Greece

[JayHecht at aol.com]

There have been some interesting claims about what happened in Greece in 1947.
The situation after WW II was pretty grim.  My mom's parents came to the
states at the turn of the century from a tiny village outside of Sparta.  In
1944, the SS burnt the town to the ground because it was a resistance
stronghold.  The communists played a strong role in the resistance, however,
they were always fighting with the royalists at the same time.  By 1946-7, the
situation was kind of like our own civil war, in fact, my grandfather's sister
had two sons on opposite sides (I believe the younger one was murdered by the
royalists right in front of her).  There is a good account of the Greek civil
by a Brit named Andrews; the brutality reminded me of El Salvador during the
1980s.  

I've visited my relatives in Sparta over the years and it seems to me that
their material conditions since the early 1960s have profoundly improved.  We
visited there in 1992 and was surprised to see that my mom's cousin had hired
Russians to pick the orange crop on fields that he rented from some landlord.
The down side to this, is that the place has become more and more
commercialized as it becomes integrated with the rest of Euorpe (my cousins
kids wear Nike/Jordan stuff etc.).

It pains the hell out of me to watch this aboslute fucking nightmare unwind in
Kosovo.  I've driven that road through Tito-Veles to Skope and it is so damn
beautiful as you head higher and higher from the coastal plain of Greece up
through Macedonia on up to Belgrade.  Maybe those folks believed as Zappa used
to say "it can't happen here," but now this shit has poisoned the next few
generations - what a fucking shame!!!!

Jason