More on Greece

NM nillo at tao.agoron.com
Wed Mar 31 04:58:58 PST 1999



>In a message dated 3/27/99 1:07:14 AM Central Standard Time,
>delong at econ.Berkeley.EDU writes:
>
><< 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...
> >
> >Nick Mamatas
>
> So are you one of the people who thinks that Greece would have been a
> happier place since WWII if its politics had been more like those of
> Bulgaria?
>
>Nick, Brad
>
>It is my understanding that the Greek civil war tore a giant hole in that
>country's society - maybe now it is recovered?

So? South Korea had military gov't after miltary gov't thanks to the US. Maybe now it's recovered? Maybe in ten years Guatemala will recover? Maybe in 300 years the Native American populations will recover? What's the point.


>It is pretty clear that the repression had a lof of support from the UK/US
alliance.

Oh yes.


>Didn't Churchill want D-Day to occur in Greece to prevent a southern flank
for Stalin?

I haven't heard this claim before.


>The US misunderstood the PKA to be a front for Stalin; in actuality (I
think) this
>had a lot to do with the infighting between the royalists and the
communists.

it wasn't just a misunderstanding. Even if the US had perfect knowledge of the PKA's politics, it would have worked to repress the PKA anyway. Any attempt to make a real, workable system that is non-capitalist or anti-capitalist would have been repressed.


>I'm not sure what the alternative would have looked like had Greece had a
>"socialist" gov't for the entire post war period. The 73-74 certainly
didn't
>make things better, though I remember that my mother didn't have to bargain
>over every item in the food store when we visited there afterward.

Neither do I. I don't think it was necessary obvious that Greece would have been absorbed into the Eastern Bloc. Like another poster mentioned, Greece could have taken off and worked to turn some of the Balkan states into something that more closely approached real socialism (worker council rule, industrial democracy, working towards the elimination of the market). Is it likely? Who knows, but the only two choices were not decades of on and odd military/royal rule followed by a few bones in exchange for being a subimperialist in Cyprus.

>Is that "progress" to live in a society that makes Guliani look like Marx?

No way.
>Jason
>



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list