<ἀλλ᾽ ἡ Ἕλλας οὐκ> εἶχεν εὔαρκτον στόμα, / ἡ δ᾽ ἐσφάδαζε, καὶ χεροῖν ἔντη δίφρου /
διασπαράσσει καὶ ξυναρπάζει βίᾳ / ἄνευ χαλινῶν καὶ ζυγὸν θραύει μέσον.
But Hellas does not kept her mouth obedient to the rein. /
She struggled and with her hands tore apart the harness of the car;/
then, free of the curb, she dragged it violently /
along with her and snapped the yoke in two..
Aeschylus, Persians, ll. 194-196
Referendum, July 5th, 2015. Many thanks to the Greek people for their lesson of freedom, dignity, democracy, parrhesia! As written by Yanis Varoufakis ,”Our NO is a majestic, big YES to a democratic, rational Europe!”.
“We request the Greek citizenship”
Suddenly, the heavy atmosphere of a continent, that under the rule of oligarchic groups came to forget its own name of Europe, is crossed today by unexpected winds, from a political scandal that happens just when politics and creative conflict seemed to have disappeared. The Greek people are called to decide their own fate, without delegating to experts, old wise men or pastoral guides for their future life projects.
The disgruntled and ruffled reactions by the whole ancien regime that reigns in Brussels is an imitation, after millennia, of a grotesque mask of sour disbelief that the old conservatives had worn when, under the same sky, the political experiment of democracy had first put in action a society which until then had been locked up in historical insignificance, that lived on the margins of a boundless empire. At that time they were called to discover that Greece, and Europe itself, were no longer an appendix of Asia. Under the Parthenon a new way of thinking and living has granted a long lasting profile to that unmistakable civil form – and at the same time capable of a thousand, contradictory, contaminations – that we call Europe.
A Europe without the Parthenon, without a political narrative that holds it together, isn’t even conceivable. Yet, in an attempt to humiliate the dignity of the Greeks, to prevent the spread of the virus from Athens, a political virus of citizenship and participation experienced as an active dimension, we witness a disproportionate economic aggression, in which the issue of debt is used instrumentally as an improper weapon (just to blackmail Greece, in one day only, June 29th, they have burned through 340 billion euro of capitalization of European stock exchanges, an amount equal to the Greek debt).
But fear of the oligarchic institutions corresponds symmetrically to the hopes of those that, like us, see in the Greek crisis the new beginning of a common European history. A European future that has to be built in the exercise of citizenship lived and experienced fully and concretely, not by assembling abstract rules and regulations, courtesy of technocratic organizations that in the folds of the bureaucratic procedures disguise an extreme ideological unilateralism.
From Athens comes a call to which every good European must respond to immediately. Through Athens passes, once again, the road and way to get to Europe. From Athens we learn the sense of being European citizens, that participate actively in a project of expansive continental rebirth.
We therefore ask the Greek people, and their representatives, to grant us the honor of getting the passport of the Ελληνική Δημοκρατία (Hellenic Republic), a document that will become the symbol of our agreement, of our bond for this new Europe and, therefore, of our gratitude.
Ask for the Ελληνική Δημοκρατία passport: sign the petition
signatures
Monica Centanni (docente universitario)
Luciano Canfora (docente universitario)
Franco Cardini (docente universitario)
Alberto Ferlenga (docente universitario)
Nadia Fusini (docente universitario)
Giuseppe Goisis (docente universitario)
Fabio Granata (avvocato; operatore culturale)
Giacomo Marramao (docente universitario)
Peppe Nanni (avvocato)
Moni Ovadia (regista e attore)
Alessandro Tonin (studente)
Alessandro Visca (giornalista)