Justice, Not Revenge

Political violence has been around as long as politics. I grew up with it in Greece.

As a five-year-old, I remember looking across the street of a chic Athenian neighborhood, seeing the door of a black, chauffeur-driven car open and a bald man bending down in order to enter it. Then I heard one, two, three, four shots, and saw round, dark red holes form on his scalp. The screams that followed were from his daughter, who was watching his departure from a balcony above.

The name of the victim was Kalyvas, and he was undersecretary of some Greek ministry during the German occupation of 1941 to 1944. That meant he was a collaborator, according to the Stalin-led Communists in Greece. Others felt differently: that unless responsible and patriotic Greeks accepted government posts, the Germans would be ruling outright, with far worse results.

I saw far worse during the civil war that followed Greece’s liberation from the Axis powers. The royal gardens next to where we lived and where I daily played were suddenly covered with stinking, rotting corpses. Both sides were taking revenge, and it wasn’t pretty. The good guys won—with a little help from the Americans, thank God! It took more than 80 years for old wounds to heal; they only healed because those who fought during the civil war died and their old hatreds died with them.

In America, old hatreds between North and South have also died away. Some were still around when I attended the University of Virginia. Back then, Southern boys made fun of Yankees, but there was no hatred involved. My sympathies regarding the Late Unpleasantness were, of course, on the side of the Confederacy. 

In the wake of former FBI Director James Comey’s indictment, Democrats and the so-called neutral media are issuing dark warnings about how his arrest signals the end of democracy. These lefties and their sidekicks were around on Joe Biden’s watch but failed to notice that Trump, a former president, faced four separate indictments with 88 criminal charges. Trump advisers Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro were jailed for contempt of Congress, and my buddy Roger Stone—a sharp, London-tailored womanizer—was arrested at dawn in an over-the-top FBI raid.