group only has power over another group to the extent that the oppressed group cooperates with the oppressor, and to the extent that there will come a point where the oppressor will be required to negotiate. That is a very positive philosophy of action and it is empirically robust, as we know. I want to move from the ideological discussion and that of strategy towards organisational matters. From attending some meetings about self organisation tactics, I am aware that in the last six months there has been a restructuring of XR. I broadly understand it is based on the holacracy model, and that this organisational structure is based on distributed, decentralised architecture, distributed authority. There

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are differences between this kind of architecture and the model of Occupy, for example, that was consensus-based, and where things tended to be a little bit slower, what activists call ‘the muddle of Occupy’, whereas XR has follows the ‘by consent’ model. I wonder about your views on how this architecture of organising came about and what whether you had contributed to the organisational structure yourself. What are your views on movement organisation more broadly? Well, the plan for XR took about a year and a half of research and conversations, so it didn’t come out of nowhere. It wasn’t like Occupy where there was no pre-organisation. We had 20 or 30 people involved in designing a modern social movement. And there were six or seven sort of key elements which made it successful. One, of course, was mass civil disobedience and another one was trying to transcend the conflict between hierarchy and horizontalism. The middle way or the transcendent sort of notion was a whole structure where there is delegated authority to mandated groups to have autonomy to get on and initiate creative action within their mandates and so on. The big advantage was that it created an institutionalisation of the social movement, to avoid it collapsing because of structurelessness, as has happened with all the horizontal movements over the last 20–30 years. But it didn’t take on a traditional left wing, sort of top-down, leadership structure, as you might say. It was very successful to the extent that thousands of people joined it very quickly.

But in my view, it’s been extremely unsuccessful in being able to create a leadership structure that can create strategic coherence and inspiration, in the context of the biggest existential crisis in the history of humanity. Sociologically speaking, all crises require a top-down leadership in order to create strategic coherence, so there’s a big contradiction between the sort of high-tech model and the necessity for rapid decision making, which is always needed in non-violent confrontation, if it’s going to be successful. As you can see from Martin Luther King and Gandhi models, there was always a central hierarchy that is even more essential now, because we’re going to have billions of people starving to death in the next 20–30 years, if we don’t create some sort of coherence. So, there’s a big clash really between the existential emergency and the idealism of some that don’t understand the urgency of the situation.

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Athina Karatzogianni and Jacob Matthews Athina Karatzogianni:

Roger Hallam:

You talked about being a teenager in the 1980s and the peace movement and getting arrested, etc. Going back to the 60s and 70s, the civil rights movement, the student movement in the US and Europe, basically you had the emergence of this idea of more participatory, shared and decentralised leadership, to recognise the emotional labour of activists, to have more participatory leadership. And right now, in the global north, you find this obsession with decentralisation and horizontalism. For example, Alicia Garza has talked about the same problem of the misapplication of decentralised leadership, decentralised structures in Black Lives Matter. This for me is of particular interest: if you go back to your formative years, what were your impressions from people that mentored you, so to speak, or that you worked with? And what’s going on in this continuum of the last 50–60 years? What are your impressions of this leadership question? There was a big transition from what you might call traditional left social democratic organisational structures, which were rooted in the mid-twentieth century, but lasted until the 1990s, and decentralised New Left and postmodernist sort of orientated movements, which originated after 1968 and became even more prominent after 1989. Since 1989, the horizontal dogma has dominated radical politics. In my view, this has been the primary reason for the failure of radical politics, because of its inability to create material power formations that are capable of presenting a material threat to the neoliberal system. Horizontalism is part of the neoliberal construction of society, which enables radical people to virtually signal their opposition, but not to create any material opposition. You can obviously see that in the failure of the climate movements to prevent a 60% increase in carbon emissions over the last 50 years, and in the failure of the left to stop the massive increase in social inequality.

The left has catastrophically failed, in my view, over the last 30 years, and the radical left has been a disaster, insomuch, as its been incapable of creating strategic coherence and mass organisation. This is largely a function of its domination by the privileged urban middle class in the Global North that has been disconnected with the older working-class formations of the mid-twentieth century, such

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as a structural default. But I think horizontalism now is reaching a crisis point, because of the determination, as it were, of the climate crisis. The climate crisis will be manifested through a rise of right-wing populism and fascistic movements. Over the next 5–10 years, the moment of truth for social movements is whether they break out of that domination of the radical left and move towards a more twentieth century realist model of alliances across different social and economic groups – a little bit like in the 1930s – and accept the democratic hierarchical models which were most effective in the twentieth century, where you vote a leadership in, the leadership is given executive control, and you can vote them out if you don’t like it. So, for me, it’s a sort of return: what climate change is going to do is that it will force a return to a modernist political culture in the next 10 years. The postmodernist period will be seen as an aberration of northern privilege. Athina Karatzogianni:

Roger Hallam:

I want to ask you about the digital communication experiences you have had in the last 3 or 4 years. To my understanding XR used WhatsApp up until a point and then changed to Signal and Telegram due to privacy and security concerns. There’s a platform that is based on a carbon neutral server in Switzerland, and there is also Glassfrog and mattermost that is used by XR activists as well. When you consider communication aspects both internally (their role within the group, the movement) and externally (publicising, coordinating actions with the masses), what role do you think communication has particularly played in the trajectory of the movement? What is your own experience of this? Well, my view is that social media has a heroin like aspect to mobilisation processes, in other words, you get a quick hit and then you got a quick collapse. Social media undermines the ability to create effective hierarchical organisation that will maintain the material resistance to the neoliberal state. What social media does is that it creates very rapid mobilisations and then facilitates very rapid collapse, because it can only and it’s only really good at creating action. It’s not good at creating decision-making structures. It undermines decision-making structures, because it overloads people with information and it also privileges outside voices that are usually destructive. It is a major problem and it doesn’t add anything, in my view, to the process of effective mobilisation. Effective mobilisation really has to be rooted in in meetings and in in face-to-face mobilisation contexts such as public meetings and people’s assemblies and such like, where you can enable people to engage in active speech, which

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Athina Karatzogianni and Jacob Matthews is the primary mechanism of personal empowerment and then free people engaging in the ICT stage. You can go through a process of aggregation and once the aggregation is happening, then there needs to be delegation to an executive to take the aggregation and put it into action. The big problem with social media is that it privileges only a few voices, because there’s too much information on it and it degenerates into aggressive sort of speech. It’s impossible to aggregate, because unless it’s specially designed, you can’t aggregate. And last of all, there’s no implementation because there’s no agreement on who the executive should be. All those things make it extremely difficult, and really a diversion from material resistance to the state. Extinction Rebellion realised this in its design stage of not engaging in social media mobilisation.

