Panourgiá, Neni. 2008c. “Review of Stathis Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War.” Historein, 192-97.
- Chapter 6. 1950–1967: Post–Civil War
- » Fucking Fifties
A great many graduate students, in both Greek and European universities, are participating in this project, engaging in local-history research and trying to produce a complete picture of the political landscape of Greece in the decade of the forties and fifties. Apart from the methodological problems of this entire project, however (see Panourgiá 2008c), there are other, more serious epistemological ones, as the project is ultimately both an enumerative one, and an attempt at balancing atrocities.
After the end of the civil war, military tribunals started to prosecute not only the captured DSE military but also the political branch of the Party and Leftists in general. The paramilitaries continued their terror, which set the tone of the political climate of the country as one of conflict and tension. This resulted in the murder of a number of Left and Left-leaning civilians and politicians, such as the pacifist Gregorios Lambrakis in Thessaloniki in 1963. (The Lambrakis affair, as it has come to be known, is the subject of the film Z, by Costa-Gavras.) The places of exile were not closed down. Quite the contrary, exile was intensified as a measure of both discipline and punishment, as we have seen. The state, through complete control of education, engaged in an even tighter production of patriotism and nationalism. In 1953, the government headed by Marshall Papagos founded the Kentrike Yperesia Plerophorion (KYP), the Greek equivalent of the CIA. According to James Becket (1970: 13), the KYP “was a subsidiary of the Langley, Virginia, parent corporation… and was directly financed by it.” Although initially the KYP was not permitted to interfere in Greek domestic affairs but was to engage in “counter espionage activities outside of Greece” (ibid.), both the KYP and the CIA became heavily involved in Greek matters.
As Becket rightly observes, the “heavy involvement of KYP and the C.I.A. in domestic Greek affairs can be explained by their concept of the enemy. The enemy was not simply expansionist Russia but communism” (ibid.). It was back to square one of the Idiônymon. KYP and the CIA, even if they did not organize the paramilitaries, certainly abetted them. The parakrátos (para-state) and the paramilitaries were allowed to utilize every known method of organized terror, abducting citizens in the middle of the street or in the middle of the night, or fabricating crimes and evidence. One such instance, a pretext for the coup of 1967, was the case of ASPIDA (literally meaning “shield,” the acronym abbreviates Axiōmatikoi Sôsate Patrida Idaniká Dēmoratia Axiokratia, “Officers Save Fatherland Ideals Democracy Meritocracy”). A group of Centrist army officers was accused of having formed a Left-wing, antiroyalist organization of that name, which was planning to take power through a coup. The attempt never took place and, according to the officers themselves, never had been planned. Nevertheless, the officers were tried for “treason against the Greek state” and for “following a known communist,” namely, Andreas Papandreou, the son of ex-prime minister Georgios.
In the crevices between the terror of the Right and the abject existence of the Left people, went on trying to live a life worth living, falling in love, dancing, going out, throwing parties, decorating Christmas trees, studying, working, swimming.
Becket, James. 1970. Barbarism in Greece: A Young American Lawyer's Inquiry into the Use of Torture in Contemporary Greece, with Case Histories and Documents. Foreword by Senator Claiborne Pell.. New York: Walker and Company.
Photograph of Kostas Papaioannou and other exiles on the island of Ai-Stratis, in the northern Aegean, taken in October 1950. In the center is General Stefanos Sarafis, commander in chief of ELAS during the Resistance. Sarafis was exiled in 1945 to the island of Ikaria and then transferred to Makrónisos, from which he was transferred again to Ai-Stratis in 1950. Next to him, with glasses and an open jacket, is Konstantinos Despotopoulos. They are surrounded by other political exiles, both civilians and captured military. What is remarkable about the photograph is that the exiles appear (after the tortures of Makrónisos and—possibly—Yáros) with the imprimatur of the social class to which they belonged before the war and the civil war started: suits, military attire, and peasant and lower-middle-class aesthetics mingle in this photograph. Kostas Papaioannou Archive, General State Archives of Kavala. Reproduced with permission.
The reaction to the Kalyvas-Marantzidis project has been forceful. In addition to the special issue of Vivliodromio (where the entire debate is published), see also Eleftherotypia's “Ios,” especially “Oi Tagmatsphalites dikaionontai” (“The Tagmatasphalites are being exonerated)” October 26, 2003 (in two parts); “He Nea 'Sovietologia' gia ten Katoche kai ten Antistase” (“The New 'Sovietology' about the Occupation and the Resistance”) May 12, 2004 (in two parts); and Kalyvas's letter to “Ios” and “Ios's” response, November 3, 2003. See also Panourgiá 2004b.
Photograph of salute to the flag at the opening ceremony of the (“performances of gymnastics”) at the High School of Naousa, Western Macedonia, May 1956. At the front, to the left of the flag-bearing group, is the physical education teacher in charge of the performance. Private collection.
March of the High School of Naousa in March 1956 to celebrate the 1821 War of Independence. Leading the march is the physical education teacher. Immediately following her are high-school students dressed in traditional costumes. Behind them follows the entire high school, dressed in the formal high-school uniform. Girls precede boys. Note how demeanor in this photograph differs from : a fascistic appearance gives way to the softness of the flowing silk costumes and the smartness of the teacher's suit. Private collection.
Parakrátos denotes the machinery of the underground, unacknowledged, and (thus) lethal structure of persecution, character assassination, and extermination of political dissidents that allowed the official state to maintain its modicum of legality. The parakrátos (translated as “deep state” in the case of Turkey) should not be confused with the paramilitary organizations and the militias, which existed in Greece (and have elsewhere in the world, such as the death squads in Latin America). The agents of the parakrátos certainly existed at the margins of the state. They were individuals who worked closely with the police and the gendarmerie but were not armed (as the militia and the paramilitaries were). They used crude objects (axes, axe handles, large stones, lead pipes, etc.) to carry out their operations, which were not only aimed at exterminating Leftists but also at creating and maintaining a climate of fear. As Veena Das and Deborah Poole note, paramilitaries “represent both highly personalized forms of private power and the supposedly impersonal and neutral authority of the state (2004: 14). The complete locution was to parakrátos tes Dexias (“the parastate of the Right”), indicating the deep commitment of the Right to maintaining power and its identification with the state (and vice versa). The existence of the parakrátos, like the paramilitaries, further underlines not only the fragmentation at the margins of the state but also the investment of the state in maintaining these margins. Importantly, the margin allows the elasticity of being (temporarily) both inside and outside of the law, and it is therefore as fiercely contested as the center. Das and Poole have also noted this, but not the temporality of interiority and exteriority in terms of the law (see Das and Poole 2004: 15).
In trials of Leftists in the fifties and sixties, it turned out that policemen charged with shadowing suspects could not produce documentation because they had simply fabricated it. It is easy to dismiss this as simply one of the excesses of political power, but it reveals the state's need for an affect of legality to legitimate its actions. I am indebted to Vassilis Karydis for bringing these trial transcripts to my attention.
The laughable notion that Papandreou was a Communist can be explained only by the intense antidemocratic climate in Greece in the years preceding the junta, such that any and all democratic, antiroyalist and anti–Right-wing tendencies in the body politic were relegated to Communism. See the excellent account of this process in Deane [Gigantes] 1976.