Introduction: The Colonels' Dictatorship and Its Afterlives (original) (raw)
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Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 2017
Kitsch is intricately linked with the remembrance of the military junta of 1967–1974 in postdictatorial Greece. Since the 1980s, the term has been used to articulate a range of responses to the dictatorship, from refracting it as a totalitarian or fascist regime to reconstructing it as a semifarcical interlude in recent Greek history. These divergences can largely be attributed to the ambiguities of kitsch as a signifier, as well as its intersections with particular agendas of recollection at specific junctures. What these approaches share is both an attempt to situate the identities of social agents in relation to the dictatorial past and a broader interest in fostering a dialogue on questions of social complicity with the junta.
This article addresses the question of political violence and focuses on armed opposition groups during the military dictatorship in Greece (1967–74). It examines the diverse ideas about the use of violence among the opposition circles in Greece and abroad in order to place the political violence in its specific historical context and highlight their differences from their Western European counterparts. Also, using interviews of activists from several opposition groups, the article discusses how they frame their experience from the 1960s and lend legitimacy to their past actions. In the early hours of 21 April 1967 unfamiliar noises woke up the people in the cities. It was the sound of military trucks and tanks in the streets and then the sound of military marches on the radio. A voice on the radio announced that the army had taken over power to save the Greek nation from demagogues and subversives. The coup of Colonel Georgios Papadopoulos on 21 April 1967 came as a shock, just a few weeks before the elections that, according to all predictions, the Centre Union (Enosis Kentrou) would have won. There were rumours about a coup, but very few believed them and almost none was prepared for the eventuality. Seven thousand people were arrested and imprisoned in the first days, and one person, Panagiotis Elis, was killed while in custody. The colonels suspended the articles of the constitution that guaranteed civil liberties; freedom of expression was suppressed; the press was censored; political parties and unions were banned; and demonstrations were prohibited. In the following months many people, students in particular, fled and organized the campaign against the dictatorship in various European countries. Those who continued to live in Greece knew that there was no way out: if they wanted to fight against the dictatorship,
The Evolution of the Greek State ‘ Explaining the activist military : Greece until 1975 ’
2005
The paper aims at explaining the high degree of the military’s involvement in Greek politics over the course of the 20 century. It argues that focusing either on Huntington’s “professionalisation” thesis or the more sociological accounts of economic development represents an inadequate attempt to explain the Greek armed forces’ military interventions in political life in general and the 1967 coup in particular. In contrast to such explanations, I suggest a context-based, historical approach centred on the Greek armed forces’ ‘dual character’ that draws on the political environment of the post-war era. The army’s tendency to intervene should be viewed as a result of two main factors: a) The co-existence of two antithetical syndromes in the self-perception of the officer corps and b) the army’s identification with the monarchy and the political Right post-1949 in the context of the Cold War. For a very long period of time going back to its formation as a modern state, Greece had suffe...
A View of the Greek Dictatorship from the 'Lighthouse' of The New York Review of Books
Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 2017
The New York Review of Books' coverage of the Greek military dictatorship of 1967-1974 connected the emergence of the right-wing regime to the turbulent sociopolitical sphere of the 1960s and 1970s in America. The Review's analysis of events taking place in Greece, as well as its focus on two prominent Greek poets, George Seferis and C.P. Cavafy, was caught in the crossfire of disputes of intellectual legitimacy and served two interrelated purposes: to criticize American overseas aggressions from an ideological position affiliated with the New Left, on the one hand, and to exemplify this position by bringing forward artistic and intellectual manifestations of antiauthoritarianism, on the other. By extrapolating in this way the case of Greece toward a critical surveillance of opportunistic Western agendas and their links to humanitarian crises overseas, the Review's erudite contributors at once shed light on the junta's relevance to timely concerns and coopted its repercussions to reflect upon American intellectualism and its shortcomings.
Explaining an Activist Military: Greece until 1975
2005
ABSTRACT The paper aims at explaining the high degree of the military's involvement in Greek politics in the 20th century. It argues that focusing either on Huntington's “professionalization” thesis or the more sociological accounts of socio-economic development can hardly give an explanation for the Greek armed forces' military interventions in political life in general, and the 1967 coup in particular.
Making the Junta Fascist: Antidictatorial Struggle, the Colonels, and the Statues of Ioannis Metaxas
Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 2017
Why does drawing a comparison between Ioannis Metaxas’s interwar dic- tatorship and the military junta of 1967 appear so obvious nowadays? And how does this comparison contribute to the frequent designation of the latter as fascist? In this article, we examine the belief that the two regimes shared a common fascist ideology as a conceptual monument of the antidictatorial struggle with a profound impact on subsequent historical production. We then ask how the junta itself viewed its relation to Metaxas. By examining several statues of the interwar dictator erected during the junta’s rule, we identify internal contradictions and continuous power struggles within the regime’s leadership that complicate the comparison with Metaxas, as well as contemporary understandings of Greece’s dictatorial past.