Another problem with social media and organisation is that you tend to speak to people similar to yourself and that leads to a dead spot, to disconnected network structures which over and over radicalise people and turn things into a sort of cult-like, paradox of political identity-esque situations. So, what Extinction Rebellion decided to do was to mobilise through nineteenth-century mechanisms, which is the public meeting. And the great thing about the public meeting is that it invites a lot of people. You’ve got the emotional connection and people together. You revisit the age-old successful oratory, which in my view is essential for maintaining and promoting mobilisation, the emotionality of the speech and the testimony of ordinary people. Those are the things that drive mobilisation, the emotionality of collective spaces. Obviously, that’s a major reversal of a lot of the wishful thinking of social media utopianism, but I’m just being empirical about, you know, not looking ideologically against social media. Everything I’m telling you is broadly empirical. Athina Karatzogianni:

Roger Hallam:

I wanted to ask you about this meeting where XR youth came and occupied the meeting. Can you talk to me a little bit about this experience, if you faced challenges from a part of XR in relation to your role in the movement, how you dealt with those, and how you feel about this conflict? Has it harmed the movement, this conflict in relation to you in particular and on a personal level? Well, you know, as you probably noticed, I take a broader sociological view of social situations. What I’m trying to communicate to you – and a lot of scholars have a difficulty understanding this – is that in the next 10–20 years, it’s highly likely that there’ll be

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social collapse around the world, and that realisation is creating an exponential increase in social stress psychologically, materially. You need to understand that we’ll be going over 0.5 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures in the next 5–10 years, which will lead to the collapse of the Paris agreement, which was never serious in the first place. And we’ll be going over 2 degrees in the next 10–20 years, which will precipitate mass starvation events. Given that that’s 5–6 degrees in inland areas, which means 10–20 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures during heatwaves, it makes it impossible to grow food. We have an absolute crisis that will continue to create a fragmentation in the social space, as is well documented in previous social periods, when a society faces annihilation. The fragmentation is between fatalism or hedonism or revolution. Those are the three main fragmentations, and they always happen simultaneously. And these fragmentations interfere with each other, as you might say. One of the dynamics in Extinction Rebellion is the intense emotionality of people realising that all that they wish for is not going to come true and it is particularly true for young people. There are two sorts of polarisations there. One is to move towards self-pity and try to create safe spaces and avoid what is horrible, as you might say, and another one is towards explicit resistance. Now, those two approaches obviously conflict. And one of the reasons in my sense is that a lot of young people are conflicted between those two: their desire for safety and their need to enter into resistance. So that conflict is working its way through and it leads to a lot of denial and fear. This leads to a bigger tension in middle class northern social movements. Social movements tend to attract people who are very likeable and want to see a good world. They find it very difficult to engage in confrontation. And so, paradoxically, they withdraw from confrontation, because they think confrontation is what they’re against. It is a major challenge to persuade people that you might have confrontation. Most social resistance movements make that crossing of the Rubicon moment where they decide they’re going to create whatever confrontation is necessary. Because, you know, in the words of one of the girls who did the children’s march in 1963, we are going to get hurt anyway. The realisation you’re going to get hurt anyway for me is the major impetus towards civil resistance. In other words, you can’t escape. You’re already going into the gas chamber, right? There’s no alternative. And obviously, the more privileged you are, the more you can deceive yourself. So really, in a sense, Extinction Rebellion is a transitory movement that has mobilised the wrong demographic. It has mobilised the demographic that’s the most privileged and the keenest on nice things happening. XR needs to mobilise the traditional revolutionary demographic, which is the lower middle class, which is the main revolutionary demographic. Either it goes to fascism or it goes to the left-wing movements historically. The reason for that is because it doesn’t have skin in the game as much as the professional middle class. But it’s intelligent enough, educated enough and has enough time and money to

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effectively rebound. So, it’s a sweet spot in the social structure in terms of civil resistance. The major strategy in our transition has to be connecting and integrating the climate crisis with the social crisis. Through that integration, we can create civil resistance that is centred on the lower middle class in Western societies. But that’s a massive challenge because, the professional middle class has monopolised the climate movement for the last 30 years and it doesn’t want to give it up. Athina Karatzogianni:

Roger Hallam:

Athina Karatzogianni: Roger Hallam:

I want to ask you about your experience, because obviously at some point you said, this is the strategy, in connection to Heathrow airport, and then you were arrested a few days prior and then after. At that point, XR and yourself were at odds with going ahead with that action. How did this conflict arise? I’m talking specifically about XR youth, which, of course, you explained to me really well. What do you think is going on with XR Youth? I want to ask about this particular conflict in relation to you and your strategies. Do you think that this group dominates now? How do you see your role inside XR now? Because I know you have created other organisations, such as Burning Pink. What is your experience of this struggle? In my previous answer, I gave you the sociological structure of the division and conflict. A particular side of that conflict was the inability of Extinction Rebellion to agree to engage in flying drones, safely, to the extent of closing down the airport. So, it wasn’t agreed by XR, largely because of the intervention of those young people. It went along independently insomuch as effective material resistance to the general project is ethically and strategically imperative. A bunch of people did that and it obviously largely failed to have the impact because it didn’t have the infrastructural support. One of the reasons for setting up Burning Pink is to create an infrastructural support for civil resistance projects, Extinction Rebellion being largely appropriated by the privileged middle class of the global north. As a consequence of that, they’re not willing to engage in in classical civil resistance, because they’ve got too much skin in the game. I have noticed that you still post and that you still work with colleagues in XR. You must still feel that there is a role for you to play there. Yes, Extinction Rebellion is a broad church. There are still 25–50% of people in XR around the world who are

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actively engaged and wishing to bring about civil resistance episodes. There is still a role to play, as you might say. However, I think once we come out of the pandemic, then the movement will probably diverge. Part of it will return to the traditional denial of the old model environmentalist movement. And other people will move forward to a civil resistance social model. My prediction is that the latter will thrive and the former will discontinue, because they’re historically irrelevant, because of the structural determinants of a system. Now some specific questions regarding framing. Your argument is that there should be a culture, not a neutral language, for the mass movement to be built. But then you say that the movement might need to create separate mobilisations to be channelled into a movement of movements. You talk about the need for workers to organise themselves, people say from the black community should organise themselves separately – to have this set of mobilisations that they feed into a movement of humans. To understand what I mean you need to have quite a sophisticated analysis of this area, because it’s quite easy to talk about in simplistic team terms which don’t really relate to the underlying causal determinants of how to be successful. One of the common misunderstandings with the notion of movement of movements is that it doesn’t differentiate between what you might call top-down alliances and bottom-up alliances, which are fundamentally different sorts of strategies, so that the top-down and likely movement alliance idea is that you go to the gatekeepers and leaders, the central power holders of an alternative movement space. And then you persuade those to enact civil disobedience with you. The alternative strategy is to go in at the side of the movement, as it were, and cooperate with people locally or in the local branches. A third strategy is to just create a completely separate mobilisation, which includes people in that demographic, as an alternative. For instance, the three strategies with trade unions would be either to talk to the trade union leaders and they come on side. That’s number one. You go to a trade union office, to branches, and recruit them to do stuff. And the third one is the separate mobilisation of

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Athina Karatzogianni and Jacob Matthews trade unionists who have their own structure. What I was suggesting was that the two that are meaningful and work are the latter two, which is going sideways and going in to create separate mobilisations of people from that demographic.

