High life
High and low
Taki
INew York 'ye been very high all week. And when I say high, I mean really high — 30,000 feet to be exact, and for the better part of a whole week. And no, I haven't as yet become an airline steward, I've just been trekking across the Atlantic four times.
It all began last week, when I left London for the Big Olive, and the national karate championships of Greece. No soon- er was the one-day tournament over than I flew to the Big Apple, feeling by the time I arrived among the stretch limos a bit stretched myself, and a bit flat, too. The first night in New York is always a fun one, and I was busy planning it when the telephone rang, and it was my mother informing me that my old dad had suffered a heart attack, and was in intensive care in one of those butcher shops the socia- lists call hospitals in the birthplace of medi- cine.
Now it's very hard to describe what it's like flying back to where one has just flown in from, especially when one is thinking that by the time one gets there, the man who made one may be no more. I have always had a close relationship with my father. I have always loved him and held him in awe, but his feelings towards me have been ambivalent at least.
Needless to say, the trip back was full of guilt feelings, not a small amount of whisky — only hookers drink champagne in sad situations — and a very stiff upper lip that Eton made possible. I tried to look at the other passengers to see if any were on as sad a trip as I was. Most of them looked bored, crude, and busy looking at report papers. But then I looked at myself, and the result was almost the same (not crude, mind you, but almost). So I wondered how many times I had travelled near people who were on their way to a funeral, or who were worried about a loved one, and decided never, but never, again to be rude to people on aeroplanes, something I have been guilty of ever since I first flew TWA to New York in September 1947. Being back in Athens without my father in charge was a first for me. While going through some papers of his, I found some old mementoes of what modern revision- ists call the Greek civil war, but what I call the communist coup against an unarmed population of 1944. And, as luck would have it, there was a letter from my friend Alistair Londonderry which included an article by Neal Ascherson of the Observer. Knowing what I know about what the commies did in Greece, having lived through their massacres and seen it first- hand, and especially knowing the part my old man played in defending us against the butchers, I hope, dear readers, you will excuse the expression, but Ascherson is full of shit and so is the paper that can publish such rubbish.
His piece had.to do with the film Eleni, and the fact that it was one-sided, i.e. the victims were the only ones whose story was told. (Sorry, Neal, I know it's unfair, but some of the commies who murdered inno- cents did not get to explain why they did it. But life is unfair, as you must know from experience.) Anyway, the kidnapping of 30,000 children, who were eventually sent to communist countries for indoctrination, does not seem to have shocked the scribe. What has shocked him is the fact that the film did not make clear that some parents sent their children away . . . voluntarily, as the reds claimed. Well, if you believe this, you'll also believe that I'm an Old Etonian, and I guess a lot of you do, which shows how easy it is to fool all the people all the time. N'est pas Ascherson?
There are plenty of killers walking around free in Greece nowadays, un- punished and almost proud. Constantine Karamanlis made it possible for them to return, and Andreas Papandreou — Assad's closest friend in Europe — made sure they're called freedom fighters, rather than child molesters and murderers. But I know better, and I hope that some of you will believe me when I say that among the big lies we've heard this century, this one ranks among the biggest.
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