These Intellectuals

But a case much closer to us as students is that recounted in the French bi-monthly intellectual organ "La Pensee" for Jan.-Feb., 1949. It concerns the summary execution of two of Greece's finest intellects, on the unsubstantiated charge that they were "implicated in plotting an act of sabotage."

The "trial" took place by court-martial In Athens on June 25 last year. The covering letter to "La Pensee" from Greece says, "We believe we can safely say that there was no such plot, and that most of the accused were known only for their republican and anti-fascist sentiments."

Remember the Nazi Johst's saying, "When I hear the word 'culture' I cock my revolver"? Remember Hitler's expulsion of Einstein and Mann, his screening of the Universities, his arrest and torture of Boenheim and Scheller? His massacre of Czech students? Fascism has always hated human beings who used their brains for the [unclear: etterment] of Mankind. Hon. John Strachey once wrote: "It is necessary for the Fascists, whose object it is to perpetuate our more and more irrational capitalist system, to assail in every conceivable way the supremacy of human reason."

Well, in the course of these proceedings in Athens, three years after the "defeat of fascism," the President of the Tribunal remarked, "We Must do away with these intellectuals—lfs them who threaten the established order." For two of the twenty accused were Dmitri Lagos, poet, and Christos Carambelas, economist.

You have never heard of them? The chances are there are many, poets and economists of great promise in your own college of whom you have never heard. They were 38 and 29 respectively. Lagos occupied in the Greek resistance movement the place of Aragon or Eluard in the French. His books of clandestine verse, notably The Fruitful Melancholy and Between the Yes and the No, were the marching songs of the underground. He had also translated much of Baudelaire and other French poets into Greek.

Carambelas had studied economics, and worked in a group of sociology students in the Anti-Nazi underground. He had written not only on economics, but on ethnology and even a paper on "The Music of the Ancients and the Phrygian Flue!" He could speak English, French. Russian, German and Italian, and had a fine resistance record.

Both men, without any trial beyond this militarist farce, were condemned to be shot. Lagos, from the dock, said, "In all my life, I have loved only the truth, and I have sung it together with my native land. ... I know how to die like a Greek."

Carambelas left a letter to his friends, written on the eve of his murder.