The reason for that is largely empirical in the sense that if you go and talk to the main gate keepers, power holders or leaders of other social movements, spaces or left political spaces, then what you find is entrenched, reformist orientations, which means that people in positions out of ideology or privilege are going to be unwilling to enter into civil resistance, and they will block your attempts to mobilise for those reasons. I don’t think there’s anything particularly unusual in terms of social theory about how this works, because the vast majority of civil resistance episodes are created by autonomous mobilisations, separate from the official organisations. For instance, in 2012, in the Egyptian revolution, it was the grassroots of the Muslim Brotherhood that joined the revolution, it wasn’t the hierarchy and the leadership; the hierarchy and the leadership came in at the end. There’s no point going to the hierarchy in the leadership before the revolution, because they don’t have the political imagination, courage or willingness to risk their status to engage in a revolution. The primary strategic sort of point I’m making here is to criticise conventional movement building, which pursues an elitist, reformist method, and therefore ineffectual political change. Athina Karatzogianni:

Roger Hallam:

I want to take you back to a term you have used, ‘culturally neutral language’. That is the very classical problem, strategy or identity in a movement. The more open the framing is, the more people can feel included in that, and be mobilised and recruited. But then you have the problem of what is the strategy and who is included. This is the alliances that you’re mentioning externally and then internally. When you use the term ‘culturally neutral language’, I was wondering about that because the next point is about the separate mobilisations as well. It seems like a paradox, that tension. What I’m proposing is a dual strategy. The first strategy is to make the mainstream movement space as opening open and neutral and welcoming as possible. There’s a whole number of concrete micro designs that ensure that that happens, in order to encourage different demographics, cultures and ethnicities to create their own mobilisations, so that they can draw in the benefits of attracting people. The major mechanism of mobilisation is to have people from the group talking to that group. Neither of those are perfect and both of them have dangers. But the point is that both of those

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strategies are a lot more preferable to the default political identity problem, which is a movement builds and it ends up manifesting just one particular demographic or culture, excludes people from joining the mainstream movement, and therefore limits its growth and prevents it from becoming a mass movement. By refusing to enable other groups to self-organise, then you end up not being able to integrate groups who do fundamentally want to organise on their own within their own identities, because their identities are quite strong or different to what you might call the mainstream identity. None of that is conflict free. There’s no utopian solution to movement building. What we’re looking at is the best suboptimal scenario and that’s better than what you’ve got at the moment, which is often combined with superficial tokenism, the idea of bringing black people in to make a speech, but not enabling black people to organise, because they won’t fundamentally change the culture of the organisation to welcome black people in. Athina Karatzogianni:

Roger Hallam:

That’s actually very true. You can see it also with how some councils work and the representation there, especially in that sense. I was going to ask you about the Citizens Assembly. It is quite central in what you are proposing and also in relation to the transition period, specifically, because I think you don’t seem to be settled on that one yourself in terms of design, because you talk about a transitional period of 2 years, where perhaps you will have a thousand people for a fixed period of that, and then you have regional and cities citizens assemblies. I was wondering about this transitional period for the citizens assemblies because it’s a national city/regional focus. But how does that work in a global context as well? So definitely on the transition point, I have questions in regards to that and the role of the citizens assemblies. One of the annoying things about social change is its unpredictably non-linear. It’s very difficult to design transition periods, which don’t involve highly unpredictable breaks in previous social arrangements. In other words, usually what happens is a crisis that will throw up various potentialities and then basically the revolutionary leadership has to scramble around to innovate very quickly because it’s all or nothing. That’s not because it’s proactive design. That’s because no one’s on the street and suddenly everyone’s on the street, because of the collective

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Athina Karatzogianni and Jacob Matthews action dynamics and the herding dynamics of mobilisation. Having said that, I don’t think there’s anything particularly intellectually or academically challenging about a transition to a citizens assembly based constitution.

Citizens assemblies is a constitutional mechanism in the same way as representational democracy is, as the same way as sort of autocratic kingship is. We’ve got numerous examples historically about how you make constitutional revolutions. I mean, there’s been dozens of them. But the general gist is that people on the street demand for a new constitutional arrangement and then that comes in and then the elites fight back against it. People come onto the street and you have a to and fro scenario for 2 years or a few months, depending upon the historical example. That new constitutional regime becomes embedded and then maybe 10 or 20 years later, it gets challenged again. An example is French history over the last 200 years, how many constitutional breaks that they had? About four or five, something like that. So that’s what we’re really looking at. We’re not looking at some total collapse of the social system or something. What will happen, the big break, is when in terms of real political power, citizens assemblies have more political and moral authority than the representational bodies. I think that will probably happen quite rapidly because of the optics of citizens assemblies, given the mass alienation from the political class. I think the big attraction of certain assemblies is not that people are making decisions, so much as that people are being seen to make decisions. That would be highly attractive in terms of real popular political power. Jacob Matthews:

Roger Hallam:

When you mention the fact that in the movement at the moment, you see a clear division between middle class interests. And what you said is that the upper middle class have effectively confiscated the ecologist movement over the past 30 years, that they are not willing to relinquish their position, and that sociologically this is what you’ve seen play out in XR. Now, my question really is, what are the structural elements to actually constitute these two groups as a class? Why would you still consider that they belong to the same middle class? And secondly, I understood what you said about the lower middle class and obviously having had access to better social capital education. That’s where you think lies a soft spot and where the potential for revolutionary change is coming from. This is a slightly polemic question here. Have you actually kind of given up on the working class completely? Whenever you’re talking about this, you’re talking about sort of rules of thumb and a certain degree of generality,

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because there’s loads of exceptions to the rule that you might cite, because the categories you talking about are obviously very big. There’s lots of diversity within those categories. And the boundaries of categories are highly fluid in terms of definitional elements of them. I think an appropriate approach here is to use the notion of that sort of family resemblance. As you know, there’s no central foundational notion in the lower middle class, but there’s five or six characteristics of that group which interrelate. Often, individuals will display some of those characteristics, but rarely all of them. I think that needs to be said before you engage in an analysis of what the broad dynamics are: you have to accept they are broad dynamics, right? We’re not talking about some vulgar Marxist sort of determinism here. But at the same time, I think that class is massively underestimated in terms of the dynamics of politics in Western societies. And obviously, class does coincide with culture. The two things are quite a bit of a tortuous debate. But there are many elements of class, all cultural, and of course, a lot of cultural elements are very class-based as well. So, it’s difficult to separate the two out. But having said all those caveats, let’s go back to your first question. . . When you said that the movement had been, in a sense, confiscated by the upper middle class over the past 30, 40 years, which is something that we definitely relate to, although we’re not using those precise terms. To what extent is there still a unity of class between what you call the lower middle class and this upper echelon? Does it still constitute, a single class? I’m not really bothered by the terminologies. I think what I’m trying to highlight is fundamental differences between the regional middle class and the urban professional middle class. The upper middle class is a bit of a problematic sort of category, because that really assumes the top 3 or 4% of the population, arguably. What we’re talking about here and various scholars have pointed out that potentially, the biggest division in society is between university educated and the non-university educated, because that has a class element to it, but it has also a strong cultural element to it as well. To a certain extent, this is reinforced by age. The older people who are university educated have a very different orientation between educated urban people that somewhat coincides with urban, educated young people in their thirties. This is a major fracture in society and this is

