When you have undergone a genocide because of barbarism and you have managed to survive as a nation through this crime against humanity, you don’t only have a duty toward the dead to remember, but also a responsibility to teach the unborn not to forget the events that changed your life due to death.
Therefore, the historians and experts in regards to the genocide issue, such as Antonis Pavlidis and Konstantinos Fotiadis, were able, not only to record the history they studied, but to also provide tangible data for the education of our children through civilization.
In this manner, for years on, there is, in the curriculum of the third year of lyceum, a special chapter on the genocide of the Greeks of Pontus.
This managed to remain there, despite the adverse conditions we had to face, with alterations in the history books, which have tried to turn them into anything but that, as if we had to learn solely from the newspapers of oblivion.
Yet, we all resisted and managed to keep our history, tooth and nail, without retreating even one step backwards.
Since then, the Genocide of the Greeks of Pontus has finally acquired an international scope, with international recognitions at both national and state levels and with the development of the approach of the triad of genocides, with which Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks unite, rally and move as a strategic mix, in order to achieve results which were completely unthinkable only a few years ago.
Now then, that we have reached that stage, it came to our attention, that the Ministry of Education is trying to remove the subject from the syllabus of the program.
If this barbaric move becomes utilised, it will not merely be a setback of many years, as the more diplomatic of us will put it, but it would begin an unrestrained resistance struggle, in order to reverse this decision.
It is not regarding a detail for Hellenism, nor a servility stigma alone, but a degeneration.
What all those fighting overseas for the acknowledgments will say, when they realize that the genocide of the the Greeks of Pontus has undergone through a crime of peace, in the homeland of Hellenism, a genocide of the memory, and that, with the initiative of their own country? quite simply: With it, or on it. Ἢ τὰν ἢ ἐπὶ τᾶς.