Every year on October 28, Greece celebrates OXI Day – a national holiday honouring the moment in 1940 when prime minister Ioannis Metaxas refused Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s demand to allow Axis troops into the country. That word, “Oxi” (“No”), ignited Greece’s resistance to invasion and came to symbolise the nation’s enduring spirit of courage, freedom, and defiance in the face of tyranny.

Our co-founder, Yanis Varoufakis, lays out the reason that the Greek people celebrate OXI Day every October 28, and how the current oligarchy tries to suppress this spirit.

“It marks the greatness of a people who can say NO when they need to say NO, regardless of the outcome – even when they know that the enemy is ironclad.
We honor the wise people who understand that their survival and prosperity are not served by servility and capitulation to foolish, provocative, and ruthless conquerors.

“The oligarchy pretends to honor this greatness, this wisdom of the Greek people, with parades, when in reality it strives to demonise it, to equate it with immoderation, arrogance, anti-Europeanism, and foolishness.

“Of course, it does not succeed. Especially on October 28 and March 25 – the two days each year when collective memory reminds everyone who loves this place that the only way to serve our homeland, the only way to honour humanity, is through our resistance, through our disobedience to the powerful who are destroying Hellenism, who are turning Europe into an iron cage, who support genocide, who undermine peace.”

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