High life
History of lies
Taki
Writing in the Sunday Telegraph, my old friend (and frequent recipient of Greek munificence) Geoffrey Wheatcroft says that were the Elgin Marbles to be returned to their rightful owners they should go to ...Turkey. Thinking my eyes were play- ing tricks, I actually had to read that splen- dide mendax twice. Wheattie — or the incredibly rigid man — was obviously up to his old tricks again. Lay off the booze, Geoffrey, it makes you sound much more foolish than you are. Writing what you did was as unfair as Edith Cresson's claim that all Englishmen are queer, when, as every- one knows, only 92 per cent are. Under Wheatcroft's premise, had the Ottomans sold part of the only surviving wall of Herod's Temple to the Brits, the Wailing Wall today should be in Ankara.
Needless to say, this was in response to the cowardly murder of Brigadier Stephen Saunders in Athens by terrorists, in which he correctly predicts that Athens will quickly forget about it. As some of you may remember, six years ago some gangsters blew up my boat in a futile attempt to extort moolah. They also planted bombs in the houses of two of my closest associates, forcing me to relocate them to Switzerland. I eventually brought in an American ex- DEA agent who made contact with the extortionists, leading to a meeting between the bad guys and yours truly. We also bor- rowed one of their favourite tricks, when we photographed one of their children leaving school, showing them that two can play that game. (They screamed bloody murder, the way the Left always do when someone copies their methods.) I told the bad guys that if they killed me they would also die, but under torture. If they wound- ed me they would be killed, and if they blew up any more houses they would be blown up themselves. We knew where they and their families lived and showed them that we did. An uneasy peace was reached, one that is still holding.
Mind you, it was an extremely expensive operation. The state, needless to say, did nothing until we told them who the bad guys were, and even then they moved very reluctantly. (I dropped the charges at the request of my associates who were scared shitless that, once I and my DEA contacts were out of the country, the gangsters would go after them.) Why did the fuzz sit in its corner eating souvlaki and playing with its worry beads? Easy. A cop is paid next to nothing in the birthplace of selective democracy — incidentally, the best kind — and the terrorists and gangsters have made it very clear that any judge, prosecutor or cop who is involved in a conviction should kiss his loved ones goodbye. The irony of the brigadier's murder is the visit to his widow by the foreign minister George Papandreou. It was Andreas Papandreou, his father, and the greatest crook ever to be prime minister of a coun- try outside Africa, who was the godfather of November 17, the group that carried out the killing of an unarmed man. The higher- ups of Pasok, the ruling socialist party, know full well who the terrorists are, or at least who they were when they were mur- dering Richard Welch and other American servicemen during the Seventies. They are obviously not about to come clean and lose their government-provided limos, drivers and perks. Ergo, nobody is about to be arrested, and, if they are, they will be allowed to go home, once the publicity dies down, for lack of evidence. I have known many of the victims of November 17, and even know some of the lucky ones who escaped attempts to mur- der them. My father had to use an armoured ear and had a bodyguard, but that was more for show than protection. When the bombing of Serbia was going on, I told an American friend of mine living in Athens to be careful. Alas, Nov-17, cow- ards that they are, did not go after a clown like the Robertson fellow, or Shea or Rubin or Albright or Blair or Clinton. As always, the Left, which is what Nov-17 is, picked on a soft target, an unarmed man going to work. I was certain there would be repercussions against innocents from the Just as cowardly bombing of Serbia, and wrote about it in Taki's 'Top Drawer'. Pasok, of course, is one long history of lies. It denounced the King of Greece as a collaborator with the Colonels, when King Constantine was the first man to try to overthrow them. It imposed a vindictive ban on the King and his family's right to travel to Greece and expropriated the King's properties, paid for, I might add, not by a grateful nation but with his great uncle's own moolah. I don't hear Blair say- ing anything about this outrage, and he won't do anything about Saunders once the furore has died down.
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