Even if Mythistory were someday to fear that its ancient Holy Grails might be reduced to little more than ordinary household utensils in modern times, it has never hesitated to guard them jealously. Indeed, at times almost provocatively, it protects as the apple of its eye not merely the pages of history, but also those “filthy, insignificant streets… adorned with splendid and illustrious names”—names that were, in truth, anything but illustrious. On the contrary, their presence and their deeds in the historical life of their age deserve to be described as disgraceful—even criminal. To call them by such names is perhaps the very least one can do in the service of historical truth.
1. The Asia Minor Catastrophe
One may invent a thousand explanations for the Asia Minor Catastrophe, each no more than half a truth. Yet unless one acknowledges, first, the utter absence of a coherent strategic plan corresponding to the territorial, political and ethnic realities of the region among those who resolved upon the invasion—while recognizing as the principal moral architects of the disaster the Goebbelses of their age, industriously manufacturing torrents of incendiary patriotic rhetoric in praise of the Great Idea—and, second, the inability of the campaign’s planners to grasp that the geopolitical map of the world had already been transformed after 1917 by the birth of the Soviet Union under Stalin’s leadership, one has forfeited any claim to be regarded either as a statesman or as a soldier.
The verdict remains the same whether the man in question is Eleftherios Venizelos, architect of the Treaty of Sèvres, or Crown Prince—later King—Constantine, victor of the Balkan Wars. Once that fatal misjudgment had been made, the rest followed with tragic inevitability. One disaster bred another.
As always, it was ordinary people who paid the bill. Young conscripts, herded to slaughter, and the Greeks of Asia Minor who survived only to become refugees in their ancestral homeland, where they were received with the same suspicion and contempt with which Pakistani immigrants and economic migrants are so often regarded in Greece today.
To relieve public outrage, the political establishment in Greece and throughout Europe found it expedient to stage a trial, convicting and executing a handful of conveniently responsible—and fundamentally expendable—men for the national catastrophe. Meanwhile, the vain and spectacularly incompetent Prince Andrew, derisively nicknamed Kapsokalývas (“Burnt Hut”), whose grandson is the present King Charles of Great Britain, escaped entirely unscathed. Just as the future dictator Theodoros Pangalos had reportedly promised, “not a single hair of his head” was touched.
2. Was the Greek Conflict of 1946–1949 Really a Civil War?
Was the struggle between the National Army and the Democratic Army of Greece from 1946 to 1949 truly a civil war?
If the French Revolution of 1789 and the Russian Revolution of 1917 are themselves to be classified as civil wars, then, by all means, let the Greek conflict bear the same name.
Yet a popular movement of such magnitude is, by its very nature, a revolution, irrespective of whether it ends in victory or defeat. In Greece, only the political Right profits from reducing one of the country’s greatest social upheavals to the status of a mere civil war. It is, to say the least, a historical misrepresentation—one that, remarkably enough, is now endorsed even by the establishment-minded, Stalinist Communist Party of Greece (KKE), a party that bears scarcely any resemblance to the historic revolutionary movement from which it claims descent.
3. Konstantinos Karamanlis and Nicolae Ceaușescu: Day and Night
If the Romanian communist leader Nicolae Ceaușescu deserves to be remembered as a dictator, then the Greek Prime Minister and leader of the National Radical Union (ERE), Konstantinos Karamanlis, calls for a vocabulary far harsher than that. Executioner, perhaps. The very torchbearer of political and ideological cleansing.
During the years when Papagos’ Greek Rally and Karamanlis’ ERE had transformed military tribunals into factories of death for Leftists, nearly half the population of a country of barely five million people had passed through prison islands, places of exile, prisons and dungeons, concentration camps, or had been driven into political exile throughout the socialist countries of Eastern Europe.
Romania, by contrast, held only a few dozen right-wing political prisoners—and not in concentration camps—in a nation numbering almost twenty million inhabitants.
At precisely the same time, the average Greek—especially in the countryside—still lived without what much of Europe already regarded as the simplest marks of civilisation: indoor toilets, toilet paper, toothpaste, bathrooms, and, in countless villages, even electricity, a deprivation that in many places persisted until 1981.
The average Romanian, by contrast, enjoyed all these ordinary conveniences of modern life, even if he often had to queue to buy meat.
Greeks, admittedly, seldom stood in such queues—not because abundance prevailed, but because they simply lacked the money to purchase meat in the first place. Butchers’ shops certainly existed; customers with sufficient means did not. Meat remained a privilege of the prosperous few. The many survived instead on salted herring and cured sardines, bought with coins that were themselves painfully difficult to earn.
Ceaușescu left Romania with no foreign debt, while his own children reportedly died in poverty.
Karamanlis and the political dynasty that followed him, by contrast, left Greece burdened with bankruptcy. To this day, their political “nephews,” as popular irony would have it, continue either to cost lives while siphoning off European funds or to feast upon the family inheritance in luxurious villas in Rafina and Nea Politia, on the northern outskirts of Athens.