RISTO KIRIAZOVSKI’S WRITINGS AND MY POLEMICS WITH HIM

RISTO KIRIAZOVSKI’S WRITINGS AND MY POLEMICS WITH HIM

According to the information presented in his latest book, historian Risto Kiriazovski spared no punches in his criticisms of those seeking the truth. One of those who he attacked was me. He attacked me for writing the books “(Self) Sacrifice of the Macedonians under Greece, 1994”, “Ideological activism against Macedonians under Greece”, and others I wrote more than 20 - 30 years ago. I was motivated to write these books because of Kiriazovski’s outrageous claims made in his book “Five Fateful Years (1945 - 1949)”. I wanted to confront him with irrefutable facts, which by the way, he did accept before he died. Facts which he refused to accept for many years.

I read part of his book and was shocked. I felt like crossing myself, even though I am an atheist!

I could not help myself but respond to his claims, but not via a memo or an article. He wrote all his claims in a book so I decided to respond to them with my own book.

These however, were times when a historian of Kiriazovski’s caliber had the right and could simply tell you to “shut up” and “get lost”. Be grateful for the bread we give you. But, instead of doing that, in his defense, he opened a forum for attacking his critics.

The most striking examples of how the lives of many prominent Macedonian fighters were destroyed by political motives, took place in 1976. At that time I read a private memorandum written by Dr. Kiriazovski who said that, among others, Pavle Rakovski’s manuscript cannot be published and cannot be used because it contained provocative claims against the Yugoslav leadership. He wrote “I propose this paper not be given wider readership…” (Sk. 4-686 INV. 1419/76, November 15, 1976.)

Pavle Rakovski suffered many indignities at the hands of bureaucrats until he was broken.

When Pavle Rakovski, member of the NOF top leadersip, an intellectual and author, came from Siberia to the Republic of Macedonia, he was not welcome even though he had devoted his

entire life working for the Macedonian cause. (See: Rakovski Pavle, Autobiography - My Sufferings, Publisher, “AEA Publishers”, Skopje, 2000.) After thirty years of being anathematized, shortly before his death he was eventaly rehabilitated.

Pavle Rakovski, and many others like him, lived through frightening experiences in an “internal” prison. And what was this “internal” prison? An “internal” prison is a prison of the mind when one is made to live in fear, to feel frightened by the thought of making a mistake, to feel dirty, deceitful, isolated, uneducated, uncultured and so on. It is a state of mind and feelings that affects the soul.

When a person finds no meaning in life, he or she begins to seek death in the nothingness, which means that the inner prison is much more than a dark cell.

And these are things that we did to ourselves….

* * *

Now about my book “(Self) sacrifice of the Macedonians under Greece” 1994. Dr. Kiriazovski may not have recognized my book as a contribution to the affirmation of the freedom of intellectual thought, but rather used totalitarian methods, which have always been positioned as the pillars of truth, and wrote 41 pages of intentional satanism and did not publish them himself but gave them to a number of indivduals who saw themselves as protectors of “Aegean Macedonian history”, and who then re-wrote them and had them published in “Nova Makedonija”. These were people who ordinarily worked for Kiriazovski, just like the music box which rolled and played the same song. Some realized what they did was wrong, others did not. But please understand, as time has shown, not everyone was literate and knew how to read and write. True literacy requires much, much more effort…!

The material written by Kiriazovski was deposited on February 8, 1994 in “Memoir” file no. SK, 1118 in the INI Documentation Unit.

In the FORUM section of the “Macedonian Sun” magazine, published December 14, 2001, about my book “Ideological

Activism over the Macedonians under Greece” (2000), Kiriazovski himself wrote:

“According to Stoian Kochov, Macedonian historiography is servile, that is, subordinate to the Belgrade line and daily political biases... The basic question that Kochov poses, and tries to answer, is the question of who is to blame for the Greek Civil War and the grave consequences for the Macedonians.

Mr. Kochov argues that the Greek Civil War was neither a revolution nor a continuation of the glorious Ilinden tradition, and that NOF was serving the CPY and the CPG respectively as well as serving other anti-Macedonian interests.

If NOF played the role as described by Mr. Kochov, then NOF’s leadership is a direct accomplice and responsible for the tragic consequences the Macedonian people experienced which cannot be amnestied and glorified.

Kochov blames Macedonian historiography for not integrally studying the history of the Macedonian people, a Macedonian phenomenon, which is not entirely true.”

Kiriazovski blamed me for a lot of things which he claimed not to be true. But later, in his latest book, he admits that I was right about many things. But my question still is: Do we in fact have an integral Macedonian history?

Why am I asking this question? Whether we like it or not, we Macedonians from Greek occupied Macedonia have only one homeland and I will not reveal a secret if I say that there was no national interest in the Republic of Macedonia to write the truth about everything that happened to the Macedonians in the Greek Civil War, especially in the years 1946 - 1949, when the Macedonian organizations were led by the CPM/CPY.

* * *

Who gave Kiriazovski the right to vilify the DAG fighters who did not desert and who went to the Republic of Macedonia from Eastern

European countries, labeling them disloyal to the Yugoslav regime and depriving them of the earned privileges their comrades who deserted enjoyed.

