Greece

Sam Pawlett epawlett at uniserve.com
Fri Mar 26 09:32:47 PST 1999



>
>
> 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.

Not a TKO, but maybe a standing 8 count.


> 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.

That is very much open to question. The EAM/ELAS had broken with Stalin by 1947. It is unfair to lump all those Eastern bloc countries together. The conditions in them varied from place to place region to region. Yugoslavia was called by a Western economist "the most laissez-faire society on Earth" or something like that. The post-WW deuce Greek governments were just as corrupt and even more repressive than the Eastern bloc ones. Thousands of people of a left political persuasion were tortured, murdered or disappeared. I don't think the EAM/ELAS could have done any worse than the Greek generals. The standard of living isn't much higher in Greece either. But Greece has better weather and better cuisine than Poland, so I'd rather live in Greece. Check out the movie Z if yu have a chance. Also the book _The Kapetanios_ by Dominic Eudes. Eudes was a member of the ELAS. He blames it all on Stalin.

Sam Pawlett



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