Politique Internationale / Katis vs. Eleni

...I was pilloried by the press and given 16 months in jail for libel...

...A small fact that the onetime employers of Nicholas Gage have never made as big a fuss about as, say, Watergate, or South Africa...

...Using the late Gus Grissom as a mouthpiece, Wolfe scorns the ethic of "God, country, home, and hearth" in favor of the astronauts' true code, "Flying & Drinking & Drinking & Driving"--the unbuttoned life-style that was a necessary corollary to the icy, taciturn courage required of fliers whose daily chance of coming down in flames was one in four...

...She organized their escape through Communist redoubts with a party of other women and children, but at the last moment she and her daughter Glykeria were forced by the reds to stay behind to work the fields, and so Nicholas Gage left with his two elder sisters, his aunt, and grandmother, never to see his mother again...

...The uncle was saying to the boy, "Didn't they break up our family, drag your grandmother, your mother and me out of our village and put us in camps in Hungary for six years...

...Father wasn't surprised, however...

...What about the hundreds of thousands they executed in occupied villages...

...murderers like Fidel Castro, or Pol Pot...

...The day we left Togo we each received a copy of a gorgeously illustrated coffee table book entitled The Last Africans...

...The boy's eyes narrowed...

...I n 1976 I published an article in the New York Times claiming that the Soviets were behind the Greek press campaign against the United States...

...More than fifty thousand children were taken from their mothers and marched to the Communist paradises bordering on Greece...

...We were, needless to say, among the fortunate...

...It was just about that time that my father told us that his factories had been blown up by the Communists...

...A capital offense...

...The book was a gift from a Swiss hotelier who owns an expensive new hotel in LomC According to its jacket, the book was "conceived by a European for Europeans," and in it the author writes rather fondly of the African ritual of roasting and eating a pet dog (a sacrifice of "something one loves...

...Gage was in the room, and the only thing he asked me was, "How is your karate going...

...Here is Wolfe's full definition of "the right stuff": _9 . . a man should have the ability to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and put his hide on the line and then have the moxie, the reflexes, the coolness, to pull it back in the last yawning moment--and then go up again the next day, and the n e x t . . , and, ultimately, in its best expression, do so in a cause that means something to thousands, to a people, a nation, to humanity, to God...

...and "How is your yacht...

...I lost two uncles and somebody very special to the butchers, but that is beside the point...

...Wolfe knocks off the astronauts' haloes, but not to make the men underneath look bad...

...Yet it was they who tilled the land alongside their men, who herded, sowed and harvested, apart from doing the domestic chores and bringing up the children...

...While the campaign against me was going on I went to the Times for help...

...Bombs didn't scare me as I had been hearing them drop for three years...

...The horror of it is unspeakable, though not as unspeakable as the reaction to it of liberal-left elements...

...My last memory of Togo: As we sat in the humidity of Lom~'s airport waiting for Air Afrique to take us back to New York, Elaine sneezed with a cold...

...They are no better or worse than some of the people Warren Beatty admires...

...We spent most of our time crouching on the floor and slept underneath our beds...

...One of the busiest spots in Lom~ was the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart--a place of such imperialistic relics as incense, genuflections, and stylized frescoes of traditional saints...

...Their one true enemy was never the Nazis...

...The children sang some songs in French and then marched out, satchels in hands, to the beat of an African drummer...

...Her body was thrown down a gully and left to rot, unburied...

...The man most responsible, one Katis, turns out the most arrogant...

...The men who ordered her torture and execution were higher-ups in the Communist hierarchy of Greece...

...A test pilot may feel justified in lapsing from these standards, but that doesn't mean he rejects them philosophically...

...this in a country where seven people out of ten lost members of their families to the red terror...

...It was their way of thanking him for refusing to collaborate with the conquering German armies and for closing them despite German threats to his life when he did...

...The point of Wolfe's book, part of which originally appeared in the pages of Rolling Stone, is to replace this squeaky-clean image with a more accurate picture of the hard-drinking, high-flying, loose-living subculture of the military test pilot, from which the Martha Bayles is film critic for The American Spectator...

...How typical that a feminist reviewing Eleni in the Sunday Times of London concentrated almost entirely on this aspect, as if Gage had written a lament for women's rights...