After the Greek Civil War ended I, as part of a large military formation, was sent to the USSR. I was educated there and was living a modest but happy life which helped me understand and learn to appreciate the people and things around me far more than I ever could before. I had the opportunity to discover and understand the evils perpetrated against the Macedonian family and against the Macedonian people in general. I had the opportunity to think about the problems and hardships we Macedonians lived through. When I found out that I was welcome to go to the Republic of Macedonia and live there I was thrilled. Macedonia is my homeland, all of Macedonia regardless of the artificial borders dividing it. I had absolutely no idea that when I entered its borders (the Republic of Macedonia) that I would be passing through Idrizovo Prison. It was incomprehensible to me… to all of us! But in time I came to believe that evil was everywhere. I also came to believe that, on top of everything else, we Macedonians are also victims of Stalin and Tito’s quarrels.

And as Russian writer Fiodor Dostoyevsky said: “One who deceives himself is easily offended...”

It does not take much thinking to figure out what motivated Kiriazovski to do what he did. He was a historian who supported the establishment and its daily politics and the establishment supported him. His job, as a top academic in the field of history, was to promote historical information that supported the current regime and rejected everything else, especially information that cast shadows on those in power. He was surrounded by “yes men” who would do what they were told and who isolated him and did his bidding. I knew some of these “yes men” from the war. Most of them were DAG deserters who learned how to play the political game early. Now they call themselves Marxists and revolutionaries.

There is no end to people like that, which reminds me of what philosopher Socrates (469 - 399 BC) said when asked: “Which animal has the worst bite?” He replied: “From the wild kind the one

that is annoyed the most and from the domestic kind the one which is a bootlicker.”

At every occasion, be it a “class hassle” or a pointless “ideological act”, these people as guardians of the “open mass grave”, threw every self-conscious Macedonian into it. Everything was reduced to a dangerous division of the Macedonian national body.

It is a fact that “foreign ideologies” created and have always created parallel worlds and parallel historical events inside Macedonia and among us Macedonians.

We the participants of DAG, who have a historic memory of a long series of national defeats, now know this very well. But too bad we did not know it before the Greek Civil War and before DAG’s defeat. Had we known it, so many lives that were lost in vain could have been saved. We would have known the “tricks” used on NOF and AFZH who in turn, wittingly or unwittingly, tricked the “Macedonian people” to (self) sacrifice themselves for nothing and on top of that, to lose their homes, their lands and have their identity questioned by being called “Aegeans”.

As it turned out these political activists have been put in place and have been working systematically to destroy our national pride since then.

What is funny is that I found written statements made by people who were not only incompetent but totally uninformed who called themselves friends and allies - Greeks and Yugoslavs, forgetting who they were and that they had their own national and geopolitical interests.

A large part of them were from Gogol’s list of “dead souls” and that reminded me of what Bielinski wrote after reading Gogol’s “Dead Souls”: “God, why is the truth so unfortunate, miserable and sad for us?” Of course, all of these articles were marketed over the idea of the famous model of our past, with a certain premonition, with a narrower intellectual horizon, and reduced to:

What did they actually defend? They said, “Our history of the Aegeans is well-written…”!

After listening to this ideological barking, I felt utterly degraded, shattered, and full of rage, because I could not find answers, not even in my own homeland. Why did I and thousands of Macedonians like me, sacrifice ourselves, i.e.: was that war a revolution or a scam? Did the CPM/CPY push us into a war in which Aegean Macedonia was supposed to experience genocide?

I was convinced that history, as a social science, needed to function properly in society. The thought process needed to be allowed to be free. After that I came to know the cruel reality of life... People have always feared history... When credible facts speak, then and only then will history reveal the truth. Then and only then the veil of darkness will fall and we will see the truth shown to us by historical events. The way to our future will be paved for us by taking big steps backwards.

The question is why has this not happened already? Are we Macedonians simply not capable of self-criticism?

This is not the first time the Macedonian people suffered from horrible amnesia, from illusions and lies. That is why it is important to make radical changes in the subconscious Macedonian mentality to reject conjecture and seek facts. Anyone who thinks he or she can mislead and lie has a problem, more accurately they have a problem with themselves. This was well demonstrated by Kiriazovski who in his entire career had a problem with the Macedonian DAG fighters to which he later admitted in his book, which he published outside the INI national institution.

The historiography about us Macedonians from Aegean (Greek occupied) Macedonia in the last 60 years has proven to be very susceptible to politicization and marginalization from a political standpoint. And when used to manipulate people it distorts things with unintended consequences.

My research has revealed many mysterious and hidden facts written by Macedonian authors in the “sectoral history of the Aegeans”. The

roots of evil and the dark secrets of the architects of the war, who set the deadly trap through ideological activism, which led to the great deception of the century - genocide and the largest resettlement of Macedonians from Greece, have been hidden for over six decades. Those who do not believe that genocide was perpetrated against the Macedonian people in Greek occupied Macedonia in 1945 - 1949, and that this was a Macedonian tragedy, will never be able to understand the Greek fascist and genocidal policy towards the Macedonian people. This is why it is an illusion to think that one can escape fate.

History remembers everything that was said and not said. The truth lies in history. Real and lasting things are built on the truth.

We need to realize that we too need to accept blame for our actions. The time has passed when we needed to cast blame on someone else. We can’t always blame someone else for what we do. We Macedonians have to admit that we have been under Greek surveillance for a long time, and for a long time the Greeks have said: “Let the enemy sleep.” Studies have shown that the architects of war have been long aware of the Macedonian passions and how easy it is to over boil it. It is in our blood and we all have felt it, at least one time in our lives. This is what drove us to act without thinking, especially those who fought in the war, and led us to face tragic consequences.

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