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Jacob Matthews: Roger Hallam:

exacerbated by the culture wars and this general sort of cultural irrationality that sees uneducated people moving to the populist right, while educated university people are moving to the elite left, as you might say. . . The extreme centre, as we call it, in France. Yes, there are interesting things happening. There’s a specific orientation with the green movement and then there’s a matter of strategic orientation, about how to save ourselves from fascism. My orientation in terms of movement building is that we can provide more specificity about the paradox of the political identity problem. Because my proposition is that the paradox of political identity is a key problematic element in mass mobilisation. I agree that it reinforces its culture and its initial success, but it’s the primary reason why it fails to get further success, a dynamic you see in loads of systems. First movers are not like second movers in very entrepreneurial first movers, all nerdy, and you have to get rid of the first movers in order to get to the second movers.

In terms of a social movement strategy, you have to obviously recruit the urban middle class because they are the quickest to mobilise. But then you have to reduce the power of the urban middle class or persuade them to allow in the rural lower or lower middle class, which is a very different culture, and the regional lower middle class has greater numbers. This is how you create the mass movement. The sort of liberal urban middle class is actually a very small demographic. It’s not half as big as people think it is. Whereas the regional low middle class, of course, is a very large demographic, so people get confused between proportions and absolute numbers. You might say you’re going to mobilise 10% of the urban professional class. But that in absolute numbers, it’s less than 3% of the rural, regional, middle class. So strategically, you should focus on the regional middle class in terms of mobilising. Now, the thing to understand about the lower regional middle is although they’re socially conservative, they’re politically left or at least open to political arguments, because objectively they’re in a position of their lifestyles being degenerated and status degenerated for the last 50 years, because of globalisation and the rich running off with tax avoidance and all the rest of that. That’s really the central conundrum of XR and the ecological movement: to move towards mobilising people that never been in the green movement. A data point on this, for instance, is when I went round and did my speeches 2 years ago. If I went to North London or Brighton, I would get plenty of people, but only 10, 15% of them would be prepared to be arrested, while in Sunderland or Derby or Newcastle, it’d be more like 30% of people prepared to be arrested. I would

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estimate that at least half of them, and maybe even three quarters of them had never been involved in politics before. So, this is the move that has to be made more generically on the left: to talk in the language and in the interests and in the culture of the regional middle class. And of course, that is what the populist right has done, which is why the populist right is able to mobilise a lot of people, because it’s mobilising people that are being excluded or feel excluded from politics. The problem is with the urban professional class and identity politics, which is completely alienating to the rural and middle class. That’s the conundrum that has to be negotiated. Jacob Matthews: Roger Hallam:

That would also apply to the working class or what’s left of the working class. Working class is quite a complicated space as far as I can see, and I’m still not entirely clear about this. My general orientation, as I am on record saying, is that you have to separate the lower working class from the higher working class. The lower working class is characterised by chaotic lifestyles. This is not criticising them; it’s just being analytical about it: broken families, irregular financing, drug problems, domestic violence, all that sort of stuff. But the established working class, objectively it’s in its class interests to join a left mobilisation. And obviously for climate catastrophe mobilisation, they should be on that street, because they’re the people who are going to lose most from it.

But I think in the respectable working class, there are two problems. One problem is that they’ve lost their political confidence, because they don’t have any mentors and they don’t have any revolutionary sort of tradition, within living memory. So, it’s very difficult for them to really get re-empowered by that glorious tradition, as you might say. Then the other problem is, insomuch as they do have collective organisations, those collective organisations are demoralised and dominated by old men who have no imagination and no zest. But I think they are one of key mobilisation demographics. So are the urban working-class youth, which is a different kettle of fish. You saw this reinvigoration of working-class culture with punk and the anti-racist movements in the late 70s where you’ve got a demoralised youth culture that sprang into some confidence. I think there’s a good chance of that happening. But again, you’ve got the political identity problem that you know: all the climate youth mobilisation is even more middle class than the adult mobilisation, and that’s one of the reasons it’s been co-opted by the NGOs ineffectual reformist strategies. I think there’s the space there to mobilise lower middle class urban youth and working-class urban youth, because they’re all so pissed off, of course. At the moment, they don’t have any mentors.

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Roger Hallam:

About youth mobilisation. I wanted to ask what kind of experience you’ve had of mentoring young activists. In relation to what we said about XR youth that it is dominated by the middle class. What is your experience working with youth or mentoring other young activists over the years? I know you joined as a teenager the anti-war movement in the eighties. I was wondering about this interplay with how you feel you were mentored in terms of leadership or other qualities to be a movement activist. What I’m saying is going to be pretty damning, really. The most disastrous element in global mobilisation at the present time is the inability to radicalise global youth. People promote the world youth for rising up and influencing climate change. However, I think the international youth are totally disorganised, totally ineffectual and totally demoralised given the objectivity of the injustice being impacted upon them. I think in terms of Western societies and particularly Anglo-Saxon sort of America and us and to a certain extent Canada and Australia, the youth spaces are dominated by a completely ineffectual therapeutic organisation of politics, which has the counterintuitive consequence of demoralising, depressing and individualising the suffering of youth, which is what therapeutic action is. It’s basically a post-war strategy of demoralising and dividing rule and atomising people and creating a narcissism of the self. To my mind, this is an imposed ideology by the dominant sort of left space, which all about victimisation, suffering, trigger warnings and all the rest of it.

