The Slow Death Of Greece’s KKE Communists

If she weren’t so obtuse, you could say that Aleka “Irrelevant” Papariga, who has dragged Greece’s Communist party down so low you’d need a microscope to find it – appropriate when you’re looking for amoeba anyway – saw the handwriting on the wall (Commie Go Home!) when she decided to step down as its non-leader.
But she couldn’t see a red arrow coming straight at her face if she were wearing 3-D glasses, so maybe she just got tired of reciting the same old worn-out Commie bromides and offering no answers.
She said she never really wanted to lead, only oppose anybody who was in power and that’s all you ever really to know about her types or the Communist manifesto that went out of fashion when people were still wearing powder blue polyester leisure suits with collars the size of B-22 stealth bomber wings.
Greece’s Communists, whose day was done when they got whipped in the Civil War after World War II, still believe they are the great egalitarians who want everybody to be equal, a particularly quaint and antiquated notion because life just isn’t that way. Some people are janitors and some are brain surgeons and that’s just the way it is and you can’t pay them the same.
Papariga, 67, was at the head of the KKE’s (yes, it actually is pronounced Koo-Koo) for 22 years, during which time she accomplished exactly nothing and in the last election the Commies won 12 seats out of 300 in the Parliament, the definition of irrelevance. Watching her engineer the Commies is like watching a train wreck in slow motion.
She handed over the reins to the dead horse to Dimitris Koutsoumbas, who is so unknown his own family wouldn’t recognize him, and you can bet he’ll read from the same moribund playbook (running yellow dog capitalist imperialists banker bosses) and recite the same propaganda that is so old and harmless tha you can buy Commie posters on line as junk art.
What’s especially tragic about Greek Communists is that they talk like it’s 1957 but none of them have a Chevie from that year because they like new cars and prefer to vacation in Paris and go to the Moulin Rouge instead of hiking it to Cuba to work in the sugar cane fields with their comrades. Greek Commies talk the talk but walk the walk to Flocafe for a 5 euros coffee instead of donating the money to the cause.
SEEING ONLY RED
I had a conversation with one earnest young Communist, of the type who stand around subway stations and hand out the party newspaper that is about as exciting as the one-hour opening of a Theo Angelopoulos movie showing wheat waving (the kind the Communists could never harvest, leading the Soviet Union to bring in farmers from Iowa after the Cold War ended to show them how to do it) and he said – with a straight face, I kid you not – “Stalin was a great man.”
Usually I don’t get into a battle of wits with unarmed opponents, even those who try to offer biting ripostes while drooling on themselves as they sit in their underwear in the basement of their mother’s house and type out illiterate rigidly ideological traps for themselves, but I spit out my coffee and said, “What are you smoking? He killed six million people!” If Hitler had his PR man the Nazis would still be around (oh, they are.)
That’s the part that always throw Communists, along with asking them which is the biggest capitalist country in the world and they don’t know the answer is China. They just can’t defend pogroms.
Under Papariga, KKE went from 8.5 percent of the vote to 4.5 percent last year, a near 50 percent loss in popularity, so maybe that’s why she walked out the door before the next elections when the party might go the way of LAOS, the equally whacky extreme right version of political insanity. These people are crazier than loons and anyone else except for the the Nazis in Golden Dawn who couldn’t spell cat if you spotted them the “c” and the “a”.
You gotta love the Commie propaganda though because it provides comic relief during Greece’s crushing economic crisis. I keep waiting for them to drag out some of the classic posters, such as the one showing an earnest woman in a scarf with her finger to her mouth under the slogan, “Don’t babble, keep your tongue behind your teeth,” which explains both why Commies aren’t good French-kissers and are deadly dull conversationalists.
As Commies go though, Papariga is a relatively sweet harmless creature although you’d rather walk into Harlem wearing only a placard denouncing African-Americans than get into a conversation with her because she’s human Sominex.
With Greece buried under $460 billion in debt created by the running yellow dog capitalists of New Democracy and the soft leftists of the PASOK anti-socialists hiring everyone in Greece except Communists for 40 years, all Papariga could come up with to oppose what’s going on is to say, “Hey, it’s not good,” a rallying cry if you ever heard one.
Once Fidel Castro figured out that even the world’s best cigars as exports weren’t going to save Cuba and his brother who succeeded him opened the economy to quirky capitalistic ideas like letting people own their own businesses, it was pretty much over for the likes of Papariga who at least is an intelligent woman, unlike the mental midget running the world’s last bastion of Communism in North Korea. We can only hope he fires a missile that gets shot down and the US of A rains death on his head.
Papariga has been bleeding support to one of her leftist rivals, the coalition of soft Communists, Maoists, Hot-to-Trotyskites and ecologists in the SYRIZA party that seems to be missing only Scientologists in its motley grab bag as it has risen even faster than KKE has fallen, showing that even Communists are opportunists. If you’re going to be a Marxist it should be Groucho Marx who know how to be irreverent and funny at the same time, unlike Communists whose funny bone is removed at birth.
But now that she’s got time on her hands, maybe Papariga can do what her former fellow Communist Fotis Kouvelis, now the head of the barely more relevant Democratic Left did: become a capitalist conservative and do whatever Prime Minister Antonis Samaras tells you to do. Either that or head for Pyongyang while it’s still on the map.