Greek nationalism angers Yankee imperialists

by MC5

The Wall Street Journal has touched off a controversy by 
speculating that Greece's hosting of the Olympics in 2004 will be 
a financial failure because of so-called terrorism. Such 
speculation by business papers has a way of becoming self-
fulfilling prophecy as panic spreads. Greece correctly responded 
that it was the Atlanta Olympics in the U$A that had a bomb go off 
right in the Olympic park.(1)

The Boston Herald of June 6th issued an editorial defending 
countries not usually mentioned in the U.$. list of "terrorist" 
sponsors--Greece and Pakistan. The U.$. imperialists are weighing 
cut-offs of arms sales to Greece and Pakistan.

In Greece, Kurdish nationalists do not earn the label "terrorist." 
Greece harbored Kurdish revolutionaries including PKK organization 
leader Abdullah Ocalan and this has angered Turkey and the United 
$tates.  Greece and Turkey have a long-standing war going on over 
the island of Cyprus. The war between Greece and Turkey has always 
complicated things for the U.$. imperialists and their NATO 
military alliance.

Now a Greek organization called November 17 is really angering the 
U.$. imperialists. On June 8th, the November 17 organization 
killed a British military official in Athens, Brigadier Stephen 
Saunders.(2) The British and American military have a history of 
working together in Greece and elsewhere. An attack on one ally is 
regarded as an attack on the other by these imperialists.

The imperialist media managed to whip up a furor over the 
righteous killing of Saunders. Instead of people asking, "what was 
a British military official doing in Greece?" the question became 
one of opposing so- called terrorism. Historically, the real 
terrorism in Greece has been practiced by British and Amerikan 
intelligence and military people.

The prize for hypocrisy goes to the ex-CIA chief James Woolsey. 
November 17 got its start by killing the CIA station chief in 
Greece in 1975. We must say that November 17 has had an impeccable 
sense of targets, not blindly firing at the masses but focussing 
on the real enemy.

Woolsey spoke with confidence in front of the media regarding 
Greece, because he must have realized that few people know the 
history of the situation and certainly the monopoly capitalist 
mouthpieces standing in front of him were not among those few. 
Woolsey went on the attack saying, "I believe there are some 
people in the Greek government who know certain members of 
November 17."(3)

According to the British imperialist media corporation BBC, 
Woolsey said that the Greek government would be embarrassed by a 
trial of November 17, "which might reveal details of their own 
activities against the military junta in the 1970s."(1) This was a 
really mixed up thing for Woolsey and the BBC to say. There is no 
reason for anyone to be embarrassed by being associated with the 
fight against a military junta, even by bourgeois standards. What 
is more, the junta in question was a U.$.-imposed regime in 
Greece, one that inspired the movie "Z" (and then the insipid 
social-democratic magazine "Z" which has not learned a thing about 
imperialism despite its name).

The reason that November 17 has never suffered an arrest 
(according to CIA reasoning) is that the Greek government backs 
it, which might actually be true. If so, MIM supports the Greek 
government in its decision despite its denials. Amerikan and 
British intervention in Greece well justify attacks on military 
and intelligence officials from those countries.

In April 1967, the CIA installed a military junta in Greece to 
prevent the elected leader of the Greek people named George 
Papandreou (not the same one as the Foreign Minister today) from 
winning another election and extending power. He had won an 
outright majority of the vote in February 1964. He had gotten his 
start as a British puppet installed as prime minister in Greece 
during World War II. He sided with the British troops against 
Greek communists who had led the fight against the Nazis.

By the time of the 1960s, the elected premier's son was a U.S. 
citizen on the CIA payroll and a supporter of Adlai Stevenson and 
Hubert Humphrey. However, U.$. President Lyndon Johnson thought 
Papandreou showed too much independence and the son was arrested 
during the coup of colonels (1967) and held in prison. The father 
died in 1968 and the torch passed to his son who formed a 
socialist organization that brought him to power as premier from 
1981 to 1989 and again in 1993.

