Archive note: This text comes from the old archive of Nomika Epilekta and is preserved with care for historical and informational reading.

That February day of 2012 must have been nightmarish for the political leaders of ND, PASOK and LAOS, as well as for their staffs. The three leaders had received the fifty-page English text of the memorandum in the morning, since the meeting with Loukas Papadimos was scheduled for noon. However, the meeting was delayed for several hours because the president of LAOS, careful, not the president of Laos, but the president of LAOS, refused to sit at the table with an English text and asked for an official translation of the document by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs first. The most orthodox member of the Holy Trinity would not sit at the table with the text of the Unholy Troika written in the barbaric English language.

Nationalist cries were not absent either. Among other things, the following grandiloquent statement was heard: A poor state can recover. A humiliated nation never can. Let us put an end to the constant flow of their unreasonable demands, saving the most precious thing: our national dignity.

This event raises many questions:

FIRST, if we agree that we must always put first things first, as we say in the language of the heretics, delaying such important talks and decisions because formalities, procedures and stamps are missing is the expression of a mentality that has until now crushed us beyond measure.

SECOND, on the merits, if the political leader who raised the problem does not know English, a serious question of qualifications also arises. Only if you are going to be leader of North Korea can you nowadays shut yourself inside yourself and ignore the everywhere-present English language, whether we like it or not. Even GAP understood that a political leader without a laptop and English is unthinkable.

THIRD, it is time to think seriously whether nationalist cries and attachment to symbols and formalities make us ridiculous while we imagine that they elevate us. The bitter truth is that this is exactly what happens, and at some point we must acquire the ability to see things three-dimensionally, not only to see the side visible from our own side. In other words, to see also through the eyes of others. And others see nationalist cries as absurdities.

Besides, this is perfectly clear if we think about how the nationalist shouting of other peoples appears to us. Just watch an excerpt from a speech by Marine Le Pen of the French National Front, and you will immediately understand what I mean.

National dignity is never advanced by cries and shouting, nor by intolerance or paranoia. It is advanced by superiority, intelligent speech and intelligent actions, where we have a major deficit.

A classic example is the taxi driver who delivers fanatically nationalist sermons to his customers during the ride, expresses his disgust for every foreigner, and then a tourist gets into his taxi and he cheats him. In the end, does this great super-patriot advance Greece, or does he defame it? And to complete the picture of absurdity on which we insist so stubbornly, what usually happens is that this taxi driver gives such sermons of hate while at the same time his car is decorated with icons and crucifixes, and he loudly declares his devotion to the Church and Christian ideals. The fact that he does not see the contradiction should worry us. Unfortunately, today there is such a bottomless lack of self-knowledge in a people that otherwise claims intellectual ownership of know thyself.

It goes without saying that things are somewhat similar with the religious devotion of the modern Greek. Christian ideals are located in censers, the lighting of oil lamps, blessings, making the sign of the cross and such things. When you are very devout, you wait for the priest carrying the holy gifts to pass so that you may touch his vestments and receive at least a few electrons from the magical radiation emitted by the wearer of the vestments.

Christian morality is limited to whatever has to do with sex. When we say that a woman is moral, we mean that she has intercourse neither before marriage nor outside marriage. She may be a liar, a thief, a schemer, malicious; we are not interested, as long as she does not do it. Thus morality too has become a formal matter, judged robotically, just as Tiresias judges the creditworthiness of prospective borrowers.

And the attachment to forms and symbols continues. At a recent mayoral swearing-in, a metropolitan bishop was present and, after the rite, delivered a little speech. Immediately afterward, a communist member of the municipal council took the floor and said that under law number such-and-such of 2010, the participation of priests in the swearing-in is not provided for. When the metropolitan heard this, he had a fit of hysteria and chaos broke out, a real comedy; after all, that is exactly where our formalism worship leads, to comedy. You can enjoy the spectacle online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EH-V6Zkwx4w.

It is worth pausing, however, also on the content of the statement of the communist, according to whom whatever is not provided for by law is forbidden. We could write an entire book on this perception. That is, whatever is not expressly permitted by law is forbidden? Can you imagine such a society? Was this perhaps how the societies created by communists in the countries where they prevailed were? In any case, the law of 2010 did not provide for this intervention by the communist during the swearing-in either.

And one important detail brings us back to our subject, formalism worship: the communist asked for his statement to be recorded in the minutes. As if anything changes whether such nonsense is or is not written in the minutes. That is, the communist's whole intervention took the form of a procedural formality, on procedure, as we hear all the assembly-obsessed activists constantly repeat. They go to the assembly from morning until night, and two out of three interventions are on procedure. Rarely on the substance.

It is a pity that Greek cinema has now fallen into decline, because all this is ideal material for comedies that would produce abundant laughter. If we turned these things into comedies, at least we would create culture. But when comedy becomes reality, then not only do we fail to produce culture, we also degrade our country and remove from ourselves every reason to feel national dignity. Others hear us and laugh, just as we sneer at the foolish cries of Marine Le Pen.