Brad
>At 11:00 AM 3/24/99 -0800, you wrote:
>>But I don't think that the argument that Winston Churchill was a bad man
>>because he ordered British intervention in Greece in the closing stages of
>>World War II is a winner. I don't know anyone who thinks that the Greek
>>people would have had a happier time in the years since World War II if
>>their domestic politics had been more like the politics of Bulgaria,
>>Romania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, or Yugoslavia.
What a way to delurk. Anyway, I know a fair number of people who disliked Churchill's activities in Greece. And most all of them are still living in Greece today and had to deal with the negative effects of Churchill's intervention, both the direct effects and the indirect effects. When Greek royalty returned to the country in 1993 and were greeted with thousands of people chanting "EXO EXO EXO" (out out out), it seems to me that your formulation is based on the very small sample size. You don't know anyone who thinks that the Greek people would have been better without Churchill stabbing the resistance in the back? Then you don't know all that many people.
>Besides, this ignores other options which were available. Why is the only
>alternative to Western support of Greek fascists, who ruthlessly
>consolidated their power, Greecian membership in the Warsaw Pact?
Good point Brett, and given the very large membership of the resistance movement (maybe 2 million out of 7 million total inhabitants) and the general independence of the movement, plus the fact that the resistance did control huge swaths of the country, it strikes me as unlikely that Greece would have willingly joined the Warsaw Pact, and there would have been a significant amount of military difficulty in Soviet expansionism. At any rate, the Greek fascists/royalists/whatever, in the face of such hypothetical expansionsim, strike me as far more likely to submit and hand the country over than a government that emerged out of the powerful community/worker councils of the resistance would have.
>With a little knowledge of history, it is almost trivially easy
>to show, as others on this list have already done, that the reason for
>Western involvement in Greece (and there are many other examples around the
>world) had nothing to do with a concern for the well being of the people of
>Greece.
Like Churchill letting the troops know that they should treat Greece as though it was enemy territory? Oh yeah.
Nick Mamatas