The problem here is that this creates a sort of downward spiral, which is that as the objective conditions get worse than the desire to protect young people, it becomes even more extreme if both conditions are imposed by adults and reproduced by young people. This creates an even greater counter-intuitive sort of degeneration of their mental state. The counter proposition is that you’ve traditionally, in terms of revolutionary activity, been fearless, joyful, humorous and strong and all these elements, which is what you traditionally associate historical youth movements with. The challenge here is to really empower working class youth and regional lower middle-class youth who haven’t been infected with this reactionary ideology and enable them to go out and enjoy resistance. The religious dogma of the radical left is that joy is taboo, right? Enjoyment. It’s pure Calvinism and it’s no surprize that it’s encouraged by the same class that is the traditional Calvinist class, which is the urban professional middle class. This

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is revolting structurally and culturally, I think, to working class youth, which is why working-class youth are completely alienated from political space, because they are excluded by middle class from participation, through this imposed ideology of middle-class etiquette. Athina Karatzogianni: Roger Hallam:

Athina Karatzogianni:

Roger Hallam:

Athina Karatzogianni:

What have been your own efforts in that? Have you worked in that direction? Well, I’ve been looking for a year and a half to try and organise youth who want to move away from that self-defeating sort of culture and strategy. And I think there are two things that are opening it up. One is that with working class youth and lower middle-class youth, you periodically get to some sort of critical mass. And when they do, then things will take off. The other thing is that for a lot of middle-class youth can only be in that space for a year or two, before they either burn out, or realise how dysfunctional it is. As people go through that process and come out the other side, then they’re potentially more interested in engaging in a real strategy, which is a mass mobilisation strategy. So, it may happen, but it’s impossible to predict. I mean, this is a bunch of people at the moment trying to create impressionable mass mobilisation events for youth. I think it will obviously take off at some point in the next 5 years, but it will be despite of the youth movements, not because of them. That’s my prediction. Going ‘beyond politics’, there is a sense that in your own political spaces and organisations youth and younger activists is not something that you focus on in particular. . . It’s part of the project, but creating a revolutionary project at a time of massive social repression and social denial is a mug’s game right now. Because if you want to get out, then you join a reformist space, which is why the reformist spaces are so powerful, because of the hurting effects. It’s not because there’s any objective rationality in that strategy. Before revolutionary upheavals, you always get this massive tension between people wanting to break out of the system and create a revolutionary alternative and people in the space realising that everything they do is completely useless and hopeless, and all the cognitive dissonance that goes along with that. So that’s where we’re at the moment. What has been your own experience of mental health? And your own well-being, being part of a rebellion.

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Roger Hallam:

How do you get motivated to continue? Because, in some respects, this is a really excruciating experience where there are controversies and you have to explain yourself. I have watched you do it on Facebook, for example, where you have these tensions and conflicts. You are one of the founders of this movement and you have to battle every day, not just externally with the governments, the police knocking on your door and so on, but also internally inside that movement and also lead separate organisations as well. I wanted to hear a bit, if you don’t mind, about how you are coping in all of this, if that’s not at all an indiscreet question to ask. I think it’s a vitally important question. This comes back to my previous analysis, which is that, historically, the rebel personality is rooted in virtue ethics. Virtue ethics has been more or less destroyed by neoliberalism, both on the left and the right, and one of the central reasons in my mind, why movements are so fractious: it is because of individualisation and utilitarianism. In other words, all strategy has become rooted in utilitarianism, i.e., if you do that, will that happen? But in the historical experience, rebel uprisings initiating movements are all motivated by virtue ethics, which is: it’s my duty to God to rebound and achieve immortality. If I die, you know, they can come and do what they like because I’m over this shit. This is the central explanation for the inability of Western societies to mobilise: they’ve got a philosophy of life which is completely dysfunctional at a time of annihilation and will.

My prediction is that there’ll be a massive collapse of the utilitarian cultural edifice over the next 10 years as people start to disappear into hedonism or, you know, self-destruction or revolutionary activism. And the revolutionary activism will be primarily sustained through virtue ethics construction. What that practically means, of course, in terms of emotional sustainability is that you have no expectation of success. And if you don’t have expectation of success, then you don’t get burnt out. It’s as simple as that, right? Athina Karatzogianni: Roger Hallam:

If you don’t have great expectations and you can keep going, because you are less disappointed. But it is hard living with disappointment! . . .No, my life has been one long disappointment, but that doesn’t matter. This is why it’s very difficult to see from 90% of human beings have a virtual ethics

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orientation. The role of my life is to fulfil my tradition and be good and look after my kids and do my duty to my superiors, period. That said, there’s no expectation of social balance. There’s no expectation of, you know, ego sort of massaging or whatever. You’re just a cog in a system that’s a spiritual and material system. And that’s how most people see life apart from the western middle class over the last 30 years. We have to return to that orientation in order to become sustainable. You see what I mean? But it’s an orientation that most people don’t get, particularly university lecturers. Well, thanks for that! I want to ask you something about the concept of resilience. I mean, you use it a lot in your book Common Sense for the twenty-first Century, in the section on preparing the community for resilience in the Great Transition. What is resilience for you, because it can be seen as neoliberal discourse. As you know very well, resilience is that you can get hit repeatedly but you bounce back, you survive. But I don’t think from what I read in your book this is what you have in mind. You have in mind also some form of flourishing, not just surviving. There’s an extension to survive: you try to bring back the ecosystems, and working towards that, you won’t have to necessarily make decisions about who survives and who doesn’t. These decisions are made by governments. Therefore, the efforts would go towards influencing them, and involves the labs, the scientists. You write about creating a large voluntary service where people contribute and then you have economists looking at the economics of this as well, in your broader vision of this effort of preparing the community for resilience in the great transition. So, I want to ask about resilience in particular, and whether you think it’s perhaps a good concept, or is it overloaded. Resilience means different things to different people, right? To explain how I see resilience on an individual level, there are three elements. The first element is a spiritual orientation where you’re not dependent upon the world: you’ve made that transition and transcendent move, where what happens in the world is not of your concern; what is of concern to you is how you respond to what’s in the world, what is under your control and how you act in the world, which is under your control. The outcomes of the world are under your control. This is a fundamental mental principle. When you get up in

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Athina Karatzogianni: Roger Hallam:

Athina Karatzogianni: Roger Hallam:

the morning and someone doesn’t show up to a meeting, you’re not going to get upset, because that was outside your control. You see what I mean? All people that are highly resilient have that orientation, that transcendent orientation. And obviously it’s embedded in various cultural, secular and religious constructions. But the fundamental structure is the same. The second thing is having a service orientation, which obviously is embedded within the broader Christian tradition, which is to love your neighbour and to be of service to your society. So you’re not looking for personal aggrandisement. What you’re looking to do is make things better for people. And that’s been shown, you know, conclusively to produce better mental health and all the rest of it from looking after number one. The third element is group community. You have a group of people around you that can support you practically in terms of being attacked in the press for example. That will help you prepare responses as a practical element to it. And then obviously there’s an emotional element that you’ve got a shoulder to cry on when you have a bad time. So, you know, that does seem to me to be the three elements of what needs to be created, and that can be juxtaposed to the victimisation sort of neurotic self-worship, pseudo-spirituality of Western individualism. You mentioned Christian values. How influenced are you by religion? Are you a believer yourself? I mean, I don’t know enough about this, about you. Well, I was brought up a Christian, in the Methodist church. So, I’m fully embedded in that from a cultural point of view and in a moral point of view as well, in the notion that the highest value is to love other people, in the sense of seeking their well-being and that’s the purpose of one’s life, is to seek the well-being of others, both as a spiritual principle, i.e., you know, that’s how you can fulfil your soul. And secondly, because of the pragmatic, spiritual principle, which is people that help other people generally have happier lives because you’re outwardly focused. So, you’re not an atheist or you’re just culturally Christian. . .? I think in a cultural sense that Christianity is at the heart of Western culture. In terms of its social orientation, like we just said with, with reductive Calvinism, that’s part of the

