“Alors, c’est la guerre.”
Rather than the popularized, colloquial, and laconic, ‘Oxi’, the Greek Prime Minister – in fact dictator – replied in an annoyed, diplomatic French ubiquitous in the era, “well, then it’s war,” to the Italian dictator’s ultimatum. There is both irony and contradiction in Ioannis Metaxas’ position. A dictator who denied his people political agency, spoke up for his country and his people’s national agency in a manner that the overwhelming majority of Greeks fully supported.
Because, ultimately to be Greek is to seek agency – and that includes the agency to say “No.”
And Greece did say no.
Though, to be fair, the Greek merchant marine had been saying no to fascism from September, 1939, and its ships and sailors paid with their lives from the first months of the war. Greeks knew the cost of ‘Oxi’ and the stakes – moral and political – for a craven ‘Nai’.
The couples in love who danced their last dance in the summer of 1940, the fathers and husbands seeing their loved ones for the last time as they boarded a boxcar for the Albanian frontier.
More ominously, there would be the massacres, starvation, and foreign occupation, harkening back to Turkish rule thrown off in 1821 – or for so many Asia Minor and Thracian Greeks, living memories of a recent expulsion and genocide less than two decades old. They knew the stakes of ‘Oxi’, and they also knew that their tormented polity had fissures which were hardly healed and would burst open in civil war even before the occupier was expelled.
They refused, to a man (and woman) to abridge their national agency. They said ‘Oxi’. Just as infamies so great can take centuries to atone for, so too, can acts of honor sustain across eras. Greece’s ‘Oxi’ opened a second front, a boil of heroism and agency that Hitler had to lance, and in so doing, he expended soldiers, treasure, and time, so that his troops reached the suburbs of Moscow not in September 1941, but in December. And we all know that the most famous Russian general is named ‘Winter’.
The dividend of ‘Oxi’ is an honor that is so profound that it is neither quantifiable nor easily presented as a receipt for payment. Further, the beneficiaries of Greece’s ‘Oxi’ far too often neither recognize nor defer to this dividend. Perhaps more than anything else, it is a badge of honor and pride that every Hellene carries and about which he must ask himself – how can I be worthy?
‘Oxi’ is not just a holiday, and certainly not an organization, it is an ethos, grounded in agency, and in choosing agency and struggle, over a surrender that will not save you from destruction. The Heroic ‘Oxi’ of 1940 was not the first time Greeks changed the world, for the better. The question is, will it be the last. Can we retain the Ethos of 1940?