Since the 1970s, Greek politicians have agreed not to expose the 
U.$. role in the military coup in Greece in exchange for better 
relations with the U.$. Government. It is little wonder that some 
may now be outraged when Woolsey talks about fighting the military 
junta in the 1970s as if fighting it were some kind of crime. (The 
junta fell apart when it went to war over Cyprus and lost in 
1974.)

Here is what President Lyndon Johnson said to the Greek ambassador 
to justify U.$. intervention: "fuck your Parliament and your 
Constitution. America is an elephant. Cyprus is a flea. Greece is 
a flea. If these two fleas continue itching the elephant, they may 
just get whacked by the elephant's trunk, whacked good... We pay a 
lot of good American dollars to the Greeks, Mr. Ambassador. If 
your Prime Minister gives me talk about Democracy, Parliament and 
Constitutions, he, his Parliament and his Constitution may not 
last very long."(4) As MIM has said all along, there is no 
democracy. It's do what Uncle Sam wants or else. It's impossible 
to have democracy under capitalism.

MIM is unaware of the conditions for armed struggle in Greece. MIM 
does not claim that Greece is similar to the United $tates in 
conditions. It is a country that requires more examination with 
regard to how it benefits from the flow of superprofits arranged 
by U.$. imperialism.

Nonetheless, MIM does have a unique and novel suggestion for those 
Amerikans and British concerned about violence in Greece: Get the 
military and intelligence people out of there and then they won't 
be killed like the occupying force they have been in the last half 
a century.

What happens in Greece is an important lesson in imperialism. 
While the U$A calls itself a free and democratic country, in fact 
it imprisons more people per capita than any other country and it 
overthrows more elected governments than any other country. That's 
what imperialism is in its political essence.

We must learn to ignore imperialism's rhetoric and pay attention 
to its practice, country by country, decade by decade. Only real 
communists will not whitewash this kind of "democracy." It's fine 
to start with a theory or principle of "democracy" as long as one 
examines how things actually work. Otherwise, if one always works 
for political progress with ideas that do not work, and never come 
true, one becomes a figleaf for something else. In the case of 
U.$. imperialism, people speaking for "democracy" are covering up 
the U.$. role and becoming figleafs for military regimes, like the 
one in Greece installed by a supposedly "democratic" country, the 
United $tates.

The democratic socialists, social-democrats and hordes of phony 
communists are not really scientists, because the best and most 
innocent of them proceed from what they wish were true instead of 
what actually happens. They wish there were this thing called 
"democracy" when it fact democracy is rhetoric used to fool people 
into putting up with interventions to overthrow elected 
governments. At this time in the imperialist countries, only the 
scientists of Marxism in the genuine communist parties can be 
counted on to expose this truth. The "democracy" mongers are only 
spreading socialist ideas that get people killed at the hands of 
military and intelligence forces, as in the 1967 coup in Greece.

Various social-democrats and phonies calling themselves Marxist 
have not learned this. "Z" magazine regularly whitewashes U.$. 
style democracy and fails to admit that the people can only manage 
their own destiny if they are willing to take up arms against 
Yankee imperialism. Otherwise, Uncle Sam crushes any elected 
government that Uncle Sam does not like.

The so-called Communist Party in Greece is also phony. They and 
the social-democratic mush collection called "The Coalition of the 
Left and Progress" opposed the killing of the British military 
official in Greece, with the latter calling it "a blind act of 
violence."(2) Far from blind, the act was highly organized, 
targeted, and mindful of history.



Notes:

1. BBC, 6July2000, 
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/europe/newsid_822000/822108
.stm

2. BBC, 8June2000, 
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/europe/newsid_783000/783265
.stm

3. BBC, 9June2000, 
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/europe/newsid_784000/784403
.stm

4. William Blum, The CIA: A Forgotten History (London, 1986), p. 
244.