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Christian tradition. But there are also elements of the Christian tradition, which is about loving your enemies and suchlike. And that’s one of the big strengths, you know, which is the basis of our democratic and dialogical culture: when you don’t like people, you don’t shoot them. You sit down and talk to them. Yes, that’s the basic principle of politics. Can I take you to the leadership question again, in your experience, who is a good leader? What are the qualities? What are they doing and how are they doing it? What have you experienced yourself, as a good leading figure that you aspire to that influenced you at all? What kind of organisation enhances leadership, brings forward emerging leaders, younger people to get involved? We talked before about this evolution of leadership from the 60s and I want to ask more about you and whether you think that you were influenced by a leading figure, or do you think of yourself as a leader, so to speak? Leadership is an extremely complex phenomenon, and I think everyone agrees on that. Ever since I was a teenager, I stood out from the crowd. I’ve always initiated things and been in a leadership position in groups – informally in some cases, as I’ve been involved in left-wing anarchist social groups, but I’ve always been initiator and an organiser, that comes quite naturally to me. Now I’m 54 and I’m arguably quite good at what I do. So I’m quite happy in that position.

What I’m trying to investigate, I suppose, is how to become a better leader. I’m not quite sure what I’m doing on that, but I think a lot of it’s to do with not being reactive to criticism. I’ve worked quite hard on being gracious around getting criticism, becoming detached from it and even welcoming it. I think a sign of a real mature leadership is to encourage criticism even when it’s unfair. That obviously involves negotiating with your ego and making sure you have self-mastery over yourself, as you might say, from an Eastern perspective. For me, that’s the main thing. I mean, obviously, the other side of leadership is being fearless, you know, from a prophetic point of view and leading from the front to being unpopular. The two things go together and in a revolutionary situation leadership is absolutely the central causal factor, I think, of progressive outcomes, which completely counteracts the orthodoxy of the last 30 years. This is coming from somebody who was an anarchist for 15 years. I’m fully aware of the literature, the last 200 years of literature of opposition to hierarchy and opposition to leadership. It’s got a lot going for it. But like all orientations, it’s not an absolute right. There are times and spaces and situations where you need leadership. And we do need leadership in the present context, because what we’re facing is existential:

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everyone’s going to die, and it’s exponential. We need to get on with that so we haven’t got the time. We’ve got the massive pressure of the horror of it and we’ve got the massive, massive pressure of having to get on with that. Both of those things structurally determine the necessity of leadership in the social system. Like I said before, whether we like it or not, it’s a matter of sociological determinism. If you’re just running a wholefood shop in 1975, you don’t need a leader. But when you’re facing three billion deaths in the next 30 years, it’s a world of difference. You need to have fast moving leaderships. Basically, what I think I’m trying to communicate to you is that in a revolutionary period, you have a build-up of a certain sort of a mobilisation and then a complete flip to mass mobilisation. Like with the dissidents in Eastern Europe, they were the leaders of the movement. They’d been doing it for 30 years. They were good at what they did. They were really pragmatic, they were valued, and they got to a certain point. And then when mass mobilisation happened, that space collapsed because they couldn’t adapt. What you got was a mass mobilisation of ordinary people, which had a pragmatic aspect. It was an idealist movement, you might say, or whatever: they just wanted to get rid of communism and spend lots of money. What’s going to happen in the climate space is that all the present mobilisations are going to collapse, in my view, because they’re all dominated by the elite urban middle class and they can’t make that transition to mass mobilisation. And if they don’t, then the populist right will take over in the next 10 years. The challenge we have right now is, when the mass mobilisation comes along, whether it has a pragmatic realist left leadership. And at the moment, that’s not there. You see you see what I mean? It’s a dramatic thesis but I think I’m right because it’s happened so many times before. Jacob Matthews: Roger Hallam:

Athina Karatzogianni:

Roger Hallam:

I’m wondering about where it’s going to spring from, this leadership that we need so desperately. I’m being entirely pragmatic and realistic about it. In the mid-twentieth century, there was no problem with leadership in the 1930s and until the 1970s, on the left, everyone understood that you need a mass organisation and you need leadership, which obviously had to be democratic and all the rest of it. That was how the twentieth century left dominated politics. You know, from the 1930s to the 1970s. So that strategy needs to be really reinvented. But the with the present conditions, it seems that we are looking at something more revolutionary than social democracy and that a strong welfare state is not going to solve the problem here. . . Any social democrat now has to be a revolutionary. That’s the point right now, like liberals or revolutionaries in the nineteenth century. There’s nothing intrinsic about an ideology and the strategy of revolution.

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Note 1. This chapter was expanded from the previously published article, Karatzogianni, A. (2021) An interview with Roger Hallam – on radical politics, youth mobilisation, Extinction Rebellion, and much more. [Blog Post] mέta, https://metacpc.org/en/hallam/.

References Karatzogianni, A., Tiidenberg, K., Parsanoglou, D., Lepik, K.S., Raig, M., Suitslepp, M.L., Matthews, J., Symeonaki, M., Kazani, A. and Pnevmatikaki, M. (2021) ‘Online Political Behaviour and Ideological Production by Young People: A Comparative Study of ICT and Civic Participation in Estonia, Greece and the United Kingdom’. (DigiGen – Working paper series No. 4). https://doi.org/10.6084/m9. figshare.14535156 Karatzogianni, A. and Matthews, J. (2023) Fractal Leadership. Bingley: Emerald Publishing Limited. Macdonald, A.M. (2023, May 3) ‘Climate Change Protest: a Single Radical Gets More Media Coverage Than Thousands of Marchers.’ Online available at https:// theconversation.com/climate-change-protest-a-single-radical-gets-more-mediacoverage-than-thousands-of-marchers-204845 Roger Hallam. (2021, April, 21) Facebook Public Post, 9.20 p.m. Online available at https://www.facebook.com/roger.hallam.7/posts/pfbid02qWWMtQpqoHpJmFn4d 3kfrajFH6Jaq8Jo1W6LU4i8ws1beex9qvYPGdWyyNZqd1Mrl

