Complaint of censorship of a Hadjidakis song in the classroom goes viral, sparking controversy

Source: Manos Hadjidakis’s official site

By @Inflammatory_ and @IrateGreek

The latest case of censorship in Greece found an unlikely target in a song by famous Greek composer Manos Hadjidakis. 

Deputy Minister of Education Theodoros Papatheodorou ordered last night an ex officio investigation into claims by a primary school music teacher in Thessaloniki that the principal of her school forbade her from teaching Hadjidakis’s song Kemal to her 5th-grade class. This was followed today by a question in parliament by New Democracy MP Giannis Michelakis, who called upon the Ministry of Education to take an official position on the matter and condemned the school principal in the harshest of terms, calling the incident “a monument of ignorance, fanaticism and stupidity.”

Advertisement

#rbnews international show 06 April 2013: Nationalism and national identity in Greece

This week on #rbnews international, we inaugurated a series of shows about fascism and anti-fascism in Greece with an interview with Athanasia Anagnostopoulou, a historian and associate professor in Panteion University in Athens. We discussed the formation of Greek national identity and its evolution towards elements of aggressive, dangerous nationalism not only in the recent crisis years, which saw the rise of Golden Dawn, but also in past decades, where the basis for such a form of nationalism was established.

You can listen to the podcast, as usual, after the jump.

Proposing second-rate citizenship: it’s not only Golden Dawn

On 25 February 2013, the Hellenic Armed Forces General Chief of Staff Michalis Kostarakos caused considerable reaction on all sides of the political spectrum when he tweeted:

“The time has come to regulate by law the issue of genos for those enrolling in Military Academies. They should be Greek by genos.”  

The expression “Greek by genos” is a commonly used but rather vague criterion of “Greekness”. The word “genos” (γένος) in its wider sense can be translated as parentage, race, breed, lineage, species and more. Defining someone as “Greek by genos” may mean “Greek by birth”, “Greek by blood”, “born to Greek parents”, “of Greek lineage”, “ethnic Greek” or any variation of the above, depending on the political intention of the speaker. For the extreme-right, it can go as far as meaning “someone who has Greek DNA.”