2000. After the War Was Over: Reconstructing the Family, Nation, and State in Greece, 1943–1960., ed. Mark Mazower Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
- Chapter 6. 1950–1967: Post–Civil War
- » Fucking Fifties
The first such injunction is to relocate the beginnings of the emphýlios from 1944 (as had been announced by the Greek state and published in the Government Gazette on September 18, 1989) to 1943, claiming that it has “finally been grafted onto consciousness” that, when referring to the emphýlios, “we mean the entire period of 1943–1949” (2004, point 1), although such consciousness seems to exist only within the group of the “revisionists,” since not even the old Right-wing historiography made such a claim. Another one of the ten points is that “recent research has shown that violence was not the prerogative of only one party” (point 4). With a suspicious wink at postmodern discourses, they accuse the research produced thus far of looking for “one truth,” for which should now be substituted partial, collaborative, and conjoined research that would “avoid attempts at large scale interpretive schemes if they are not supported by detailed and complete documentation” (point 5). Of course, the positivism of their entire project, with its reliance on numbers, mathematical models (especially by Kalyvas), and the need “to set the record straight” (in Mazower 2000: 142) reveals not a commitment to postmodernism but a deep commitment to finding not “one truth” but “the truth.” It is a project as far removed from postmodernism as could be.
Kalyvas and Marantzidis have reverted to the earlier, Right-wing model of narrating the emphýlios even more than moderate historians and political scientists such as John Iatrides, who came to the conclusion, after decades of studying the phenomenon, that the KKE “as a genuinely revolutionary party was determined to seize power at the first opportunity, preferably by political means but by armed force if necessary” (2005: 9). This possibility of seizing power, “preferably by political means” has been lost in Kalyvas and Marantzidis (as Iatrides has overlooked that the Greek Communist Party was not a “genuinely” revolutionary party, since it did not attempt to create the conditions for revolution).
To study the emphýlios in its entirety, Kalyvas and Marantzidis have sought to form a revisionist school of thought that would prove the emphýlios to be not only a power struggle initiated by the KKE but one that necessarily and as a matter of tactics used violence. In the first article that he wrote to set the project in motion (in Mazower 2000), Kalyvas set out to prove: (1) that the Left had not been the main “(or even the only) victim of violence” in the civil war (Mazower 2000: 142), and (2) that the “seemingly straightforward instances of German terror and rightist 'white' terror prove misleading when not connected to the red terror and placed into the full sequence of events to which they belong” (ibid.: 143–44). He thus seeded the argument that German reprisals and German and collaborationist terror resulted from violence enacted by the partisans against the occupying forces. Because this argument needs documentation with examples from across the country, a number of younger scholars have been drafted into the endeavor. This movement has caused a furor in historical and political circles in Greece, since it has reanimated many of the original political positions and debates of the emphýlios itself. Because the Left is not a uniform and monolithic entity in Greece, this debate has drawn criticism from many angles, many different ones from the Left itself.
Even if Kalyvas and Marantzidis would like to raise our consciousness on this matter, as Peter Berger told us in 1974, “it is, in principle, impossible to 'raise the consciousness' of anyone, because all of us are stumbling around on the same level of consciousness—a pretty dim level” (13).