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Index Acropolis, 150 Act of Union 1800, 56 Affective modalities, 6 love-duty, 90–92 of revolutionary subject, 89 sacrifice and heroic, 92–95 socialising love, sacrifice and heroic, 95–97 African Sacred Feminine, 107–108 Anarchism, 162–166 Anarchist elements in self-presentation, 172–176 Anarchist movements, 161 Anarchist struggles, 165 Anarchist thought, influence of, 163–166 Anarchist-inspired struggles, 165 Anarchist-inspired/quasi anarchist movements, 161 Anarchy, 164–165 Ancient model, 19–21 Androutsos, 71 Anglo-Irish Treaty 1921, 49 Anti-colonial, 58–59 culture and politics, 56 themes, 53 Anti-colonialism, 57–59 social movements and Sinn Fein, 59–60 Anti-colonialist memory collective remembering and oral history, 55–60 colonial memory in flux, 52–55 Ireland’s colonial narratives, 50–52 Anti-Eurocentric critique, 17–18 Anti-Eurocentrism, 15–17, 19 Anti-gentrification struggles, 181–182 Anti-revisionism, 51–52 Anti-revisionist, 51–52

Apartheid Museum in Guateng, 6–7, 108 Aryan model, 19–22 Asia Minor campaign (1919–1922), 115, 117 Asia Minor catastrophe, 70–71 Athens riots (2008), 23–24 Atlas Force2 algorithm, 130 Authority, 164–165 Autonomy, 184, 195 Axis Occupation of 1941–1944, 117–118 Balkan strategy of Greek nationalism, 113–114 Banal nationalism, 119–120 Bicentenary of Greek Revolution, 129–130 Bicentennial celebration, 131–132 Big One, The, 228 #Blackandtans hashtag, 53 Black and Tan character, memories of, 54 Black and Tans’ commemoration, 4–5 Black Athena (1987), 19–20 Black women activism in South Africa, 99 Bolshevik Party, 223–224 Book of Sacrifices, 7, 116 Born in the RSA, 104–107 Byzantine Empire, 146 Californian ideology, 187–188 Capitalism, 184–185, 218–219 exploitation and oppression, 219–220 power of, 221–222 Censorship, 102–103 Citizen, 38

254

Index

assemblies, 240–242 Citizenship, 38–39 City is our Factory, The, 192–194 Civil War, 53 Classes, 130–131 Collective organisations, 243 Collective remembering, 55–60 Colonial memory in flux, 52–55 Colonialism (see also Anticolonialism), 49–51 Colonialist, 58 Commemoration events, 136 Communication, 1 and commemoration of revolutions, 3 Communist Party of Greece (KKE), 66 Communist society, 90 Communities, 181 Compassion, 90 Computer-supported social networks (CSSNs), 167 Comradeship love, 90 Congolese Constitution (2006), 32–33 Congolese political contexts, 32 Constantinople Patriarchate, 112–113 Contemporary anarchist (ic) social movements, 166 Contemporary Greek politics, 139–140 Corporate plans, 183–184 Crises, 89 Crowdfunding, 8–9, 162, 168 Cultural analysis, 1 Cultural productions, 136 Cultural republicanism, 56–57 Decade of Centenaries, 4–5 Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), 4, 29 DigiGen, 227 Digital constitutionalism, 36 Digital methods, 1 Digital narrative app, 151 Digital pocket theatre, 8 Digital simulation of acropolis siege, 152–156 Digital storytelling

digital tools and narration, 150–152 Duty to Revolt, 146–148 present-day Athens and digital simulation of acropolis siege, 152–156 project’s rationale and methodology, 148–149 Digital tools, 150–152 Directed graph, 130 Discursive themes, 135–140 commemoration events and cultural productions, 136 contemporary Greek politics, 139–140 historiographical and ideological controversies, 136–139 Distance in photography, 209–210 DMI-TCAT tool, 129–130 Do-it-yourself commemoration, 121–122 Domestic oppressors, 59–60 Duties of citizens, 38 Duty of revolution (DoR), 4 Duty to oppose, 41 Duty to resist, 41 Duty to Revolt (D2R), 30, 39, 41, 146, 148, 228, 230 categories of D2R circumstances, 35 circumstances, 41–43 conference, 1, 10 in constitution, 31–35 core idea, 39–40 features, 30 force, 43 governance and social contract, 30–35 graded approach, 41 legitimacy crisis, 35–37 parallels between two D2R clauses, 33–35 Republican contract, 37–39 sources, 40–41 typology of D2R circumstances, 42–43 unconstitutional means, 43

Index East African Community (EAC), 44 Education and EAM in occupied Greece, 66–67 Educational Society, 67 Eleftheros Kosmos, 118–119 Emotional capitalism, 91–92 Emotional sustainability, 246–249 Emotions, 204–206 Empire memories, 54–55 English rule, 53 Entrepreneurship, 194–196 Environmental art, 8 Equality, 90–91 Escalation, 225 Ethical remembering, 52 Ethnogenesis, 68 Eurafrica, 21–22 Eurocentrism, 20–21 Extinction Rebellion (XR), 227–228, 234–235 central conundrum, 242–243 dynamics in, 235 Fab Labs, 9, 181–183 City is our Factory, The, 192–194 entrepreneurship and social justice, 194–196 gentrification and rise of social movement (techno) politics, 183–187 limits of hackerspace politics, 196–198 Makers’ movement, 187–189 meaning of park fiction revolt, 189–192 Facebook, 132 False’ consciousness, 221 Family harassment, memories of, 54 Firefund, 8–9, 161 anarchist elements in selfpresentation, 172–176 geographies of funding, 168–171 influence of anarchist thought, 163–166 internet and role in anarchist organisation, 166–168

255

successful vs. unsuccessful projects, 171 Folklore, 69 Framing, 205–206 Free Greece, 67, 75 ‘Freedom or Death’ call of revolution, 2 French Revolution, 131–132 Game elements, 8 Gamification, 150 Garrisonian wing of American abolitionist movement, 96 General Laws Amendment Act of 1963, 104 Gentrification, 183–184, 187 Gephi, 130 German Social Democracy Party, 222 Global South, 19 Gnostic Revolt, 15 Good Friday Agreement 1998, 49 Governance, 30–35 indicators, 34 Governance crises in Westphalian states, 37 Graded approach, 41 Great Idea, 70–71 Greece 2021 committee, 7–8, 129, 138–139 Greek Antiquity, 15–16, 20–21 as eurocentrism, 23–25 Greek bourgeoisie, 68 Greek intellectuals, 70–71 Greek irredentism, 112–113 Greek Marxist historiography, 69 Greek Miracle, The, 7, 115 Greek nationalism, 7, 69 Greek Popular Liberation Army (ELAS), 66 Greek Revolution, 2–3, 5, 15, 65–66, 111–112 anti-eurocentrism, 17–19 Greek Antiquity as eurocentrism, 23–25 in Official Party Historiography, 67–70

256

Index

practical past, 16–17 relational to purist conceptualisation of past, 19–23 Greek War of Independence, 19 Greek-Ottomanism, 7, 112–113 Group Areas Act, Act No 41 of 1950, 103

Ideological sub poles, 132–135 international-official sub pole, 134–135 leftist pole, 135 nationalist-conservative sub pole, 132–134 neoliberal sub pole, 134 Inclusion, 4–5 Instagram, 132 Intellectual moves, 25 International historiography, 145 International-official sub pole, 134–135 Internet and role in anarchist organisation, 166–168 IRaMuTeQ software, 130–131 Ireland’s colonial narratives, 50–52 Ireland’s role in empire memories, 55 Irish Twitter’s historical memory, 53