...But when it comes to the astronauts themselves, Wolfe engages in a different sort of debunking, aimed not at the astronauts but at the press, for insisting that all seven of the first chosen were dedicated family men, ardent patriots, and devout churchgoers...

...Although the Togolese government provides public education, families scrimp to send t h e i r children to Catholic schools...

...Not even Genghis Khan would have gone so far...

...Their mothers were beaten for their lamentation and mourning...

...Mass graves filled the gardens of Athens and littered the countryside...

...This novel experiment in creating pure Communists was called pedomazoma...

...In one memorable passage Gage recounts the horror he felt in 1974 when he realized that the newly legalized Communists were setting in motion the machine that rewrites history in order to glamorize the terrorists in the eyes of those not old enough to remember: Once in my village I overheard a friend about my age arguing with his nephew, a 22-year-old university student...

...The trouble is, Wolfe attributes the same ambivalence to the other astronauts, when really, theirs is the 34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1984...

...Was that 'humanitarian?' "his uncle persisted in a louder voice...

...His main target is Life magazine, which he says tailored the astronauts' reality to suit its conventional readership--which is a bit ironic, since to some extent Wolfe does the same thing for his unconventional one...

...The last "deprived" Africans of their true religions and left them "uprooted...

...She was dragged up a ravine on bleeding feet from thefalanga (yes, the Communists were using falanga long before Hollywood invented it as the symbol of right-wing Latin America) and shot...

...When Tito fell out with the butcher at the Kremlin and closed his borders, the Greek Communist insurrection was doomed...

...German missionaries completed the cathedral in 1912...

...Hundreds of thousands of Greeks were murdered by the Communists that winter and over the next four years...

...It was packed every time I walked past it...

...When Communists occupied her northwestern village, Eleni immediately began planning an escape for her children...

...I should have answered which of my three yachts did he mean, but finding myself inside the Times building I was feeling a bit nervous, like an honest man among moneylenders, and so I said nothing...

...While I chatted with P~re Touvi, a priest dressed completely in white who had been born in a Togolese village and studied in Rome, the children from the cathedral school were being dismissed for the day below Ptre Touvi's balcony...

...I am talking about the round-up of children between the ages of three and fifteen, children abducted at gunpoint and forced to accompany the Communist troops into Albania and Bulgaria, where they were inducted into camps to be brought up as Communists...

...I know one thing: I would not have done what Mr...

...Judy turned to her and said, "You must be allergic to America...

...For more than 450 pages Gage describes his mother's life and the hardships she went through to ensure her children's survival...

...Yet Wolfe gets trapped in his own logic, because no matter how much license it may take, the test-pilot subculture is like any other subculture: ultimately dependent on, and defined by, the larger culture of which it is a part...

...On the contrary, he wants to make the press look bad, for hanging the haloes there, and to make the real astronauts look good...

...Christmas Day came up gray and wet...

...For her actions Eleni was brutally tortured and finally executed...

...Not only possible, say I, but true...

...In The Right Stuff, his 1979 book about the Mercury space program, he gleefully goes after everyone--from politicians to NASA bureaucrats, engineers, and medical researchers--whose official dignity can he satirically contrasted with his morals, motives, or table manners...

...The salient fact about test-pilot craziness is that it exists within the most rigid of frameworks: military orders to show up at dawn ready to risk one's life...

...This standout, of course, was John Glenn--whose sincerity Wolfe acknowledges, if only to say that the other six found it laughably absurd...

...There wasn't much to eat, and Athens had become a nightmare city of skeletal figures searching for food, falling dead, and lying unburied...

...Lillian Hellman, a liar of mythological proportions, was defending Stalin while it was going on, and cocktail party girl propagandists like Christopher Hitchens prefer to blame the victims themselves for what the rewriters of Greek history call the civil war...

...His Javert-like pursuit of the men who murdered her comes to fruition when he finally locates those still living and confronts them one by one...

...Nick Gage left the Times in 1980 to devote himself to uncovering the murderers of his mother, and his recent book, Eleni,* tells her story...

...Priests, civil servants, teachers, policemen, the well-to-do, anyone who was not a Communist sympathizer, was executed...

