Alexis Tsipras probably didn’t expect that publishing Ithaca would shake the Greek political ecosystem the way it did. He wrote a memoir; Greece heard a battle cry. Within hours of its release, every corner of the media landscape, television panels, newspaper columns, radio talk shows, social feeds dripping with venom or praise, turned into a tribunal. Everyone had something to say about Tsipras, about the past, about what they think happened and most importantly about who should be ...blamed. But in this cacophony something remarkable, albeit unintended, emerged, Tsipras’ book didn’t just revive political debate, it exposed in full nudity the monumental success of Mitsotakis’ and the far-right’s propaganda machine in reshaping public memory itself.
Greece isn’t suffering from political division only; it’s suffering from political amnesia. And Ithaca became the flashlight in a room where someone had been switching off lights one by one for a decade.
Let’s make something clear before diving into the swamp; Greece did not collapse under Alexis Tsipras. The nearly decade-long bankruptcy, the humiliation of the memoranda, the international ridicule, the crushing austerity that numbed an entire population, none of it began in 2015. These wounds were already festering long before Syriza ever approached power. Yet today, thanks to the relentless narrative engineering orchestrated by New Democracy’s communications apparatus and enthusiastically amplified by its far-right satellites, thousands of Greeks have been subconsciously conditioned to believe that Tsipras somehow authored the Greek tragedy.
This is not just political spin; this is historical erasure.
For years, Greek conservatives have operated with one unwavering objective, shift all blame of the crisis to the left, cleanse their own fingerprints from the scene, and retell the story with themselves as reluctant fire-fighters instead of the arsonists who drenched the house in petrol.
Tsipras writes his version of events in Ithaca, and whether one fully accepts his viewpoint or not, the explosive reaction reveals something deeper, we have allowed an entire chapter of the country’s recent history to be rewritten by those who should have been held accountable for it.
It was not Tsipras who handed Greece the first two memoranda. It was not Syriza that set the country ablaze with corruption, backroom deals, tax evasion sanctuaries, and grotesque waste of public money. It was not the left that hollowed out the health system until hospitals resembled abandoned barracks. Nor was it Tsipras who butchered pension after pension, sending generations of elderly people into despair. These were the trophies of the PASOK–New Democracy duopoly, decades of rotten governance crowned by the Samaras–Venizelos era, which brought Greece to its knees.
Under Antonis Samaras’ government, the first two memoranda landed with the precision of a guillotine. Salaries were slashed, small businesses suffocated, the middle class evaporated, the young emigrated and the phrase “we are broke” became the national lullaby. The social fabric didn’t tear, it disintegrated.
And yet, wander into the digital coliseum today and you’ll find an astonishing revisionist chorus chanting that Tsipras “destroyed” Greece. That he “caused” the crisis. That before 2015 everything was somehow manageable, maybe even fine. A fantasy bordering on mass hallucination.
This is where Mitsotakis’ political marketing brilliance or cynicism cannot be underestimated. Since 2019, New Democracy has deployed an industrial-level propaganda machine using privateers like the fascist propaganda and mudslinger tool, the “squad of truth”. It is polished, disciplined, well-funded, and synchronized across every platform. Private media, already dependent on government-friendly funding, has offered itself willingly as an organ of repetition. And repetition, as every propagandist knows, becomes truth if hammered often enough.
Thus, “Tsipras ruined Greece.”
Thus, “New Democracy saved the economy.”
Thus, “the crisis started in 2015.”
History, rewritten by press release.
The dangerous part is not that these claims are wrong, they are absurdly wrong. The danger lies in how effortlessly they have been absorbed by a portion of the population desperate for a simplified, blame-free narrative. After all, the true story is messy and implicates almost every political dynasty of the last half-century. It requires confronting the fact that Greece’s political elite spent decades looting public institutions, inflating public debt, hiring legions of party loyalists, and treating national wealth as private inheritance.
Far easier, then, to pin it on one man in 2015.
Tsipras’ Ithaca comes as an inconvenient reminder of that erased decade. Whether or not one admires him, whether or not one agrees with the choices he made during the negotiations of 2015, the book forces Greece to re-engage with what actually happened. It disrupts the manufactured myth. And myths, when challenged, provoke rage.
This is why the reaction has been volcanic. The country is not debating the book; it is debating the narrative that the book threatens.
The Mitsotakis establishment knows that controlling the past is the ultimate political weapon. If New Democracy can convince voters that Samaras’ austerity was heroic, that PASOK’s corruption was a bureaucratic hiccup, that the banking collapse was an unfortunate accident, and that the memoranda arrived like harmless paperwork instead of national execution orders, they gain not just votes, they gain absolution.
And absolution is priceless in politics.
Yet the most troubling element is not what politicians say. It is how easily we, the public, have accepted the edited version. We have allowed ourselves to forget that teachers fainted in classrooms from exhaustion, that hospitals collapsed under shortages that young people fled en masse because Greece had ceased offering even the minimum promise of a future. We forget that poverty was not “introduced” during Syriza but normalized long before it. We forget because forgetting is comfortable.
But nations that forget their recent past become playthings of those who rewrite it.
Ithaca reopened the wound and thank god it did. Not because Tsipras is beyond criticism, not because he holds a monopoly on truth but because his book disrupts a dangerously convenient story.
If Greece wants to reclaim a sense of reality, it must first reclaim its memory. Not the memory shaped by press advisors, not the memory sanitized by party loyalists, but the memory of what people actually lived through.
The political earthquake caused by Ithaca is not about Alexis Tsipras at all.
It is about whether Greece will allow its past to be rewritten by those who caused its collapse and who now insist they were the saviours all along.
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