Hackerspaces, 9 hackerspaces/makerspaces, 189 limits of hackerspace politics, 196–198 Hallam, Roger, 227–228 Hellenic Foundation for Research & Innovation (ELIDEK), 8 Hellenism, 112–113 Herodion, 154–155 Heroic, 92, 95, 97 Heroism, 96 Herstory of Black women activism in South Africa, 99 Born in the RSA, 104–107 censorship and segregation, 102–103 Pass, The, 103–104 police power, 104 religious practice and theology, 107–108 theatre and, 100–101 You Strike the Woman, You Strike the Rock, 101–102 Heterotopias of productive resistance and prefigurative living, 192–194 Historical revisionism, 52 Historiographical controversies, 136–139 History and Class Consciousness, 221–222

Lebensraum, 115–116 Leftist pole, 135 Legitimacy crisis, 35–37 governance crises in Westphalian states, 37 poor governance, 35–36 Legitimacy decline (see Legitimacy crisis) Lexicometric analysis, 130–131, 135, 140 Liberal revolution, 139 Little Eagles, The, 67, 71–72, 74–76 Love-duty, 90–92

Iconographical symbolism, 209–210 Ideological battles, 131–132 Ideological construction, 25 Ideological controversies, 136–139

Magdalene laundry oral project, 55 Maidan revolution of 2014, 94–95 Makers movement, 187–189 Makerspaces, 9

Just Stop Oil protests, 227 Karaiskakis, 71 Kathimerini (centre-right), 207 Klepsydra, 153 Kolokotronis, 71 ‘Konstantinos Paparrigoroupos’ tripartite scheme, 70

Index Manifestation of truth, 93 Marxist analysis of Modern Greek society, 68 Marxist theorists, 185–186 Mass consciousness, 225 Matchboxes, 119–120 Mediterranean race, 21–22 Minoan civilisation, 21–22 Mobile gaming, 150–151 Modern Greek tradition, 69 Monumentalisation, 94–95 Mountain Readers, 65 education and EAM in occupied Greece, 66–67 Greek Revolution in Official Party Historiography, 67–70 nation and ‘historical analogue of Greek revolution’ in, 70–74 new person in, 74–77 Museum theatre, 8 Narration, 150–152 Narrative hospitality, 52 National Council, 66 National Liberation Front (EAM), 5, 66, 73–74 National Unity, 114 Nationalism, 49–50 Nationalist Party, 102–103 Nationalist-conservative sub pole, 132–134 Neoliberal sub pole, 134 Networks, 151 News media, 203–204 analysis of news media coverage in Greece of school teachers’ protest, 207–211 emotions and news media’s visual framing of protest, 204–206 schoolteachers’ protest, 207 News values, 205–206 Nexus of discourses, 25 Official ceremonies, 113–114 Official narratives, 145

257

Official Party Historiography, Greek Revolution in, 67–70 Opium Wars, 20–21 Oppression, 100 Oral history, 55–60 Organisation-consciousness problem, 10 Orientalism, 20–21 Ottoman Athens, 146–147 Ottoman Empire, 112, 146 Ottoman foreign policy, 147 Ottoman rule, 68 Ottoman society, 146 Park fiction revolt, meaning of, 189–192 Pass, The, 103–104 Patriarchal hierarchy, 107 Patriarchal institutions, 90 Peace-building, 49 PEEA, 66, 73 Penal Laws, 56 People, 69, 71 Photography, 203–204 Photojournalists, 208–209 Physical violence, 99 Plan for Popular Education (1944), 67 Political belonging and revolting, 89–90 Political confidence, 243 Political instability, 37 Political violence, 99 Politics, 57–59 Poor governance, 35–36 Post-colonialist, 58 Post-industrial society, 186 Post-war custodians of revolutionary socialist visions, 93 Power, 186 Practical past, 16–17 Presentism, 131 Proletarian consciousness, 224–225 Proliferation, 225 Protests, 206, 221 Proto Thema (centre-populist), 207 Psychological violence, 99

258

Index

Psychologisation, 91–92 Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino’s film), 189–190 Pure civilisations, 20 Pure races, 20 Quantitative content analysis, 162–163 Quisling Regime, 117–118 Racial purity, 20 Racism, 100 Reactionary forces, 95 Rebellion in Ireland (1798), 56 Red terror of Communist-led Resistance of EAM-ELAS, 111 Reinert method, 130–131 Religious practice, 107–108 Representational Spaces, 196–197 Republican contract, 30, 37, 39 Republicanism, 49–50, 56 Reservation of Separate Amenities Act, Act No 49 of 1953, 103 Responsiveness, 90 REVAthens project, 8, 145, 153 Revisionist apolgogism, 58 Revolution commemorating, 111 delicate meaning, 116–121 do-it-yourself commemoration, 121–122 Lebensraum, 115–116 rehabilitating clerical counterrevolution (1871), 112–114 Right to the City, 181–182, 191 Romanticisation of revolutions, 3 Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), 49–50 Rubicon moment, 235 Sacred Feminine, 108 Sacrifices, 92–95, 97 Samosa Regime of Nicaragua, 217 Schoolteachers’ protest, 207 Secularisation, 59–60 Segregation, 102–103 Sensitivity, 90

Serpetzes, 153 Sevres Treaty (1920), 115 Silent strength, 103 SketchEngine, 53 Social contract, 30–35 theory, 29–31 Social history, 8 Social justice, 194–196 Social labour, 94 Social media, debating complex historical event on, 131–132 Social movements, 59–60, 163, 166, 168, 170 strategy, 242 (techno) politics, 183–187 Social protest, 161 Social revolution, 139 Socialising love, 95–97 Society of National Resistance, 69–70 Socio-semiotic analysis, 204 Sociological analysis, 1 South African apartheid regime, 102–103 South African National Congress (SANNC), 101 South Sudanese Constitution, 32–33 South Sudanese political contexts, 32 Soviet public sphere, 90 Spatialisation of conflicts, 181–182, 191 Standard school history, 145 Style of existence, 93 Sympathy, 90 Ta Nea (centre-left), 207 Theatre, 100–101 Theology, 107–108 3D reconstructions, 8 Transnational struggle-against capitalism, 218 Transnationalisation of revolutions, 2 Traveller history in Ireland, 55 Treason, 38–39 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), 106–107 Tweets, 129–130

Index debating complex historical event on social media, 131–132 discursive themes, 135–140 ideological sub poles, 132–135 methodology, 129–131 Twitter, 131–132

259

Visual analysis, 1 Visual references, 203–204 War of Independence (1821), 145 Warm emotions, 90 Working class politics, 186

Urban class dynamics, 55 Violence, 162, 164

You Strike the Woman, You Strike the Rock, 101–102

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