...Six years later the Times stringer in Athens conf'trmed my story: The Soviets do subsidize many (3reek newspapers...

...The few that he missed beat a hasty retreat...

...He almost brags about what he did to the women and children...

...As for such African practices as the Somba tribe's use of self-immolation, which are more difficult to portray in a flattering light, the author cautions Europeans not to focus on the "outward forms" of such rituals but to understand "what their justification i s . " He reminds the Europeans that Europe brought only war, exploitation, and Christianity...

...Pretty noncommittal, considering that presumably the cause must mean something to the test pilot, too...

...I n s o f a r as the function of the press is to debunk, Tom Wolfe is a charter member of the corps...

...Wolfe takes this odd stance because he has got the concept of a subculture confused with a concept he is more familiar with: that of a counterculture...

...The president climbed into a helicopter and personally shot the whale: quite a blow to the Save-theWhale sensibilities of a member of our group who had been singing Eyadema's praises all week long...

...Pbre Touvi told me that all the country's "higher ups" patronize church schools...

...There was no civil war, just an armed uprising by Communist stooges...

...Random House, $15.95...

...I believe my father told me there were about twelve of them...

...When they came out in the open and were about to attack he let them have it with the machine gun he was manning...

...It's just that mine aren't limited to the killers...

...There were epidemics of cholera, typhus, and diphtheria...

...Women were held at an almost subhuman level...

...His description of village life in Greece is flawless...

...For years following the Communist coup more and more bodies were discovered--victims, all of them, of the "red terror...

...seven astronauts were recruited...

...Wolfe exposes this framework when he concedes that even the cynical Grissom would reply, if asked, that "yes, he was religious, and yes, he was a family man, and yes, he was a patriot...

...Gage did when he finally found his mother's killer (but then neither would I have been able to track him down...

...Christmas 1944 was a bad time for us...

...What I minded was that as Christmas neared the incoming fire was being directed at us not from the sky, but from a hill three blocks away...

...We waited for them crouched on the floor, and around mid-day they began approaching...

...They did it for humanitarian reasons," the boy replied levelly, "to save you from fascist bombs...

...The reason...

...He also told me that the Church is growing rapidly in numbers in Togo--one Lom~ parish, for example, recently baptized 500 adults in a single day...

...four years of occupation the reds spent more energy and time betraying nationalists to the Germans than fighting the enemy...

...This confusion comes out even more clearly in Wolfe's ambivalence toward Glenn, whose glib facility as a spokesman he admires (along with the rest of the journalists), but whose "Dudley Do-Right" values he disdains...

...Such are the joys of Communist seduction of the media that their crimes are now referred to as the holy war against fascism (which makes Eleni, I guess, a fascist...

...Villagers were intimidated into saying that she was pro-American (like many Greek males her husband was in the United States, working as a waiter) and that she indeed had tried to help her children escape...

...Throughout the Taki Theodoracopulos is The American Spectator's European editor...

...My father stationed himself inside the Italian armored personnel carrier he had managed to get his hands on after the Italian surrender in 1943...

...Among the first seven astronauts there was one who stood out as the media favorite, not only because he was handsome and articulate but also because he seemed genuinely to embody the values the press was fond of attributing to the group as a whole...

...They probably had good reason...

...Unlike my father, Eleni wasn't equipped to defend her family against THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1984 33 the terrorists...

...The only thing I wonder about is whether it was worse to be among the 150,000 the terrorists butchered or among the surviving parents whose children were taken from them and turned into hard-core Stalinists, some of them still active both inside Greece and out...

...He knew all about the Communists through the resistance...

...Some of them are back in the birthplace of democracy at this minute, enjoying the pardon and recognition given them by Karamanlis in 1974...

...So she did the next best thing...

...by Taki Not possible, you say...

...My impression was that the citizens of Togo see things differently...

...Gage seems to bear no grudges, but I do...

...It was any Greek who wasn't a Communist...

...Gage wants to kill him, but in the end decides that his mother would not have wanted him to avenge her through bloodshed...

...Our house, which was located in the choicest part of the city, near the British embassy, had no heat, no electricity, and no running water...

...The death of Eleni Gatzoyiannis, the murdered mother of former New York Times reporter Nicholas Gage, is not however...

...Although only seven, I was already a veteran...