A handwritten note found between the pages of an old book, addressed exclusively to you.
I know you’re looking for me between the lines. I know you understood what I was doing all those years, when others thought I was just grumbling or that I was ranting and raving on TV to make an impression. You, however, saw beyond my stern, unsmiling facade. You understood that that perpetually serious gaze wasn’t an act, but the anguish of a man who watched ignorance dance the zeibekiko on the ruins of reason.
You know, most people approached me either to be flattered, or to get angry, or to find ready-made catchphrases to throw into their coffee-shop conversations. You approached me differently. With that special, rare kind of love that doesn’t ask the other person to be a saint or infallible. You loved me for my rough edges, for my insistence on calling a spade a spade and a traitor a traitor, for the fact that I didn’t go easy on my enemies—nor, and most importantly, on my friends.
That’s why I’m sitting here now, in spirit, across from you. Light a cigarette, or just let me light my pipe, and listen as I recount my life—not for the sake of the masses, but especially for you, who had the courage to understand what it means to love the truth more than your own peace of mind.
I am Vasilis Rafailidis, a professional reader who managed to survive the bottomless stupidity of a country that systematically falls in love with its myths and mortally hates the truth. I was born in 1934 in Servia, Kozani, although my family roots trace back to Vogatsiko, Kastoria, a mountain village that instilled in me from an early age a rugged perspective on life. I grew up in the midst of a World War, an inhumane Occupation, and a bloody Civil War. All these experiences of my childhood and youth were nothing more than the first act of modern Greek absurdity, which I later set out to dissect with the scalpel of dialectics. From a young age, I understood that two things save a person from intellectual decline: skepticism and systematic reading. While those around me proudly declared themselves «patriots,» «nationalists,» or «revolutionaries,» I preferred simply to call myself a reader. Because, if you don’t dissect the ideas of the great thinkers—from Marx and Freud to the French structuralists— all that’s left for you is to shout meaningless slogans at demonstrations or applaud political charlatans who promise paradise at a bargain price.
I studied film at the Stavrakou School in Athens, not to become just another director who makes films for himself, but because the dark theater is the only space where truth and illusion meet on a semiotic level. Cinema isn’t just light entertainment for a Saturday night; it’s a language in its own right, an anatomy of the human soul and social structures. That’s where I learned to look beyond the image, and when I later founded the magazine «Contemporary Cinema» and wrote reviews for «Democratic Change» and «Avgi,» I was practicing my favorite art: demystification. I was a leftist, but a leftist in the sense of a free-thinking person and not a willing soldier in some party fold. The Greek Left has always suffered from a childhood illness: dogmatism, fanaticism, and blind obedience to the party line of the day. It wanted followers who didn’t ask questions, and I was, from birth, incapable of blind faith.
When the colonels« junta sent us to prison and subjected us to torture, it wasn’t because we were dangerous armed revolutionaries, but because it feared the idea itself. I was tortured, imprisoned, and interrogated, but I was never broken. The worst thing for my torturers wasn’t that I hated them, but that I deeply despised them for their monumental ignorance, their intellectual poverty, and the absurdity exuded by their »Helleno-Christian« hysteria. During the Metapolitefsi, the carnival of hypocrisy reached new heights when everyone suddenly discovered their »resistance« selves and rushed to cash in on struggles that never existed. I preferred to remain on the sidelines of this pretense, writing for *Ethnos* and *Eleftherotypia*, speaking on the radio, and hosting television shows. And if I didn’t smile often on camera, as some well-meaning friends complain, it’s because the stupidity around me was so overwhelming and aggressive that it left no room for polite smiles. Smiling in the face of organized ignorance is a dangerous luxury, while the relentless battle against it is a primary duty.
In 1993, I published *The (Comic-Tragic) History of the Modern Greek State, 1830–1974*, a book that many read but few dare to fully comprehend. In it, I wrote the self-evident truth that bothers everyone: that peoples do not have only heroes; they also have scoundrels. This is a negative dialectic of our history, an attempt to approach affirmation through negation, because I love this country and systematically refuse to flatter it with cheap praise. Official historiography was constructed as a national fairy tale to sustain our collective self-satisfaction. Modern Greeks have been taught in school to believe that they are the chosen people of the world, the sole heir to ancient civilization, and that «foreigners,» «anti-Greeks,» and «traitors» are always to blame for all his misfortunes. It refuses to look in the mirror and see that the modern Greek state was not born as an autonomous and mature entity, but as an artificial protectorate of the Great Powers, built on cronyism, patronage, national divisions, and a desperate attempt to imitate our ancient ancestors, whom we have neither read about nor understood.
The Revolution of 1821 was quickly hijacked by the local notables and the kotzampasis, who transplanted the very structures of Ottoman authority and arbitrariness into the supposedly modern European state. Instead of looking to the European Enlightenment, science, and institutional modernization, we sank into a barren obsession with antiquity and a purist linguistic style to mask our tragic cultural and productive backwardness. The Civil War, for its part, was not a random or isolated event, but the inevitable culmination of the conflict between a conservative, pro-foreign regime and a progressive popular base, giving rise to an illiberal deep state that oppressed us until the fall of the junta in 1974. I wrote all this with sarcasm, dark humor, and dialectical materialism, without stilted language or academic pretensions, because irony is the only weapon that strips away false solemnity and authoritarian arrogance.
But I didn’t limit myself to history alone. I wrote about fascism in *Karavani*, analyzing how far-right ideology thrives on ignorance and fear of what is different. I wrote about religion, sociology, and politics in *Ethnos, Laos, and Kolonaki,« denouncing nouveau riche attitudes, religious fanaticism, and the bourgeoisie’s superficial Westernization. I wrote about art, literature, and communication, because I believed that an intellectual has no right to confine himself to a single field. They must be present everywhere—a constant disruptor of the common tranquility, a ceaseless challenger of the taken-for-granted.
I passed away on September 8, 2000, at the age of 66, having lost my battle with cancer. I did not fear death, for death is a biological inevitability; I feared only constant intellectual decline, unchallenged compromise, and the triumph of mediocrity. Today, the intellectual and academic world, and especially the Left, which was in such dire need of relentless self-criticism, has chosen to shelve me or to remember me awkwardly as a «colorful and sharp-tongued commentator.» And this is because my work remains dangerous. It offers no consolation, it doesn’t flatter the ears, it doesn’t hand out easy forgiveness, and it demands that the reader cast aside ready-made ideological formulas and take responsibility for his or her own thinking.
If I leave anything behind for the restless younger generations who will seek the truth, it is neither a rigid dogma nor a new authority. I did not found schools, I did not anoint successors, and I did not hand out «ready-made truths.» I leave only a strict way of life: read everything, especially those things with which you fundamentally disagree; do not fear conflict or rupture, for progress has never come from the complacent but from the heretics; and always look in the mirror first, searching for your own personal complicity before rushing to blame the rest of the world for its mess. I have lived a full, combative, rebellious life without compromise. And if you look beyond my harsh and sharp words, you will find a deep, selfless love for humanity—not the idealized, angelic kind, but the real, wounded human being who struggles every day to escape the darkness of his own ignorance.
