Venizelos Slams Avramopoulos For Allowing Armored Vehicles To Take Part At OXI Day Parade
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| (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
At the start of the Memorandum three years ago -or when PASOK once again gained power- the armored vehicles were excluded from the parade following a decision that was taken by Evangelos -The Large- Venizelos, who at the time was acting as Minister of Defence. The reason: The cost of parading these vehicles and airplanes was too high (or so we were told).
But the present Defence Minister Dimitris Avramopoulos decided to ignore this decision, and after examining a proposal by the Chief of the Hellenic National Defence General Staff (GEETHA) General Michalis Kostarakos he accepted and from what we learn this year's parade is indeed going to be grand.
The tanks and armored vehicles were withdrawn in 2010 when Greece signed the first agreement with its European lenders in order to reduce the military costs. In fact, the cost of the annual national parade was reduced from 3.1 million euros to 350,000 euros. However, there is no information concerning this year’s military parade cost.
The news might sound insignificant to some, and in many ways it is, but if you examine this issue a little you will agree that PASOK -and especially Venizelos- get very hot under the collar when socialist decisions are ignored. In fact they were so annoyed that Harilaou Trioupi (or PASOK headquarters) even issued a statement about it calling on the Ministry of Defence to reverse this decision.
What is the big deal? Well, PASOK may have told us that the reason it decided to ban motorized divisions of the Armed Forces in military parades on October 28 and March 25 was in the framework of saving money, but if you go back to that period and view the issue more closely you will see that it is far from the truth.
On March 25th several years ago, during PASOK rule, Greek citizens for the first time experienced what it felt like to live in a police state. We witnessed snipers on the Parliament building, were not permitted near and/or around the perimeter of the stands where the politicians were located and the only view of the military parade in all its glory was via television.
The site of snipers, and no people might be normal in Venizelos' twisted view of how a country should be operated -or the making of a police state-, but the truth is that these measures were adopted by his party because they were terrified of the high concentration of armed forces and citizens in one area.
One example of that is what happened in Thessaloniki several years ago. During that parade, the President of the Republic Karolos Papoulias was forced to leave after the people flooded the streets not permitting the parade to continue unless the stand where the dignitaries -or the country's leadership- was located left. They did, and it soured the Papandreou government to a great extent.
With Papoulias gone, the majority of military forces also decided to leave from the parade as well -just one or two divisions remained- and citizens then continued with a "peoples parade". But the decision by some young cadets to ignore a call to retreat to their barracks and march worried the government greatly and unfortunately, the Armed Forces once again paid dearly for that political crisis.
And this is because it was much simpler for the leadership at the time to blame a third party for the mess the country was in, rather than to take responsibility for creating the chaos to begin with. Three days later the leadership of the Armed Forces was "beheaded" on the same day that the Papandreou government collapsed.
In the statement Venizelos literally denies the Greek people the right to admire its Armed Forces. "These tanks are not for show but for defense," said the statement from PASOK adding that "military planes make us proud as guardians of the Aegean and (should) not be used in demonstration flights "... And PASOK called on the Ministry of Defence to reverse its decision.
With Stalin-style tactics and "I command you or else" statements such as the above, it is no wonder why people do not like, respect and/or trust Evangelos Venizelos (and more so his party PASOK).
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