sunday ponderings, dreaming of heroism

Carved in the prison cell of Terpsichori Chryssoulaki-Vlachou, a young anti-fascist activist girl from Crete, just before her execution under the Nazi occupation of Greece:

"Είμαι 18 χρονών. Με καταδίκασαν σε θάνατο. Περιμένω από στιγμή σε στιγμή το εκτελεστικό απόσπασμα. Ζήτω η Ελλάδα. Ζήτω η Κρήτη!"

English translation:

"I am 18 years old and sentenced to death. I am waiting for the firing squad any minute now. Long live Greece. Long live Crete!"

Another example is the one of Lepa Svetozara Radić, the Bosnian Serb partisan whom at the age of 15 joined the anti-fascist movement in Yugoslavia. She was executed in February 1943 at the age of 17 for engaging in fire fights with German troops. As her captors tied the noose around her neck, they offered her a way out of the gallows by revealing her comrades' and leaders' identities. She responded that she was not a traitor and that they would reveal themselves when they avenged her death:

"Long live the Communist Party, and partisans! Fight, people, for your freedom! Do not surrender to the evildoers! I will be killed, but there are those who will avenge me! I am not a traitor of my people. Those whom you are asking about will reveal themselves when they have succeeded in wiping out all you evildoers, to the last man."
 Now, I am not a fan of communism, in fact, I quite strongly dislike and discredit it, but that is beside the point. If the paragon of human courage and discipline is not found embodied within the 17 year old girl, Lepa Radić, then I do not know at all where it can be found. This, whomever reads this fucking shit, is a testimony to the spirit of human heroism, nothing more, nothing less. Fuck all of you rats who do not work in aspiration of this heroism, or do not even idealize it. Just dwell on this for a minute, will you. These two examples of courage. Just dwell on what kind of strength human beings are capable of. I am not longer calling myself a misanthrope, it is a too one-dimensional designation to put on oneself. It is silly and shallowly informed; it is a self-identity of weakness, it is an unimpressive and empty contemplation, it is a route of least resistance to say to all humans: I hate you all, all of you I hate, and everything of you, and everything in you, I hate. It is the utterances of a child. I say, I hate people as much as I love what is in them.