This is another interesting piece from William Blum’s Anti-Empire Report. Blum is a long-time critic of American imperialism. I’ve already reblogged several of his pieces. In issue 137 of his Report, he comments on the election of the new Syriza government in Greece. A number of the commenters on Mike’s blog wondered how far Syriza would be allowed to go in defying the Troika and its economic diktats before they were overthrown by the Fascist right, all in the name of fiscal responsibility, properly paying off the debt, Greece honouring its international obligations, and so forth.
They weren’t alone in fearing for Greece’s future as a democratic country in the face of pressure from the EU and the international financial and industrial nexus. Blum also wondered how long they would last, based on the historical precedents. After the War, Greece was forced into the Western, capitalist bloc following the agreement Churchill and the Americans had made with Stalin at Yalta. The result was a bloody civil war fought against the Communist partisans, who had done the most to stop the Italians and had fought hardest against the Germans. Then, in 1964, when the liberal Papandreou came to power and began to pursue an independent line, he was overthrown in a coup, backed again by the CIA and the Americans. Blum writes
American historian D.F. Fleming, writing of the post-World War II period in his eminent history of the Cold War, stated that “Greece was the first of the liberated states to be openly and forcibly compelled to accept the political system of the occupying Great Power. It was Churchill who acted first and Stalin who followed his example, in Bulgaria and then in Rumania, though with less bloodshed.”
The British intervened in Greece while World War II was still raging. His Majesty’s Army waged war against ELAS, the left-wing guerrillas who had played a major role in forcing the Nazi occupiers to flee. Shortly after the war ended, the United States joined the Brits in this great anti-communist crusade, intervening in what was now a civil war, taking the side of the neo-fascists against the Greek left. The neo-fascists won and instituted a highly brutal regime, for which the CIA created a suitably repressive internal security agency (KYP in Greek).
In 1964, the liberal George Papandreou came to power, but in April 1967 a military coup took place, just before elections which appeared certain to bring Papandreou back as prime minister. The coup had been a joint effort of the Royal Court, the Greek military, the KYP, the CIA, and the American military stationed in Greece, and was followed immediately by the traditional martial law, censorship, arrests, beatings, and killings, the victims totaling some 8,000 in the first month. This was accompanied by the equally traditional declaration that this was all being done to save the nation from a “communist takeover”. Torture, inflicted in the most gruesome of ways, often with equipment supplied by the United States, became routine.
George Papandreou was not any kind of radical. He was a liberal anti-communist type. But his son Andreas, the heir-apparent, while only a little to the left of his father, had not disguised his wish to take Greece out of the Cold War, and had questioned remaining in NATO, or at least as a satellite of the United States.
As far as I can tell, all of this is correct. Misha Glenny, talking about his book on the Balkans at the Cheltenham Literature Festival back in the ’90s, stated that the division between the ‘east’ and ‘west’ bloc countries was entirely artificial, and was made according to the interests of the great powers, not the people of those countries themselves. The Communists were far stronger in Greece than in Romania, for example, but geopolitical considerations decided that Greece ended up in the West, and Romania in the Communist bloc.
The full article can be read at: http://williamblum.org/aer/read/137. The article’s entitled, Some Things Not To Forget, Which the New Greek Leaders Have Not’.
Tags: Cheltenham Literary Festival, Churchill, CIA, Cold War, Communist Bloc, Coups, D.F. Fleming, ELAS, George Papandreou, Internal Security Agency, KYP, Misha Glenny, NATO, stalin, Syriza, Troika, Vox Political, Western Bloc, William Blum, Yalta
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